The Commonwealth Saga
Author: Peter F. Hamilton
Date: 2014-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Fantasy; Fiction
Description: Earning comparisons to such sci-fi/fantasy greats as Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, and George R. R. Martin, Peter F. Hamilton is a one-of-a-kind voice in space opera. His interstellar adventures are hugely ambitious, wildly entertaining, and philosophically stimulating. Now Hamilton’s centuries-spanning Commonwealth Saga—the linked novels Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained —is available in one epic eBook bundle. Contains a thrilling preview of Peter F. Hamilton’s upcoming novel, The Abyss Beyond Dreams, set in the same universe as the Commonwealth Saga. PANDORA’S STAR JUDAS UNCHAINED 2380. The
Publisher: Del Rey
Rights: Copyright © 2006 by Peter F. Hamilton

Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained are works of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A Del Rey eBook Edition

Pandora’s Star copyright © 2004 by Peter F. Hamilton
Judas Unchained copyright © 2006 by Peter F. Hamilton

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

The novels contained in this omnibus were each published separately by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York, in 2004 and 2006.

eBook ISBN 9780804180658
www.delreybooks.com
v3.1

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Pandora’s Star

Judas Unchained

A Del Rey® Book

Published by The Random House Publishing Group

Copyright © 2004 by Peter F. Hamilton

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

www.delreydigital.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hamilton, Peter F.

Pandora’s star / Peter F. Hamilton.

p. cm.

1. Interplanetary voyages—Fiction. 2. Mars (Planet)—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6058.A5536P36 2004

813′.54—dc22

2003068753

eISBN: 978-0-345-47219-9
v3.0_r2

CONTENTS

Master - Table of Contents

Pandora’s Star

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

PROLOGUE

Mars dominated space outside the Ulysses, a bloated dirty-ginger crescent of a planet that never quite made it as a world. Small, frigid, barren, airless, it was simply the solar system’s colder version of hell. Yet its glowing presence in the sky had dominated most of human history; first as a god to inspire generations of warriors, then as a goal to countless dreamers.

Now, for NASA Captain-Pilot Wilson Kime, it had become solid land. Two hundred kilometers beyond the landing craft’s narrow, curving windshield he could pick out the dark gash that was the Valles Marineris. As a boy he’d accessed the technofantasies of the Aries Underground group, entranced by how one day in an unspecified future, foaming water would once again race down that vast gully as raw human ingenuity unlocked the frozen ice trapped beneath the rusting landscape. Today, he would be the first to walk through those dusty craters he’d studied in a thousand satellite photos, trickle the legendary thin red sand through his gloved fingers. Today was glorious history in the making.

Wilson automatically started a deep feedback breathing exercise, calming his heart before the reality of what was about to happen could affect his metabolism. No way was he giving those goddamn desk medics back in Houston a chance to question his fitness to pilot the landing craft. Eight years he’d spent in the USAF, including two combat duties based in Japan for Operation Deliver Peace, followed by another nine years with NASA. All that buildup and anticipation: the sacrifices, his first wife and totally alienated kid; the eternal VR training at Houston, the press conferences, the mind-rotting PR tours of factories; he’d endured it all because it led to this one moment in this most sacred place.

Mars. At last!

“Initiating VKT ranging, cross match RL acquisition data,” he told the landing craft’s autopilot. The colored lines of the windshield’s holographic display began to change their geometrical patterns. He kept one eye on the timer: eight minutes. “Purging BGA system and vehicle interlink tunnel.” His left hand flicked the switches on the console, and tiny LEDs came on to confirm the switch cycle. Some actions NASA would never entrust to voice activation software. “Commencing BGA nonpropulsive vent. Awaiting prime ship sep sequence confirmation.”

“Roger that, Eagle II,” Nancy Kressmire’s voice said in his headset. “Telemetry analysis has you as fully functional. Prime ship power systems ready for disengagement.”

“Acknowledged,” he told the Ulysses’s captain. Turquoise and emerald spiderwebs within the windshield fluttered elegantly, reporting the lander’s internal power status. Their sharp primary colors appeared somehow alien across the dull pallor of the wintry Martian landscape outside. “Switching to full internal power cells. I have seven greens for umbilical sep. Retracting inter-vehicle access tunnel.”

Alarmingly loud metallic clunks rang through the little cabin as the spaceplane’s airlock tunnel sank back into the fuselage. Even Wilson flinched at the intrusive sounds, and he knew the spaceplane’s mechanical layout better than its designers.

“Sir?” he asked. According to the NASA manual, once the lander’s airlock had retracted from the prime ship they were technically a fully independent vehicle; and Wilson wasn’t the ranking officer.

“The Eagle II is yours, Captain,” Commander Dylan Lewis said. “Take us down when you’re ready.”

Very conscious of the camera at the back of the cabin, Wilson said, “Thank you, sir. We are on-line for completed undocking in seven minutes.” He could sense the buzz in the five passengers riding behind him. All of them were the straightest of straight arrows; they had so much right stuff between them it could be bottled. Yet now the actual moment was here they were no more controlled than a bunch of school kids heading for their first beach party.

The autopilot ran through the remaining preflight prep sequence, with Wilson ordering and controlling the list; adhering faithfully to the man-in-the-loop tradition that dated all the way back to the Mercury Seven and their epic struggle for astronauts to be more than just spam in a can. Right on the seven-minute mark, the locking pins withdrew. He fired the RCS thrusters, pushing Eagle II gently away from the Ulysses. This time there was nothing he could do to stop his heart racing.

As they drew away, Ulysses became fully visible through the windshield. Wilson grinned happily at the sight of it. The interplanetary craft was the first of its kind: an ungainly collection of cylindrical modules, tanks, and girders arranged in a circular grid shape two hundred meters across. Its perimeter sprouted long jet-black solar power panels like plastic petals, all of them tracking the sun. Several of the crew habitation sections were painted in the stars and stripes, implausibly gaudy against the plain silver-white thermal foam that coated every centimeter of the superstructure. Right in the center of the vehicle, surrounded by a wide corrugated fan of silver thermal radiator panels, was the hexagonal chamber that housed the fusion generator that had made the ten-week flight time possible, constantly supplying power to the plasma rockets. It was the smallest fusion system ever built: a genuine made-in-America, cutting-edge chunk of technology. Europe was still building its first pair of commercial fusion reactors on the ground, while the USA had already commissioned five such units, with another fifteen being built. And the Europeans certainly hadn’t got anything equivalent to the sophisticated Ulysses generator.

Damnit, we can still get some things right, Wilson thought proudly as the shining conglomeration of space hardware diminished into the eternal night. It would be another decade until the FESA could mount a Mars mission, by which time NASA planned on having a self-sustaining base on the icy sands of Arabia Terra. Hopefully, by then, the agency would also be flying asteroid-capture missions and even a Jovian expedition as well. I’m not too old to be a part of those, they’ll need experienced commanders.

His mind underwent just the tiniest tweak of envy at the prospect of what would come in the midterm future, events and miracles whose timetable and budget allocations meant they might just elude him. The Europeans can afford to wait, though. While thanks to the dominant influence of the Religious Right over the last few administrations, the U.S. had halted all genetic work centered around stem cells, the Federal government in Brussels had poured money into biogenic research, with spectacular results. Now that the early bugs had been ironed out of the hugely expensive procedure, they’d begun to rejuvenate people. The first man to receive the treatment, Jeff Baker, had died in a climax of global publicity; but in the following seven years there had been eighteen successes.

Space and Life. Those separate interests spoke volumes about the way the cultures of Earth’s two major Western power groups had diverged over the past three decades.

Now Wilson’s fellow Americans were beginning to reevaluate their attitude to genetic engineering. Already there were urban myths of Caribbean and Asian clinics offering the rejuvenation service to multibillionaires. And Federal Europe was once again attempting to narrow the American lead in space, desperate to prove to the world that it excelled in every field. Given the fractious political state currently afflicting the planet, Wilson rather welcomed the idea of the two blocs drawing closer together once more—that was, after Americans had landed on Mars.

“First de-orbit burn in three minutes,” the Eagle II’s autopilot said.

“Standing by,” Wilson told it. He automatically checked the fuel tank pressures, and followed that up with main engine ignition procedures.

Three hypergolic fuel rockets at the back of the little spaceplane fired for a hundred seconds, pushing their orbit into an atmosphere-intercept trajectory. The subsequent airbrake maneuver lasted for over ninety minutes, with the scant Martian atmosphere pushing against the craft’s swept delta wings, killing its velocity. For the final fifteen minutes, Wilson could see the faintest of pink glows coming from the Eagle II’s blunt nose. It was the only evidence of the violence being done to the fuselage by high-velocity gas molecule impacts. The ride was incredibly smooth, with gravity slowly building as they sank toward the crater-rumpled landscape of Arabia Terra.

At six kilometers altitude, Wilson activated their profile dynamic wings. They began to expand, spreading out wide to generate as much lift as possible from the thin, frigid air. At full stretch they measured a hundred meters from tip to tip, enough to allow Eagle II to glide if necessary. Then their turbine fired up, gently thrusting them forward, keeping speed constant at two hundred fifty kilometers an hour. The westernmost edge of the massive Schiaparelli Crater slid into sight away in the distance, rolling walls rising up out of the rumpled ground like a weatherworn mountain range.

“Visual acquisition of landing site,” Wilson reported. His systems schematics were tracing green and blue sine waves across the view. Ground radar began to overlay a three-dimensional grid of spikes and gullies that almost matched what he could see.

“Eagle II, midpoint systems review confirms you are go for landing,” said Mission Control. “Good luck, guys. You’ve got quite an audience back here.”

“Thank you, Mission Control,” Commander Lewis said formally. “We are eager for the touchdown. Hoping Wilson can give us a smooth one.” It would be another four minutes before anyone back on Earth heard his words. By then they should be down.

“Contact with cargo landers beacon,” Wilson reported. “Range thirty-eight kilometers.” He squinted through the windshield as the autopilot printed up a red line-of-sight bracket within the glass. The crater rim grew steadily larger. “Ah, I’ve got them.” Two dusty gray specks sitting on a broad patch of flat landscape.

For the last stage, Eagle II flew a slow circle around the pair of robot cargo landers. They were simple squat cones that the Ulysses had sent down two days earlier, loaded with tons of equipment, including a small prefab ground base. Getting them unloaded and the projected exploration campus up and running was the principal task awaiting the crew of the Eagle II.

“Groundscan confirms area one viability,” Wilson said. He was almost disappointed at the radar picture. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were landing on the moon, they had to hurriedly take manual control of their Lunar Module and fly it to safety when the designated landing site turned out to be strewn with boulders. This time, eighty-one years later, satellite imagery and orbital radar mapping had eliminated such uncertainty from the flight profile.

He brought the Eagle II around on its preplotted approach path, engaging the autopilot. “Landing gear extended and locked. VM engines pressurized and ready. Profile dynamic wings in reshape mode. Ground speed approaching one hundred kilometers per hour. Descent rate nominal. We’re on the wire, people.”

“Good work, Wilson,” Commander Lewis said. “Let’s bump struts, here, huh?”

“You got it, sir.”

The landing rockets fired, and Eagle II began to sink smoothly out of the light pink sky. A hundred meters up, and Wilson couldn’t stand it. His fingers flicked four switches, taking the autopilot off-line. Red LEDs glared accusingly at him from the console. He ignored them, bringing the little spaceplane down manually. Easier than any simulation. Dust swirled outside the windshield, thick and cloying as the rocket jets scoured the surface of Mars. Radar gave him the final approach vectors, there was nothing to see visually. They settled without a wobble. The sound of the rockets died away. External light began to brighten as the agitated dust flurries dissipated.

“Houston, the Eagle II has landed,” Wilson said. The words had to be forced out, his throat was so tensed up with pride and exhilaration. He could hear that beautiful phrase echo along history, past and future. And I made it happen, not some goddamn machine.

A wave of jubilant shouts and cheering broke out in the cabin behind him. He wiped an errant drop of moisture from his eye with the back of one hand. Then he was suddenly involved with systems supervision, reengaging the autopilot. External instrumentation confirmed they were down and stable. The spaceplane had to be put into surface standby mode, supplying power and environmental services to the cabin, keeping the rocket engines warm so that takeoff wouldn’t be a problem, monitoring the fuel tank status. A long, boring list of procedures that he worked through with flawless diligence.

Only then did the six of them begin to suit up. Given the cabin’s chronic lack of space, it was a cramped, difficult process, with everyone jostling each other. When Wilson was almost ready, Dylan Lewis handed him his helmet.

“Thanks.”

The Commander didn’t say anything, just gave Wilson a look. As reprimands went, it didn’t get much worse than that.

To hell with you, Wilson retorted silently. We’re the important thing, people coming to Mars is what matters, not the machines we come in. I couldn’t allow a software program to land us.

Wilson stood in line as the Commander went into the small airlock at the back of the cabin. Third, I get to be third. Back on Earth they’d only ever remember that Dylan Lewis was first. Wilson didn’t care. Third.

The tiny display grid inside Wilson’s helmet relayed an image from the external camera set just above the airlock door. It showed a slim aluminum ladder stretching down to the Martian sand. Commander Lewis backed out of the open airlock, his foot moving slowly and carefully onto the top rung. Wilson wanted to shout: For God’s sake get a move on! The suit’s medical telemetry told him his skin was flushed and perspiring. He tried to do his deep feedback breathing exercise thing, but it didn’t seem to work.

Commander Lewis was taking the ladder rungs one at a time. Wilson and the others in the cabin held their breaths; he could feel a couple of billion people doing the same thing back on the old home planet.

“I take this step for all of humanity, so that we may walk together as one people along the road to the stars.”

Wilson winced at the words. Lewis sounded incredibly sincere. Then someone sniggered, actually sniggered out loud; he could hear it quite plainly over the general communications band. Mission Control would go ballistic over that.

Then he forgot it all as Lewis took his step onto the surface, his foot sinking slightly into the red sand of Mars to make a firm imprint.

“We did it,” Wilson whispered to himself. “We did it, we’re here.” Another outbreak of cheering went around the cabin. Congratulatory calls flooded down from Ulysses. Jane Orchiston was already clambering into the airlock. Wilson didn’t even begrudge her that; political correctness wouldn’t allow it any other way. And NASA was ever mindful of pleasing as many people as possible.

Commander Lewis was busy taking a high-resolution photo of his historic footprint. A requirement that had been in the NASA manual for the last eighty-one years, ever since Apollo 11 got back home to find that embarrasing omission.

Lieutenant Commander Orchiston was going down the ladder—a lot faster than Commander Lewis. Wilson stepped into the airlock. He couldn’t even remember the time the little chamber took to cycle; it never existed in his personal awareness. Then it was him backing out onto the ladder. Him checking his feet were secure on the rungs before placing all his—reduced—weight on them. Him hanging poised on the bottom rung. “I wish you could see this, Dad.” He put his foot down, and he was standing on Mars.

Wilson moved away from the ladder, cautious in the low gravity. Heart pounding away in his ears. Breathing loud in the helmet. Hiss of helmet air fans ever-present. Ghostly suit graphic symbols flickered annoyingly across his full field of vision. Other people talked directly into his ears. He stopped and turned full circle. Mars! Dirty rocks littering the ground. Sharp horizon. Small glaring sun. He searched around until he found the star that was Earth. Brought up a hand and waved solemnly at it.

“Want to give me a hand with this?” Commander Lewis asked. He was holding the flagpole, stars and stripes still furled tightly around the top.

“Yes, sir.”

Jeff Silverman, the geophysicist, was already on the ladder. Wilson walked over to help the Commander with the flagpole. He gave the Eagle II a critical assessment glance on his way. There were some scorch marks along the fuselage, trailing away from the wing roots, very faint, though. Other than that: nothing. It was in good shape.

The Commander was attempting to open out the little tripod on the base of the flagpole. His heavy gloved hands making the operation difficult. Wilson put out his own hand to steady the pole.

“Yo, dudes, how’s it hanging? You need any help there?” The question was followed by a snigger, the same one he’d heard earlier.

Wilson knew the voice of everybody on the mission. Spend that long together with thirty-eight people in such a confined space as the Ulysses and vocal recognition became perfect. Whoever spoke wasn’t on the crew. Yet somehow he knew it was real-time, not some pirate hack from Earth.

Commander Lewis had frozen, the flagpole tripod still not fully deployed. “Who said that?”

“That’d be me, my man. Nigel Sheldon, at your service. Specially if you need to get home in like a hurry.” That snigger again. Then someone else saying: “Oh, man, don’t do that, you’re going to so piss them off.”

“Who is this?” Lewis demanded.

Wilson was already moving, glide walking as fast as was safe in the low gravity, making for the rear of the Eagle II. He knew they were close, and he could see everything on this side of the spaceplane. As soon as he was past the bell-shaped rocket nozzles he forced himself to a halt. Someone else was standing there, arm held high in an almost apologetic wave. Someone in what looked like a homemade space suit. Which was an insane interpretation, but it was definitely a pressure garment of some type, possibly modified from deep-sea gear. The outer fabric was made up from flat ridges of dull brown rubber, in pronounced contrast to Wilson’s snow-white ten-million-dollar Martian Environment Excursion suit. The helmet was the nineteen fifties classic goldfish bowl, a clear glass bubble showing the head of a young man with a scraggly beard and long oily blond hair tied back into a pigtail. No radiation protection, Wilson thought inanely. There was no backpack either, no portable life-support module. Instead, a bundle of pressure hoses snaked away from the youth’s waist to a …

“Son of a bitch,” Wilson grunted.

Behind the interloper was a two-meter circle of another place. It hung above the Martian soil like some bizarre superimposed TV image, with a weird rim made up from seething diffraction patterns of light from a gray universe. An opening through space, a gateway into what looked like a rundown physics lab. The other side had been sealed off with thick glass. A college geek type with a wild Afro hairstyle was pressed against it, looking out at Mars, laughing and pointing at Wilson. Above him, bright Californian sunlight shone in through the physics lab’s open windows.

ONE

The star vanished from the center of the telescope’s image in less time than a single human heartbeat. There was no mistake, Dudley Bose was looking right at it when it happened. He blinked in surprise, drawing back from the eyepiece. “That’s not right,” he muttered.

He shivered slightly in reaction to the cold air around him, slapping gloved hands against his arms. His wife, Wendy, had insisted he wrap up well against the night, and he’d dutifully left the house in a thick woolen coat and sturdy hiking trousers. As always when the sun fell below Gralmond’s horizon, any warmth in the planet’s thinner-than-average atmosphere dissipated almost immediately. With the telescope housing open to the elements at two o’clock in the morning, the temperature had dropped enough to turn his every breath into a stream of gray mist.

Dudley shook the fatigue from his head, and leaned back into the eyepiece. The starfield pattern was the same—there had been no slippage in the telescope’s alignment—but Dyson Alpha was still missing. “It couldn’t be that fast,” he said.

He’d been observing the Dyson Pair for fourteen months now, searching for the first clues of the envelopment that would so dramatically alter the emission spectrum. Until tonight there had been no change to the tiny yellow speck of light twelve hundred forty light-years away from Gralmond that was Dyson Alpha.

He’d known there would be a change; it was the astronomy department at Oxford University back on Earth that had first noticed the anomoly during a routine sky scan back in 2170, two hundred and ten years ago. Since the previous scan twenty years earlier, two stars, a K-type and an M-type three years apart, had changed their emission spectrum completely to nonvisible infrared. For a few brief months the discovery had caused some excited debate among the remnants of the astronomy fraternity about how they could decay into red giants so quickly, and the extraordinary coincidence of two stellar neighbors doing so simultaneously. Then a newly settled planet fifty light-years farther out from Earth reported that the pair were still visible in their original spectrum. Working back across the distance, checking the spectrum at various distances from Earth, allowed astronomers to work out that the change to both stars had occurred over a period of approximately seven or eight years.

Given that amount of time, the nature of the change ceased to become a question of astronomy; stars of that category took a great deal longer to transform into red giants. Their emission hadn’t changed due to any natural stellar process; it was the direct result of technological intervention on the grandest possible scale.

Somebody had built a solid shell around each star. It was a feat whose scale was rivaled only by its time frame. Eight years was astonishingly swift to fabricate such a gigantic structure, and this advanced civilization had apparently built two at the same time. Even so, the concept wasn’t entirely new to the human race.

In the twenty-first century, a physicist named Freeman Dyson had postulated that the artifacts of a technologically advanced civilization would ultimately surround their star in order to utilize all of its energy. Now someone had turned his ancient hypothesis into reality. It was inevitable that the two stars would be formally christened the Dyson Pair.

Speculative papers were written after the Oxford announcement, and theoretical studies performed into how to dismantle Jovian-size planets to produce such a shell. But there was no real urgency connected to the discovery. The human race had already encountered several sentient alien species, all of them reassuringly harmless; and the Intersolar Commonwealth was expanding steadily. It would be a matter of only a few centuries until a wormhole was opened to the Dyson Pair. Any lingering questions about their construction could be answered then by the aliens themselves.

Now he’d seen that the envelopment was instantaneous, Dudley was left with a whole new set of very uncomfortable questions about the composition of the shell structure. An eight-year construction period for any solid shell that size had been assessed as remarkable, but obviously achievable. When he’d begun the observation he’d expected to note a year-by-year eclipse of the star’s light as more and more segments were produced and locked into place. This changed everything. To appear so abruptly, the shell couldn’t be solid. It had to be some kind of force field. Why would anyone surround a star with a force field?

“Are we recording?” he asked his e-butler.

“We are not,” the e-butler replied. “No electronic sensors are currently active at the telescope focus.” The voice was slightly thin, treble-boosted; a tone that had been getting worse over the last few years. Dudley suspected the OCtattoo on his ear was starting to degenerate; organic circuitry was always susceptible to antibody attack, and his was over twenty-five years old. Not that the glittery scarlet and turquoise spiral on his skin had changed. A classic spree of youthful dynamism after his last rejuvenation had made him choose a visible pattern, stylish and chic in those days. Now it was rather embarrassing for a middle-aged professor to sport around the campus. He should have had the old pattern erased and replaced it with something more discreet; but somehow he’d never gotten around to it, despite his wife’s repeated requests.

“Damnit,” Dudley grunted bitterly. But the idea of his e-butler taking the initiative had been a pretty forlorn hope. Dyson Alpha had risen only forty minutes earlier. Dudley had been setting up the observation, performing his standard final verification—an essential task, thanks to the poorly maintained mechanical systems that orientated the telescope. He never ordered the sensor activation until the checks were complete. That prissy routine might have just cost him the entire observation project.

Dudley went back for another look. The little star was still stubbornly absent in the visual spectrum. “Bring the sensors on-line now, will you please. I need to have some sort of record of tonight.”

“Recording now,” his e-butler said. “The sensors could benefit from recalibrating, the entire image is considerably short of optimum.”

“Yeah, I’ll get on to it,” Dudley replied absently. The state of the sensors was a hardware problem; one that he ought to assign to his students (all three of them). Along with a hundred other tasks, he thought wearily.

He pushed back from the telescope, and used his feet to propel the black leather office chair across the bare concrete floor of the observatory. The rattling noise from its old castors echoed thinly around the cavernous interior. There was enough vacant space for a host of sophisticated ancillary systems, which could bring the observatory up to near-professional standards; it could even house a larger telescope. But the Gralmond university lacked the funds for such an upgrade, and had so far failed to secure any commercial sponsorship from CST—Compression Space Transport, the only company truly interested in such matters. The astronomy department survived on a collection of meager government grants, and a few endowments from pure-science foundations. Even an Earth-based educational charity made an annual donation.

Beside the door was the long wooden bench that served as a de facto office for the whole department. It was covered with banks of aging, secondhand electronic equipment and hi-rez display portals. Dudley’s briefcase was also there, containing his late-night snacks and a flask of tea.

He opened the case and started munching on a chocolate cookie as the sensor images swam up into the display portals. “Put the infrared on the primary display,” he told the e-butler.

Holographic speckles in the large main portal shoaled into a false color image of the starfield, centered around the Dyson Pair. Dyson Alpha was now emitting a faint infrared signature. Slightly to one side and two light-years farther away, Dyson Beta continued to shine normally in its M-type spectrum.

“So that really was the envelopment event,” Dudley mused. It would be two years before anyone could prove whether the same thing had happened simultaneously at Dyson Beta. At least people would have to acknowledge that the Dyson Alpha event occurred in under twenty-three hours—the time since his last recorded observation. It was a start, but a bad one. After all, he’d just witnessed something utterly astounding. But without a recording to back him up, his report was likely to generate only disbelief, and a mountainous struggle to maintain his already none-too-high reputation.

Dudley was ninety-two, in his second life, and fast approaching time for another rejuvenation. Despite his body having the physical age of a standard fifty-year-old, the prospect of a long, degrading campaign within academia was one he regarded with dread. For a supposedly advanced civilization, the Intersolar Commonwealth could be appallingly backward at times, not to mention cruel.

Maybe it won’t be that bad, he told himself. The lie was comforting enough to get him through the rest of the night’s shift.

The Carlton AllLander drove Dudley home just after dawn. Like the astronomer, the vehicle was old and worn, but perfectly capable of doing its job. It had a cheap diesel engine, common enough on a semifrontier world like Gralmond, although its drive array was a thoroughly modern photoneural processor. With its high suspension and deep-tread tires it could plow along the dirt track to the observatory in all weather and seasons, including the meter-deep snow of Gralmond’s winters.

This morning all it had to surmount was a light drizzle and a thin slick of mud on the track. The observatory was situated on the high moorland ninety kilometers to the east of Leonida City, the planet’s capital. Not exactly a mountaintop perch, but it was the highest land within any reasonable distance, and unlikely ever to suffer from light pollution. It was forty minutes before the Carlton started to descend into the lower valleys where the main highway meandered along the base of the slopes. Only then were there any signs of human activity. A few farmsteads had been built in sheltered folds of the land where dense stretches of dark native evergreen cynomel trees occupied the ground above every stream and river. Grazing meadows had been established on the bleak hillsides, where animals shivered in the cold winds blowing down off the moorland.

All the while as the Carlton bobbed cautiously along the track, Dudley pondered how he could realistically break the news. Even a twenty-three-hour envelopment was a concept that the Commonwealth’s small fraternity of professional astronomers would dismiss out of hand. To claim it had happened in a split second would open him to complete ridicule, and invariably to an in-house status review from the university. As to the physicists and engineers who heard his claim … they’d gleefully contribute to the case against him.

Had he been at the start of his career he might have done it, achieving a degree of notoriety before finally proving himself right. The little man overcoming formidable odds, a semiheroic, or at least romantically poetic, figure. But now, taking such risks was too great. He needed another eight years of uninterrupted employment, even on the university’s demeaningly low salary, before his R&R pension was full; without that money there was no way he could pay for a rejuvenation. And who in the last decades of the twenty-fourth century was going to employ a discredited astronomer?

He stared out at the landscape beyond the vehicle’s windows, unconsciously stroking the OCtattoo on his ear. A wan light was illuminating the low undulating landscape of drab, damp cordgrass, revealing miserable-looking terrestrial cows and herds of the local bovine nygine. There must have been a horizon out there, but the bleak, gray sky made it hard to tell where it began. As vistas went, this had to be one of the most depressing of all the inhabited worlds.

Dudley closed his eyes and sighed. “And yet it moves,” he whispered.

As rebellions went, Dudley’s was fairly pitiful. He knew he couldn’t ignore what he’d seen out there among the eternal, unchanging constellations. Somewhat thankfully, he realized, he still had enough dignity left to make sure he didn’t take the easy burial option. Yet announcing the envelopment to the public would be the end of his own particular world. What others regarded as his essential meekness, he liked to think of as a caution that went with age. Similar to wisdom, really.

Old habits die hard, so he broke the problem down into stages, the way he always taught his students, and set about solving each one with as much logic as he could apply. Very simply, his overwhelming priority was to confirm the speed of envelopment. A wavefront of proof that was currently receding from Gralmond at the speed of light. And Gralmond was almost the farthest extent of the Commonwealth in this section of space. Almost, but not quite.

The Intersolar Commonwealth occupied a roughly spherical volume of space with Earth at the center, measuring four hundred light-years across. Gralmond was two hundred forty light-years from Earth, among the last of the second expansion phase planets to be settled. It didn’t require a great deal of calculation for Dudley to find that the next planet to witness the envelopment would be Tanyata, right on the edge of phase two space. Tanyata was even less developed than Gralmond—there was certainly no university yet—but a unisphere datasearch did find him a list of local amateur astronomers. There was one name on it.

Five months and three days after the evening he’d seen Dyson Alpha vanish, Dudley nervously waved good-bye to his wife as the Carlton pulled out of their driveway. She thought his trip to Tanyata was legitimate, sanctioned by the university. Even after eleven years of marriage, he didn’t have the courage to tell her the absolute truth. Or maybe it was that after five marriages he knew what to keep quiet about.

The Carlton drove him directly to the CST planetary station, on the other side of Leonida City from the university campus. Spring was just arriving, bringing a sprinkling of vivid green buds to the terrestrial saplings in the city’s parks. Even the full-grown native trees were responding to the longer, brighter days; their dark purple bark had acquired a new lustrous sheen as they prepared to unfurl their leaf awnings. Dudley watched the city’s residents from his seat: businesspeople striding about with purpose; parents being tolerant or exasperated with their kids; first-life adolescents milling about together outside coffeehouses and mall entrances, hopelessly gauche yet still managing to look like the most lethal gang members in human history. All of them so bright and normal. Dudley had chosen to settle here late in his second life because frontier planets always had an infectious air of expectation and hope; this was where new dreams really could take root and grow. And he’d done so little with that second life. His slightly desperate relocation here was an acknowledgment of that.

CST had opened their planetary station on Gralmond over twenty-five years ago. About the time Dudley was getting his colorful OCtattoo, in fact—an irony that hadn’t escaped him. The planet had done well for itself during its first quarter century of human history. Farmers had set their tractorbots and herds loose on the land. Urbanites brought prefab buildings that they lined up in neat grids and called cities in homage to the great metropolises they hoped would one day evolve from such humble beginnings. Factories were imported, riding in on the strong tide of investment money; hospitals, schools, theaters, and government offices multiplied fruitfully around them. Roads expanded out from the population center, sending exploratory tendrils across the continent. And as always, the trains came after them, bearing the greater load of commerce.

Dudley’s Carlton drove along the side of the Mersy rail route as he neared CST’s planetary station. A simple chain-link fence and a plastic safety barrier was all that separated the dual lane highway from the thick lines of carbon-bonded steel rails. The Mersy rail route was one of five major track lanes that had so far been laid out of the station. Gralmond’s population was rightly proud of them. Five in twenty-five years: a good sign of a healthy expanding economy. Three of the rail routes, including the Mersy, led away to vast industrial parks squatting on the outskirts of Leonida City, while the remaining two stretched out into the countryside, where forking again and again, they connected with the principal agricultural towns. Goods flowed in and out of the CST planetary station day and night, slowly increasing in quantity as the years progressed; circulating money, material, and machinery across fresh lands, advancing the human boundary month by month.

A big freight train grumbled alongside, going only slightly faster than the Carlton. Dudley looked over at the sound, seeing long olive-green wagons rolling along steadily, the sulfur-yellow lettering on their sides faded from age and sunlight. There must have been fifty of them linked together, all pulled along by a giant twenty-wheel engine. It was one of the GH7-class engines, he thought, though which particular marque he wasn’t sure; those brutes had been in use for nearly eighty years, a thirty-five-meter body filled with superconductor batteries, powering massive electric axle motors. Gralmond wouldn’t see anything bigger until the planet reached full industrialization status, in maybe another seventy years or so.

Already, such a monster trundling through the flourishing city seemed slightly incongruous. This district still contained a lot of the original prefab buildings, two- or three-story cubes of whitened aluminum with solar cell roofs. Redevelopment was hardly necessary on a world where the government gave land away to anyone who asked for it. Gralmond’s total population barely reached eighteen million, nobody was crowded here. The prefabs, however, remained as useful housing and commercial centers for the newest and poorest arrivals. But many city blocks of the shabby metal boxes had been torn down and replaced by new stone or glass-fronted buildings as the local economy bootstrapped itself upward. More common was the encroachment of drycoral, a plant originally found on Mecheria. New residents planted the genetically tailored kernels along the bases of their houses, carefully tending the long flat strands of spongy pumicelike stone that grew quickly up the walls, broadening out to form a sturdy organic shell around the entire structure, with simple pruning keeping the windows clear.

The passenger terminus was only a small part of the ten square kilometers that was the CST planetary station; most of the area was given over to marshaling yards and engineering works. At one end was the gateway itself, sheltered from the weather beneath a broad arching roof made from crystal and white concrete. Dudley could barely remember it from his arrival eleven years ago, not that it would have changed.

The Carlton drew up at the departures rank at the front of the terminal, then trundled off home as soon as he stepped out with his luggage. He walked into the station to find himself immersed in a throng of people who seemed to be going in every direction but the one he wanted. Even though it was relatively new, the concourse had an old-fashioned look to it: tall marble pillars held up a high glass roof; franchise stalls lurked in the cathedral-style archways; the short stairways between levels were implausibly wide, as though they led to some hidden palace; statues and sculptures occupied deep high alcoves, every surface covered in bird droppings. Big translucent holographic projections hung in the air, crimson and emerald signs that backed up the train timetable information for anyone who didn’t have an interface with the local network; little birds zipped through them continuously, hooting in puzzlement at the trail of sparkles their membranous wings whipped up.

“The Verona train is leaving from platform nine,” Dudley’s e-butler told him.

He set off down the concourse toward the platform. Verona was a regular destination, with a train leaving every forty minutes. There were a lot of commuters from there, middle management types from the finance and investment companies who were involved with setting up and running Gralmond’s civil infrastructure.

The Verona train was made up of eight double-decker carriages hooked up to a medium-sized PH54 engine. Dudley shoved his cases into the baggage compartment on the fifth carriage and climbed on board, finding an empty seat by one of the upper deck windows. Then there was nothing to do but try to ignore his growing tension as the timer display in his virtual vision counted down toward departure time. There were seven messages for him in his e-butler’s hold file; half of which were from his students containing both data and audio clusters.

The last five months had been extraordinarily busy for the small university astronomy department; even though there had been no stellar observations made in all that time. Dudley had declared that the state of the telescope and its instruments was no longer acceptable, and that they’d been neglecting the practical side of their profession. Under his supervision, the tracking motors had been dismantled and serviced one by one, then the bearings, followed by the entire sensor suite. With the telescope out of commission, they also had the opportunity to upgrade and integrate the specialist control and image analysis programs. At first the students had welcomed the chance to get their hands dirty and improve the available systems. But that initial enthusiasm had long since faded as Dudley kept finding them new and essential tasks that delayed recommissioning.

Dudley hated deceiving them, but it was a legitimate way of suspending the whole Dyson Pair observation project. He told himself that if he could just secure the evidence, then the impact it would have on their department and its budget would more than justify the small subterfuge. It was only during the last couple of months as he put up with all their complaints that he’d begun to think of the effect a verified envelopment might have on his own career and fortunes. Failure to back up the observation would have ruined him; success, on the other hand, opened up a whole new realm of prospects. He could well progress far beyond anything the Gralmond university could offer. It was a pleasant daydream to lose himself in.

The train started moving, pulling away from the platform and out into the spring sunshine. All Dudley could see through his window was the industrial landscape of the station yard, where hundreds of tracks snaked across the ground, crossing and recrossing like some vast abstract maze. Single wagons and carriages were being moved about by small shunting engines that coughed out thick plumes of diesel exhaust. The only visible horizon seemed to be made from warehouses and loading bays, where a spidery gridwork of gantry cranes and container stackers wove through every section of the big open structures. Flatbed carriages and fat tankers were being readied or unloaded within the mechanical systems that almost engulfed them. Engineering crews and maintenancebots crawled along several tracks, performing repairs.

Traffic began to increase on the tracks around them as they headed for the gateway; long cargo trains alternating with smaller passenger carriers. All of them snaked their way over junctions with sinuous motions, arrowing in toward the final stretch of track. On the other side of the carriage, Dudley could see a near-continual stream of trains emerging from the gateway.

There were only two tracks leading to the gateway: one inbound, one outbound. The Verona train finally slotted onto the outbound stretch, fitting in behind the passenger train for EdenBurg. A freighter bound for StLincoln slotted in behind them. A low warning tone chimed through the carriage. Dudley could just see the edge of the curving gateway roof ahead of them. The light dimmed fractionally as they passed underneath. Then there was just the wide shimmering amber oval of the gateway dead ahead, so reminiscent of an old-fashioned tunnel entrance. The train slid straight into it.

Dudley felt a slight tingle on his skin as the carriage passed through the pressure curtain that prevented the atmospheres of the two worlds from mixing. Even though it spanned a hundred eighteen light-years, the wormhole itself had no internal length. The generator machinery that created it had a considerable bulk, however; most of which was tucked away in the massive concrete support buildings behind the roof. It was only the emission units that were contained in the great oval hoop of the gateway, measuring over thirty meters thick. Given the speed the train was traveling, even that flashed past in a second.

Glorious copper twilight streamed in through the carriage windows. Dudley’s ears popped as the new atmosphere flooded into the carriage through the rooftop vents. He looked out at the massive expanse that was CST’s Verona station. There was no visible end to it, no glimpse of the megacity that he knew lay beyond. One edge of the station was a solid cliff of gateways, sheltering under their curving single-span roofs, each oval framing a slightly different colored patch of haze depending on the spectral class of the star whose world they reached. But for the rest of it, as far as the eye could see, trains and tracks were the sole landscape. Behemoth freighters rolled along, their engines dwarfing the GH7s that had so impressed Dudley; nuclear-powered tractor units pulling two-kilometer chains of wagons. Sleek white passenger expresses flashed past pulling dozens of carriages with multiworld commuters whose routes would take them through twenty or more planets as they rushed from gateway to gateway on a never-ending circuit. Simple little regional trains like the one Dudley was on shuffled between their larger, grander cousins. Verona station had them all.

As Earth was the junction world for all the planets in phase one space of the Intersolar Commonwealth, so Verona was the major junction for this section of phase two space, with gateways leading to thirty-three planets. It was one of the so-called Big15; the industrial planets established out along the rim of phase one space, a hundred or so light-years from Sol. Company-founded, company-funded, and company-run.

Verona station boasted seven passenger terminals; Dudley’s train pulled into number three. Again the scale of the place hit home. This terminal alone was five times the size of Gralmond’s planetary station. Verona’s thicker atmosphere and slightly heavier gravity contributed to his feeling of triviality as he wandered along the packed concourse in search of the Tanyata service. He found it eventually on platform 18b, three single-deck carriages pulled by a diesel-powered Ables RP2 engine. His luggage went on an overhead rack, and he sat on a double seat by himself. The carriage was less than a third full. There were only three trains a day to Tanyata.

When he arrived, he could see why there were so few scheduled services. Tanyata was very definitely a frontier planet; the last to be established in this sector of phase two space. It simply wasn’t commercially practical to build wormholes that reached any farther. Verona would link no more Human-congruous planets; that honor now fell to Saville, which was less than ten light-years from Gralmond. CST was already building its new exploratory base there, preparing to open wormholes to a new generation of star systems: phase three space, the next wave of human expansion.

The CST Tanyata station was just a couple of hurriedly assembled boronsteel platforms under a temporary plastic roof. A crane and a warehouse comprised the entire cargo section, backing on to a vast muddy yard where stacked metal containers and tanks formed long rows on the badly mowed vegetation. Wagons and trucks grumbled along the aisles, loading up with supplies. The settlement itself was a simple sprawl of standardized mobile cabins for the construction crews who were laying down the first stage of the planet’s civil infrastructure. Quite a few prefabs buildings were being integrated, with men and big manipulatorbots slotting together reinforced aluminum modules inside a matrix of carbon beams. The biggest machines were the roadbuilders, tracked mini-factories with big harmonic blades at the front chewing up soil and clay. A chemical reactor processed the material into enzyme-bonded concrete that was squeezed out at the rear to form a flat level surface. The thick clouds of steam and fumes swirling out from around the units made it virtually impossible to see them fully.

Dudley stepped out onto the platform, and immediately reached for his sunglasses. The settlement was somewhere in the tropics, with a clammy humidity to go with the burning blue-tinged sunlight. To the west, he could just see the ocean past a series of gentle hills. He pulled his jacket off and fanned himself. His skin was already sweating.

Someone at the other end of the platform called out Dudley’s name and waved. Dudley hesitated in the act of raising his own hand. The man was just over six feet tall with the kind of slim frame that marathon runners cherished. Physical age was difficult to place, his skin was heavily OCtattooed; patterns and pictures glowed with hazy color on every limb. Gold spiral galaxies formed a slow-moving constellation across his bald head. A perfectly clipped, graying goatee beard was the only real clue to late middle age. He grinned and started to walk down the length of the platform; his kilt flapping around his knees. The tartan was a bold pattern in amethyst and black.

“Professor Bose, I presume?”

Dudley managed not to stroke his own OCtattoo. “Uh, yes.” He put his hand out. “Er, LionWalker Eyre?” Even the way he pronounced it was wrong, like some kind of disapproving bachelor uncle. He hoped the heat was covering any blush to his cheeks.

“That’ll be me. Most people just call me Walker.”

“Er. Great. Okay. Walker, then.”

“Pleased to meet you, Professor.”

“Dudley.”

“My man.” LionWalker gave Dudley a hearty slap on his back.

Dudley started to worry. He hadn’t given any thought to the astronomer’s name when the datasearch produced it. But then, anyone who had enough money to buy a four foot reflecting telescope, then ship it out to a frontier world and live there with it, had to be somewhat eccentric.

“It’s very kind of you to allow me a night’s observation,” Dudley said.

LionWalker smiled briefly as they headed back down the platform. “Well now, it was very unusual to be asked such a thing. Got to be important to you, then, this one night?”

“It could be, yes. I hope so.”

“I asked myself: why one night? What can you possibly see that only takes up such a short time? And a specific night as well.”

“And?”

“Aye, well that’s it, isn’t it? I could not come up with a single thing; not in terms of stellar events. And I know there are no comets due, either, at least none I’ve seen, and I’m the only one watching these skies. Are you going to tell me?”

“My department has an ongoing observation of the Dyson Pair; some of our benefactors were interested in them. I just want to confirm something, that’s all.”

“Ah.” LionWalker’s smile grew wise. “I see. Unnatural events it is, then.”

Dudley began to relax slightly. Eccentric he might be, but LionWalker was also pretty shrewd.

They reached the end of the platform and the tall man suddenly twisted his wrist and pointed a finger, then slowly drew a semicircle in the air. The OCtattoos on his forearm and wrist flared in a complicated swirl of color. A Toyota pickup truck pulled up sharply in front of them.

“That’s an interesting control system,” Dudley commented.

“Aye, well, it’s the one I favor. Sling your bags in the back, will you?”

They drove off along one of the newly extruded concrete roads, heading out of the busy settlement. LionWalker twitched his fingers every few seconds, inducing another ripple of color in his OCtattoos, and the pickup’s steering would respond fluidly.

“Couldn’t you just give the drive array some verbal instructions?” Dudley asked.

“Now what would be the point in that? My way I have control over technology. Machinery does as I command. That’s how it should be. Anything else is mechanthropomorphism. You don’t treat a lump of moving metal as an equal and ask it pretty please to do what you’d like. Who’s in charge here, us or them?”

“I see.” Dudley smiled, actually warming to the man. “Is mechanthropomorphism a real word?”

LionWalker shrugged. “It ought to be, the whole bloody Commonwealth practices it like some kind of religion.”

They quickly left the settlement behind, driving steadily along the road that ran parallel to the coast, just a couple of kilometers inland. Dudley kept catching glimpses of the beautifully clear ocean beyond the small sandy hillocks standing guard behind the shore. Farther inland the ground rose to a range of distant hills. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, nor any breeze. The intense light gave the tufty grass and coastal reeds a dark hue, turning the leaves almost jade. Small scrub trees grew along the side of the road; at first glance similar to terrestrial palms, except their leaves were more like cacti branches, complete with monstrous red thorns.

Fifty kilometers clear of the settlement the road curved inland. LionWalker gave an elaborate wave with his hand, and the pickup obligingly turned off, heading down a narrow sand track. Dudley wound the window down, smelling the fresh sea air. It wasn’t nearly as salty as most H-congruous worlds.

“See the way they laid the road well inland?” LionWalker called over the wind. “Plenty of prime real estate between it and the coast. Thirty years’ time, when the city’s grown up, that’ll sell for ten thousand dollars an acre. This whole area will be covered in rich men’s beach houses.”

“Is that bad?”

“Not for me,” LionWalker said with a laugh. “I won’t be here.”

It was another fifteen kilometers to LionWalker’s house. He’d taken over a curving bay that was sheltered by dunes that extended for several kilometers inland. His house was a low bungalow of pearl-white drycoral perched on top of a large dune only a hundred meters from the shore, with a wide veranda of decking facing the ocean. The big dome of the observatory was a little farther back from the water, a standard concrete and metal design.

A golden Labrador ran out to greet them, tail wagging happily. LionWalker fussed with it as they walked to the house. Dudley could hear the sounds of a furious argument while they were still twenty meters away.

“Oh, Lord, they’re still at it,” LionWalker muttered.

The thin wooden shutter door slammed open and a young woman stormed out. She was startlingly beautiful, even to Dudley, who was used to a campus full of fresh-faced girls.

“He’s a pig,” she spat at LionWalker as she hurried past.

“Aye, I’m sure,” LionWalker said meekly.

The woman probably didn’t hear, she was already walking toward the dunes, face set with a determination that made it clear she wasn’t going to stop until she reached the end of the world. The Labrador gave her a longing look before turning back to LionWalker.

“There, there.” He patted the dog’s head. “She’ll be back to give you your supper.”

They’d almost reached the door when it opened again. This time it was a young man who came out. With his androgynous features, he was almost as beautiful as the girl. If it hadn’t been for the fact he was shirtless, Dudley might even have questioned his gender.

“Just where does she think she’s going?” he whined.

“I don’t know,” LionWalker said in a resigned tone. “She didn’t tell me.”

“Well, I’m not going after her.” The youth set off for the beach, slouching his shoulders and kicking at the sand with his bare feet as he went.

LionWalker opened the door and gestured Dudley inside. “Sorry about that.”

“Who are they?” Dudley asked.

“They’re my current life partners. I love them dearly, but I sometimes wonder if it’s worth it, you know. You married?”

“Yes. Several times, actually.”

“Aye, well, you know what it’s like then.”

The interior of the house was laid out in a classic minimalist style, which suited the location perfectly. A big circular fireplace served as the focal point of the living room. Tall curving windows revealed an uninterrupted view of the bay and the ocean. Air-conditioning provided a relaxing chill.

“Sit yourself down,” LionWalker said. “I expect you could do with a drink. I’ll take you over to see the telescope in a minute. You can check it out then. I’m confident you’ll be satisfied.”

“Thanks.” Dudley lowered himself into one of the big sofas. He felt very drab and colorless in such surroundings. It wasn’t just the richness of the house and its setting, but the vivacity of the people who lived here as well.

“This isn’t what I was expecting,” he admitted a few minutes later, when he’d drunk some of LionWalker’s very agreeable fifty-year-old scotch.

“You mean you thought I’d be somebody like you? No offense, my man.”

“None taken. So what are you doing here?”

“Well, I was born with a reasonable trust fund; then I went and made even more money for myself in the commodities market. That was a couple of rejuvenations ago. I’ve just been loafing ever since.”

“So why here? Why Tanyata?”

“This is the edge. This is as far out from our starting point as we’ve got—well, with the exception of Far Away. That’s a wonderful thing, even though everyone regards it as commonplace. I can sit here at night and look where we’re going. You look at the stars, Dudley, you know what marvels there are to be seen out here. And those cretins behind us, they never look. Where we are now, this was what our ancestors thought was heaven. Now I can look out from their heaven and see where our future lies. Do you not think that’s a thing of glory?”

“Certainly is.”

“There are stars out here that you cannot see from Earth with the naked eye. They shine down out of the sky at night, and I want to know them.”

“Me, too.” Dudley saluted him with the crystal tumbler that was a hundred years older than the scotch it held, and gulped it down in one.

The two youngsters returned after a couple of hours cooling off by themselves. LionWalker introduced them as Scott and Chi as they sheepishly greeted Dudley. As a penance, the two of them set about building a bonfire on the beach, using the local driftwood that had a curiously matted texture. They lit it as the sun sank down toward the ocean. Bright orange sparks blew out of the flame tips to swirl high above the sand. Potatoes were pushed into the heart of the fire, while a makeshift barbecue grill was prepared for when the flames died down.

“Can we see the Dyson Pair from here?” Scott asked as the stars began to appear in the darkening sky.

“No,” Dudley said. “Not with the naked eye, they’re too far away. You can barely see Earth’s star from here, and the Dyson Pair are almost a thousand light-years beyond that.”

“So when were they enveloped?”

“That’s a very good question—we’ve never been able to pin down the exact construction time of the shells—that’s what my observation project is going to help solve.” Even now Dudley wasn’t going to admit what he’d observed.

Astronomy post 2050 had effectively ceased to be a pure science. CST had long since taken over all major deep-space observation for purely commercial ends. In any case, when you could visit stars of every spectral type to observe them directly, there was little point in prioritizing astronomy. Few higher education institutions on Commonwealth worlds bothered building observatories; even Oxford’s telescope had been over a century old when it discovered the Dyson Pair.

An hour after sunset, Dudley and LionWalker walked through the dunes to the observatory. Inside, it was little different to the one on Gralmond: a big empty space with the fat tube of the telescope in the middle, resting on a complex cradle of metal beams and electromuscle bands. The sensor housings surrounding the focus looked a lot more sophisticated than anything the university could afford. A row of neat, modern display portals was lined up along the wall beside the door.

Dudley glanced around at the professional equipment, feeling a degree of tension ebbing away. There was no practical reason the observation shouldn’t occur. All he had to deal with was his own memory of the event. Could it really have happened like that? Five months after the fact, the moment seemed elusive somehow, the memory of a dream.

LionWalker stood close to the base of the telescope, and began what looked like a robot mime dance. Arms and legs jerked about in small precise movements. In response, the doors on the dome started to peel open. Electromuscle bands on the telescope cradle flexed silently, and the fat cylinder began to turn, aligning itself on the horizon where the Dyson Pair were due to rise. LionWalker’s body continued to twist and whirl, then he was snapping his fingers to some unheard beat. The portals came alive one by one, relaying the sensor images.

Dudley hurried over to them. The image quality was flawless. He gazed at the starfield, noting the minute variation from the patterns he was used to. “What sort of linkage have we got?” he asked his e-butler.

“The planetary cybersphere is negligible; however, there is a landline to the CST station. Available bandwidth is more than capable of meeting your stated requirements. I can open communication to the unisphere whenever you want.”

“Good. Begin a quarter of an hour before estimated enclosure time. I want full SI datavault storage, and a unisphere legal verification of the feed.”

“Acknowledged.”

LionWalker had stopped his gyrations, allowing the telescope to rest. He raised an eyebrow. “You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.” A datavault store and legal verification were expensive. Along with his ticket, the cost had taken quite a chunk out of their carefully saved holiday money. Something else Dudley hadn’t told his wife. But it had to be done, with the telescope sensor feed authenticated the observation would be beyond dispute.

Dudley sat in a cheap plastic chair beside the telescope, his chin resting on his hands, watching the holographic light within the portals. He watched the dark sky obsessively as the Dyson Pair rose above the horizon. LionWalker made a few small adjustments and Dyson Alpha was centered in every portal. For eighty minutes it remained steady. A simple point of ordinary light, each spectrum band revealing an unwavering intensity.

LionWalker made a few attempts to talk to Dudley about what to expect. Each time he was waved silent. Dudley’s e-butler established a full wideband link to the unisphere, and confirmed that the SI datavault was recording.

It was almost an anticlimax when, right on time, Dyson Alpha vanished.

“Yes!” Dudley yelled. He jumped to his feet, sending the chair tumbling backward. “Yes, yes, yes. I was right.” He turned to LionWalker, his smile absurdly wide. “Did you see that?”

“Aye,” LionWalker grunted with false calm. “I saw that.”

“Yes!” Dudley froze. “Did we get it?” he asked his e-butler urgently.

“Unisphere confirms the recording. The event is logged in the SI datavault.”

Dudley’s smile returned.

“Do you realize what that was?” LionWalker asked.

“I realize.”

“It was impossible, man, that’s what. Completely bloody impossible. Nobody can switch off a star like that. Nobody.”

“I know. Wonderful, isn’t it?”

TWO

Adam Elvin walked out of the CST planetary station in Tokat, the capital of Velaines. He took his time as he passed the sensors that were built into the fluted marble pillars lining the concourse. If he was going to be arrested, he would rather it be now, before the rest of the mission was exposed.

The average Commonwealth citizen had no idea such surveillance systems existed. Adam had dealt with them for most of his adult life. Understandably paranoid about sabotage, CST used them to monitor everyone using their facilities. The sensor’s large processor arrays were loaded with visual characteristics recognition smartware that checked every passenger against a long long list of known and suspected recidivists.

Adam had used cellular reprofiling to change his height and appearance more times than he could remember; at least once a year, more often twice or three times. The treatment could never cure the aging process that was starting to frost his joints and organs; but it did remove scar tissue, of which he’d acquired more than his fair share over the decades. It also gave him a wide choice of features. He always felt that trying to disguise his seventy-five years was a pointless vanity. An elderly person wearing an adolescent’s face was truly pitiful. The rest of the body always gave them away: too bulky, too slow.

He reached the departure rank outside the station’s passenger terminal and used his e-butler to hail a taxi. There had been no alarm. Or at least nothing detectable, he told himself. You never could tell when you were up against her. She was smart, and getting closer to him as the years wore on. If she had prepared a trap for him on Velaines, it wasn’t to be sprung today—the time he would prefer.

For the moment he was free to go about his mission. Today he was a new person, previously unknown to the Commonwealth. According to his citizenship file he was Huw North, a native of Pelcan, a first-life sixty-seven; an employee of the Bournewell Engineering Company. To look at he was overweight; considerably so, given how seriously Commonwealth citizens took their health these days, weighing in at around two hundred thirty pounds. Accompanying that was a round saggy face that sweated a lot. Thinning gray hair was combed low across his forehead in an unfashionable style. He wore a baggy brown raincoat with wide lapels. It was open down the front to reveal a creased gray suit. A big man with a small life, someone nobody paid attention to. Cellular reprofiling was a cosmetic treatment for the poor and the vain, not a method of adding fat and giving skin a pasty pallor. As a misdirection it never failed.

Which means it is probably time to change it, Adam thought as he eased his oversize frame into the taxi, which drove him to the Westpool Hotel. He checked in and paid for two weeks in advance. His room was a double on the eighth floor, with sealed windows and air-conditioning set too cold for him. He hated that; he was a light sleeper and the noise from the air-conditioning would keep him awake for hours. It always did.

He unpacked all the clothes in his suitcase, then took out the smaller shoulder bag containing his emergency pack—two sets of clothing, one of which was several sizes too small, a medical kit, cash, a CST return ticket from EdenBurg to Velaines with the outbound section already used, a couple of very sophisticated handheld arrays containing some well-guarded kaos software, and a legal ion stun pistol with buried augmentation that gave it a lethal short-range blast.

An hour later, Adam left the hotel and walked five blocks in the warm afternoon sunlight, getting a feel of the capital city. Traffic up and down the wide roads was close-spaced, with taxis and commercial vans dominating the lanes. None of them used combustion engines; they were all powered by superconductor batteries. This section of town was still respectable, close to the central financial and commercial districts. Around him were stores and offices, along with some small side roads of terraced apartments, none of them over four or five stories high. Public buildings built in a late-imperial Russian style fronted neat squares. In the distance, down the perfectly straight roads, were the towers that marked the heart of the city. Every few blocks he walked under the elevated rail tracks snaking through the city’s road grid, thick concrete arteries on high stanchions, carrying the major lines in and out of the planetary station.

Velaines was in phase one space, barely fifty light-years from Earth itself. Opened for settlement in 2090, its economy and industry had matured along model lines ever since. It now had a population of over two billion with a proportionally high standard of living, the kind of world that phase two and three space planets aspired to become.

Given the length of its history, it was inevitable that some strands of decay should creep into its society. In the fast-paced capital market economy model that Velaines followed, not everybody could make themselves rich enough to enjoy multiple rejuvenations. The areas they lived in reflected their financial status. Road surfaces became cracked and uneven, while the efficient citywide network of metro trams serving them offered fewer than average stops and ran old carriages. This was where the real rot set in, the despair and dead ends, where human lives were wasted, sacrificed to the god of economics. In this day and age it was an outrage that such a thing should happen. It was exactly the environment Adam had long ago committed himself to eradicating, and now the place he needed most for his other activities.

He found himself an A+A hotel at the end of Fifty-third Street, and checked in, using his Quentin Kelleher identity. The A+A was a franchise of cheap fully automated hotels where the manager was also the maintenance chief. The reception array accepted the Augusta dollar account transfer from his credit tattoo, and gave him a code for room 421. Its layout was a simple square three meters on a side, with a shower/toilet alcove and a dispenser outlet. There was one jellmattress bed, one chair, and one retractable shelf. However, the room was on the corner of the building, which meant he had two windows.

He asked the dispenser’s small array for a sleeping pouch, three packaged meals, two liters of bottled water, and a toiletries bag, all charged to his account. The mechanism whirred smoothly a minute later, and the items popped out into the rack. After that he set one of his handheld arrays to sentry mode, and left it scanning the room. If anyone did break in, it would notify his e-butler immediately with an encrypted message from a onetime unisphere address. Such an act had a low probability. Velaines was proud of its relatively low crime index, and anyone staying in an A+A wouldn’t have anything of value. Good enough odds for him.

That evening Adam took a metro tram across town to another slightly shabby district. In among the closed shops and open bars he found a door with a small sign above it:

INTERSOLAR SOCIALIST PARTY
Velaines, 7th chapter

His e-butler gave the door his Huw North Party membership code, and the lock buzzed. Inside was pretty much what he expected, a flight of bare wooden stairs leading up to a couple of rooms with high windows, long since boarded up. There was a bar in one, serving cheap beer from microbreweries and lethal-looking liquors from ceramic bottles. A games portal took up most of the second room, with observer chairs packed around the walls.

Several men were sitting on stools at the bar. They fell silent as Adam walked over. Nobody wearing a suit, even as cheap as his, belonged in that room.

“Beer, please,” Adam told the barman. He put a couple of Earth dollar bills on the counter; the currency was accepted without question on most worlds.

The bottle was placed in front of him. Everybody watched as he took a sip. “Not bad.” Adam even managed to keep a straight face. He could appreciate a Socialist club not buying from a big corporate brewery, but surely they could find a smaller one that actually produced drinkable beer.

“New in town, comrade?” the barman asked.

“Got in today.”

“Staying long?”

“A little while, yeah. I’m looking for a comrade called Murphy, Nigel Murphy.”

The man at the far end of the bar stood up. “That’ll be me then.” He was slim, taller than Adam, with a narrow face that carried suspicion easily. Adam guessed he was a first-lifer; his head was almost bald, with just a thin monk’s ring of graying hair. His clothes were those of an ordinary workingman: jeans, and a checked shirt, with a fleece jacket worn open, a woolly hat stuffed into one pocket. They were all streaked with dirt, as if he’d come straight from the factory or yard. But the way he looked at Adam—the assessment he carried out in a glance—marked him out as a leader.

“Huw North,” Adam said as they shook hands. “One of my colleagues was here last week.”

“Not sure if I remember,” Nigel Murphy said.

“He said you were the man to talk to.”

“Depends what you want to talk about … comrade.”

Adam held in a sigh. He’d been through this same ritual so many times over the years. By now he really ought to have worked out how to circumvent the bullshit and get right down to business. But as always, it had to be played out. The local man had to be proved top dog in front of his friends.

“I have a few issues,” Adam said. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“You’re very free with your money there, comrade,” said one of the others sitting behind Nigel Murphy. “Got a lot of it, have you? Thinking you can buy our friendship?”

Adam smiled thinly at the barfly. “I don’t want your friendship, and you certainly don’t want to be a friend of mine.”

The man grinned around at his colleagues. His appearance was mid-thirties, and he had the kind of brashness that suggested that was his genuine age, a first-lifer. “Why’s that?”

“Who are you?”

“Sabbah. What’s it to you?”

“Well, Sabbah. If you were my friend, you’d be stalked across the Commonwealth, and when they caught you, you’d die. Permanently.”

Nobody in the bar was smiling anymore. Adam was glad of the small heavy bulge in his jacket produced by the ion pistol.

“Any of you remember November 21, 2344?” Adam looked around challengingly.

“Abadan station,” Nigel Murphy said quietly.

“That was you?” Sabbah asked.

“Let’s just say I was in the region at the time.”

“Four hundred and eighty people killed,” Murphy said. “A third of them total deaths. Children who were too young to have memorycell inserts.”

“The train was late,” Adam said. His throat was dry as he remembered the events. They were still terribly clear. He’d never had a memory edit, never taken the easy way out. Live with the consequences of your actions. So every night he dreamed of the explosion and derailment just in front of the gateway, carriages plunging across junctions and parallel rails in the busiest section of the station. Fifteen trains hit, sideshunted, crashing, bursting apart, exploding, spewing out radioactive elements. And bodies. “It was on the wrong section of track at the wrong time. My chapter was after the Kilburn grain train.”

“You wanted to stop people from eating?” Sabbah asked sneeringly.

“Is this a drinking den or a Socialist chapter? Don’t you know anything about the Party you support? The reason we exist? There are certain types of grain trains which are specially designed to go through zero-end gateways. CST don’t tell people about those trains, same way as they don’t mention zero-end. The company spent millions designing wagons which can function in freefall and a vacuum. Millions of dollars developing machinery whose only job is to dump their contents into space. They go through a zero-end gateway onto a line of track that’s just hanging there in the middle of interstellar space. Nobody knows where. It doesn’t matter, they exist so that we can safely dump anything harmful away from H-congruous planets. So they send the trains with their special wagons through and open the hatches to expel their contents. Except there’s nothing physically dangerous about the grain. It’s just tens of thousands of tons of perfectly good grain streaming out into the void. There’s another clever mechanism built into the wagons to make sure of that. Just opening the hatch isn’t good enough. In freefall the grain will simply sit there, it has to be physically pushed out. And do you know why they do it?”

“The market,” Nigel Murphy said with a hint of weariness.

“Damn right: the market. If there’s ever a glut of food, the prices go down. Commodity traders can’t have that; they can’t sell at enough profit to pay for the gamble they’ve made on the work of others, so the market demands less food to go around. The grain trains roll through the zero-end gateways, and people pay higher prices for basic food. Any society which allows that to happen is fundamentally wrong. And grain is just the tiniest part of the abuse people are subject to thanks to the capitalist market economy.” Adam stared hard at Sabbah, knowing that once again he was going too far, making too much of an issue out of his own commitment. He didn’t care; this was what he’d devoted himself to. Even now, with all his other priorities, the greater human cause still fueled him. “That’s why I joined this Party, to end that kind of monstrous injustice. That’s why I’ve committed my life to this Party. And that’s why I’ll die, a total death, a member of this Party. Because I believe the human race deserves better than those bastard plutocrats running us like some private fiefdom. How about you, sonny? What do you believe in?”

“Thanks for clearing that up,” Nigel Murphy said hurriedly. He stood between Adam and Sabbah. “All of us here are good members of the Party, Huw. We might have joined for different reasons, but we have the same aims.” With one hand he signaled Sabbah and the others to stay at the bar. His other arm pressed lightly on Adam’s shoulder, steering him toward a small door. “Let’s talk.”

The back room was used to store beer crates and all the other junk that a bar generates down the years. A single polyphoto strip was fixed to the ceiling, providing illumination. When the door was closed, Adam’s e-butler informed him its access to the cybersphere had been severed.

“Sorry about that,” Nigel Murphy said as they pulled out a couple of empty beer crates to sit on. “The comrades aren’t used to new faces around here.”

“You mean the Party’s a lost cause on Velaines?”

Nigel Murphy nodded reluctantly. “It seems that way some days. We barely scrape two percent in elections now, and a lot of those are simply protest votes against the major parties. Any direct action we take against the companies is so … I don’t know. Puerile? It’s like we’re hitting a planet with a rubber hammer, we’re not causing any damage. And there’s always the risk of another mistake like Abadan. Socialism isn’t about killing people, after all. It’s supposed to be about justice.”

“I know. It’s hard, believe me. And I’ve been working for the cause a lot longer than you. But you have to believe that someday all this will change. The Commonwealth today is based on pure imperialist expansion. That’s always the most favorable time for market economics because there are always new markets opening. But it will ultimately fail. The expansion into phase three space is nothing like as fast and aggressive as the first and second phases were. The whole process is slowing. Eventually this madness will stop and we can start to focus our resources toward genuine social growth instead of physical.”

“Let’s hope so.” Nigel Murphy raised his beer bottle. “So what can I do for you?”

“I need to speak to some people. I’m looking to buy weapons hardware.”

“Still blowing up grain trains, huh?”

“Yeah.” Adam forced a smile. “Still blowing up grain trains. Can you set that up for me?”

“I can try. I’ve bought a few small pieces myself over the years.”

“I’m not looking for small pieces.”

“The dealer I use, she should be able to help. I’ll ask.”

“Thank you.”

“What kind of hardware are we talking about, exactly?”

Adam handed over a hard copy of the list. “The deal is this; you can add on whatever this chapter needs up to ten percent of the total price. Think of it as a finder’s fee.”

“This is some very serious hardware.”

“I represent a very serious chapter.”

“All right then.” Nigel Murphy still couldn’t quite banish the troubled expression from his face as he read down the list. “Give me your e-butler access code. I’ll call when I’ve set up the meeting.”

“Good. One thing, have you had any new members join recently? The last couple of months or so?”

“No. Not for about nine months now, unfortunately. I told you, we’re not very fashionable at the moment. We’re going to mount another recruitment drive in the general workers unions. But that won’t be for weeks yet. Why?”

“Just checking.”

Sabbah hated himself for what he was doing. The comrade was obviously well connected in the Party, probably in the executive cadre. Which meant he truly believed in what he was doing, especially if he’d been truthful about the grain train.

It wasn’t that Sabbah didn’t believe in their cause. He absolutely hated the way everyone else in the world seemed to be doing better than he was, that his background had condemned him to one life lived badly. The way society was structured prevented him from bettering himself. That was what attracted him to the Socialists in the first place, the way they were working to change things so that people like him would get a chance to live decently in an inclusive world.

All of which only made this worse. The comrade was actively working to bring down the companies and the plutocratic state that supported them. Which was a lot more than Sabbah ever seemed to do. All the seventh chapter did was hold endless meetings where they argued among themselves for what seemed like hours. Then there was the canvassing, days spent being abused, insulted, and treated with utter contempt by the very people they were trying to help. And of course the protests outside company offices and factories, ambushing politicians. Sabbah had lost count of how many times he’d been on the wrong, and very painful, end of a police shockwhip. The real reason he kept going these days was because of the rest of the chapter. He didn’t have many friends outside, not anymore.

But he didn’t have any choice. Not in this.

It was nine years ago when he met the woman. The job that night had been so easy it would have been criminal not to do it. He’d gone along with a couple of old mates he’d known back from his gang years, when they’d all pulled a tru from the reform academy to run the streets. Their quarry was a delivery truck that made a nightly run from the CST planetary station to various local wholesale warehouses about town. It was carrying crates of domestic goods from Augusta, all high quality. And the van was old, its alarm a joke.

Thanks to some decent targeted kaos software bought from a contact they’d managed to intercept the van and lift its load clean within ten minutes. Sabbah even took a couple of maidbots with him when he went home in addition to his cut.

She was waiting for him when he walked through the door: a middle-aged woman with mild Asian features, her shoulder-length raven hair flecked with gray strands, wearing a smart business suit. Sitting in his living room, looking like she belonged in that dingy two-room apartment more than he ever did.

“You now have a choice,” she said as his mouth was gaping open in surprise. “Either I’ll shoot you in self-defense, because you were assaulting a government official in the pursuit of her duties, or we make a deal and I’ll let you keep your dick.”

“Whoo …” Sabbah frowned at his door, silently cursing its alarm circuit for not warning him she’d broken in.

“Or do you believe the Velaines public medical insurance scheme will pay for a new dick, Sabbah? That’s where I’m aiming, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

In horror he saw she had some kind of small black metal tube in her hand, and it really was leveled at his groin. He shifted the boxes containing the maidbots, gradually lowering them until they covered his hips and the hugely valuable personal organ situated there.

“If you’re police, you won’t—”

The violent crack that her weapon produced made him cower. Scraps of foam packaging drifted through the air while the remnants of the maidbot dropped to the floor. The little machine’s crablike electromuscle limbs spasmed for a while before collapsing limply. Sabbah stared at it. “Oh, Christ on a crutch,” he whispered. He gripped the remaining box even tighter.

“Do we now know where we both stand?” the policewoman asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“All I want is for you to do something for me. A small thing. Will you do that?”

“What?”

“One day someone will turn up at your chapter, and I want to know about it. I can’t give you his name, he changes it every time. But he’ll be looking to buy things, weapons most likely, or kaos software, or samples of diseases, or components with the wrong specifications which will screw up whatever they’re installed in. That’s the kind of person he is. A very unpleasant individual. He’ll claim to be a Party member, to be doing what he does for a noble cause. But he’s lying. He’s a terrorist. An anarchist. A murderer. So I want you to tell me when he visits you. Okay?”

Sabbah didn’t like to think of the alternative. She was still pointing the weapon right at him, aiming low. “Yeah, sure. I’ll do that.”

“Good.”

“When’s he coming?”

“I don’t know. It might be tomorrow. It might be in thirty years’ time. It might be never. Or I might have caught him before he ever reaches Velaines.”

“Uh, right, okay.”

“Now turn around.”

“What?”

“You heard.” She got to her feet, the little weapon still pointing at him. Sabbah reluctantly turned to face the door. His hands were grabbed, forcing him to drop the maidbot box. A cold band of malmetal coiled around his wrists immobilizing them. “What the hell …”

“You’re under arrest for theft.”

“You’ve got to be fucking joking! I said I’d help you. That was the deal.” He turned his head to try to look at her. The weapon was jabbed into his jaw.

“There is no deal. You made a choice.”

“That was the deal!” he yelled furiously. “I help you, you get me off this rap. Jesus!”

“You are mistaken,” she said relentlessly. “I didn’t say that. You committed a crime. You must face the consequences. You must be brought to justice.”

“Fuck you, bitch. Fuck you. I hope your terrorist blows up a hundred hospitals, and schools. I hope he wipes out your whole planet.”

“He won’t. He’s only interested in one planet. And with your help, we can stop him from damaging it further.”

“My help?” The word came out as a squeak he was so shocked. “You stupid bitch, you can suck me and I’d never help you now. We had a deal.”

“Very well. I will lodge a plea with the judge, asking him for leniency.”

“Huh?” This was so weird it was doing his head in. Right from the start the woman scared him. He wasn’t even sure she was a policewoman anymore. More like a serial killer.

“I will tell him you cooperated fully, and agreed to be my informer. The file will not be encrypted when it is attached to your court record. Do you think your friends will access it when they see you receiving a light sentence? Will they be happy about what it says? My colleagues have already arrested them for tonight’s robbery, by the way. I expect they’ll be curious about how we knew.”

“Oh, goddamn.” Sabbah was near to tears. He wanted this whole nightmare to end. “You can’t do that to me. They’ll kill me, a total death. You don’t know what they’re like.”

“I think I do. Now, are you going to tell me when my target turns up?”

So through clenched teeth he said, “Yes.”

And that had been the way of it for nine years. He’d been given a suspended jail term for the robbery, and made to perform two hundred hours’ citizen service. It was the last time he’d done a job—well, anything major, anyway, just the occasional rip off.

And every three weeks there would be a message in his e-butler’s hold file asking him if the man had come. Every time he replied no.

Nine years, and that superbitch had never let it go. “Time,” she’d told him on the way to the police station, “lessens nothing.” She’d never said what would happen if he didn’t tell her. But then, it wasn’t something he wanted to find out.

So Sabbah walked for several blocks, leaving the chapter house behind. That way his e-butler would be operating through a cybersphere node that wasn’t anywhere near the building. The chapter had several tech-types; heavily idealistic about total access they all sailed close to anarchistic beliefs, believing all information should be free. They also smoked things they shouldn’t and played sensory immersion games for most of their waking hours. But they did have an unnerving habit of delivering the goods when databanks had to be cracked for the cause. Sabbah wouldn’t put it past the Party’s senior cadre to mount a simple surveillance operation around the chapter building.

His e-butler entered the code she’d given him. The connection was placed immediately, which was unnerving if not entirely surprising. Sabbah took a deep breath. “He’s here.”

Adam Elvin took his time in the lobby of the Scarred Suit club while the hostess dealt with his coat. His retinal inserts adapted to the low lighting easily enough, bringing up an infrared profiling that banished shadows for him. But he wanted a moment to take in the whole scene. As clubs went it was pretty standard; booths around the wall, each with an e-seal curtain for privacy, tables and chairs on the main floor, a long bar with an extensive number of bottles on the shelves, and a small stage where the boys, girls, and ladyboys of the Sunset Angels troupe danced. The lighting was low, with topaz and purple spots casting their shady beams onto the dark wood of the fittings. The music was loud, a drab software synth that kept up a constant beat for the performers to remove their clothes to. There was more money in here than there should have been, he thought. That made it protected.

At one o’clock in the morning, every table was taken, and the crowd of lowlifes around the stage was enthusiastically waving notes in the faces and crotches of the two dancers. Several booths were occluded by shimmering force fields. Adam frowned at that, but it was only to be expected. As he watched, one of the Sunset Angels was led over to a booth by the manager. The force field sparkled and allowed them through. Adam’s handheld array had the capacity to pierce the e-seal, but the probe would be detected.

So many hiding places was a risk. Again, one he was used to. And in a protected joint, they wouldn’t take kindly to police.

“Excuse me,” the doorman said. He was being friendly, not that it mattered, cellular reprofiling had given him the same kind of bulk as Adam, except his wasn’t fat.

“Sure.”

The doorman glided his hands above Adam’s jacket and trousers. They were heavily OCtattooed, the circuits fluorescing claret as they scanned for anything dangerous.

“I’m here to meet Ms. Lancier,” Adam told the hostess as the doorman cleared him. She led him around the edge of the main room to a booth two places down from the bar. Nigel Murphy was already there.

For an arms dealer, Rachael Lancier wasn’t inconspicuous. She wore a bright scarlet dress with a low front. Long chestnut hair was arranged in an elaborate wave, with small luminescent stars glimmering among the strands. Her rejuvenation had returned her to her early twenties, when she was very attractive. He knew it was a rejuvenation, possibly even a second or third. Her attitude gave her away. No real twenty-two-year-old possessed a confidence bordering on glacial.

Her bodyguard was a small thin man with a pleasant smile, as low-key as she was blatant. He activated the e-seal as soon as Adam’s beer arrived, wrapping the open side of the booth in a dull platinum veil. They could see out into the club, but the patrons were presented with a blank shield.

“That was quite a list,” Rachael said.

Adam paused for a moment to see if she was going to ask what it was for, but she wasn’t that unprofessional. “Is it a problem for you?”

“I can get all of it for you. But I have to say the combat armor will take time. That’s a police issue system; I normally provide small arms for people with somewhat lower aspirations than yours.”

“How much time?”

“For the armor, ten days, maybe two weeks. I have to acquire an authorized user certificate first.”

“I don’t need one.”

She raised her cocktail glass and took a sip, looking at him over the rim. “That doesn’t help me, because I do need it. Look, the rest of your list is either in storage or floating around the underground market, I can pull it in over the next few days. But that armor, that has to come from legitimate suppliers, and they have to have the certificate before they’ll even let it out of their factory.”

“Can you get the certificate?”

“I can.”

“How much?” he asked before she could start on her sales pitch.

“In Velaines dollars, a hundred thousand. There are a number of people involved, none of them cheap.”

“I’ll pay you eighty.”

“I’m sorry, this isn’t some kind of market stall. I’m not bargaining. That’s the price.”

“I’ll pay you eighty, and I’ll also pay you to package the rest of the list the way I require.”

She frowned. “What sort of packaging?”

Adam handed over a memory crystal. “Every weapon is to be broken down into its components. They are to be installed in various pieces of civil and agricultural equipment I have waiting in a warehouse. The way it’s laid out, the components will be unidentifiable no matter how they are scanned or examined. The instructions are all there.”

“Given the size of your list, that’s a lot of work.”

“Fifteen thousand. I’m not bargaining.”

She licked her lips. “How are you paying?”

“Earth dollars, cash, not an account.”

“Cash?”

“Is that a problem?”

“Your list will cost you seven hundred and twenty thousand. That’s a lot of money to carry around.”

“Depends what you’re used to.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a thick bundle of notes. “That’s fifty thousand. It’s enough to get you started and prove my intent. Once you’ve assembled the list, give me the location of your secure warehouse where I can send my machinery. When it arrives there, I’ll pay you a third of the remaining money. When you’ve installed it, I’ll pay you the remainder.”

Rachael Lancier’s poise faltered slightly. She gave her bodyguard a glance, and he picked up the notes. “It’s good to do business with you, Huw,” she said.

“I want daily updates on the state of play.”

“You’ll get them.”

Chief Investigator Paula Myo left her Paris office three minutes after getting the call from Sabbah. It took her eighteen minutes to get across town to the CST station. It was only an eight minute wait on the platform for the next express. She arrived on Velaines within forty minutes.

Two senior detectives, Don Mares and Maggie Lidsey from the Tokat metropolitan police, were waiting for her when the taxi delivered her to their headquarters. Given the level of the request for cooperation from the Intersolar Serious Crimes Directorate, the two detectives had no trouble requisitioning a conference office and departmental array time. Their captain also made it clear to them that he expected them to provide genuine assistance to the Chief Investigator. “She’ll file a report on our operational ability when this is over,” he said. “And the Directorate has political clout, so be nice and be useful.”

With Don Mares sitting restlessly beside her, Maggie Lidsey used her e-butler to call up the Chief Investigator’s file. Broad columns of translucent green text began to flow across the virtual vision generated by her retinal inserts. She skipped through the information quickly; it was a refresher rather than a detailed appraisal. Everyone in law enforcement knew about Paula Myo.

The headquarters array informed the two detectives their guest had arrived. Maggie focused on the lift doors as they opened, banishing the ghostly ribbons of text. The conference office on the eighth floor of the metropolitan police headquarters building had glass walls, as did every cubicle on the same floor. From her viewpoint, Maggie could see the whole layout. At first nobody paid much attention to Paula Myo as she walked down the main corridor, followed by two colleagues from the Serious Crimes Directorate. In a white blouse, prim office suit, and sensible black shoes she fitted perfectly into the bustling compartmentalized work environment. She was slightly short by today’s standards when eighty percent of the population had some kind of genetic modification. Not that she lacked physical stature; she obviously stuck determinedly to an exercise routine that kept her fitness level an order of magnitude above anything the metropolitan police required from their officers. Her thick raven hair had been brushed straight so that it hung well below her shoulder blades. The Human Structure Foundation on Huxley’s Haven that had so carefully developed her genome had selected a mix of Filipino and European genes as a baseline, giving her a natural beauty that was utterly beguiling. A rejuvenation five years previously made it look as if she were now in her early twenties.

Even though she knew she should never judge anyone by physical guise, Maggie Lidsey had trouble taking the girl seriously as they shook hands. With her size and fresh looks, Paula Myo could quite easily be mistaken for a teenager. The giveaway was her smile. She didn’t seem to have one.

The other two Investigators from the Directorate were introduced as Tarlo, a tall, blond Californian, and Renne Kempasa, a Latin American from Valdivia, who was halfway toward her fourth rejuvenation.

The five of them sat around the table, and the walls opaqued. “Thank you for such a swift response,” Paula said. “We’re here because I have a tip-off that Adam Elvin has arrived on Velaines.”

“A tip-off from who?” Don asked.

“A contact. Not the most reliable, but it certainly needs investigating.”

“A contact? That’s it?”

“You don’t need to know, Detective Mares.”

“You were here nine years ago,” Maggie said. “At least, that’s the official entry in our files. So I’d guess your man is Sabbah. He’s a member of the Socialist Party, as was Elvin.”

“Very good, Detective.”

“Okay, we’re here to help,” Maggie said. She felt like she’d passed some kind of test. “What do you need?”

“To begin with, two surveillance operations. Elvin has made contact with a man called Nigel Murphy at the seventh chapter of the local Socialist Party here in town. We need to keep him under constant watch, virtual and physical. Elvin is here to acquire arms for Bradley Johansson’s terrorist group. This Murphy character will be his link to a local underground dealer; so he can lead us to both of them. Once we have the connection, we can intercept Elvin and the dealer at the exchange.”

“This all sounds very easy and routine,” Maggie said.

“It won’t be,” Tarlo said. “Elvin is very good. Once we’ve identified him, I’ll need a detective team to help backtrack his every movement to the moment he arrived. He’s a tricky son of a bitch. The first thing he will have done is establish an escape route in case this deal blows up in his face. We need to find it, and block it.”

“You guys know it all, don’t you?” Don Mares said. “What he’s doing, where he is. I’m surprised you even need us.”

Paula looked at him briefly, then turned her attention back to Maggie. “Is there a problem?”

“A little more information would be appreciated,” Maggie said. “For instance, are you sure he is here to contact an arms dealer?”

“It’s what he does. In fact, it’s all he does these days. He’s just about given up on the Party. Oh, he’ll throw the local chapter a bone or two for cooperating with him. But he hasn’t really taken any part in the movement since Abadan. The Party’s executive cadre effectively disowned him and his entire active resistance cell after that fiasco. That’s when he hooked up with Bradley Johansson. No one else would touch him, he was too hot. Ever since then he’s been the quartermaster for the Guardians of Selfhood. The acts they commit on Far Away make Abadan seem quite mild.”

Don Mares grinned. “Managed to get any of the money back yet?”

Tarlo and Renne gave him hostile stares. Paula Myo looked at him without saying anything. Don met her gaze levelly, showing no remorse.

“Is he likely to be armed?” Maggie asked. She glared at Don; at the best of times he could be an asshole, and today he seemed to be going out of his way to prove it.

“Elvin will probably be carrying a small weapon,” Renne Kempasa said. “But his main armory is his experience and guile. If there’s any kind of physical trouble, it won’t be him that starts it. We’ll have to research the arms dealer carefully; they tend to lean toward violence.”

“So no money, then,” Don persisted. “Not after—what is it now—a hundred and thirty years?”

“I also need your office to try and track down Elvin’s export route,” Paula said. “The CST security division will cooperate with them fully on that.”

“We’ll liaise with our captain over officer allocation,” Maggie said. “We’ve already arranged for you to have an office and access to the departmental array.”

“Thank you. I’d like to brief the observation teams in two hours.”

“Tight schedule, but I think we can manage that for you.”

“Thank you.” Paula hadn’t moved her gaze from Maggie. “No, I haven’t got any of the money back yet. Most of it is spent on arms deals like this one, which makes it particularly hard to track and recover. And I haven’t gotten this close to him for twenty years. So I will be seriously disappointed if an individual screws this up. It will be a career-wrecker.”

Don Mares tried to sneer off the threat. He didn’t really succeed. Maggie thought it was because he’d realized the same thing she had. Paula Myo never smiled because she didn’t have a sense of humor.

Adam was finishing a rather splendid early breakfast at the Westpool Hotel when his e-butler informed him that an unsigned message had arrived in its hold file. It had come from a onetime unisphere address, and the text it contained was encrypted with a key code that identified the sender to him immediately: Bradley Johansson.

Outwardly, Adam drank his coffee quietly as the waiters fussed around the restaurant tending to the other guests. In his virtual vision, he prepared the message for decryption. His wrist array was worn on his left arm, a simple band of dull malmetal that flexed and expanded constantly to maintain full contact with his skin. Its inner surface contained an i-spot that connected to his OCtattoos, which in turn were wetwired into his hand’s nerve fibers. The interface was represented in his virtual vision by a ghostly hand, which he’d customized to a pale blue, with sharp purple nails. For every tiny motion he made with his flesh and blood hand, the virtual one made a scaled-up movement, allowing him to select and manipulate icons. The system was standard across the Commonwealth, giving everyone who could afford an OCtattoo direct connection to the planetary cybersphere. He guessed that most of the businesspeople having breakfast around him were quietly interfacing with their office arrays. They had that daydreaming look about them.

He pulled the appropriate key out of its store in his wrist array, represented by a Rubik’s Cube icon, which he had to twist until he’d arranged the surface squares into the correct pattern. The cube opened up, and he dropped the message icon inside. A single line of black text slid across his virtual vision: PAULA MYO IS ON VELAINES.

Adam just managed to hold on to his coffee cup. “Shit!”

Several nearby guests glanced over to him. He twitched his lips in an apologetic smile. The array had already wiped the message, now it was going through an elaborate junction overwrite procedure in case it was ever examined by a forensics retrieval system.

Adam never did know where Bradley got half of his information. But it had always been utterly reliable. He should abandon the mission right now.

Except … it had taken eighteen months to plan and organize. Dummy companies had been established on a dozen worlds to handle the disguised machinery exports to Far Away, routing and rerouting them so that there would be no suspicion and no trail. A lot of money had been spent on preparations. And the Guardians wouldn’t receive another shipment of arms until he could set one up. Before he did that, he needed to know what had gone wrong this time.

They had been so close, too. Rachael Lancier’s last call confirmed that she had put together about two-thirds of the list. So close.

Maggie Lidsey’s car drove her into the headquarters building underground parking lot an hour before she was due on shift. She’d been working longer hours ever since the case started. It wasn’t just to curry favor with Paula Myo; she was learning a lot from the Chief Investigator. The woman’s attention to detail was incredible. Maggie was convinced she must have array inserts, along with supplementary memorycells. No aspect of the operation was too small for her to show an interest in. Urban myth certainly hadn’t exaggerated her dedication.

The elevator in the lobby scanned her to confirm her identity: only then did it descend to the fifth basement level where the operations centers were situated. The Elvin team had been codenamed Roundup, and assigned room 5A5. Maggie was scanned again before the metal slab door slid aside to admit her. The interior was gloomy, occupied by three rows of consoles with tall holographic portals curving around the operator. Each one was alive with a grid of images and data ribbons. Laser light spilled out from them in a pale iridescent haze. A quick glance at the ones closest to the door showed Maggie the familiar pictures of the buildings that Rachael Lancier used to run her car dealership from, along with shots from the team’s two shadow cars showing Adam Elvin’s taxi as they followed him through midtown.

Maggie requested an update, and quickly assimilated the overnight data. The one item that stood out was the encrypted message delivered to Elvin’s e-butler through the Westpool Hotel node. She saw Paula Myo sitting at her desk at the far end of the room. The Chief Investigator seemed to get by on a maximum of two hours’ sleep per day. She’d had a cot moved into her office, and never used it until an hour after both main targets had retired for the night. And she was always up an hour before the time they usually got out of bed. The night shift had standing orders to wake her if anything out of the ordinary happened.

Maggie went over to ask about the message.

“It came from a onetime address in the unisphere,” Paula said. “The Directorate’s software forensics have traced its load point to a public node in Dampier’s cybersphere. Tarlo is talking to the local police about running a check, but I’m not expecting miracles.”

“You can track a onetime address?” Maggie asked. She’d always thought that was impossible.

“To a limited degree. It doesn’t help. The message was sent on a delay. Whoever loaded it was well clear.”

“Can the message encryption be cracked?” Maggie asked.

“Not really, the sender used folded-geometry encryption. I logged a request with the SI, but it said it doesn’t have the resources available to decrypt it for me.”

“You talked with the SI?” Maggie asked. That was impressive. The Sentient Intelligence didn’t normally interface with individuals.

“Yes.”

There was nothing else forthcoming.

“Oh,” Maggie said. “Right.”

“It was a short message,” Paula said. “Which limits what it could contain. My guess is it was either a warning, a go authorization, or a stop.”

“We haven’t leaked,” Maggie said. “I’m sure of it. And they haven’t spotted us either.”

“I know. The origin alone seems to rule out a mistake by any of your officers.”

“The Socialist Party does have a number of quality cyberheads, they might have noticed our scrutineer programs shadowing Murphy’s e-butler.”

Paula Myo rubbed a hand over her forehead, pressing hard enough to furrow up the skin. “Possible,” she conceded. “Although I have to take other factors into consideration.”

“Yes?” Maggie prompted.

“Classified, sorry,” Paula said. Even though she was tired, she wasn’t about to confide her concerns to anybody. Although if Maggie was any kind of detective she should be able to work it out.

As Mares had said, a hundred thirty-four years without an arrest was an uncomfortably long time. In fact, it was impossible given the resources Paula had to deploy against Bradley Johansson. Somebody had been providing Johansson and his associates with a great deal of assistance down the decades. Few people knew what she was doing on a day-to-day basis, so logically it was someone outside the Directorate. Yet the executive administration had changed seventeen times since she had been assigned command of the case. They couldn’t all contain secret sympathizers of Johansson’s cause. That just left her with the altogether murkier field of Grand Families and Intersolar Dynasties, the kind of power dealers who were always around.

She’d done everything she could, of course: set traps, run identification ambushes, deliberately leaked disinformation, established unofficial communications channels, built herself an extensive network amid the political classes, gained allies at the heart of the Commonwealth government. So far the results had been minimal. That didn’t bother her so much, she had faith in her ability to work the case to its conclusion. What concerned her more than anything was the reason anyone, let alone someone with true wealth and power, would want to protect a terrorist like Johansson.

“Makes sense,” Maggie said with a trace of reluctance. She knew there was a terrific story behind the Chief Investigator’s silence. “So what action do you want to take about the message?”

“Nothing immediate,” Paula said. “We simply wait and see what Elvin does next.”

“We can arrest all of them now. There are enough weapons stored at Lancier’s dealership to begin a war.”

“No. I don’t have a reason to arrest Elvin yet. I want to wait until the operation has reached its active smuggling stage.”

“He was part of Abadan. I checked the Directorate file, there are enough testimonies recorded to prove his involvement no matter how good a lawyer he has. What more do you need to arrest him?”

“I need the weapons to be shipped. I need their route and destination. That will expose the whole Guardian network to me. Elvin is important primarily for his ability to lead me to Johansson.”

“Arrest him and have his memories extracted. I’m sure a judge would grant the Directorate that order.”

“I don’t expect to have that option. He knows what will happen the second I have him in custody. He’ll either suicide or an insert will wipe his memories clean.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“He’s a fanatic. He will not allow us access to his memories.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“It’s what I’d do,” Paula said simply.

Paula briefed the watcher teams before the shift changeover, explaining her suspicions about the encrypted message. “It changes our priorities slightly,” she said. “If it was a cancellation then Elvin will make a break for the CST station. I need a detail of officers on permanent duty there to arrest him if he tries to leave. Detective Mares, will you organize that, please?”

“I’ll see the captain about more personnel, sure.” During the week of the operation Don Mares had modified his attitude slightly. He didn’t contend anything, nor disagree with Paula; but neither did he put any extra effort into the operation. She could live with that; baseline competence was a depressing constant in law enforcement agencies throughout the Commonwealth.

“Our second option,” Paula said, “is a go code. In which case we need to be ready to move. There will be no change in your assignments, but be prepared to implement immediately. The third option is not so good: he’s been warned about our observation.”

“No way,” Don Mares said. “We’re not that sloppy.” There was a grumble of agreement from the team officers.

“As unlikely as it sounds we have to take it into consideration,” Paula insisted. “Be very careful not to risk exposure. He’s smart. He’s been doing this for forty years. If he sees one of you twice in a week he’s going to know you’re following him. Don’t let him see you. Don’t let him see the car you’re using. We’re going to get a larger vehicle pool so we can rotate them faster. We cannot afford mistakes.” She nodded curtly at them. “I’ll join the lead team today. That’s all.”

Don Mares and Maggie Lidsey came over to her as the other officers filed out of the operations center. “If he catches a glimpse of you, it really will be game over,” Don Mares said.

“I know,” Paula said. “But I need to be close. There are some calls you can’t make sitting here. I’d like you to take over as general coordinator today.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you have the qualifications, you’ve taken command of raids before.”

“Okay.” He was trying not to smile.

“Maggie, you’re with me.”

They caught up with Adam Elvin as he was taking a slow, seemingly random walk through Burghal Park. He did something similar most mornings, an amble through a wide-open space where it was difficult for the team to follow unobtrusively on foot.

Paula and Maggie waited in the back of a ten-seater car that was parked at the north end of Burghal Park. The team had the rest of their vehicles spaced evenly around the perimeter, with three officers on foot using their retinal inserts to track his position, never getting closer than five hundred meters, boxing him the whole time. The Burghal was a huge area in the middle of the city, with small lakes, games pitches, tracks, and long greenways of trees brought in from over seventy different planets.

“That’s twice he’s doubled back on his route,” Maggie said. They were watching the images relayed from the retinal inserts on a small screen in the car.

“Standard for him,” Paula said. “He’s a creature of habit. They might be good habits, but any routine will betray you in the end.”

“Is that how you tracked him?”

“Uh-huh. He never uses the same planet twice. And he nearly always uses the Intersolar Socialist Party to set up the first meeting with the local dealer.”

“So you turned Sabbah into your informant and waited.”

“Yes.”

“For nine years. Bloody hell. How many informants do you have, on how many planets?”

“Classified.”

“The way you operate, though, always arresting them for their crimes. That doesn’t make for cooperative informants. You’re taking a big risk on a case this important.”

“They broke the law. They must go to court and take responsibility for their crimes.”

“Hell, you really believe that, don’t you?”

“You’ve accessed my official file. Three times now since this case started.”

Maggie knew she was blushing.

That day Adam Elvin finished his walk in Burghal Park and caught a taxi to a little Italian restaurant on the bank of the River Guhal, which meandered through the eastern districts of the city. While eating a large and leisurely lunch he placed a call to Rachael Lancier, which the metropolitan police had no trouble intercepting.

ELVIN: Something’s come up. I need to talk to you again.

LANCIER: The vehicle you wanted is almost ready for collection, Mr. North. I hope there’s no problem at your end.

ELVIN: No, no problem about the vehicle. I just need to discuss its specifications with you.

LANCIER: The specifications have been agreed upon. As has the price.

ELVIN: This is not an alteration of either. I simply need to speak with you personally to clarify some details.

LANCIER: I’m not sure that’s a good idea.

ELVIN: It’s essential, I’m afraid.

LANCIER: Very well. You know my favorite place. I’ll be there at the usual time today.

ELVIN: Thank you.

LANCIER: And it had better be as important as you say.

Paula shook her head. “Routine,” she said disapprovingly.

Eighteen police officers converged on the Scarred Suit club. Don Mares dispatched the first three within two minutes of the conversation. The club wasn’t open, of course, they simply had to find three observation points around it and dig in.

Two of Lancier’s people arrived at eight o’clock that night, and performed their own surveillance checks before calling back to their boss.

When Adam Elvin finally arrived at one o’clock in the morning, ten officers were already inside. As before, they had managed to blend in well enough to prevent him from identifying any of them for what they were. Some of them assumed the role of business types looking for some bad action after a long day in the office. Three of them hung around the stage, identical to the other losers frantically waving their grubby dollars at the glorious bodies of the Sunset Angels. One had even managed to get a job, trying out as a waiter for the night, and was making reasonable tips. Renne Kempasa was sitting in one of the booths, the hazy e-seal protecting her from view.

The remainder of the team were outside, ready for pursuit duties when the meeting was over. Paula, Maggie, and Tarlo were parked a street away in a battered old van, with the logo of a domestic service company on the side. The two screens they’d set up in the back showed images taken by the officers inside the club. Rachael Lancier was already in her booth, a different one this time. Her skinny-looking bodyguard was with her: identified by headquarters as Simon Kavanagh, a man with a long list of petty convictions stretching back three decades, nearly all of them violence-related. When he arrived he’d swept the booth twice, scanning for any covert electronic or bioneural circuitry. The passive sensors carried by the officers nearby nearly went off the scale. He was using some very sophisticated equipment—as was to be expected from someone who worked for an arms dealer.

Paula watched Lancier and Elvin tentatively shake hands. The arms dealer gave her buyer an inhospitable look, then the e-seal around the booth was switched on. Its screening was immediately reinforced by the units that Kavanagh activated. One of them was an illegally strong janglepulse capable of frying the cerebral ganglia of any insect within a four-meter radius.

“Okay,” Paula said. “Let’s find out what’s so important to Mr. Elvin.”

A meter above the booth’s table, a Bratation spindlefly was clinging to the furry plastic fabric of the wall matting. Amid the artificial purple and green fibers, its translucent, two-millimeter-long body was effectively invisible. As well as a chameleon-effect body, evolution on its planet had provided it with a unique neurone fiber that used a photo luminescent molecule as the primary transmitter, making it immune to a standard janglepulse. It had only half the expected life span of a natural spindlefly because its genetic code had been altered by a small specialist company on a Directorate contract, replacing half of its digestion sac with a more complex organic structure of receptor cells. In its abdomen was an engorged secretion gland that threw out a superfine gossamer strand. When it had flown in from the neighboring booth, it had trailed the gossamer behind it. Gentle lambent nerve impulses from the receptor cells now flowed along the strand to a more standard semiorganic processor that Renne carried in her jacket pocket.

In the middle of Paula’s screen a grainy gray and white image formed. She was looking down on the heads of three people sitting around the booth table.

“So what the hell has happened?” Rachael Lancier asked. “I didn’t expect to see you until completion, Huw. I don’t like this. It makes me nervous.”

“I got some new instructions,” Elvin said. “How else was I supposed to get them to you?”

“All right, what sort of instructions?”

“A couple of additions to the list. Major ones.”

“I still don’t like it. I’m this close to calling the whole thing off.”

“No you’re not. We’ll pay for your inconvenience.”

“I don’t know. The inconvenience is getting pretty fucking huge. All it’s going to take is one suspicious policeman walking into my dealership, and I’m totally screwed. There’s a lot of hardware stacking up there. Expensive hardware.”

Elvin sighed and reached into a pocket. “To ease the inconvenience.” He put a brick-sized wad of notes on the table and pushed them over to Simon Kavanagh.

The bodyguard glanced at Lancier, who nodded permission. He put the notes into his own jacket pocket.

“All right, Huw, what sort of goodies do you need now?”

Elvin held up the small black disk of a memory crystal, which she took from him.

“This is the last time,” she said. “Nothing else changes. I don’t care what you want, or how much you pay, understood? This is the end of this deal. If you want anything else, it has to wait until next time. Got that?”

“Sure.”

Paula sat back in the thin aging cushioning of the van’s seat. On the screen, Adam Elvin had stood up to leave. The booth’s e-seal flickered to let him out.

“That was wrong,” she said.

Maggie frowned at her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, that was nothing to do with additions to the list. Whatever’s really in that memory crystal, it won’t be an inventory.”

“What then?”

“Some kind of instructions.”

“How do you know? I thought it fitted what happened.”

“You saw his reaction to the message at breakfast. The camera caught his expression spot on. It shocked the hell out of him. First rule on a deal like this is you don’t change things this late in the game. It makes people very nervous. Rachel Lancier’s reaction is a perfect example. And it’s not a good thing to make arms dealers nervous. A deal this size, everybody is quite edgy enough already. Elvin knows that.”

“So? He was shocked his bosses wanted to change things.”

“I don’t buy it.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“Nothing we can do. Keep watching. Keep waiting. But I think he’s on to us.”

The news about Dyson Alpha’s enclosure broke midmorning two days later. It dominated all the news streams and current events shows. A surprisingly large number of Velaines citizens had opinions on the revelation, and what should be done about it.

Maggie kept half her attention on the pundits, both the serious and the mad, who appeared on the news streams while she was sitting around the underground operations center. Time and again, the shows kept repeating the moment when the star disappeared from view. Diagrams sprang up simplifying what had happened for the general public.

“Do you think Elvin was rattled by that?” Maggie asked. “After all, the Guardians of Selfhood are supposed to be protecting us from aliens.”

Paula glanced at the portal where Dudley Bose was being interviewed. The old astronomer simply couldn’t stop smiling. “No. I checked. The message was sent half a day before Bose confirmed the event. In any case, I don’t see how the Dyson enclosure concerns the Guardians. Their primary concern is the Starflyer alien and how it manipulates the government.”

“Yeah, I get their propaganda. Damnit, I fall for the message authorship every time.”

“Think yourself lucky you’re not the author. I pick up the pieces on those scams as well.”

“You know a lot about them, don’t you?”

“Just about everything you can without actually signing on.”

“So how does someone like Adam Elvin wind up working for a terrorist faction?”

“You must understand that Bradley Johansson is basically a charismatic lunatic. The whole Guardians of Selfhood movement is simply his private personality cult. It calls itself a political cause, but that’s just part of the deception. The sad thing is, he’s lured hundreds of people into it, and not just on Far Away.”

“Including Adam Elvin,” Maggie muttered.

“Yes, including Elvin.”

“From what I’ve seen of Elvin, he’s smart. And according to his file he is a genuine committed radical Socialist. Surely he’s not gullible enough to believe Johansson’s propaganda?”

“I can only assume he’s humoring Johansson. Elvin needs the kind of protection which Johansson provides, and his beloved Party does benefit to some small degree from the association. Then again, maybe he’s just trying to revive past glories. Don’t forget he’s a psychotic; his terrorist activities have already killed hundreds, and every one of these arms shipments introduces the potential for more death. Don’t expect his motivation to be based in logic.”

The observation carried on for a further eleven days. Whatever additional items Adam Elvin had requested, they appeared to be difficult for Rachel Lancier to acquire. Various nefarious contacts arrived for quick private meetings with her in the back office. Despite their best attempts, the Tokat metropolitan police technical support team was unable to place any kind of infiltration device inside. Lancier’s office was too effectively screened. Not even the spindleflies could penetrate the combat-rated force field that surrounded it. Her warehouses, too, were well shielded. Although the team had managed to confirm the two where the weapons were being held. Several modified insects had gotten through to take a quick look around before succumbing to either janglepulse emitters or electron webs.

Secondary observation teams followed the suppliers as they left, watching them assemble their cache of weapons and equipment before delivering it to the dealership. A whole underground network of Valences’s iniquitous black-market arms traders was carefully recorded and filed, ready for the bust that would end the whole operation.

On the eleventh day, the observers logged a call that Adam Elvin made to a warehouse in town, authorizing them to forward an assignment of agricultural machinery to Lancier’s dealership.

“This is it,” Tarlo declared. “They’re getting them ready for shipment.”

“Could be,” Paula admitted.

On the other side of the operations office, Mares just sighed. But she did ask for the arrest teams to be put on standby.

Maggie was in one of the cars parked close to the dealership. When the eight trucks arrived, stacked high with crates of agricultural machinery, she relayed the pictures to the operations center. Wide gates in the fence surrounding the dealership compound were hurriedly opened to let them through. There was a brief holdup as yet another of Lancier’s cars went out on a test run. The lawful business had been doing well for the whole duration of the observation, with up to a dozen cars a day taken out by legitimate customers. Sales were brisk.

All eight trucks drove into the largest of Lancier’s warehouses. The doors rolled down as soon as the last one parked inside. Sensors that the observation team had ringing the site reported screening systems coming on immediately.

“Where’s Elvin now?” Paula asked.

Tarlo showed her the images of their prime target finishing his lunch in a downtown restaurant. Paula settled down at the side of the console to follow him, using the sensors carried by the observation teams.

After lunch, Elvin walked around one of the shopping streets, using his usual tactics to try to spot any tails. When he got back to the hotel he started packing his suitcase. Late that afternoon he went down to the bar and ordered a beer. He drank it while watching the portal at the end of the counter, which was showing Alessandra Baron interviewing Dudley Bose. In the early evening, just as the sun was falling below the horizon, his suitcase followed him downstairs, and he checked out.

“All right,” Paula announced to the teams. “It looks like this is it. Everybody: stage one positions please.”

Don Mares was in one of the four cars assigned to follow Elvin. He waited a hundred meters from the hotel, seeing the big man emerge from the lobby. A taxi drew up at the request of Elvin’s PL. His suitcase trundled up onto the rear luggage platform as he climbed in.

“Stand by, Don,” Paula said. “We’re placing a scrutineer in the taxi drive array. Ah, here we go, he’s told it to take him to Thirty-second Street.”

“That’s nowhere near the dealership,” Don Mares protested as their car took off in pursuit.

“I know. Just wait.” Paula turned to the visual and data feeds coming from the dealership. Rachael Lancier and ten of her people were now inside the sealed-up warehouse with the trucks. The rest of the work force had been sent home as usual at the end of the day.

On the console in front of Paula, data displays began flashing urgent warnings at her. “Hello, this is interesting. Elvin is loading some infiltration software into the taxi’s drive array.” She watched as the police scrutineer program wiped itself before the new interloper could establish itself and run an inventory on the operating system.

“He’s changing direction,” Don Mares reported. There was an excited note in his voice.

“Just stay calm and stay with him,” Paula said. “But don’t get too close, we’ve got him covered.” Out of the six images of the taxi that the console’s big portal offered her, only one was coming from a pursuit car. The others were all feeds from the civic security cameras that covered every street and avenue of the city. They showed the taxi sliding smoothly through the rush-hour traffic.

Elvin must have ordered it to accelerate. It began to speed up.

“Don’t be obvious,” Paula muttered to the observation team as the taxi took a sharp right. It was a good hundred fifty meters ahead of the first pursuit car now. Their standard boxing tactic had put the lead vehicle out of the picture. She watched the grid map with its bright dots, seeing how they rearranged themselves to surround the taxi.

Elvin turned right again, then quickly left, taking off down a small alleyway. “Don’t follow,” she instructed. “It’s only got one exit.”

Pursuit car three hurried to reach the street where the alleyway finished. The taxi emerged smoothly, and took a left. It was heading in the opposite direction to car three. They passed within a couple of meters.

Don Mares’s car resumed its tag position. The taxi began to speed up again. Screens along Paula’s console showed the blurred lines of car lights on either side of it, stretching away through the tall buildings of the city center. The taxi turned onto Twelfth Street, one of the broadest in the city, with six lanes of traffic and all of them full. It began to switch lanes at random. Then it slowed. An overhead camera followed it as it passed under one of the hulking bridges that carried the rail tracks into the CST planetary station.

“Damnit, where did he go?” Paula demanded. “Don, can you see him?”

“I think so. Second lane.”

Two cameras were focused on the other side of the bridge, covering every lane. A constant flow of vehicles zipped past. Then the cameras were zooming in on the taxi. It had changed to the outside lane again.

“All right,” Paula said. “All cars, reduce separation distance. Stay within eighty meters. We can’t risk loss of visual contact again. Car three, get under the bridge, check it out. See if he dropped something off.”

The taxi carried on with its evasive maneuvers for another kilometer, then abruptly turned onto Forty-fifth Street and stayed in one lane. Its speed wound back to a steady seventy kilometers per hour.

“He’s heading right for us,” Maggie said.

“Looks that way,” Paula agreed. “Okay, all pursuit cars, back off again.”

Eight minutes later the taxi pulled up outside Rachael Lancier’s car dealership. The gates opened and it went in, driving right through the open door of a warehouse. It stopped beside an empty repair bay.

Paula squinted at the portal image. The warehouse door had been left open, allowing the team’s sensors and cameras a perfect view. Nothing moved.

“What’s happening?” Tarlo asked.

“I’m not sure,” Paula said. “Rachael is still in the warehouse with the trucks. No wait …”

Simon Kavanagh was walking across the brightly lit concrete of the open warehouse floor. His bank tattoo paid the taxi charge. The rear luggage platform opened, and Elvin’s suitcase rolled out. It started to follow the slim bodyguard as he walked away. The taxi drove out of the warehouse.

“Oh, hell,” Paula grunted. “All teams, you have a go code for stage three. I repeat, we are at stage three. Interdict and arrest. Don, stop that taxi.” The city traffic routing array fired an emergency halt order into the taxi’s drive array. All four pursuit cars surged forward, forming a physical blockade around the vehicle.

Maggie was already moving as the taxi emerged from the warehouse. The sun had finally sunk from the sky ten minutes earlier, leaving a gloomy twilight in its wake. Behind her, the towers of the city center cut sharp gleaming lines into the shady sky. Ahead, there were only a few murky polyphoto strips fixed on the warehouse eaves to cast a weak yellow glow across the dealership with its rows and rows of parked cars. On the far side of the compound, an elevated rail line blocked the horizon, a thick black concrete barrier separating the city roofline from the darkening ginger sky. A single cargo train hissed and clanked its way along, a badly adjusted power wheel intermittently throwing up a fantail of sparks that marked out its progress as it slid deeper into the city.

Her fellow officers were advancing beside her, scuttling between the silent, stationary cars as they closed on the locked and screened warehouse. She activated her armor. The system, which looked like a chrome-blue skeleton worn outside her uniform, started to buzz softly. Its force field expanded, thickening the air around her. She prayed the power rating was good enough. Heaven only knew what caliber weapons they’d be facing.

Cars skidded behind her with tires squealing like wounded animals. Up ahead, the point members of the police tactical assault squad had reached the warehouse door. They barely stopped to fire an ion bolt at the bonded composite paneling. A dazzling flash threw the compound into monochrome relief, accompanied by a thunderbolt crack. Splinters of smoldering composite hurtled through the air, revealing two large holes in the building. Squad members raced through.

“FREEZE, POLICE.”

“DO NOT EVEN THINK OF MOVING, MOTHERFUCKER.”

“YOU, HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM. NOW.”

Adrenaline was singing in Maggie’s veins as she rushed through the gap. She cleared the little layer of smoke on the other side, her ion pistol held ready, retinal inserts on full resolution. Surprise at the scene before her almost made her stumble.

Rachael Lancier was standing casually at the front of a truck. The ten employees who had stayed behind were clustered around her. Heavyliftbots had removed several crates from the truck, stacking them neatly on the floor. A bottle and ten glasses were standing on top of one, clearly waiting for a toast to be drunk.

“Ah, good evening, Detective,” Rachael Lancier said as she saw Maggie’s insignia. Her mocking grin was pure evil. “I know I offer a good deal on my cars, but there’s no need to rush. I have something to suit every bank tattoo.”

Maggie cursed under her breath, and slowly engaged her pistol’s safety catch. “We’ve been had,” she said.

“Don?” Paula was asking. “Don, is he in the taxi? Report, Don.”

“Nothing!” Don Mares spat. “It’s fucking empty. He’s not in it.”

“Goddamnit,” Paula shouted.

“This is a stitch up,” Maggie said. “The bitch is laughing at us. I’m standing five meters away from her, and she’s still bloody laughing. We’re not going to find anything here.”

“We have to,” Tarlo cried furiously. “We’ve been watching them for three goddamn weeks. I saw those arms go in there with my own eyes.”

Now it was over, now the hype had cooled, the adrenaline cold turkey kicked in, Maggie felt dreadfully weary. She looked directly into Rachael Lancier’s triumphant gleaming eyes. “I’m telling you, we’ve been royally fucked.”

The one make-or-break moment came when he rolled out of the still-moving taxi under the rail bridge. Adam hit the ground hard, yelling at the sharp pain slamming into his leg, shoulder, and ribs. Then he twisted again, and surged to his feet. The second, empty taxi was parked ready not five meters away. He dived in through the open door, and his Quentin Kelleher e-butler told it to take him directly to the A+A.

The vehicle slid smoothly out into the busy traffic flow. As he looked around, he could see a car brake hard under the bridge. Two people jumped out, and began scanning around. He grinned as the distance built behind him. Not bad for a fat seventy-five-year-old.

Room 421 was just as he’d left it, and the scanning array gave him an all-clear. He limped in. The bruises were starting to hurt badly now. When he sat on the edge of the jellmattress and stripped off his clothes he found a lot of grazed skin that was oozing blood. He applied some healskin patches, and flopped down to let the shakes run their course. Sometime later, he began to laugh.

For two weeks he never left the room. The dispenser mechanism delivered three meals a day. He drank a lot of fluid. His e-butler filtered the output of the local and Intersolar news shows, with a special search order for items concerning Dyson Alpha.

He lay on the bed for twenty hours a day, feeding on cheap packet food and crappy unisphere entertainment shows. Standard commercial cellular reprofiling kits cocooned his torso and limbs, slowly siphoning the fat out of him, adjusting the folds of skin to fit his new, slimmer figure, and ruining most of his OCtattoos in the process. A pair of thick bands with a leathery texture were attached to each leg, on either side of his knees. They were the deep pervasion kits that extended slender tendrils through his flesh until they reached bone. Slowly and quite painfully, they reduced the length of his femur and tibia by half a centimeter each, altering his height to a measurement that was absent from any criminal database.

The adjustments left him weak and irritable, as if he were recovering from a bout of flu. He consoled himself with the mission’s success. It had cost them another hundred thousand dollars, but Rachael Lancier had cooperated enthusiastically. Over the last ten days of the mission, every car leaving the dealership compound had been carrying a part of the order. They’d been dropped off all over town at buildings he’d paid her to rent. Rachael’s workers had parceled them up in the crates he’d shipped in months before. The entire list was on its way to Far Away via a multitude of circuitous routes. They’d arrive over the next few months.

His only regret was not being able to see Paula Myo’s face as the extent of the deception became apparent. That would almost be worth the feel of restraints clasping his wrists.

Seventeen days after the fateful night, Adam dressed himself in a loose-fitting sweatshirt and trousers, and left the A+A. A twenty-minute taxi ride took him to the CST planetary station. He wandered through the concourse without setting off any alarms. Content with that, he caught the express train to LA Galactic.

THREE

Few people outside government circles had ever heard of the Commonwealth ExoProtectorate Council. It had been formed in the early days of the Intersolar Commonwealth, one of those contingency groups beloved of bureaucrats. Back then, people were still justifiably worried about encountering hostile aliens as CST wormholes were continually opened on new planets farther and farther away from Earth. It was the Commonwealth ExoProtectorate Council that had the task of reviewing each sentient alien species discovered by CST, and evaluating the threat level it posed to human society. Given the potential seriousness should the worst-case scenario ever happen, its members were all extremely powerful in political terms. However, with the extremely rare probability that such an encounter would ever occur, the Council members invariably delegated the duty to staff members. In this diluted form, the Council continued to meet on a regular annual basis. Every year it solemnly confirmed the galactic status quo. Every year its delegates went off and had a decent lunch on expenses. As the Commonwealth was discovering, sentient aliens were a rare commodity, at least in this section of the galaxy.

Now though, the Dyson Alpha event had changed everything. Nigel Sheldon couldn’t recall ever attending a Council meeting before, although he supposed he must have when the Silfen and the High Angel had been discovered. Such recollections weren’t currently part of his memories. He’d obviously retired them to secure storage several rejuvenations ago.

His lack of direct recall experience had been capably rectified by the briefings his staff had given him on the trip from Cressat, where he and the rest of the senior Sheldon family members lived. CST had routed his private train direct through Augusta to the New York CST station over in Newark; from there it was a quick journey over to Grand Central.

He always enjoyed Manhattan in the spring. The snow had gone and the trees were starting to put out fresh leaves, a vibrant green that no artist ever quite managed to capture. A convoy of limousines had been waiting at Grand Central station to drive him and his entourage the short distance to the Commonwealth Exploration and Development Office on Fifth Avenue. The skyscraper was over a hundred fifty years old, and at two hundred seventy-eight stories no longer the highest on the ancient metropolis island, but still close.

He’d arrived early, ahead of the other Council members. The anxious regular staff had shown him into the main conference room on the two hundred twenty-fifth floor. They weren’t used to such high-powered delegations, and it showed in their hectic preparations to have everything in the room just perfect for the start of the meeting. So he waved away their queries, and told them to get on with it, he’d just wait quietly for the other members to turn up. At which point his entourage closed smoothly and protectively around him.

From the conference room, he could just see over the neighboring buildings to Central Park. The patina of terrestrial-green life was reassuringly bright under the afternoon sun. There were almost no alien trees in the park these days. For the last eight decades, Earth’s native species protection laws had been enforced with increasing severity by the Environment Commissioners of the Unified Federal Nations. He could just see the brilliant ma-hon tree glimmering dominantly at the center of the park, every spiral leaf reflecting prismatic light from its polished-silver surface. It had been there for over three hundred years now, one of only eight ever to be successfully transferred from their strange native planet. For the last hundred years it had been reclassified as a city monument—a concept that Nigel rather enjoyed. When New Yorkers were determined about something, not even the UFN environmental bloc could shift them, and there was no way they were going to give up their precious, unique ma-hon.

Nigel’s chief executive aide, Daniel Alster, brought him a cup of coffee, which he drank as he looked out over the city. In his mind he tried to sketch in the other changes he’d seen to the skyline over the centuries. Manhattan’s buildings looked a lot more slender now, though that was mainly because they were so much taller. There was also a trend toward architecture with a more elaborate or artistic profile. Sometimes it worked splendidly, as with the contemporary crystal Gothic of the Stoet Building; or else it looked downright mundane like the twisting Illeva. He didn’t actually mind the failures too much; they added to the personality of the place, so different from most of the flat urban sprawls on most of the settled worlds.

Rafael Columbia was the second committee member to arrive, the chief of the Intersolar Serious Crimes Directorate. Nigel knew of him, of course, although the two had never met in the flesh.

“Pleasure to meet you at last,” Nigel said as they shook hands. “Your name keeps cropping up on reports from our security division.”

Rafael Columbia chuckled. “In a good context, I trust?” He was just over two hundred years old, with a physical appearance in his late fifties. In contrast to Nigel, who rejuvenated every fifteen years, Rafael Columbia had apparently decided that a more mature appearance was appropriate to his position. His apparent age gave him broad shoulders and a barrel torso that needed a lot of exercise to keep in shape. Thick silver hair was cut short and stylish, accentuating the slightly sour expression that was fixed on his flat face. Bushy eyebrows and bright gray-green eyes marked him down as a Halgarth family member. Without that connection he would never have qualified for his current job within the Commonwealth administration. The Halgarths had founded EdenBurg, one of the Big15 industrial planets, and as a result had become a major Intersolar Dynasty, which gave them almost as much influence inside the Commonwealth as Nigel’s family.

“Oh, yes,” Nigel said. “Major crime incidents seem to be down lately, certainly those against CST anyway. Thank you for that.”

“I do what I can,” Rafael said. “It’s these new nationalist groups that keep springing up to harass planetary governments, they’re the main source of trouble; the more we frustrate them, the more aggressive their core supporters become. If we’re not careful, we’re going to see a nasty wave of anti-Commonwealth terrorist assaults again, just like 2222.”

“You really think it will come to that?”

“I hope not. Internal Diplomacy believes these current groups simply claim political status as a justification for their activities; they’re actually more criminal-based than anything else. If so, they should run a natural cycle and die out.”

“Thank Christ for that. I don’t want to withdraw gateways from any more planets, there are enough isolated worlds as it is. I thought the only planet left with any real trouble was Far Away. And it’s not as if that can ever be cured.”

Rafael Columbia nodded gravely. “I believe that in time even Far Away can be civilized. When CST begins opening phase four space it will become fully incorporated into the Commonwealth.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Nigel said dubiously. “But it’s going to be a long while before we start thinking about phase four.”

Commonwealth Vice President Elaine Doi walked into the conference room, talking to Thompson Burnelli, the Commonwealth Senator who chaired the science commission. Their respective aides trailed along behind, murmuring quietly among themselves. Elaine Doi greeted Nigel with polite neutrality, careful to maintain her professionalism. He returned the compliment, keeping an impassive face. She was a career politician, having devoted a hundred eighty years to clawing her way up to her present position. Even her rejuvenations were geared around promoting herself; her skin had progressively deepened its shading until it was the darkest ebony to emphasize her ethnicity. Over the same period, her face had actually abandoned her more attractive feminine traits in favor of a more handsome, sterner appearance. Nigel had to deal with her kind of politician on a near-constant basis, and he despised every one of them. In his distant idealistic youth when he’d built the first wormhole generator he had dreamed of leaving them all behind on Earth, allowing the new planets to develop in complete freedom, becoming havens of personal liberty. These days he accepted their dominance of all human government as the price of a civilized society—after all, someone had to maintain order. But that didn’t mean he had to like their endlessly self-serving narcissistic behavior. And he considered Doi to be one of the more reprehensible specimens, always ready to advance herself at the cost of others. With the next presidential selection due in three years’ time, she had begun the final stage of her century-long campaign. His support would ensure she reached the Presidential Palace on New Rio. As yet he hadn’t given it.

Thompson Burnelli was less effusive, a straight-talking man who was North America’s UFN delegate in the Commonwealth Senate, and as such the representative of a huge conglomeration of old and powerful interests made up from some of the wealthiest Grand Families on the planet. He looked the part, a handsome man, wearing an expensive gray silk suit, so obviously a former Ivy League college athlete. His air of confidence was something that could never be acquired through memory implants and bioneural tweaking; it was available only through breeding, and he was very definitely one of Earth’s premier aristocracy. Nigel had hated that kind of rich-kid arrogance while he was in college—as much as he did the politicians. But given a choice, he would prefer to deal with Burnelli’s kind any day.

“Nigel, this must be somewhat galling for you, I imagine,” Thompson Burnelli said with amusement shading close to mockery.

“How so?” Nigel asked.

“An alien contact that your exploratory division had nothing to do with. Some fifth-rate academic astronomer makes the most profound discovery in the last two hundred years, and his only piece of equipment is an equally decrepit telescope that you could probably pick up for a thousand bucks in any junk shop. How much does CST spend on astronomy every year?”

“Couple of billion at the last count,” Nigel replied wearily. He had to admit, the Senator had a point. And he wasn’t the only one making it. The unisphere media had adopted a kind of gleeful sarcasm toward CST since Dudley Bose announced his discovery.

“Never mind,” Thompson Burnelli said cheerfully. “Better luck next time, eh?”

“Thank you. How did your continent’s team do in the Cup?”

The Senator frowned. “Oh, you mean the soccer thing? I’m not sure.”

“Lost, didn’t they? Still, it was only the first round of eight, I don’t suppose you suffer quite so much getting knocked out at the bottom. Better luck next time.” Nigel produced a thin smile as the Senator turned away to greet Rafael Columbia.

More Council members were arriving, and Nigel busied himself welcoming them; at least they could swap football small talk. Crispin Goldreich, the senator chairing the Commonwealth budgetary commission; Brewster Kumar, the President’s science advisor; Gabrielle Else, the director of the Commonwealth Industry and Trade Commission; Senator Lee Ki, director of the phase two space economic policy board, and Eugene Cinzoul, Chief Attorney at the Commonwealth Law Commission.

Elaine Doi raised her voice above the burble of conversation. “I believe we can call this meeting to order now,” she said.

People looked around and nodded their agreement. They all started hunting for their respective seats. Nigel took the chair to the left of the Vice President, who was chairing the meeting. According to protocol, he was the ExoProtectorate Council’s deputy chair. Aides began to settle behind their chiefs.

The Vice President turned to her chief of staff, Patricia Kantil. “Could you ask the SI to come on-line, please?”

That was when Ozzie Fernandez Isaac chose to make his entrance. Nigel squashed the smile that was forming on his lips; everyone else around the table looked so surprised. They should have known better. Back when Nigel and Ozzie assembled the math that made wormhole generators possible, he’d been a genuine eccentric; moments of pure genius partied with surfer-boy dumbness to become the dominant personality trait throughout his undergrad years. A time that Nigel had spent alternately worrying himself sick about the days Ozzie spent out of his skull, and shaking his head in awe as his friend cracked the problems that he’d considered unsolvable. They’d made a great team, good enough to compress space in time for Nigel to step out on Mars to watch the NASA spaceplane landing. After that, taming the beast they’d created was always Nigel’s job, transforming that temperamental prototype of high-energy physics equipment into the ultimate transport method, and in doing so fashioning the largest single corporation the human race had ever known. Management and finance and political influence were of no interest to Ozzie. He just wanted to get out there and see what wonders the galaxy held.

It was the time spent in between his forays out amid the virgin stars that made him legend; the wildman of the Commonwealth, the ultimate alternative lifestyle guru. The stories ran the gamut: girls; the new narcotic stimulants, chemical and bioneural, that he pioneered; Ozzieworld, the H-congruous planet he was supposed to live on all by himself in a palace the size of a city; decades spent as a tramp poet worldwalking to witness the new planet cultures forming from the bottom end of society; the hundreds of naturally conceived children; outré rejuvenations so he could spend years in animal bodies: a lion, an eagle, a dolphin, a Karruk nobear; the attempted dinosaur DNA synthesis project that cost billions before it was hijacked by the Barsoomians; the secret network of wormholes linking the Commonwealth planets that only he could use; his thought routines taken as the basis of the SI. Everywhere you went in the Commonwealth, the locals would tell of the time when Ozzie passed through (an unknown in disguise at the time of course) and enriched their ancestors’ lives by some feat or other: organizing a bridge to be built over a treacherous river, rushing a sick child to a hospital through a storm, being the first to climb the tallest mountain on the planet, slaying—in single combat—the local crime boss. Turning water into wine, too, if the tabloid side of the unisphere was to be believed, Nigel thought. After all, Ozzie was certainly an expert on the opposite process.

“Sorry I’m late, man,” Ozzie said. He gave the Vice President a friendly wave as he walked over to the last empty chair. As he passed behind Nigel, he patted him on the shoulder. “Good to see you, Nige, it’s been a while.”

“Hi, Ozzie,” Nigel said casually, refusing to be out-cooled. It had been seventeen years since they’d last seen each other in the flesh.

Ozzie finally made it to his chair and sprawled in it with a happy sigh. “Anyone got some coffee? I’ve got a bitch of a hangover.”

Nigel gave a quick flick of his finger, and Daniel Alster had a cup taken over. Several Council members were struggling to keep their disapproval from showing at the legend’s disrespectful attitude. Which was, as Nigel well knew, what Ozzie was hoping for. There were times when he considered Ozzie having a rejuvenation to be singularly pointless; the man could be extraordinarily juvenile without any help from the popping hormones of an adolescent body. But the acceptance and adoration he was granted by the Commonwealth at large must have made that same young Afro-Latino kid finally feel content. Even in the politically correct twenty-first century those two cultures had never mixed, not out on the San Diego streets where he came from. Ozzie had gotten the last laugh there.

“Are you here in an official capacity, Mr. Isaac?” Crispin Goldreich asked, in a very upper-class English accent, which simply reeked of censure.

“Sure am, man, I’m the CST rep for this gig.” In his casual lime-green shirt and creased ochre climbing trousers he looked hugely out of place around that table of masterclass power brokers. It didn’t help that he still had his big Afro hairstyle; in over three centuries of arguing, pleading, and downright mockery, Nigel had never persuaded him to get it cut. It was the one human fashion that had never, ever, come around again. But Ozzie lived in hope.

“Don’t look at me,” Nigel said. “I’m the operations side of CST; Ozzie is the technical advisor to this Council.”

Ozzie gave Crispin Goldreich a broad grin, and winked.

“Very well,” Elaine Doi said. “If we could proceed.”

The large wall-mounted portal overlooking the table bubbled into life. Tangerine and turquoise lines scudded backward into a central vanishing point, looking like some antique screen-saver pattern. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,” the Sentient Intelligence said smoothly. “We are happy to be in attendance at what will surely be an historic meeting.”

“Thank you,” the Vice President said. “All right, Brewster, if you would, please.”

The presidential science advisor looked around the table. “There isn’t actually much I can add to the unisphere news reports, except to confirm that it’s real. At our request, CST has opened an exploratory wormhole in interstellar space beyond Tanyata, and used its own instruments to confirm the envelopment event.”

“Our equipment is considerably more sophisticated than the telescopes used by Dudley Bose,” Nigel said. He ignored the quiet snort from Thompson Burnelli. “Even so, there is very little raw data available. The entire process takes about two-thirds of a second. We don’t believe the barrier can be a physical shell, it must be some kind of force field.”

“One which cuts off the visual spectrum?” Lee Ki asked.

“In scale alone, this technology is way beyond anything we have,” Brewster Kumar said. “The damn thing is thirty AUs in diameter. I wouldn’t even expect it to be anything similar to our molecular bonding shields, or even a quantum field.”

“Are there any realistic theories about what the barrier is?”

“We’ve got two dozen in every university physics department across the Commonwealth. But that’s hardly the point; it’s what it does which is interesting. It’s an infrared emitter, which means it’s preserving the solar system inside.”

“How’s that?” Gabrielle Else asked him.

“Essentially there is no buildup of energy inside the barrier. When the star’s electromagnetic output hits the barrier, it passes through to be emitted as heat. If it didn’t, if the barrier contained it, well, the effect would be like a pressure cooker in there. We believe the barrier radiates the solar wind as infrared energy as well, although at this distance it’s difficult to tell.”

“In other words,” Nigel said, “whoever put them up around the Dyson Pair is still living happily inside. The conditions in there haven’t changed from before.”

“Which brings us to the next consideration,” Brewster Kumar said. “Were these barriers erected by the aliens living at the stars, or were they imposed on them? Neither case is particularly helpful to us.”

“How can isolationism be detrimental to us?” Rafael Columbia asked.

“Isolationism in our history is traditionally enacted in times of hostility,” Nigel said. “Such a situation must have existed at the Dyson Pair when this happened. If it is the alien civilizations of these two star systems who erected the barriers, we have to consider the possibility that their motive was defensive. If so, that was one god-awful weapon they were protecting themselves against. The alternative is just as bad, that some other alien species feared them so much, they wanted them contained. Either way, there could well be two alien species out there, both with weapons and technology so far ahead of ours it might as well be magic.”

“Thank you, Sir Arthur,” Ozzie muttered.

Nigel grinned at his old friend; he doubted anyone else in the room got the reference. They were all too young by at least a century.

“I think you’re wrong in assigning them human motivations,” Gabrielle Else said. “Couldn’t this simply be a case of stop the universe I want to get off? After all, the Silfen are fairly insular.”

“Insular?” Rafael Columbia exclaimed. “They’re so spread out we don’t even know how many planets they’re settled on.”

“It is the purpose of this Council meeting to take the worst-case scenario into account,” the Vice President said. “And the hostile locale scenario is certainly plausible.”

“Speaking of the Silfen,” Ozzie said. “Why don’t we ask them what’s going down there?”

“We have,” the Vice President said. “They say they don’t really know.”

“Hell, man, they say that about everything. Ask them if there’s going to be daylight tomorrow and they’ll scratch their asses and ask you what you mean by ‘tomorrow.’ You can’t just ask them a straight question like that. Goddamn loafing mystics, they’ve got to be chased down and fooled into giving us an answer.”

“Yes, thank you, Mr. Isaac, I am aware of that. We do have a great many Silfen cultural experts, all of whom are pursuing this avenue as a matter of urgency. Hopefully, they will coax a more coherent answer from the Silfen. Until that happens, we are left on our own resources. Hence the need for this Council meeting.”

Ozzie frowned furiously and snuggled down into his chair for a good sulk.

“I don’t believe the barrier could have been imposed on those stars by an external agency,” Lee Ki said. “It’s not logical. If you fear someone so much and have the ability to imprison entire stars, then you would not make the barrier permeable. You would use it as a pressure cooker, or do worse than that. No, for my money it was defensive. Something very nasty was heading toward the Dyson Pair, and they slammed the gates shut in its face.”

“In which case, where is it now?” Thompson Burnelli asked.

“Exactly,” Brewster Kumar said.

“It no longer exists,” Ozzie said. “And you guys are all far too paranoid.”

“Care to qualify that?” Thompson Burnelli said impassively.

“Come on, man; the Dyson Pair are over twelve hundred light-years away from Tanyata. This all happened when the fucking Roman Empire ruled the Earth. Astronomy is history.”

“It was closer to Genghis Khan than the Romans,” Brewster Kumar said. “And no culture as powerful and advanced as the Dyson Pair or their aggressor is going to fade away in a single millennia. We certainly won’t, and we’re nowhere near that technology level yet. You can’t just bury your head in the sand over this and hope it all blew away all those years ago.”

“I agree,” the Vice President said. “Far Away is only five hundred and fifty light-years from the Dyson Pair, and they’re observing the barrier still intact.”

“One other piece of information which CST hasn’t made public yet,” Nigel said. “We also used our exploratory wormhole to track down the envelopment time for Dyson Beta. Unfortunately, our first guess was the right one.”

Rafael Columbia was suddenly very attentive. “You mean they’re the same?”

“Yes. As seen from Tanyata, the Pair have a two-light-year linear separation distance. We opened a wormhole two light-years closer to Beta from where we made our observation of Alpha’s enclosure. We saw Beta’s enclosure, which is identical to Alpha’s. They occur within three minutes of each other.”

“It’s defensive,” Eugene Cinzoul said. “It has to be. A civilization inhabiting two star systems was approached by an aggressor.”

“Curious coincidence,” Ozzie said.

“What is?” the Vice President asked.

“Something aggressive and immensely powerful closes in on the one civilization in this part of the galaxy that was technologically savvy enough to protect itself from them. I don’t believe it, man. Galactic timescale simply won’t allow that to happen. We only coexist with the Silfen because they’ve existed for like millions of years.”

The Vice President gave the SI portal a troubled look. “What is your interpretation of this?”

“Mr. Isaac is correct in stating that such a conflict between two balanced powers is extremely unlikely,” the SI said. “We know how rare it is for sentience to evolve on any life-bearing planet; as a consequence, technological civilizations rarely coexist in the galaxy—although the High Angel is an exceptional case. However, the proposition cannot be excluded simply because of this. We also acknowledge Mr. Kumar’s point, that any civilization capable of performing such a feat will not quickly disappear from the galaxy.”

“They can evolve,” Ozzie said quickly. “They can throw off all their primitive instincts. After all, we leave a lot of our shit behind us.”

“You also generate a great deal of new ‘shit,’ ” the SI said. “All of which is depressingly similar to your old ‘shit.’ And no primitive culture could erect these barriers around the Dyson Pair. But again, we concede the point. The barrier mechanism may simply be an ancient device that has been left on for no good reason other than its creators have indeed moved onward and upward. There are endless speculations which can be made from the presently observed data. None of which can be refined as long as that data remains so scarce and so old.”

“What are you suggesting?” the Vice President asked.

“That is obvious, is it not? This Council was brought into existence to formulate a response to any perceived threat to the Commonwealth. No coherent response to the Dyson Pair can be made based on the currently available data. More information must be acquired. You must visit the Dyson Pair to ascertain their current status, and the reason behind the enclosures.”

“The cost—” exclaimed the Vice President. She gave Nigel a quick guilty glance.

He ignored it; the SI had made things considerably simpler for him. “Yes, it would cost a lot to reach the Dyson Pair by conventional methods,” he said. “We’d have to locate at least seven H-congruous planets, stretched out between the Commonwealth and the Dyson Pair, and then build commercial-size wormhole generators on each of them. It would take decades, and there would be little economic benefit.”

“The Commonwealth treasury can hardly subsidize CST,” Crispin Goldreich said.

“You did for Far Away,” Nigel said mildly. “That was our last alien contact.”

“One station on Half Way!” the Senator said hotly. “And if nothing else, that convinced me we should never do such a thing again. Far Away has been a total waste of time and effort.”

Nigel resisted the impulse to comment directly. The Halgarths had direct allies around the table in addition to Rafael, and their family were the main beneficiaries of Far Away. Not, as they’d be the first to admit, that there were many benefits.

“I would like to propose something a little more practical than consecutive wormholes,” Nigel said. Everyone around the table looked at him expectantly, even Ozzie, which was quite an achievement. The Vice President’s expression of interest tightened at the simple demonstration of true political power.

“I’m in total agreement with the SI that we need to know exactly what has happened at the Dyson Pair,” Nigel continued. “And we can neither afford the cost nor the wait to build a chain of wormholes to take us there. So I suggest we build a starship instead.”

The idea was greeted with several nervous smiles. Ozzie simply laughed.

“You mean a faster-than-light ship?” Brewster Kumar asked. There was a strong note of excitement in his voice. “Can we actually do that?”

“Of course. It’s a relatively simple adaptation of our current wormhole generator system; instead of a stable fixed wormhole which you travel through, this will produce a permanent flowing wormhole that you travel inside of.”

“Oh, man,” Ozzie said. “That is so beautiful. Whaddayaknow, the space cadets won after all. Let’s press the red button and zoom off into hyperspace.”

“It’s not hyperspace,” Nigel answered, slightly too quickly. “That’s just a tabloid name for a very complex energy manipulation function, and you know it.”

“Hyperspace,” Ozzie said contentedly. “Everything we built our wormhole to avoid.”

“Except in cases like this, when it makes perfect sense,” Nigel said. “We can probably build this ship inside of a year. A crack exploratory team can go out there, take a look around and tell us what’s happening. It’s quick, and it’s cheap.”

“Cheap?” Crispin Goldreich queried.

“Relatively, yes.” The starship proposals had been sitting dormant in Nigel’s personal files for over a century. An exercise in wishful thinking, one he hadn’t managed to fully let go. He’d never quite forgotten (nor erased) his feeling of admiration when he watched the Eagle II fly gracefully out of the Martian horizon to settle on Arabia Terra. There was something noble about spacecraft voyaging through the vast and hostile void, carrying with them the pinnacle of the human spirit, everything good and worthwhile about the race. And he was probably the last human alive who remembered that. No, he corrected himself, not the last. “The CST corporation and Augusta Treasury would be prepared to fund up to thirty percent of the hardware costs.”

“In return for exclusivity,” Thompson Burnelli said scathingly.

Nigel smiled softly at him. “I believe that precedent was established during the Far Away venture.”

“Very well,” the Vice President said. “Unless there’s an alternative, we’ll take a vote on the proposal.”

Nobody was against it. But Nigel had known that from the start; even Burnelli raised his hand in approval. The ExoProtectorate Council was basically a rubber stamp for CST exploration and encounter strategy. With Nigel’s blessing, CST had started practical design work on the starship three days earlier. All that remained were the thousand interminable details of the project, its funding and management. Details they would all delegate to their deputies. This meeting was policy only.

“So are you going to captain this mission?” Rafael Columbia asked as they stood up to leave.

“No,” Nigel said. “Much as I’d like to, that position requires various qualities and experience which I simply don’t have, not even lurking in secure storage at my rejuve clinic. But I know a man who does.”

....

Oaktier was an early phase one planet, settled in 2089. Its longevity had produced a first-class economy and a rich and impressive cultural heritage. The crystal skyscrapers and marble condo-pyramids that comprised the center of the capital, Darklake City, made that quite obvious to any observer arriving fresh at the CST planetary station from Seattle.

Most of the original settlers had arrived from Canada and Hong Kong, with a goodly proportion of Seattle’s residents joining up with them. As such, its influences were memorably varied, with ultramodern trends sitting comfortably alongside carefully maintained old traditions. Given such roots, formality and hard work had seeped into the population’s genome over the centuries. As a people, they’d flourished and expanded; two hundred forty years after settlement, the population was just over one and a quarter billion, spread out over eight continents. The vast majority worked diligently and lived well.

With the Seattle legacy perhaps weighting the decision, Darklake City had been sited in a hilly area of the subtropics. With its slopes of rich soil, constant warm weather, and abundant water from rivers and lakes, the area was ideal for coffee growing. The lakeshore that made up the southeastern edge of the city now sprawled for thirty-five kilometers, incorporating marinas, civic parks, expensive apartment blocks, boatyards, leisure resorts, and commercial docks. At night, it was a gaudy neon rainbow of color as holographic adverts roofed the roads like luminescent storm clouds, while buildings competed against each other to emphasize their features in raw photonic energy. Bars, restaurants, and clubs used music, live acts, and semilegal pleasure-tingle emitters to entice the party people and it crowds in off the street.

Some forty years before Dudley Bose made his vital discovery, the night she was due to be murdered, Tara Jennifer Shaheef could see it all laid out before her from the lounge balcony of her twenty-fifth-floor apartment in the center of the city. The shoreline was like the glimmering edge of the galaxy, falling off into complete blackness beyond. That was where life and civilization ended. Beyond were only a few sparkling cruise ships that slid across the deep water like rogue star clusters lost in the deep night.

A gentle evening breeze stirred her hair and robe and she leaned against the balcony rail. There was a sugary scent of blossom in the air, which she relished as she inhaled. Oaktier had long ago banned combustion engines and fossil fuel power stations from the planet; local politicians boasted that its atmosphere was cleaner than Earth’s. So she breathed in the air contentedly. There was no noise, at this height she was insulated from the low buzz of electric vehicles on the streets below. And the bustling shoreline three kilometers away was too far for its racket to carry.

If she turned her head left, she could see the bright grid of city lights stretch out into the foothills. A pale light cast by the gray-blue crescent of Oaktier’s low moon was just strong enough to reveal the mountains behind them that formed a low wall across the night sky. In the daytime, long terrace lines of coffee bushes curved along the slopes. White plantation mansions nestled in lush groves of trees, set back from the narrow roads that snaked up to the summits.

Two rejuvenations ago, she’d made her life out there, away from the more frenetic urban existence. Sometimes, she dreamed of reverting, heading back into the countryside for a quieter, slower existence. An existence away from her intense, driven husband, Morton. After a couple more rejuvenations, she would probably do it, just to recharge herself. But not just yet, she still enjoyed the faster mainstream life.

She went back into the apartment, and the balcony doors slid shut behind her. Her bare feet padded quietly on the lounge’s hard teakwood floor as she made her way across to the bathroom.

In the apartment tower’s basement, her killer entered the power utility room. He removed the cover from one of the building management array cabinets, and took a handheld array from his pocket. The unit spooled out a length of fiber-optic cable with a standard v-jack on the end, which he plugged into the cabinet’s exposed maintenance socket. Several new programs were downloaded, and quickly piggybacked their way onto the existing software. When it was done, he pulled the v-jack out and replaced the cover with the correct locking tool.

Tara Jennifer Shaheef’s bathroom was decorated in marble, while the ceiling was a single giant mirror. Recessed lighting around the rim of the bath cast a warm rose-pink glow across the room, flickering in an imitation of candlelight. The bath itself was a sunken affair big enough for two, which she’d filled to the brim and added a variety of salts to. When she got in, the spar nozzles came on, churning the water against her skin. She sank into the sculpted seat, and rested her head back on the cushion. Her e-butler called up some music from the household array. Tara listened to the melody in a pleasant semidoze.

Morton was away for a week at Talansee on the other side of the planet, attending a conference with a housing developer group he was trying to negotiate a deal with. AquaState, the company he and Tara had set up together, manufactured semiorganic moisture extractor leaves that provided water for remote buildings, and was finally starting to take off. Morton was eager to capitalize on their growing success, moving the company toward a public flotation that would bring in a huge amount of money for further expansion. But his devotion to his work meant that for seven whole days she didn’t have to produce any excuses about where she’d been or what she’d been doing. She could spend the whole time with Wyobie Cotal, the rather delectable young man she’d snagged for herself. It was mainly for what he did to her in bed, but they also traveled around the city and enjoyed its places and events as well. That’s what made this affair so special. Wyobie paid attention to all those areas that Morton either ignored or had simply forgotten in his eternal obsession to advance their company. These seven days were going to be a truly wonderful break, she was determined about that. Then maybe afterward … After all, they’d been married for thirteen years. What more did Morton want? Marriages always went stale in the end. You just shook hands and moved on.

Her killer walked across the ground-floor lobby, and his e-butler requested an elevator to take him up to the twenty-fifth floor. He stood underneath the discreet security sensor above the doors as he waited. He didn’t care, after all, it wasn’t his face he was wearing.

Tara was still deliberating about what to wear that evening when the hauntingly powerful orchestral chorus vanished abruptly. The bathroom lights died. The spar jets shut down. Tara opened her eyes resentfully. A power failure was so boring. She thought the apartment was supposed to be immune from such things. It had certainly never happened before.

After a few seconds, the lights still hadn’t come back on. She told her e-butler to ask the household array what was happening. It told her it couldn’t get a reply, nothing seemed to be working. Now she frowned in annoyance. This simply couldn’t happen, that’s what backups and duplicated systems were for.

She waited for a little while longer. The bath was such a tranquil place, and she wanted her skin to be just perfect for her lover that night. But no matter how hard she wished and cursed, the power stayed off. Eventually, she struggled to her feet and stepped out. That was when she realized just how dark the apartment was. She really couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. Using irritation to cover any bud of genuine concern, she decided not to feel around for a towel. Instead she cautiously made her way out into the corridor. There was a glimmer of light available there, at least. It came from the broad archway leading into the lounge.

Tara hurried through into the big room, only mildly concerned what her soaking wet feet would do to the wooden floor. Light from the illuminated city washed in through the balcony windows. It gave the room a dark monochrome perspective. Her lips hardened in annoyance as she looked out at the twinkling lights. This was the only apartment that seemed to be suffering.

Something moved in the hallway. Large. Silent. She turned. “What—”

The killer fired a nervejam pulse from his customized pistol. Every muscle in Tara’s body locked solid for a second. The pulse overloaded most of the neural connections in her brain, making death instantaneous. She never felt a thing. Her muscles unlocked, and the corpse crumpled to the floor.

He walked over to her, and spent a moment looking down. Then he pulled out an em pulser and placed it on the back of her head, where the memory-cell insert was. The gadget discharged. He triggered it another three times, making absolutely sure the insert would be scrambled beyond recovery. No matter how good a clone body the re-life procedure produced for her, the most recent section of Tara Jennifer Shaheef’s life was now lost for ever.

The killer’s e-butler sent an instruction to the apartment’s array, which turned the lights back on. He sat in the big sofa, facing the door, and waited.

Wyobie Cotal arrived forty-six minutes later. There was a somewhat smug and anticipatory smile on the young first-lifer’s face as he walked into the room. It turned to an expression of total shock as he saw the naked corpse on the floor. He’d barely registered the man sitting on the sofa opposite before the nervejam pistol fired again.

The killer repeated the procedure with the em pulser, erasing the carefully stored duplicate memories of the last few months of Wyobie Cotal’s life from his memorycell insert. After that, he moved into the spare bedroom, pulling three large suitcases and a big trunk out from their storage closet. By the time he’d got them into the master bedroom, three robot trolleys had arrived from the tower’s delivery bay, carrying several plastic packing crates.

His first job was shoving the bodies into the two largest crates and sealing them tight. He then spent the next two and a half hours collecting every item of Tara’s in the apartment, gradually filling the remaining crates with them. Her clothes went into the cases and trunk.

When he was finished, the trolleys loaded up the crates again, and took them back down the service elevator to the delivery bay, where two hired trucks were waiting. The crates containing the bodies went into one truck, while everything else went into the second.

Upstairs the killer drained the bath, then ordered the maidbots to give the apartment a class-one cleaning. He left the little machines busy at work scouring the floors and walls for dust and dirt, conscientiously switching off the lights as he went.

FOUR

So here she was, in the bleak small hours of the morning, strapped tightly into the confined cockpit of a hyperglider that was tethered to the barren rock floor of Stakeout Canyon waiting for the storm to arrive with its two hundred kilometers per hour winds. At her age, and with her family heritage behind her, there were probably a great many better things for Justine Burnelli to be doing. Most of the ones she could think of right now involved beds with silk sheets (preferably shared with a man), or spa baths, or extremely expensive restaurants, or plush nightclubs. But the only luxuries within about a thousand kilometers were currently racing away from her as fast as the support crews could drive the convoy’s mobile homes over this god-awful terrain. And it was all thanks to her newest best friend: Estella Fenton.

They’d met in the day lounge of the exclusive Washington rejuvenation clinic she always used, both of them just out of the tank and undergoing physiotherapy, hydrotherapy, massage, and herbal aromatherapy, among other remedies to bring some life back to limbs and muscles that hadn’t been used for fourteen months. They moved like old-time geriatrics, an irony made worse by their apparently adolescent bodies.

All anyone did in the lounge was sit in the deep jellcushion chairs and stare out at the wooded parkland beyond the picture windows. A hardy few used handheld arrays to do some work, reading the screens and talking to the programs. None of them had retained the ability to interface directly with the cybersphere. Their bodies had all been purged of most of their inserts, like processors and OCtattoos, during the rejuvenation process, and they hadn’t received their new ones yet. Estella had been led into the airy lounge by two nurses, one holding each arm as the gorgeous young redhead wobbled unsteadily between them. She sank into the chair with a grateful sigh.

“We’ll be back for your hydro session at three o’clock,” the senior nurse said.

“Thank you so much,” Estella said with a forced smile. It blanked out as soon as the nurses left the lounge. “Bloody hell.”

“Just out?” Justine asked.

“Two days.”

“Three, myself.”

“God! Another ten days of this.”

“Worth it, though.” Justine held up the paperscreen she’d been reading; it was still running through the articles and pictures of the fashion magazine she’d accessed. “I haven’t been able to wear anything this good for the last ten years.” Although plenty of her female friends underwent rejuvenation religiously every twenty years (or less), Justine tended to wait until her body age was around fifty before going through the whole process again. You could carry vanity too far.

“I’m not even at the stage where I’m thinking of clothes yet,” Estella said. She ran a hand through her disheveled hair, which was an all-over bonnet five centimeters long. “I need to get styled first. And I hate having hair this short, I normally wear it down to my waist, and that always takes a couple of years to grow,” she grouched.

“That must look lovely.”

“I don’t have any trouble catching men.” She glanced around the lounge. “God, I don’t even feel like that right now.” The clinic was strictly single sex, although that didn’t always stop clients who were nearing the end of their physical therapy period from indulging in a bit of illicit hanky-panky in their rooms. It wasn’t just youth’s appearance they reclaimed after rejuve; their newly adolescent bodies were flush with hormones and vitality. Sex was at the top of just about everybody’s agenda when they left a rejuvenation clinic, and tended to stay there for quite a while.

Justine grinned. “Won’t be long. You’ll be heading for the nearest Silent World full speed ahead.”

“Been there, done that, a hundred times over. Not to say that I won’t make a stop off on the way, but I’ve got something more exhilarating planned for this time.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

That had turned out to be a two-month-long safari across Far Away. Justine had almost outright rejected the notion of joining her. But the more Estella talked about it—and she talked about very little else—the more it began to lodge in her mind.

After all, Far Away was the only true “wild world” within the Commonwealth, where civilization’s grip on the inhabitants was a loose one. It was difficult and expensive to reach, the climate and environment were odd, the enigmatic alien ship Marie Celeste was still there puzzling researchers as much as it had on the day of its discovery. And then there was the ultimate geological challenge, the Grand Triad, the three largest volcanoes in the known galaxy, arranged in a tight triangle.

Justine’s hyperglider was tethered just inside the wide opening of Stakeout Canyon, so the nose was pointing east, which put Mount Zeus to her left. In the daytime when the ground crew was rigging the hyperglider, all she could see of that colossus was its rocky lower slope, which formed one side of the huge funnel-shaped canyon. The crater peak could never be seen from the base; it was seventeen kilometers high.

To her right was Mount Titan, the only currently active volcano of the three, its crater rim standing outside the atmosphere at twenty-three kilometers high. Sometimes, at night, and if the eruption was particularly violent, the rose-gold corona shimmering above the glowing lava could be seen from the pampas lands away to the south, as if a red dwarf had just set behind the horizon. Directly ahead of her, forming the impossibly blunt and massive end of the canyon, was Mount Herculaneum. Measuring seven hundred eleven kilometers wide across its base, the volcano was roughly conical, with its twin-caldera summit leveling out at thirty-two kilometers above sea level, putting it a long way above Far Away’s troposphere. Thankfully, the geologists had classed it as semiactive; it had never erupted in the hundred eighty odd years since human settlement had begun, though it had produced a few spectacular shudders in that time.

That vulcanism could produce such huge features on a small planet like Far Away was a wonderful enigma to her. Of course, she’d studied articles on the science of it all, the fact that only a forty percent standard gravity allowed something as gigantic as Mount Herculaneum to exist, while on a world with normal Earth-like gravity it would collapse under its own weight. And the lack of tectonic plates meant that lava simply continued to pile up in the same spot, aeon after aeon.

But none of that cool reasoning could detract from the actuality of the monstrous landscape she’d come to experience. The power and forces amassing around her were elemental, a planet’s strength readily visible as nowhere else. And she was sitting in her pathetic little machine, in a lunatic attempt to tame that power, to make it do her bidding.

Her hands were shaking slightly inside her flight suit as the first hint of dawn emerged, with an outline of slate-gray sky materializing high above the end of the canyon. She cursed Estella-bloody-Fenton for the sight. It didn’t help calm her nerves knowing that Estella was in a similar hyperglider fastened to the rock a couple of kilometers away, staring out at the same inhospitable jags of rock.

“It’s starting,” someone said over the radio.

There was no cybersphere on Far Away; in fact, no modern communications at all outside Armstrong City and the larger towns. A hundred years earlier, there had been a few satellites providing some coverage for the countryside and ocean, but the Guardians of Selfhood had shot down the last of them long ago. All anybody had out here was simple radio, and Far Away’s turbulent ionosphere didn’t offer a lot of assistance to that.

“There’s some movement out here. Wind’s picking up.”

Justine peered through the tough transparent hood of the cockpit. Nothing moved on the bare rock below her. The storms that swept in from the Hondu Ocean to the west were channeled and squeezed by Zeus and Titan to roar along this one canyon between them. It had been scoured clean of any loose soil or pebbles geological ages ago.

“Derrick?” Justine called. “Can you hear me?”

Her only answer was a fluctuating buzz of static as the dawn slowly poured a wan light down into the canyon.

“Derrick?”

The caravan of trucks, four-by-fours, and mobile homes must be clear now, she acknowledged grimly, over Zeus’s foothills and sheltered in some deep gully from the morning storm. All the mad hyperglider pilots were on their own now. No escape.

Somehow this part of it had been missed off the slick advertising and intensive, reassuring briefing sessions. Even the pilot skill training memory implementation hadn’t included it. Waiting helplessly as the wind from the ocean built from a gentle breeze to a deranged hurricane. Waiting, unable to do anything. Waiting, watching. Waiting and worrying. Waiting as fright emerged from some primal place deep in the brain, growing and growing.

“How’s it going, darling?” Estella asked.

“Fine,” you bitch. “Actually, I’m getting a bit nervous.”

“Nervous? Lucky cow. I’m scared shitless.”

Justine instructed her e-butler to run through the cockpit procedures again, checking the hyperglider’s systems. Even with the limited capacity of the onboard array, the e-butler produced a perfect control interface. Its review was instantaneous; translucent icons blinked up inside her virtual vision, everything was on-line and fully functional. “Remind me again why I want to do this?”

“Because it beats the hell out of breakfast in bed,” Estella told her.

“In a five-star hotel.”

“On a Caribbean island, with a veranda overlooking the beach.”

“Where dolphins are playing in the water.”

It was getting a lot lighter outside. Justine could finally see some thin streamers of sand drifting past the hyperglider. They must have blown in from the coast, she thought. She switched the weather radar to the main console screen, studying the blobs of vivid color as they surged and squabbled against each other. The storm was definitely on its way; scarlet ribbons representing dense high-velocity air were seeping across the screen like some kind of fresh wound, always expanding.

In a way she was glad the storm was heading in from the west, creeping up on her from behind. It meant she couldn’t watch the hammerhead clouds as they devoured the sky. She was quite frightened enough as it was. Even now she wasn’t sure she was going to make the flight. There was an option to just stay here; the hyperglider was currently configured into a smooth, fat cigar shape, the wing buds confined below the main fuselage; she could simply keep the tethers wound in, and let the winds roar around her until it was all over. Many had, so she’d been told, bottling out at the last moment. Right now, in the middle of the annual storm season, it was an average five-hour wait for the gales to sweep over.

Within twenty minutes, the wind was strong enough to start shaking the hyperglider. If there was sand out there, she couldn’t see it anymore. Red waves washed continually across the weather radar screen.

“Still there?” Estella asked.

“Still here.”

“Won’t be long now.”

“Yeah. Are you getting the same readings from your radar? Some of those airstreams are almost two hundred kilometers an hour already.” The digital figures for wind speed were blurring, they were mounting so fast. At this rate the storm’s central powerhouse would be overhead in another forty to fifty minutes, and those were the winds she wanted. If she took off now, the hyperglider would simply be driven into the base of Mount Herculaneum.

The radio band seemed to be full of bad jokes and nervy bravado. Justine didn’t join in with any of it, although listening was a strange kind of comfort. It helped keep away the sense of isolation.

Clouds were rampaging across the sky now, gradually becoming lower. They blocked the rising sun, cutting the illumination to a gloomy twilight, although she could still see the swollen tatters of rain charging off into the distance. The rock around the hyperglider began to glisten with a thin sheen of water.

“Wind’s reaching two hundred,” Estella called out. There was dread mingling with anticipation in her voice. “I’m about to release. See you on the other side, darling.”

“I’ll be there,” Justine yelled. The fuselage was shaking violently now, producing a steady high-volume thrumming; even the howl of the wind was penetrating the heavily insulated cockpit. The screen displays on the console in front of her were jumbled thanks to the quivering, jittering lines of color, completely out of focus. She had to rely almost completely on the more basic information inside her virtual vision. Gray mist was a constant blur outside, eliminating any sight of the sky or canyon walls.

Then it was time. The winds along the ground of Stakeout Canyon were over a hundred sixty kilometers an hour. Her radar showed the storm’s leading edge was now boiling up Mount Herculaneum ahead of her, and that was the critical factor. Those winds had to be there to carry her a long, long way. Without them, this was going to be a short trip with one very abrupt ending.

She put her hands down on the console’s i-spots, fingers curling around the grip bars, plyplastic flowed around them, securing them for what promised to be a turbulent flight. The OCtattoos on her wrists completed the link between the i-spots and her main nerve cords, interfacing her directly with the onboard array. Virtual hands appeared inside her virtual vision. Her customization had given them long slender fingers with green nails and glowing blue neon rings on every finger. A joystick materialized amid the icons, and she moved her virtual hand to grasp it. Her other hand started tapping icons, initiating one final systems check. With everything coming up green, she ordered the onboard array to deploy the wings.

The plyplastic buds swelled out, elongating to become small thick delta shapes. The thrumming increased dramatically as they caught the wind. Tethers were being strained close to their tolerance limits. Justine prayed the carbon-reinforced titanium anchor struts, driven fifty meters into the naked rock by the support team, would survive the next few minutes.

Some little demon inside said: Last chance to stay put, and live.

Justine moved her virtual hand and flipped the forward tether icon. The locks disengaged, and she was immediately shaken violently from side to side as the hyperglider fishtailed. An instinctive response from the implanted training memory came to her aid. She twisted the joystick, and the wings bent downward several degrees. A touch on the rear tether icon, and the two strands extended. The hyperglider lifted twenty meters into the air, still shaking frantically, as if it was desperate to be rid of its final restraints. Justine halted the tether extension, and began to test her control surfaces. The rear of the hyperglider was quickly shifted into a vertical stabilizer fin. Wings expanded a little farther, angling to produce more lift. Finally, once she cleared the ground, the dreadful thrumming vibration faded away—although never cutting out altogether. Now all she had to contend with was the awesome roar of the wind as it accelerated toward two hundred kilometers an hour.

At this point, the hyperglider was nothing more than a giant kite. Very carefully, she began to extend the rear tethers still farther. They played out behind her, and the hyperglider rose eagerly away from the ground. After two minutes of careful extension, she was a hundred meters high. The ground wasn’t visible, for which she was obscurely thankful. Tatters of mist were scudding past so fast they prevented her from seeing anything beyond twenty or thirty meters. Raindrops that hit the cockpit transparency immediately hurtled off, scoured clean by the tremendous air velocity. Constantly flexing the wings to compensate for turbulence, she began extending the tethers again.

Twenty-five minutes after leaving the ground, she was fourteen hundred meters high. It was a cautious ascent, but the two tether cables were shaking with a harmonic that set her teeth on edge. Justine configured the plyplastic hyperglider for freeflight. The wings flowed outward, reaching a hundred ten meters at full span while curving around into a crescent shape; from above it made the hyperglider look like a giant scimitar blade, with the cockpit bullet jutting out of the apex. Behind her, the rear fuselage performed a vertical stretch, becoming a deep triangular stabilizer, its tips twitching with near-subliminal motion to keep the craft lined up accurately in the windstream.

She reached fifteen hundred meters in altitude. The wings curled fractionally along their length, presenting the most efficient lift capture profile to the wind. Looking at the figures on the console screen, she couldn’t believe the strain on the tether cables, almost all the safety margin was used up.

Justine sucked down a deep breath as the raw elements screamed around her. If she had the courage, this ought to be the ride of a lifetime. If … She thought back to all those years she’d lived through, from this strange viewpoint they all seemed so achingly identical, and boring.

A virtual finger reached forward, almost reluctantly touching the disengage icon.

The g-force slammed her back into the seat as the hyperglider cut free, bringing back the weight she hadn’t felt since she arrived on Far Away. The craft hurtled toward the blunt end of Stakeout Canyon at two hundred kilometers an hour. Immediately it lurched to starboard and began to descend. She twisted the joystick to compensate—not fast, smooth and positive—shifting the wings to alter the airflow. The response was astonishingly quick, sending her swooping upward. Then a near-spin started, and she flipped the stabilizer tips to counter it.

Every moment demanded her total concentration merely to hold the hyperglider roughly level. It wasn’t just the featureless wrap of cloud that cut her off from the outside world. Her attention was focused solely on the attitude display and the radar. As Stakeout Canyon narrowed, she had to hold her course directly down the center. All the time the rock walls closed in toward each other, growing steeper in the process, the furious buffeting increased proportionally. Wild turbulence was constantly trying to swirl the craft around into a spin, or pull it down to oblivion.

She wasn’t even aware of time passing, only the frantic, exhausting fight to keep the hyperglider on track. If she let it ascend too high, the massive upper windstreams would carry it away over the sides of the canyon as they gushed up and away, expanding in release from the escalating pressure at the base of the walls. She would wind up somewhere on the weather-blasted and boulder-strewn midslopes of Zeus or Titan, hundreds of kilometers from the recovery vehicles of the caravan.

Without any warning, the radar picked up the end of the canyon, twenty-five kilometers away. At this point, where the three volcanoes intersected, Mount Herculaneum was a simple vertical cliff, six kilometers high. Her own altitude was three and a half kilometers. Outside, the wind speed was still increasing within the constriction. The weather radar screen flared lurid scarlet around the edges as it tracked the lethal currents and shock waves reverberating off the rock. Darkness deepened around her as the shredded clouds were crushed back together.

Justine retracted the wings slightly, sacrificing the propulsive push they generated for a little more maneuverability. It had begun to rain steadily outside the cockpit now, thick droplets slashing along beside her. Paradoxically, visibility began to lift. The clouds were recondensing under the pressure. Droplets began to merge together for an instant before the raging winds tore them apart. Then they would re-form a second later, larger this time as the pressure continued to build relentlessly. Semicohesive horizontal streams of water churned and foamed around the hyperglider fuselage.

The cliff was twelve kilometers away, and she was down to three kilometers from the canyon floor. Water had become so dense, it was as if the hyperglider was surfing along inside the crest of some crazy airborne wave. The sun had risen above the volcano’s slopes, shining down into the top of the canyon. Suddenly it struck the chaotic foam whipping around the hyperglider, and the world flared into a thousand tattered sparkling rainbows, birthing and dying, clashing and colliding. Justine laughed in dazed appreciation at the astounding sight.

Three kilometers ahead of her, the gushing rivulets merged into a single writhing torrent two kilometers above the floor of Stakeout Canyon. That was a couple of kilometers from the cliff. The rocky constriction was at its narrowest, the pressure at its highest. There was only one way the churning river could escape.

Justine slid the hyperglider above the water, staring down on it in utter disbelief. The rainbows fizzled out abruptly. Rock slammed up into her vision to replace them, terrifyingly huge walls of it, stretching up halfway to heaven. Right in front of her, the flying river curved upward and began the long, impossible powerclimb to freedom as the entire storm went vertical. Blasting out an eternal thunderclap, the wind reached three hundred kilometers an hour. She knew she was yelling wordlessly, but couldn’t hear herself above the cacophony bombarding the cockpit.

The hyperglider was wrenched upward. G-force slammed Justine down into the seat again. Her knuckles grew white as she clenched the grip bars, fearful she’d lose contact with the i-spots. She wrestled the wing surfaces to obey in a desperate bid to maintain stability within the geysering air. Water rose with her, defying gravity to shoot up parallel to the cliff. Even with the hyperglider demanding her full devotion simply to survive the demented air currents, she spared the time, a couple of precious seconds, to stare at the incredible phenomenon. A waterfall going straight up.

At five kilometers altitude, the foaming sheet of water began to break apart again. The immense upright storm was beginning to spread wide as it reached the top of the canyon. Pressure and wind velocity were weakening. Throughout it all, Justine steered the hyperglider directly up the central track. Water and cloud cascaded away on either side as she burst out above the rock, two immense waves of vapor falling back down in swan-wing curves to crash onto the volcano’s lower slopes. Only in the center of the maelstrom did the wind keep howling, thrusting her forward and upward.

Mount Herculaneum’s gigantic bulk became visible below her, a desolate ground of shattered stone and saturated gravel extending for tens of kilometers around the top of the canyon. Gradually the harshness began to give way to the more welcome stains of ochre and avocado-green as the plants reasserted themselves. Tiny grasses rooted hard in crinkled fissures, hardy tropical moss welded to boulders. The storm continued to rage above them, seeking its escape to the quieter skies in the east by sliding around the slopes to the north and the south.

Justine modified the wing camber again, maintaining her speed, but rising ever higher. She was tracking a straight line between the canyon and the summit, never deviating to either side. Grassy meadows with sturdy scrub bushes passed below her now. Temperate lands, the plants lashed and cowed by the unremitting storms, but always flourishing. The twin cataracts of erupting water from the canyon were fifteen kilometers behind her, and the clouds were parting, pealing off right and left to find their own route around the volcano. Justine sought another path through the clear sunny sky ahead and above. Her speed was still colossal, sufficient to carry her well clear of the storm, but not quite enough for her ultimate goal. She began scanning the weather radar.

As if the volcano’s western midsection didn’t have enough to contend with, twisters were skittering over the rumpled slopes, a legacy of clear air turbulence from the storm. She could see them through the canopy, spindly strands of beige ephemera, whipping violently back and forth across the land. They came in all sizes, from mild spirals of dust, to brutal, dense vortices reaching kilometers in height. The onboard array plotted their courses, eliminating those too weak or too distant for her purpose. Not that any of them were truly predictable. This was where human intuition came in—and luck.

There was one, twenty kilometers ahead, and slightly more southward than she would have preferred. But it stood nearly five kilometers high, siphoning up car-sized boulders as it wove its erratic course. Justine banked around, lining the hyperglider’s nose on it. She acquired yet more speed as the craft sank closer to the ground. The wings and vertical stabilizer shrank inward, thickening as they went. Her eyes were mesmerized by the wild pirouettes of the twister’s base, leaving her hungry for a pattern, any sort of clue to which way it would swerve next.

The hyperglider’s descent became a fearsome dive. She swayed it in time with the base of the twister—judging, anticipating. Wings and stabilizer were down to nothing more than stubs, giving her minimal control. The ground was barely five hundred meters away. Ahead of her, the twister altered course again. She knew it would hold steady for perhaps a couple of seconds, and pushed the joystick forward, arrowing the craft straight at it. At the last moment she pulled up, watching the nose trace a sharp curve. The horizon fell away, leaving her with a sky that faded from glaring turquoise to fabulous deep indigo.

Then the hyperglider penetrated the twister. Enraged dust and whirling grit surrounded the fuselage, holding it tight. The wings and rear stabilizers bowed around, forming a stumpy propeller as the nose finished its arc to point straight up along the wavering unstable core of whirling air. Wing blades bit deep, spinning the fuselage and thrusting it up in one potent motion. Particles from sand up to alarmingly large stones hammered away on the fuselage. The multiple impacts sounded as if she were being hit by machine-gun fire. Structural stress levels quickly went to their amber alert levels. She flinched almost continually from the stones smacking against the cockpit transparency, not a foot from her face.

Despite that, this was the moment: the reason she was here. Not everybody got to this point. Some were smeared along the floor and walls of Stakeout Canyon. Others who’d actually managed to fly up the waterfall never found a twister, or messed up the entry. But her foreign memories had played true, giving her the skill. All she had to provide was the determination to back it up. That was what she’d come to this place for, finding out if she was still the same impetuous carefree person she remembered from her first life.

Motors whined loudly below her back, providing a counterspin to the forward fuselage. It helped enormously with stability, as well as holding the cockpit steady. That was the theory, anyway. She still felt dizzy and queasy, not that there was any visual reference to check if she was spinning. Virtual vision graphics showed a modest rotation that the onboard array was trying to compensate for. Acceleration was pushing her painfully deep into the seat.

It was only moments later when the hyperglider shot out of the top of the twister like a missile from its launch tube. Even though she’d only been inside for a few moments, her velocity had almost doubled. Fuselage motors strained again, halting the counterrotation. The hyperglider’s wings and rear stabilizer lengthened, this time taking on a more normal planform; straight narrow wings and a cruciform tail. There was very little atmosphere to affect them now, the hyperglider was sliding quickly and smoothly through the stratosphere. However, she did angle them so the trajectory bent slightly. The craft was chasing a simple ballistic curve, the apex of which would be nine kilometers above Mount Herculaneum’s summit.

She watched the pressure display digits wind down until it was registering an effective vacuum outside the fuselage. The sky had changed from blue to midnight-black. Stars shone strongly all around, while dazzlingly bright sunlight poured into the cockpit.

The contrast was astounding. From the pummeling terror of the storm to the utter silent serenity of space in a few seconds. Even though this environment was every bit as lethal to a human as the storm, she felt strangely secure up here. Her yammering heart began to subside. She eased the seat straps away from her shoulders, and craned to get a good look outside.

She was almost level with the summit of Mount Herculaneum, and still rising. The volcano spread out below her, its lower slopes lost below the clouds. Far behind the hyperglider’s tail, the storm emerged from Stakeout Canyon to boil away furiously around the immense rock barrier. Twisting her head to starboard she could look down into Mount Titan’s crater. Right at the bottom of it was a demonic scarlet glow from the lava lake, partially obscured by webs of thick black smoke. Broad tendrils waved upward, thinning out as they reached the lip to disperse into a haze that drizzled flaky gray ash across the upper slopes. She was mildly disappointed it wasn’t in full eruption; locals working as crew for the caravan had enthused about Mount Doom (as they called it, only half jokingly) in full flow.

Eight and a half kilometers above the summit of Mount Herculaneum, the hyperglider had reached the top of its arc. Its trajectory was flattening out as Far Away’s low gravity slowly began to reassert itself. The planet’s horizon rose into view beyond the nose. A crisp white curve against the black of space. Directly below her were the twin caldera, two vast indentations in a drab russet plain of solidified lava waves and broken clinker.

Justine’s radio picked up a few scattered words, heavy with blasts of static, from the expeditions trekking over the airless surface. Hiking trips to the top of Herculaneum were another of Far Away’s principal tourist attractions. It wasn’t difficult, the slopes weren’t particularly steep, and the low gravity gave offworld visitors an easy time of it. But the last half had to be covered in pressure suits; and the only real view, sensational though it was, came from Aphrodite’s Seat, the clifftops just below the caldera plateau. Anyone wanting to walk to the actual highest point, an unimpressive mound on the wall of the northern crater, faced a long dreary slog across a lunar-style landscape to reach it.

With the hyperglider’s nose now dipping slightly, Far Away filled most of the universe to the east of the volcano. From her supreme vantage point, Justine could see the Dessault Mountains stretching away ahead and southward. Small sharp pinnacles stabbed up through the gentle whirl of clouds. They guarded the high desert south of the equator, a cold land almost devoid of cloud. Over to the east she could see a smear of deep greens, where the steppes began their long roll toward the North Sea and Armstrong City.

The horizon’s pronounced curve presented the illusion that she was seeing an entire hemisphere of the planet, like some ancient god of myth gazing down on Earth. Although Far Away lacked the softer textures granted to the old gods of Mount Olympus. The white clouds covered a graded spectrum of miserable browns and grays. Despite close to two centuries of human endeavor, the planet’s land surface was nowhere near recovered from the mammoth, and utterly lethal, solar flare that had called people here. Tough, independent-minded settlers had pushed out from Armstrong City, planting their seeds and spraying energetic, wholesome soil bacteria across the empty miles of dusty sand, but the biosphere remained tenuous, its progress toward full planetary enrichment slow. So much was still desert or blasted earth; very, very little of the planet’s original flora and fauna had survived the radiation. The greenery she could see was alien to this place, invaders colonizing a near-dead world.

She soared silently and smoothly over the towering cliffs of Aphrodite’s Seat that guarded the eastern approach to Herculaneum’s summit. Many kilometers below them was the glacier ring that encircled the entire volcano, extending hundreds of meters across the bare rock. Sunlight glinted from the gritty fractured ice, producing a halolike aura at the upper limit of the atmosphere. Sheltering beneath the glare were the alpine forests, gene-modified Earth pines that had been introduced here as a beacon of life and color that could be seen for hundreds of kilometers. She smiled down on them, as she would any old friend, grateful for the comfort of familiarity that they brought.

Ghostly waves of blue and green began to shimmer across the weather radar screen as the hyperglider sank back into the upper atmosphere, showing her the pressure building outside the fuselage. Justine extended the wings again, shaping them into a broad delta. After a while, the cockpit began to tremble as the leading edges bit deeper and deeper into the air. Aerodynamic forces started to take over from the ballistic impetus.

Justine slowly shook off the dreamy lethargy that had captured her during the flight over the volcano. Practical decisions had to be made; from this altitude she could easily coast along for four or five hundred kilometers, putting her well clear of the volcano. But ahead, that would put her into the Dessault Mountains; while north and south would take her back into the divided wings of the storm. There was also distance to consider, the farther she flew now, the longer it would take the caravan to recover her. She altered the hyperglider’s pitch, putting the nose up so the air would start to brake her speed. Her rate of descent increased, which she balanced against the slope below, maintaining the same height above the ground. Clouds flashed around her, ablaze with bright monochrome light, as she passed through the level of the glacier ring. When the hyperglider fell out of their base she was above the pine forests. She could see grasslands stretching out beyond them. Easy enough to land on, but they were still high. It would be cold.

The grasslands grew more lush and verdant as she flew on. Swirls of wind from the lower slopes began to affect the hyperglider, shaking it with growing strength. Bushes and trees speckled the grasses, building swiftly to a dense tropical rainforest that formed an unbroken skirt around the eastern base of the volcano. Looking down, she could see the small black dots of birds flitting amid the treetops. She was already eight hundred kilometers from where she’d started, and that was in a direct line. The caravan would have to go all the way around Mount Zeus before it even reached Herculaneum. Justine sighed, and pushed the hyperglider down toward the rainforest canopy.

This close, it wasn’t as dense as she’d thought. There were clear swaths, shallow valleys with fast silver streams that had hardly any trees at all, lines of dangerous crags. Several times she saw animals racing across open spaces. The Commonwealth Council’s biosphere revitalization project had certainly been successful here.

The radar switched to ground-mapping mode. Justine was searching for a reasonable patch of ground to land on. Although, in extremis, the hyperglider could come down in a patch barely a hundred meters long, she didn’t fancy trying that. Fortunately, the scans revealed a straightish stretch three kilometers ahead and to the north. She brought the hyperglider’s nose around, lining it up. The clear ground was easily visible amid the trees. It looked like there was a clump of rock a third of the way along. Nothing too serious. When she switched the radar to a higher resolution, it showed a narrow, shallow gully running across one end of the clear ground. She started her prelanding flare, shrinking the wings in again, enhancing the camber. The edge of the long clearing rushed toward her. Three of her console display screens distorted into a hash of random color.

“Shit!”

Her e-butler was slow to respond, reporting several processors dropping out of the onboard array, even her inserts were degraded.

“What’s happening?” she demanded. Her virtual hands flickered and vanished.

A gust of wind slewed the hyperglider to starboard. She groaned in dismay as the cockpit tilted. The console screen displays were making no sense.

“Multiple electronic system failure,” the e-butler said. “Compensating to restore core function.” Hands wavered back into her virtual vision. “You have control.”

Justine automatically countered the dangerous roll with a simple wing twist. The little craft responded sluggishly, forcing her to accentuate the maneuver. When she glanced up from the console she cursed. She was already over the clear ground, and losing altitude fast. All her display screens had righted themselves. Control surface responses were instantaneous again.

She initiated the landing sequence. The wings rotated through almost ninety degrees, braking the last of the hyperglider’s speed. It began to sink as if it were made from lead. Twenty meters from the ground, and with almost no forward motion at all, she altered the wings again. They shot out into huge, thin concave triangles, generating as much lift as possible from her stall speed. The landing strut wheels touched and rebounded. Then she was bouncing over the rough terrain for forty meters before the wheels finally halted. The wings and stabilizer shrank back into their buds.

Justine let out a huge breath of relief. The cockpit canopy hissed as the seal disengaged, and it hinged upward. Plyplastic flowed away from her hands, and she let go of the grip bars. She released her helmet catches, and took it off. A somewhat nervous laugh escaped her lips as she shook her sweaty hair out. All the hyperglider’s electronic systems were back on-line.

The craft had come to rest on a slight incline in grass and some purple leaf plants that were long enough to brush the bottom of the fuselage. A stream burbled away, twenty meters to her left. Hot humid air was already making her perspire. Birds were crying overhead. The surrounding wall of the rainforest was draped in thick ropes of vine that were sprouting a million tiny lavender flowers.

Justine clambered over the side of the cockpit and dropped to the ground in an easy low-gravity curve. Only then did the enormity of what she’d done hit her. Both legs gave way, and she fell to her knees. Tears blinded her eyes, and she was laughing and crying at the same time, while her shoulders shook uncontrollably.

“Oh, Jesus Christ, I did it,” she said, sobbing. “I did it I did it, I goddamn did it.” The laughter was turning hysterical. She gripped some of the grass strands and made an attempt to calm herself. It had been a long time since she had given in to raw emotion like this, a sure sign of youthfulness.

Her breathing steadied, and she wiped the back of her hand across her eyes, smudging away the tears. She climbed to her feet, careful not to make sudden moves. In this gravity her inertia played havoc with all normal motions. A few birds were flapping about overhead, but that was about the only motion. The sun shone down, making her squint. Its heat made the skin on her face tingle. And the humidity!

She puffed out a breath, and began to struggle her way out of the leathery flightsuit. Her e-butler triggered the hyperglider’s locator. A small section of the fuselage behind the open cockpit irised open, and shiny folds of balloon fabric slithered out. It inflated quickly, and rose up into the bright sapphire sky, trailing a thin carbon wire aerial behind it.

Justine checked that the transmitter was working as she slathered on suncream. She kept her boots on, but hurriedly discarded the flightsuit in favor of simple white shorts with matching T-shirt. Everyone on the convoy swore there were no dangerous animals around, certainly not on the Grand Triad. And the Barsoomians, with their weird creatures, were thousands of kilometers away on the other side of the Oak Sea. So she should be all right dressed like this.

She slipped her multifunction wrist array on, a bronze malmetal bracelet with emeralds set along the rim, a gift from her last husband. He’d laughed about her using its extensive capabilities to survive the department store sales. That deteriorating sense of humor of his had hurried their divorce forward by several years.

The bracelet contracted softly, connecting its i-spot to her OCtattoo. Her e-butler expanded out from her inserts into the larger array, increasing its capacity by an order of magnitude. She ordered it to open the hyperglider’s cargo compartment underneath the cockpit, and checked through her equipment and supplies. It would probably take the recovery vehicles three days or so to reach her; she had decent food for a week, and dehydrated rations for another thirty days, though she really hoped she wouldn’t have to eat any of it.

Right at the front of the compartment was a box from the tour company, with a chilled bottle of champagne in a thermal jacket, and a box of chocolates. She was tempted, but the first thing she fished out of her personal case were her sunglasses, an expensive steel designer band that fitted snugly around her face, adjusting themselves to her skin. A floppy old bushman hat followed. She’d picked it up in Australia decades ago; the stupid cheap thing had been to more planets than most people, and was now bleached almost white by all those different suns.

“Okay, so what happened to the electronics?” she asked the e-butler as she took the wrapping off the chocolates. They’d started to melt in the heat.

“The cause of the systems failure is unknown. The onboard array lacks the diagnostic facilities to make a detailed analysis.”

“There must be some indication.”

“It would appear to be an external event. The recorded effect was similar to an em pulse.”

Justine glanced around in shock, a chocolate strawberry half eaten. “Someone was shooting at me?”

“That is unknown.”

“Could it have been a natural phenomenon?”

“That is unknown.”

“But is it possible?”

“This array does not have any data on possible natural causes.”

“Can you sense any em activity?”

“No.”

Justine gave the trees surrounding the open space a more careful look. She wasn’t frightened, more like irritated. She simply wasn’t used to not getting a definitive answer from her e-butler, when all of human knowledge was available in real-time anywhere within the Commonwealth. But here, cut off from the unisphere, data was a rarer, more precious commodity. And being shot at was a possibility, albeit remote.

Firstly, there were the Guardians of Selfhood, who roamed the planet at will. As everyone knew, they were well armed and prone to violence. Then there were other people, locals, who could make a great deal of money out of recovering a dead pilot’s memorycell insert. Families would pay a big finder’s fee to insure their lost loved one’s conscious-continuity when growing a re-life clone. Hypergliding was uniquely dangerous, dozens of pilots were killed each year. Most were recovered by the tour operator, and their memorycells returned home. But any whose flight was flung dramatically off course before crashing risked being lost for a very long time. Locals who came across the crash site were in for a bountiful time once they’d finished the gruesome task of cutting the memorycell free of the corpse. So it certainly wasn’t beyond possibility that there were groups who facilitated a few crashes.

If the em pulse truly had been an attempt to crash her, they were piss-poor at their job, she thought.

Right at the back of the cargo compartment was a small ion pistol for her “personal safety” should the landing site prove hostile. Nobody in the caravan had ever really defined hostile for her, the unspoken implication being wild animals. She gave the secure alcove a thoughtful look, then ordered the compartment to close and lock. If it was a criminal gang hunting her, she wouldn’t stand a chance, armed or not.

“Time to find out,” Justine told the hyperglider. Her voice sounded very loud in the long, tranquil clearing.

She filled her water bottle from the stream, the semiorganic top sucking up the slightly muddy liquid, immediately filtering and cooling it. Then she set off into the trees, using the wrist array’s inertial guidance function.

It took her quite a while to backtrack the thousand or so meters where she’d roughly estimated the interference came from. The undergrowth could be vigorous in places, and where it was low, the vines and creepers filled the gaps between tree trunks. Her whole route seemed to be one giant detour. There was certainly no sign of any track, animal or human. Nor could she hear any voices.

As she approached the general area, she began to feel sheepish. She’d jumped to a lot of conclusions very quickly. Pirates and conspiracies just seemed to fill her adrenaline-pumped mood. Now she was back to mundane reality. Hot, sweaty, having to swat creeper leaves out of her face the whole time, boots sinking into the damp peaty soil. The one blessing of tramping through this jungle was the lack of insects, at least any of the varieties that feasted on humans; the revitalization team hadn’t introduced any. Though there were plenty of tiny multilegged beetles roving around her feet, a great many of which looked alien to her. A lot of the plant species were certainly nonterrestrial.

After about twenty minutes, Justine simply stopped. She was feeling ridiculous now. There was no sign of any human activity. And if there was a band of hunter pirates creeping down to the landing site through the trees, they were crap at tracking her when she was walking straight at them.

“Can you sense anything?” she asked her e-butler.

“This unit’s sensors are registering some weak electromagnetic activity,” it replied. “It is difficult to locate an origin point. It appears to be operating on a regular cycle.”

“Some kind of radio signal?”

“No. It is a multiband emission, there is no identifiable modulation.”

“A powerburst, then?”

“That is a source which would fit the sensor data.”

“What kind of equipment would generate that?”

“That is unknown.”

“Okay, which direction is it coming from? Give me a graphic.”

The e-butler expanded a simple map into her virtual vision. Justine started walking, pushing the vines apart.

“The emission just repeated,” her e-butler said after she’d gone about fifty meters. “It was much stronger. The sensors are registering a degree of residual activity. There is no pattern to it.”

“Am I still going in the right direction?”

“Yes.”

“What about the pulse duration? Does that correspond to the one which hit the hyperglider?”

“It is very close.”

The trees seemed to be spaced slightly farther apart—although that could have been her imagination. The undergrowth and vines certainly didn’t slacken off. She’d gotten long scratches on her legs.

The overlaid map faded from her sight. “What’s happening?”

There was no reply from her e-butler. She halted and looked at her bracelet. The little power light behind one of the emeralds was winking red.

“Reboot complete,” her e-butler announced abruptly.

“Did the pulse hit you?”

“No data from the event was retained. Another pulse is the most obvious explanation.”

“Can you safeguard against another one?”

Silence answered her.

“Damnit,” she muttered. But she was intrigued now. Something was close by, and it wasn’t pirates.

She almost missed it. The vines had completely swamped the low walls, making the small building look like nothing more than another impenetrable cluster of greenery. But the door had sagged inward, leaving a dark cleft amid the leaves.

Justine pushed up her sunglasses to study the structure for a moment. It certainly wasn’t a house, it was too small for that: just a simple square shelter five meters to a side, with a sloping roof no more than three meters high at the apex. When she pulled the thick cords of creeper from the wall around the door, she found the surface beneath was made of some dull gray composite. Simple panels bolted onto a metal frame, put together in a few hours. It could have been made anywhere in the Commonwealth, even Far Away had the resources to produce this. By the look of the material, and the vegetation clinging to it, the shelter had been here for decades.

There was no lock, so she put her shoulder to the warped door and shoved. It flew open after a few pushes. Light streamed in through the opening; there were no windows. The floor was a single sheet of enzyme-bonded concrete, wet and crumbling. In the middle was a black cylinder just over a meter in diameter and eighty centimeters high. When she went over to it she saw it was actually embedded in the concrete, so she had no idea of its true length. It seemed to be made from a dark metal. Two sets of thin red cable emerged from the top, and ran across the floor to disappear into a translucent disk, half a meter wide. Examining that, she found the disk was also set into the concrete. It glowed with a faint vermilion light that originated deep inside, seemingly well below the concrete floor.

Justine narrowed her eyes at the disk as memories began to stir. She wasn’t even sure why she’d kept such old times in her head when she rejuvenated. But she’d seen something like this before; a lot of buildings on Earth used them as a power backup, places like hospitals and police and transport control centers. A solid-state heat exchange cable sunk kilometers down into the crust, where the geothermal energy could be tapped. They didn’t generate a huge amount of electricity, just enough to keep essential systems functioning in case of emergency.

So what the hell is one doing in the middle of a jungle, halfway up the biggest volcano on Far Away?

She stared at the cables, which were presumably superconductors. The cylinder they were feeding power into must be the source of the em pulses. And the whole arrangement had obviously been here for a long time, at least a couple of decades, and probably a lot longer than that. Certainly nobody had visited for ages, and concrete didn’t crumble overnight. So what could possibly use or absorb that much electricity year after year?

Her puzzlement was pushed aside by surprise as she realized the only thing the cylinder could be: a niling d-sink. They were the ultimate storage devices, and as such were rarely used within the Commonwealth simply because few people needed to store that much power. CST used them as backup supplies for their wormhole gateways, but she couldn’t remember any other organization, commercial or government, having a use for them. They were a quirk of physics, a zero-size sinkhole in spacetime that you could keep filling with energy. Theoretically, any power level could be contained providing the confining quantum field was strong enough. And after uninterrupted decades of charging from the heat exchange cable, this one would have an accumulated power level that wasn’t so much measured in kilowatt hours, more like kilotonnage.

So, a niling d-sink that pushed out an em pulse … Unshielded!

Justine got out of the shelter quickly. If it truly was unshielded, the electromagnetic emission would be intense enough to harm her nervous system as the quantum field cycled ready to admit its next input charge.

She hurried away, even more confused now she’d found the source. It began to rain before she got a hundred meters. The storm that had split to curve around the volcano had finally caught up with her.

Kazimir McFoster watched the girl pull a fist-size ball of shiny blue plastic out of the compartment that had opened under the hyperglider’s cockpit. He was sheltering behind a finicus bush, fifty meters away from where the sleek machine had landed. Rain pattered away on his head and the long dark crimson leaves alike. He paid it no heed; this was the weather he had grown up with; always at this time of year the storms would come in the morning. In another hour or so the rain clouds would have blown away to the east leaving the rest of the day mercilessly hot and humid.

The girl casually threw the ball over her shoulder, then tugged a big cylindrical bag from the compartment. He was impressed, for the bag was large and obviously heavy. But despite the clumsy way she carried it, she could lift it easily. She was strong. All offworlders were strong, he knew that. What he hadn’t expected was her beauty.

He had seen the glider pass overhead an hour earlier, a simple cruciform shape, black against the glaring sapphire sky. The sight had enthralled him, it was so graceful, so elegant. All the stories and learning of the Commonwealth and its ways had never prepared him for this. That a machine could be so poised, not just in shape but in function, was a revelation. Machines as Kazimir knew them were blunt and functional.

From his vantage point atop a lava outcrop he’d watched as it swooped ever lower over the jungle. Only once did it wobble in an ungainly fashion, and that was only for an instant. Then its wings had moved like those of a nimble bird as it alighted in the open space. Kazimir had stood looking at the place where it had sunk from sight behind the trees, a simpleton’s smile on his face. It took him a while to realize he was exposed on the rock. Harvey would scold him relentlessly for such a lapse; there would probably be short rations as well to emphasize the point. He was supposed to be well past making such stupid mistakes; that was why he was out here alone in this his final groundwalk, to prove he had mastered the wild. After he returned alive to the clan in another fifteen days, he would be ready to join battle against the alien monster. But not if he stood around like a first-year novice, offering himself as an easy target for any enemy who might be passing.

Kazimir dropped down off the rock and back into the undergrowth. He thought for a moment, placing the glider’s position in his mind. Then he was ready to pathfind through the trees, alert for enemies, focused on his goal.

By the time he’d stealthily crept up to the fringes of the lengthy clearing where the glider had landed, it was raining heavily. He couldn’t see anyone, so he’d found himself a safe place of concealment, and settled down to observe the sleek craft. The girl had appeared a couple of minutes later, her face screwed up against the rain as she hurried out of the trees. She was all in white, a few scraps of cloth clinging to her slender frame. And she was so beautiful. Like an angel, Kazimir thought. An angel come down from the sky.

The blue ball that the girl had discarded on the ground began to swell, with folds of thin plastic bulging out in odd shapes. The whole mass rolled around as if it were a living creature in pain. A minute later it had become a bulbous hemispherical shelter four meters across at the base, with a single opening, like a bloated tent. Kazimir nodded in appreciation. His own night-shelter was a little sac of shapeshift membrane that he could inflate with a small electric current. It kept him warm and dry at night, but it wasn’t big enough to move around in. This was a palace in comparison.

The girl hurried inside. Kazimir saw her grimace as she pulled a shabby soaking-wet hat from her head and ran her hands back through equally wet white-blond hair. She delved into her cylindrical bag and produced a towel, which she rubbed vigorously over herself.

Every movement fascinated Kazimir. She had long limbs, all of them perfectly shaped. The way she held her head; proud but never arrogant. Not her. Not the angel.

She eventually finished with the towel, and went over to the fat tent’s opening to peer out. Kazimir held his breath as she looked at the thick bush sheltering him. She smiled coyly, and the universe was a happier place because of it.

For a second.

“It must be uncomfortable crouching behind that bush,” she called. “Why don’t you come out into the open?”

Kazimir’s heart thudded loudly. She must be talking to him, she must have known he was there all along. He fumed, angry that his lack of skill had been mocked so. Yet the angel was still looking at him, head cocked to one side, an expectant expression in place. There actually wasn’t any mockery, he decided.

He rose to his feet, and looked from side to side, half expecting the enemy’s hunters to be there, waiting and grinning. But there was only the rain. So Kazimir had a simple choice, turn and leave, and never see her beauty again, or walk over and let her see him—which, apparently, she could anyway.

He walked toward the blue hemisphere, still wary. The angel’s head was cocked slightly to one side, regarding him with a guarded expression. One of her hands was holding a slim cylinder that he knew had to be some kind of weapon.

“You don’t have any friends nearby, do you?” she asked.

“I walk this forest alone. I need no help to survive here.”

She seemed amused by this. “Of course.” The weapon was pushed discreetly into a pouch on her belt. “Would you like to come in out of the rain? There’s plenty of room in here.”

“You are most kind, I thank you.” When he ducked inside, he was suddenly, unaccountably, overwhelmed by her presence. His eyes sought out the smooth features of the interior, looking everywhere but at her.

“My name’s Justine,” she said gently. There was a hesitancy in her voice, as if she was as uncertain as he.

“Kazimir,” he said. “How did you know I was there?”

A slim arm was raised, a finger tapping just below her right eye. “My inserts have an infrared capability. You were shining quite brightly.” Her lips twitched. “You’re hot you know.”

“Oh.” But he’d foolishly followed the motion of her hand, and now couldn’t look away from her face. Her eyes were light green, he saw, with slim eyebrows. She had long, prominent cheekbones, and a somewhat flattish jaw; a slender button nose poised above wide, moist lips. Every feature was delicate, yet together they awarded her a sophistication he was sure he could never match. And her flawless skin was a shade of pale honey-gold he’d never known before. In surprise, he realized she was very young, close to his own seventeen years. Yet she had flown the glider through the heart of the storm. The courage and talent that must take … He looked at his feet again, aware of distance opening between them.

“Here you go,” she said kindly, and handed him the towel she was holding. “You’re actually wetter than I am.”

Kazimir looked at it in confusion for a moment, before slipping his small backpack off. “Thank you.” He mopped the moisture off his face, then shrugged out of his leather waistcoat. The towel’s thin fabric seemed to suck the droplets off his chest and back as he rubbed, leaving his skin perfectly dry.

Justine reached into her bag, and produced another towel for herself. He was aware of her eyes on him, narrowed with amusement, as he dried his shins and calves. So he stopped at his knees, not lifting his kilt to dry his thighs—though they weren’t that damp, the kilt was reasonably waterproof.

“What tartan is that?” she asked.

He glanced down at the emerald and copper check, and smiled with pride. “I am a McFoster.”

Justine produced a sound that sounded suspiciously like a snort. “I’m sorry,” she said contritely. “But, with that skin color it’s a little difficult to picture you as a native clansman.”

Kazimir frowned. His skin was a rich brown, complemented by thick jet hair that he wore long and tied back with a single scarlet band; how could colors prevent him from being a clan member? Between them, the clans had members from most of old Earth’s racial groups. His grandmother always told wonderful tales of her grandmother’s early life in India. “I don’t understand. My ancestors were one of the first families to be saved by Bradley Johansson.”

“Johansson? We’re not talking Scottish clans here, are we?”

“What’s a Scottish?”

“Never mind.” She looked out of the entrance at the steady downpour of warm rain. “It looks like we’ve got a bit of time to spend together. Tell me about your clan, Kazimir.”

“The rains will only last another hour.”

“How long a story is it?”

He grinned at her, warmed by her answering smile. The angel was so achingly beautiful, any excuse to remain close to her was welcome. As if knowing this, the wall of the tent beside him changed shape, and expanded out to form a couch. They sat on it together.

“Tell me,” she urged. “I want to know about your world.”

“Will you tell me of your flight?”

“I will.”

He nodded his head, happy at the promised trade. “There are seven clans living on Far Away. Together we form the Guardians of Selfhood.”

“I’ve heard of them,” she murmured.

“We stand between the Starflyer alien and human ruin. Alone of all our race, we see the danger it brought with its shadows of deceit and its manipulation of vain men and women. Bradley Johansson opened our eyes to the truth long ago. One day, thanks to him, we will help this planet take its revenge.”

“That sounds like something you’ve been taught, Kazimir.”

“Since the moment I drew my first breath, I have known what I am, and what I must face. Ours is a harsh burden: none of you offworlders believe in our cause, you are blind to the alien’s poison. Yet we endure because of our faith and our gratitude. Bradley Johansson is our savior, and one day, all of humanity will know him as their savior.”

“How did he save you?”

“As he was saved. By decency and kindness. He came to this world among the first people, and began to investigate the alien’s ship.”

“I heard that,” Justine said. “He was the first director of the Marie Celeste Research Institute, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. People say it is deserted, a wreck, abandoned and empty. It is not; that is what the alien would have humanity believe. It survived the crash.”

“There’s a living alien here, from the arkship?”

“It used to be here, it passed into the Commonwealth long ago, where it moves among us, hidden and evil.”

“Really? So you’ve never seen it for yourself, then?”

“I have never left Far Away. But one day the Starflyer will return when its schemes reach fruition. I hope that is within my lifetime. I would like to be a part of its downfall.”

“What does it look like?”

“Nobody knows what it looks like, not even Bradley Johansson is sure. He may have seen it, he can’t remember. Many of his old thoughts were lost when he was liberated.”

“Okay, so this Starflyer survived the crash. What happened then?”

“It ignited the flare in Far Away’s sun to lure the unsuspecting here. And when Bradley Johansson delved into the secrets of the ship, he awoke the Starflyer and was enslaved by it. For many years he toiled under its control, helping to extend its influence into the Commonwealth, whispering into the hearts of those in power, issuing false promises and shaping the tide of events. But the Starflyer was ignorant of this part of the galaxy, and troubled by the other races who live here, fearful they would thwart its goals. Not all of them are as ignorant and prideful as us. It sent Bradley to Silvergalde so that he could experience the Silfen firsthand and report back on what he found. But the Silfen are wiser than humans and the Starflyer; they could see the bonds which it had cast into Bradley’s mind, and cut him free.”

“Ah, the liberation.”

“Yes. They cured him. Some men, having been freed, would run away from such a horror so they could remain free. But Bradley knew there was a greater danger in that; he said that for wickedness to succeed all it takes is for decent people to do nothing.”

“Bradley Johansson said that, did he?”

“Yes. He returned to Far Away and liberated others who had been enslaved by the Starflyer. They were the seven families who grew into the clans.”

“I see.” Her voice was serious.

Kazimir glanced anxiously at her. The expression on her face was terribly sober. It saddened him; that lovely face should only know happiness. Wasn’t protecting her and her kind what he had given his life to? “Don’t worry,” he told her. “We will guard you from the Starflyer. It will not succeed. This planet will be revenged.”

Her head tipped to one side as she gave him a long, thoughtful gaze. “You really mean that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

For some reason the answer seemed to trouble her. “It’s a very noble thing that you do, Kazimir. Nobility exerts a kinship which is hard to break.”

“The Starflyer will never corrupt my loyalty to my clan and our cause.”

Justine laid a hand on his arm. “I respect that.”

Kazimir tried to smile confidently at her, but she still seemed sad, and her touch, light though it was, distracted him terribly. She was so very close. And neither of them was wearing much clothing. Lustful, yet wondrous thoughts began to percolate through Kazimir’s mind.

Justine gave his arm a quick little squeeze, and suddenly looked around. “Oh, look, it’s stopped raining.” She sat up and went over to the entrance. “The sun’s out again.” Her smile was lovely. She was the angel again.

Kazimir got to his feet, and took a moment to put his waistcoat back on. He went outside and stood behind her as she slipped a steel band around her face. It disappointed him that he could no longer see her eyes. The sunlight made her white T-shirt nearly transparent. She was as tall as he.

“Did you really fly over the volcano?” he asked hurriedly.

“Uh-huh.”

“That must take so much courage.”

She laughed. “Just stupidity, I think.”

“No. You are not stupid, Justine. Never that.”

A finger hooked over the top of her sunglasses, and she pulled them down a fraction to stare at him over the rim. “Thank you, Kazimir. That’s very sweet.”

“What was it like?”

“Crazy! Wonderful!” She popped her sunglasses back up, and started telling him about the flight.

Kazimir listened, fascinated by a world and life as alien to his as that of the Starflyer. Justine possessed a perfect existence. It gladdened him to know that such a life was real, that humans could reach such a state. One day, perhaps, when the Starflyer was vanquished, all of them would live as she did.

It must be fate, he decided, that he’d met her. This vision, his own personal angel, come to show him that he was right to try to protect human life. She was his inspiration, his private miracle.

“You must be very rich,” he said when she finished telling him about the landing. “To afford such a craft that has no purpose other than to bring you enjoyment.”

She shrugged casually. They were both lounging on the bank above the little stream that gurgled its way along the clearing. “Everybody who visits Far Away is rich, I guess. It’s not easy to get here.” She tipped her head back to admire the tufty clouds drifting across the sapphire basin of the sky. “But definitely worthwhile. You have a strange and lovely world, Kazimir.”

“What do your parents think of you coming here by yourself? And taking such risks? That flight was very dangerous.”

Her head came around quickly, as if she’d been shocked by the question. “My parents? Ah, well, let’s see. My parents always encouraged me to be myself. They wanted me to live my life as best I can. And this, Mount Herculaneum, you, this has to be one of those classic moments that make life worthwhile and give you the confidence to go on and just experience what the universe has to offer.”

“Me? I think not.”

“Yes, you. Here you are on your own adventure, all by yourself facing whatever the volcano and the land throw at you. That makes you a lot braver than me.”

“No.”

“Yes!”

“No!”

They both laughed. Justine took her sunglasses off, and smiled warmly at him. “I’m starving,” she said. “Fancy trying some decadent Earth food?”

“Yes please!”

She sprang up, and raced toward the glider. Kazimir hurried after her, awed by how high her perfect, slender body floated above the ground as she ran.

They sat cross-legged on the ground, and she fed him morsels of food, eager for his reactions. Some of it was delicious, most was simply strange, like the hot curried meats that burned his mouth as he swallowed. “Wash it down with this,” she told him. The white wine she gave him was light and sweet. He sipped it appreciatively.

In the afternoon they explored the jungle around the edge of the clearing, trying to guess the names of the plants. He explained the purpose behind his groundwalk, how it prepared him for difficult campaigns against the enemy over all sorts of terrain, how it showed he had learned all his teachers could give him.

“A rite of passage,” she said.

He thought there was admiration in her voice. But then, several times he’d seen her glancing at him when she thought he was unaware. He hadn’t dared do the same.

“We must know that we can do what we have to do.”

“Kazimir, please, don’t do anything rash. You never have to prove your worth by risking yourself. Life is too important for that. It’s too short, as well, especially here.”

“I will be careful. I will learn not to be impetuous.”

“Thank you. I don’t want to spend my life worrying about you.”

“Will you do something for me?”

Her smile was mischievous. “There’s a lot I’ll do for you, Kazimir.”

The answer surprised him. He knew he would be blushing as he attached his own interpretation to that; one he was sure she didn’t intend, not someone so sweet and good-natured. “Please don’t visit the Marie Celeste. I know a lot of tourists do. I would worry for your safety if you did. The Starflyer’s influence is strong around its ship.”

Justine made a show of pondering the request. Fortunately the old arkship wasn’t on the itinerary anyway. Strangely enough, because of Kazimir’s devout belief that there really was a surviving alien, a little frisson of worry crept into her head and refused to leave. The whole thing was one of those ridiculous legends used by wicked old men like Johansson to keep his followers in line and paying their dues. Yet at the same time it sounded so plausible …

“I won’t go,” she promised solemnly. His look of relief made her feel guilty.

They built a fire in the late afternoon. Kazimir had an aging powerblade in his pack, and seemed intent on showing off his living-off-the-land survival skills to impress her. So she sat back and watched as he built a big pile of wood. He stripped off his little leather waistcoat, and the sweat showed on his skin from the effort of carrying the logs about. It was a sight that raised her own body temperature several degrees. Low gravity certainly hadn’t stopped his bod from developing to late-adolescent excellence. Thankfully, he didn’t want to do anything macho like shoot birds out of the sky so they could roast them on a stick spit. He was quite content to open up more of her food packets. The bonfire was just for warmth and comfort. She finally popped the cork off the champagne, and they drank it with the leaping gold flames glimmering off its energetic bubbles.

Kazimir didn’t want the evening to end, not ever. They sat close on a blanket as the sunlight abandoned the sky. Then there was only a shimmering purple-edged nimbus high above the western horizon as the glacier ring diffracted the last rays through the stratosphere. It shrank away, leaving the crackling bonfire as the only source of illumination. Platinum stars shone above them. For the first time in his life he didn’t think of them as a threat.

They talked and they drank and they nibbled on the exotic food. And all the time Kazimir silently worshiped the smiling, gorgeous angel with all his heart. A while after the sun had set, the bonfire’s wild flames sank away to leave a mound of lambent coals. It was in that teasing radiance that the angel rose to her feet and stood over him. Her T-shirt and shorts gleamed magenta in the quiescent fire, while her hair had become the gold halo his mind had always perceived. Without a word she walked over to her hemispherical tent, disappearing among the shadows that haunted the interior.

“Kazimir.”

His limbs trembling, he went over to the entrance. Twinkling starlight showed him half of the floor had risen to become a giant mattress. His angel stood before it, a simple silhouette. Her T-shirt lay crumpled on the ground at her feet. As he watched she slid the shorts down her legs.

“Don’t be afraid.”

Kazimir walked forward into the darkness. Gentle, sensual hands pushed the waistcoat from his shoulders. Unseen fingertips stroked his chest as they moved down to his waist, making him whimper helplessly. His belt was undone, and his kilt removed. The naked angel was hot on his skin as she pressed herself up against him.

Kazimir’s astonished cries of ecstasy rang out across the clearing, lasting long after the glittering sparks of the fire had finally died away.

Not even the cabin’s insulation could protect Estella Fenton from the roar of the powerful diesel engine. She held her highball glass up high as the suspension rocked the four-wheel drive Telmar ranger from side to side, trying not to spill any of the elaborate fruit cocktail. It wasn’t working, so she downed the rest of the drink in a couple of quick gulps. There was definitely vodka in it, she could feel the distinctive chill burning along her throat.

The recovery vehicles sent out from the main convoy had picked her up twenty hours ago. Which had come as a profound relief; two and a half days alone in the temperate forest was slightly more wilderness adventure than she’d wanted. Now there was just her friend Justine to find. The convoy had picked up her hyperglider’s beacon signal. Its location had caused a flutter of interest among the crews; few people, apparently, managed to fly quite as far as Justine had.

So once they’d loaded up Estella’s hyperglider into its container trailer, the five remaining recovery vehicles had set off in search of their last client. For all that Far Away’s population had left Mount Herculaneum as a natural wild park, there were plenty of paths through the rainforests of the lower slopes that vehicles like the Telmar used on tourist expeditions. Branching off them were tracks that were less well used. And then there were lines on the map that were marked as “passable routes.” They’d been on one of those for three hours solid, pushing their way through the vines and undergrowth of the jungle. Then came the really tough work of cutting a new route through the trees.

The trailblazer vehicle was fifty yards ahead of them, its forward harmonic blades sending out dense clouds of fractured woodchips as it chewed its way ever onward. Watching its progress had sent Estella to the back of the cabin where she started raiding the refrigerated bar.

“Couple more minutes should do it,” the driver, Cam Tong, called out.

Estella put the empty glass down, and peered through the bubble canopy at the broken swath of vegetation left behind by the trailblazer. The thick green walls of trees and vines came to an abrupt end, and they lurched out into a long clearing. Justine’s hyperglider was intact, standing in the middle of a carpet of lush grass. Her tent was a few meters away.

“Looks like she’s okay,” Cam Tong said happily.

“I never doubted it.”

The recovery vehicles picked up speed, which increased the rocking motion. They all started sounding their horns.

A head poked out of the tent.

“That’s not her,” Estella exclaimed.

It was a teenage boy, wearing Justine’s tatty old bushranger hat. His mouth gaped wide at the big vehicles rushing toward him, then he yelled something back into the tent. Next second he’d snatched a small backpack off the ground, and was sprinting toward the nearest tree line. Estella stared on in astonishment. He was wearing a long orange and green skirt. No, she corrected herself, a kilt, she could see the pleats. His small pack had a leather garment of some kind tied to it. He kept looking over his shoulder at the vehicles. One hand pressed the hat on his head, black hair streamed out from below the brim.

Cam Tong was laughing as he braked the big Telmar behind the hyperglider. Estella’s grin spread right across her mouth as she opened the door to climb down. Just then, Justine emerged from the tent. All she wore was a very small scarlet thong and a pair of sunglasses.

“Come back,” Justine shouted above the blaring horns and yammering engines. “Don’t be frightened. They’re my friends. Oh, fuck it!” She put her hands on her hips, and glared at the recovery vehicles.

Estella dropped lightly to the ground. By now the grin had grown into near-hysterical laughter. Other vehicle doors were opening, the smiling crew clambering out. Horns were still being tooted enthusiastically. The frantic boy had almost reached the jungle. Whoops of encouragement were yelled after him.

“Afternoon, darling,” Estella called brightly.

“You scared him off,” Justine accused, her voice sounding hurt.

Estella raised her hand to her throat in theatrical shock. “Why thank heavens, we got here just in time by the look of it.” She still couldn’t stop laughing. “We obviously saved you from a fate worse than death.”

“Goddamnit!” Justine gave the fleeing boy a last look as he disappeared into the foliage. She raised her hand limply, hoping he would see her forlorn gesture. The horns fell silent as the engines were turned off, but the hearty laughter of the crew remained loud in the muggy air.

Justine stomped back into the tent, and picked up a light cardigan. Estella trailed after her. The floor mattress was still inflated. Empty food packets littered the ground around it, along with a couple of bottles of wine.

“I don’t believe your luck,” Estella chortled. “I’m going to complain to the tour company. The only thing waiting for me at my landing site was a squirrel, and I’m pretty sure he was gay.”

Justine started buttoning up her cardigan. “Don’t,” she said irritably. “Kazimir was sweet.”

“Yeah: was.”

“You don’t understand.” She pulled up her shorts. “It wasn’t just that. I wanted to teach him a different view of the universe, make him question what he sees.”

“Ah, like: what position is this called? And: I didn’t know you could do it that way around.”

Justine growled at her and went back outside. She ordered the tent to contract, forcing Estella to hurry through the entrance. The crew were backing an empty trailer up to the hyperglider. Broad, knowing smiles were flashed in her direction; several of them winked. Justine had to roll her eyes at that, thinking what it must have looked like to them. A small sheepish smile appeared on her own lips as her sense of humor returned.

“What was he doing here?” Estella asked. “This is nowhere.”

“It’s somewhere now,” Justine replied tartly.

“God, your luck. I’m as jealous as hell. He looked divine.”

Justine pushed her lips together modestly. “He was.”

“Come on, let’s go find a bottle, we should celebrate your grand victory: longest flight and greatest landing. I expect you need to sit down, too, must be difficult trying to walk properly after all that education you gave him.” She glanced pointedly at the tent that had finished contracting. All the empty packets and bottles now lay around it, ejected by the shrinking walls. “Did you even get to see the outside world?”

“There is one?”

Estella giggled wildly, and started to climb up the short ladder to the Telmar’s cabin. “So is it true, does everything really rise higher in low gravity?”

Justine ignored her, scanning the jungle’s dense wall one last time. There was no sign of him, not even using infrared. She’d taught him that, if nothing else.

“Good-bye, Kazimir,” she whispered.

He would be out there. Watching. Probably feeling a little foolish now. But this was probably the best way. A swift clean break, and a golden memory for both of them. No regrets.

And maybe, just maybe, I taught him something about real life. Maybe he will start to question his idiotic Guardians doctrine.

There was a loud pop of a champagne cork in the cabin. Justine climbed inside and shut the door, enjoying the chill of the air-conditioning as it banished the jungle’s raw heat.

FIVE

From their admittedly elitist point of view, the residents of York5 often claimed that theirs was one of the luckier planets in the Commonwealth’s phase one space. This particular world never experienced pollution or human population pressure, and financial irregularities and corrupt politicians passed it by. A quirk of evolution had produced far fewer than average plant and animal genera. Such conditions made the establishment of nonnative species on its surface an undemanding enterprise. For people who wanted to develop land in their own special ways, it was highly desirable real estate.

When CST announced that the planet was open for settlement in 2138, the consortium of families behind the Big15 planet Los Vada put in an offer, effectively buying the entire planet. CST got an immediate payoff on its exploration costs, but York5 was never opened for general immigration. The families in the consortium were too diversified to qualify as an Intersolar Dynasty, although as they all now lived on a single world the future genealogy dynamics were such that they’d probably wind up as one, defined by the classic model.

York5 had no real capital city; the largest urban area was a small service town that supported the CST gateway and the airport that sprang up beside it. No factories were ever shipped in, denying it any industrial facilities. Everything a person wanted or needed, from cutlery to paving stones, electronics to clothes, had to be imported. There were no roads or railways providing a civil transport infrastructure, only aircraft owned by the resident families. In all of its two-hundred-forty-year history, the population had never risen above ten million, of which almost three million were staff employed by the families. Instead, it was divided up into vast estates, with each family building mansions and lodges and beach homes as they wanted, where they wanted, and planting whatever kind of surrounding flora took their fancy. Consequently, the continents became magnificent quilts of designer landscapes; it was terraforming on a scale not seen even on Far Away, and all for aesthetics sake.

Captain (retired) Wilson Kime had watched his family estate develop over the last two centuries, returning time and again for vacations and long weekends and annual reunions to enjoy the perfect tranquility it offered. The land he’d chosen was hilly with long sweeping valleys, and situated well inside the southern temperate zone. When he’d arrived, the ground was covered in native tuffgrass, a gaunt reddy brown in color, and a few manky scrub trees. Slowly, a tide of verdant, and far more pleasing, terrestrial green had rippled out over hill and vale alike, cooler and more soothing. Spinnys had sprung up, bunches of wildly different trees from dozens of worlds, their foliage varying in color from snow-white to eye-wrenching orange. Valley floors had been forested in oaks and walnuts and willows, while a few special enclaves among the taller hills were now host to giant sequoia.

One day at the height of an exceptional midsummer heat wave, Wilson walked along a long, meandering gravel track on the broad, south-facing slopes a couple of kilometers from the huge mock château that was the family home, inspecting the vines. His only company was two of the senior family’s youngest children, who skipped along with him. Emily, a six-year-old with fawn-colored braids who was his great-great-great-great-granddaughter; and eight-year-old Victor, a quiet inquisitive lad who was a nephew with a connection that was too complicated to memorize. He’d made both of them wear big white hats to protect their young skin from the blue-tinged sun’s powerful UV, even though both of them had received extensive germline modification, which included high resistance to all types of cancer. The way they charged around they’d be exhausted long before lunch, he didn’t want heatstroke added to that.

Every now and then he would stop at the end of another row of the vines, and inspect the clusters of grapes that were just beginning to fill out. It was going to be a high-quality crop this year, possibly good enough to qualify as a classic vintage. Though everybody abused that term dreadfully nowadays. The small light green spheres were wonderfully translucent, with a tinge of color creeping in as they soaked up the sunlight. Their rows stretched all the way down the slope to the broad valley floor, three kilometers away. In total, the vineyards covered nearly a hundred square kilometers now, after flourishing for a hundred twenty years in the slightly chalky soil. Buried irrigation pipes made sure they had enough water in sweltering years like this one, pumped out here from the inland freshwater sea thirty kilometers away. The Kime estate occupied a quarter of the coastline.

Red-painted viniculture bots, each the size of a motorbike, trundled up and down the rows with their electromuscle arms flashing in and out as they carefully thinned out the clusters, and forked over the soil. There couldn’t have been more than five human supervisors covering the entire vineyard. Not that any of the wine would ever be sold, this wasn’t a commercial venture, it was for the family, with a small number of bottles made available to other Farndale board members.

Wilson stopped and picked a couple more grapes. They were immature and sour, but that taste was right for this moment in their development. He spat them out after he’d chewed them thoroughly.

“Urrgh!” little Emily said, wrinkling her nose up. “That’s gross, Grandpa.”

“No it’s not,” he assured her. He tipped his own straw hat back and smiled. “They decay straight back into the soil as fertilizer. That’s good for the plants. Query your e-butler when we get back home if you don’t believe me.”

“Wilson’s right,” Victor said, using a lofty tone. “We did environmental cycles in biology.”

“You mean the vines drink your spit?” Emily was even more appalled.

Wilson put his arms around her and gave a swift hug. “No, no, it doesn’t work like that. It’s all to do with organic chemistry. Very complicated when you get down to details. But trust me, the vines don’t drink spit, okay?”

“Okay,” she said dubiously.

Victor’s look was condescending, so she scowled at him. Then the two of them were suddenly racing off down one of the rows, chasing a Forlien delong, similar to a porcupine but with a silly collar wing that flapped green and yellow when it was excited.

“Don’t touch it,” he called after them. “You’re frightening it.”

“All right.” Victor’s voice was faint from behind the vines.

Wilson carried on down the gravel. He didn’t hurry, he was enjoying the day too much. He’d come out of his latest rejuvenation three years ago, and this was a time-out life, intended as a complete sabbatical from all corporate activity. Everybody needed one now and again, especially at the kind of executive level he lived his normal lives.

After the debacle of the Mars mission, Wilson had returned to an Earth that began to change on an almost daily basis as the implications of wormhole technology were realized. In the second half of the twenty-first century, space exploration was the biggest boom industry there could possibly be. Except, this was no longer the kind of space exploration he knew anything about. What CST actually conducted was planetary surveys, the province of geologists and xenobiologists; they weren’t interested in the void between the stars, there was no striving to bridge the distance. With wormholes, there simply was no distance anymore.

A lot of the old NASA teams left to join the burgeoning CST when the agency folded not six months after Kime’s ignoble return. But they all had to start from scratch again, retraining, acquiring different skills. It wasn’t the same; they weren’t special anymore, it was just another company job—albeit a spectacular one. The change affected some people more than others. The last Wilson heard of poor old Dylan Lewis, the ex-Commander had taken over a bar in Hawaii, and was steadily and relentlessly drinking his way to full liver failure, while making an ass of himself with any passing woman who paused to hear his “old space hero” story.

Wilson escaped the whole scene altogether. He was smart enough to see the kind of requirements that the new planets would make upon the old, the desperate need for infrastructure and development. People weren’t going to live in their new promised lands without some basic civil services in place; and as local economies took off, so they’d be wanting upgrades—fast. The manufacturing of both heavy and medium engineering products was the new growth industry. With his superintensive NASA technological training and his military background, Wilson had no trouble getting himself a divisional manager slot in a company called KAD Components, which produced a range of parts for larger companies. Three years later he was on the board with a decent share option scheme when they were bought out. By 2103, seven mergers and acquisitions later, he was secure as an executive director on the board of Farndale Engineering, one of the new multiplanet colossi that had prospered and expanded in parallel with phase one space. He now had enough new share options to buy a small nation, and Farndale was just moving into the consortium partnership that would ultimately fund Los Vada. After that it was a simple linear progress as the centuries went by, his own fortunes and influence rising with the company until his own extensive family’s private wealth moved into the realm enjoyed by Earth’s Grand Families.

Twice in the last eighty years he’d been chairman of Farndale. It was a position that took up twenty-five hours in the day, leaving no time for anything other than dealmaking and politicking. His old traits of discipline and ease of command served as excellent foundations for his tenures, enabling him to score several notable victories against rival companies during those heady decades. Shareholders and fellow board members alike were satisfied with his performance; and everyone knew that within a century he’d be rotated into Los Vada’s chief executive chair. But board leadership came with a cost, the constant stress acted like an accelerated aging mechanism. Both times, he had to seek rejuvenation years earlier than he normally would, due to the strain that running the company placed on his body.

That was one of the reasons he’d decided to take a sabbatical this time around. For once he was going to sit back and enjoy the worlds and wealth he’d created. So far it had been a success. He’d even surprised himself with the enthusiasm he’d shown for the vineyards and general estate management. The current batch of children produced by his huge extended family loved having him around. It was details again, he concentrated on details, using his abilities to solve every problem the family threw up; only the scale was different from before. He had plans to extend and refurbish the château. There were lots of places he would like to visit just as a tourist, cities with their unique festivals and carnivals to experience, different landscapes, exotic species. He was also open-minded about marrying again, perhaps this time finding a wife in a way that didn’t seem too much like negotiating a company deal. All these events were out there waiting for him, a swift taxi ride from any CST station. He’d even started drawing up an itinerary, a grand tour that would take over eight years to complete. Not even Bose’s discovery of Dyson Alpha’s envelopment event had distracted him; he had faith that Farndale’s current board was capable of dealing with any problems and opportunities it created. Although the news that a starship was to be constructed had given him a momentary twinge of nostalgia.

The children emerged from the vine rows to race along the gravel road again. Wilson didn’t try to stop them. They were happy. He would have given a lot to have had a childhood like theirs. His main concern was that they grew up with some sense of dignity and responsibility. An environment like the château could give any kid a very messed up sense of his or her own importance. Rich kids were notorious brats at the best of time, a situation not helped by York5, where they were all heirs to the throne. At the same time, he didn’t want to send them away to school.

Above the western mountains, a lone contrail streaked across the open sky. He stood to watch it go, impressed as ever by the speed and the lack of any sonic boom. Everybody used hypersonics to reach their estates from the CST gateway. But the velocity that the modern planes could reach in the atmosphere was imposing, even to him. To go any faster you’d have to use a semiballistic hop, actually skimming above the upper atmosphere. The designs for such craft had been around for a long time, it was just a question of development funding. After all, the demand was very small. Planes were used on standard Commonwealth worlds, but normal commercial passenger jets flew at around Mach three, which was good enough for airlines. It was only the residents of worlds like York5 who were impatient with that speed.

Wilson heard a low whoosh of air behind him as if a phantom had just rushed by. Leaves on the nearest vines fluttered. He frowned, and turned. The sight that greeted him sent a cold shock running down his nerves. A wormhole had opened not five meters away, perfectly circular, four meters in diameter, its base holding steady a few centimeters above the gravel. A man in an expensive lavender business suit stepped out. He gave Wilson a tenuous, apologetic smile and then said, “Yo, dude, how’s it hanging?”

Wilson took three quick steps, bringing him right up to the interloper, and swung a fist. His knuckles connected with a satisfactory crunch and a burst of pain.

“Fuck!” Nigel Sheldon tumbled backward, landing on his ass in the dry grass. Two CST security personnel stepped smartly out of the wormhole, arms pointing at Wilson. Their suit sleeves rippled slightly. An annoyed Nigel Sheldon waved them back. “It’s okay,” he said, then grimaced and brought a hand up to his jaw. “Damn, that hurt.”

Wilson glowered down. “It was supposed to, you little shit.” The children came running up, stopping in confusion at the tableaux.

“Wilson!” Victor yelled. “That’s …”

“I know who it is,” Wilson said sharply.

“Oh, this is great,” Nigel grunted indignantly as he struggled to his feet. “Three hundred and thirty goddamn years, and you’re still pissed at me?”

“Three hundred. Three thousand. Nothing changes what you did.”

Nigel was poking a forefinger into his mouth. “Ouch. I think you loosened a tooth.”

“You hurt my knuckles.” Wilson shook his hand; the damn thing was, it really did hurt. He hadn’t been in a brawl since his Air Force Academy days; the streetwise how-to had evaporated over the intervening centuries.

“Are you going to do that again?” Nigel asked.

“Are you?”

“Okay, okay, so this entrance isn’t supremely tactful of me.” Nigel eyed Wilson’s grazed hand warily. “But I wanted to make an impression.”

“You did that back at Schiaparelli.”

“This is important, damnit.”

“What is?” Wilson was having to work hard at not being impressed. The fact was, he hadn’t heard of a wormhole being used like this before, not to touch base with an individual—unless you counted the rumors about Ozzie. Gateways were hugely expensive links between worlds with a very long payback time, not personal transport machines, even if that person was Nigel Sheldon. Wilson supposed he was using the CST exploratory division gateway back on Augusta to open this tunnel across interstellar space. He didn’t like to think of the cost. “I do have an e-butler address code if there’s anything urgent, you know. You could use the unisphere like the rest of the human race.”

“We both know I’m not on your e-butler acceptance list, and I needed to talk to you urgently.”

“Why? What the hell is all this about?”

“I need a favor.”

Wilson started laughing.

“Yeah, all right,” Nigel said sourly. “Very funny. Now try this on for size. We’re building a starship to go to Dyson Alpha.”

“I heard. There’s been nothing else in the unisphere news for over a month.”

“So, but you didn’t join the dots too well, did you? We can build a ship, but the kind of experienced astronauts we need to crew it, and especially captain it, are kind of in short supply in this era.”

Wilson abruptly stopped laughing. “Son of a bitch.”

“Oh. Do I have your attention now?”

“Why me?” Wilson was surprised by how weak his voice had become.

“There’s no one else left, Captain Kime. You’re the last space cadet left in the galaxy. We need you.”

“This is bullshit. You’ve got tens of thousands of people in your exploratory division.”

“We do indeed. Good kids; great, even. Not one of which has ever been out of contact with the unisphere in their first, second, or even sixth life. You, on the other hand, you know what it’s like to be shut up in a metal bubble for months on end, you can handle the isolation, the stress; you can keep command of people under those circumstances. It’s a lot different from issuing orders down the corporate chain, and having some middle management jerk leap to it. Experience is always valuable, you know that. No false modesty, Wilson, we both know how successful you’ve been. I mean, look where we’re standing right now. There aren’t many of us even today who can re-create an eight-thousand-square-kilometer chunk of a France that never really existed outside romantic literature. You’ve got that, what did you used to call it: the Right Stuff?”

“Old phrase,” Wilson muttered as the really ancient memories began their inevitable replay. He always swore he’d dump them into deep secure storage at every rejuvenation, clear them out of his brain along with all the other irrelevant clutter so there would be space for the new life. Each time, he never did. A weakness for nostalgia. He’d so nearly been a contender for true greatness rather than the corporate chieftain he’d actually become. Even today a lot of people knew who Neil Armstrong was. But Wilson Kime? Not a chance.

“Well dust off your copy, man, because it’s about to become fashionable again.”

Wilson stared at the edge of the open wormhole, the dark shimmer of nothingness that very few people actually got to see firsthand. “Is this a serious offer?” he asked quietly.

“Absolutely. It’s your gig if you want it. I hope you do. I mean that sincerely. The more I think about Dyson Alpha, how strange it is, the more I want someone I can really trust in charge out there.”

“Grandpa?” Emily gazed up in newfound awe at her ancestor. “Are you going to fly the starship, Grandpa? Really?”

“Looks like it, poppet.” Wilson patted the girl’s head. He hadn’t even needed to think about it, the response had been automatic. “Give me a few days,” he told Nigel. “I’ve got to sort things out here.”

“Sure thing, man.” Nigel smiled broadly, and stuck his hand out. “Welcome aboard.”

Wilson considered it, but not shaking would just be churlish. “Just so we’re completely clear on this, you’re not thinking of joining the crew yourself, are you?”

“No. We’re clear on that.”

....

Anshun was on the very edge of phase two space, two hundred seventeen light-years from Earth, and almost directly between the old world and the Dyson Pair. That location had been quite a factor in CST siting its new phase three exploration division there. Boongate, sixty light-years away, already had a second gateway leading to Far Away, and its government had been hopeful that CST would follow that up with the exploration station. It was not to be. Far Away was a dead end. Anshun would help extend the human frontier toward the Dyson Pair.

Not that much expansion had been notable in the eight years since the division had been established at the CST planetary station, a mere two planets had been opened up. But Anshun now possessed a quiet confidence about the years to come. It was going to be the junction for this entire new sector of space. Over the next century its economy and population would rise until it matched any of the successful phase one worlds. Its future was secure.

Wilson Kime grinned privately at the peculiar sensation of déjà vu as the passenger express from Los Vada slipped smoothly into the CST planetary station in Treloar, Anshun’s capital. The outside air here was hot and muggy from the nearby coast, just like Houston used to be. He could remember arriving at the NASA Space Center for his first day of training, the sun prickling his exposed skin with its heat. The uniform government-issue buildings of that campus had looked surprisingly shabby in the bright light, especially given what happened inside them. Somehow he’d expected the structures to be a little less industrial, a little more grandiose.

It was the same here on Anshun. Two members of CST’s exploration division were waiting for him on the platform. They showed him to a small station car, which drove through the vast empty area contained inside the perimeter fence that was destined to become the junction yard, where dozens of gateways and hundreds of busy tracks would route transport out to the new stars at some unspecified date. Right now, the landscape around him was almost ironically post-industrial. Long strips of enzyme-bonded concrete laid out long ago were now slowly buckling, roads for a mini city that never existed. The soil between them supported dispirited clumps of local grass and spindly weeds, cut up with curving tire ruts of baked clay that would form puddles after every downpour. Abandoned heavy-duty vehicles were scattered about, metal sections molting flakes of rust, composite bodywork bleached to a bland off-white, window glass smashed in, car-sized tires flat and calcified. Big fornrush birds glided above the area in wide spirals as their black wings captured the thermals. They were sleek scavengers, hunting down smaller rodents; though their catch was poor out here.

It made the brand-new dual carriageway that he was driving along seem strangely out of place, ahead of its time. A twin rail track ran parallel with it, also newly laid, linking the station’s marshaling yard with the starship project complex ahead. He saw a single DFL25 shunting engine rolling slowly in the opposite direction to him, pushing eight empty flatbed carriages ahead of it, the only sign of movement within eight kilometers.

It took ten minutes’ driving across the unused wilderness to reach the starship project. A long row of windowless pearl-white buildings materialized out of the powerful heat shimmer, protected by a six-meter-high fence. Guardbots trundled along the foot of it on an eternal patrol, smooth conical bodies concealing the weapons and sensors they were equipped with. There were three human guards on the gates. Wilson was scanned twice before they let him through, saluting smartly as he passed.

This whole complex smelled of money. He was familiar enough with fast-track projects to see an extraordinary amount of cash had been spent in a short period of time. Inside the fence, long strips of newly laid turf were neat and trimmed. Car parking spaces had names on the asphalt in fresh paint. The buildings were made from the new low-friction surface paneling that the construction industry was currently obsessed with, giving them a perpetually clean appearance. There were high doors set into most walls, all of them closed, with silvery rail lines running underneath the bottom edge. A row of pylons was visible at the back of the complex, stretching off toward the city’s largest industrial precinct, supporting slim red superconductor cables. The project was using up a lot of power.

Three stumpy, circular glass towers made up the heart of the complex, joined together at the base by soaring sheets of glass that looked like a solidified pavilion roof. The entrance lobby they formed was a huge atrium, with crystal pillars containing exotic big-leafed plants. A lot of people were hurrying across the stone floor, all of them with intent expressions. Work here was a serious thing.

Daniel Alster stood beside the long reception counter. He greeted Wilson warmly, introducing himself. “Mr. Sheldon apologizes for not being here to welcome you personally, he’s in a meeting which is overrunning quite badly.”

Wilson gave the lobby a thoughtful look, cementing his impression of unlimited budgets. Farndale had mounted big projects often enough, but that was different; their offices were built in cities, factories in industrial estates. They belonged. It must be the complex’s relative isolation that gave it such a sense of importance and urgency. “You mean Sheldon is managing the starship project himself?” he asked.

“Not the day-to-day details, no. But it is certainly high up on his schedule. He was quite relieved when you agreed to accept the captaincy.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I understand you’ll be taking over a number of administration procedures.”

“That’s right.” The quantity of data that the project had sent him over the four days since he agreed to captain the ship was phenomenal. Most of the information files were accompanied by requests from the department heads concerned. “But I need a while to settle in before I start slinging my weight around.” He’d actually felt a little overwhelmed walking into the lobby, facing up to the project all alone. Normally when he was involved in anything on such a scale he’d be accompanied by several of his own aides, and there would have been time for a thorough briefing beforehand. It was only last night he’d finally received a report on the Commonwealth ExoProtectorate Council meeting, which didn’t give him much time to mull over the political implications of the flight. The Farndale board had given his appointment their full approval, though, eager to climb on board the project.

“Of course,” Daniel Alster said. “Your office is ready for you now. But Mr. Sheldon suggested I should give you a quick tour of the facilities first.”

“Lead on.”

The complex layout was simple enough, with the three towers already housing the design and management personnel. A quarter of the office space was unused. “Crew training facilities,” Daniel Alster explained as they passed line after line of darkened glass cubicles.

“Has anybody been selected yet?”

“So far, only you. Just about everyone in our exploration division has volunteered, that’s technical personnel as well as the survey teams. Then there’s a couple of million hopefuls on every planet in the Commonwealth who are insisting they’re perfect for the job. This section of the Anshun cybersphere is having to be upgraded, we’ve had so much datatraffic. We’re waiting for you to draw up the requirement criteria before we start active recruitment.”

Wilson gave a resigned shrug. “Okay.”

The big hangarlike buildings outside the towers were where all the starship’s components were delivered, then rigorously tested before being taken through to the assembly platform. There was no manufacturing on-site, everything was shipped in through the planetary station’s gateway. Sixty-three percent of the components were fabricated on Augusta, including the wormhole generator mechanism that would act as the hyperdrive. The rest of the sections were coming in from all over the Commonwealth, contracts placed according to financial involvement and political clout. Wilson was pleased to see Los Vada had snatched over three percent.

As soon as the wagons delivered the containers, they were moved into clean rooms for testing. The assessment facilities that CST had built in such a short space of time were impressive. Sealed environment chambers could produce a huge combination of radiation, extreme thermal loads, vibration stress, electromagnetic irradiation, and hypervelocity particle impacts, all inside a good old-fashioned vacuum. There were also test labs where electronic components were subjected to all manner of improbable failure scenarios. Once they were certified, the components were moved out to the platform for assembly.

Nigel Sheldon was waiting at the gateway, which was at the end of the largest assessment building. He was wearing the same kind of white overall that Wilson had changed into. They both shook hands; still slightly wary of each other, like old friends who were patching up an argument.

“Ready for zero gee again?” Nigel asked. He put on a protective helmet, which molded itself to his skull.

“I guess so,” Wilson said. It had been a very long time, and as Daniel had been telling him during the tour, a lot of their assembly technicians had experienced mild to debilitating nausea when they were working on the ship. Not even continued exposure seemed to weaken the effect. The astronautics companies based at the High Angel had little practical help to offer; they either used robotic systems or personnel who’d been screened to find a degree of immunity. In desperation, CST had been deep-mining some very old medical papers on human zero-gee adaptation, some of which dated back to the Russian MIR station, to see what kinds of drugs or DNA resequencing they should be considering.

Wilson allowed Nigel to go first, following cautiously behind him. They were using the exploration division’s gateway, which had been taken off interstellar survey duties to provide a simple link between the complex and space above Anshun, where the assembly platform was orbiting a thousand kilometers out from the planet. A circular titanium tunnel had been built through the gateway, lined with bands of electromuscle that were capable of handling components up to eight meters wide and weighing a couple of hundred tons. The motion was like a throat swallowing, with the sealed containers riding forward on synchronized waves that rippled along the bands.

As Wilson walked forward, it looked as if they were going from the assessment building through a simple circular opening into a giant spherical chamber beyond. The assembly platform was a globe of malmetal that had been expanded out to six hundred meters in diameter. Its internal stress structure resembled hexagonal ribs, with gantry towers extending toward the center from the junctions. They supported a broad gridwork cylinder directly in front of the gateway. It was in there that the starship was taking shape. Right now, it looked like nothing more than an even denser lattice of girders. Hundreds of men and women in simple overalls were scampering along the framework, or anchoring themselves in place beside mobile constructionbots. White composite containers were sliding along the gantries, like pearls of condensation slithering down glass.

Even though Wilson was expecting it, the end of the planetary gravity field came as a shock. One foot was pressed firmly on the ground, while the one in front seemed to waver in midair. Wilson concentrated on pulling himself forward, using the handholds between the electromuscle bands. Every sense immediately told him he was falling. His hands automatically tightened their grip. In front of him, Nigel’s body had already swung around parallel to the gateway. He started to pull himself along the support gantry handholds, heading in toward the ship. Wilson copied him, using the handholds like a ladder for the first few meters, then his body simply glided along twenty centimeters or so above the gantry. He remembered to grip a handhold every few meters, just to correct his direction and prevent any spin from building up. His stomach was quivering at the falling sensation, but apart from a wet belch, he didn’t feel any dramatic onset of sickness. The air around him carried a distinct tang of welded metal and warm oil, though the smell slowly weakened as fluids began to pool in his head.

“Tell you something,” Nigel called back over his shoulder. “I get one hell of a buzz out of seeing this baby. Big projects always do that to me. But, man, I ain’t been this excited about a chunk of engineering since Ozzie and I put the original wormhole gateway together.”

“I remember the day,” Wilson said dryly. He couldn’t escape from his memories of the Ulysses that day either, the last time he’d ever seen the proud interplanetary ship, a big mass of struts with hardware attached at all points. None too dissimilar to this craft.

Nigel chuckled. “We’re coming up on the reaction drive section.”

The maze of girders wasn’t getting any clearer as they approached. Wilson asked his e-butler to access the assembly platform array. It overlaid a blueprint of what he was seeing on his virtual vision. The starship’s design was quite simple. The life-support section housing the crew was a thick ring three hundred meters in diameter, which would rotate to provide a twenty percent gravity field along its rim. A basic VonBraun wheel, Wilson thought, though no one would ever call it that nowadays. In the middle of that was a cylinder four hundred meters long and a hundred fifty in diameter, containing both the FTL drive and the plasma rockets. The surface had a multitude of bulges and prominences, as if it were growing metallic tumors.

The three of them floated around a fat nozzle with a perfect mirror-surface interior. It was the first of the five plasma rockets to be installed, leaving rosettes of struts where the other four would be fitted. Wilson studied the thick reaction mass fuel pipes and superconductor cabling that would be connected into the other units when they arrived. His hand crept out of its own accord to touch the casing of the installed nozzle.

Plasma rockets. Just like the old Ulysses had. It’s like a bicycle, some things you can’t improve.

“What kind of power source are we using?” he asked.

“Niling d-sinks,” Nigel told him. “Fifteen of the goddamn biggest we make. There are backups, as well, of course; we’re providing microfission piles and two fusion generators. But the niling d-sinks are your primary supply. They’ll give you enough power to fly seven thousand light-years.”

“That far?” Somehow Wilson had been expecting the ship to be capable of reaching Dyson Alpha and returning, nothing more.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you’ve got a license to fly off and explore the rest of the galaxy, Captain, okay?”

Wilson smiled with a faint degree of guilt. He’d been thinking just that. “You know what you’re doing, don’t you? What this ship is?”

“What?”

“You’re dropping a pebble off the top of a mountain. When it gets to the bottom it’ll be an avalanche. People are going to be interested in exploring the unknown again. They’ll want more ships like this, they’ll want to know what else is out there. The next ship will be big enough to fly around the galactic core.”

“Wrong, Captain. Only people like you want to do that, born romantics. And there aren’t as many of you as you’d like to think. This Commonwealth we’ve built for ourselves is a mature, conservative society. We’ve grown up a lot in the last couple of centuries. Only people with one short life want to go tearing out into the great unknown with nothing more than a flashlight and a stick to poke the rattlers with. The rest of us will take our time and expand slowly, that way there are no mistakes made. Tortoise and the hare, Captain, tortoise and the hare.”

“Maybe,” Wilson said. “But I don’t believe we’re as civilized as you like to think, not all of us.” They’d gone past the reaction drive sector of the ship, and were in the midsection, where two stumpy arms linked the habitation ring to the central engineering section superstructure. Again there wasn’t much to see, just the raw skeleton devoid of any hull plating, even the internal decking was missing inside the stress structure. Although a lot of auxiliary machinery had already been installed. “How’s the hyperdrive coming along?”

The lines around Sheldon’s mouth tightened slightly. “The flow wormhole generator is undergoing stage three component testing. They should begin primary installation in three to four months.”

“So how does that leave our overall timetable?” Wilson asked.

“Our initial projection has completion in another seven months,” Daniel Alster said. “However, there were several problems associated with zero-gee construction which we hadn’t factored in.”

“Be more like nine months now,” Nigel grunted.

“Everything costs more,” Wilson pronounced happily.

“And takes longer,” Nigel completed. “Tell me about it.”

“How come you didn’t build this at the High Angel?” Wilson asked. “I know it would add another two hundred and thirty light-years to the trip, but that’s not much to this ship if I read the specs right. And they have all the astroengineering expertise there.”

“Political control,” Nigel said simply. “Specifically: mine. This way, CST remains the primary operator for the whole mission.”

“Fair enough,” Wilson said. It was a reasonable compliment that Nigel didn’t feel the need to guard what he said.

Near the front of the superstructure a great nest of power cables waited for whatever unit was to be installed there. Intrigued by the power levels involved, Wilson checked the section against his virtual vision blueprint to find it was a force field generator, one of seven. “It’s well defended.”

“I want you back in one piece,” Nigel said. “And I still worry about the envelopment being a defensive action. To me it’s the most likely scenario.”

“If we’re up against weapons that you need to protect a star against, I don’t think a couple of our force fields will be much use.”

The three of them stopped drifting, and clustered together around a force field generator emplacement. “Look,” Nigel said. “One of the reasons I wanted you to see this today was so you could get a decent overview. At this stage the design is still reasonably flexible. Hell, we can put the launch schedule back by a year if we need to. I want your input on this.”

“Fine. My initial response is that we should be a lot more cautious than the flight profiles you’ve shown me so far. The last thing we want is a mission where we come out of hyperspace right next to the envelopment barrier and start yelling: Anyone here? We need to be taking our first look from at least ten light-years out, which means the very best sensor systems the Commonwealth can build. If we can’t detect any signs of conflict from there, then we move in by stages. That will probably mean adding several months to the mission.”

“I can live with that,” Nigel said.

“Good, because I will only take this ship out if we’re running with a safety-is-paramount philosophy. Not just for the crew, but for humans everywhere. If there is something hostile out there, I don’t want to draw its attention to us. I hope you appreciate just how much responsibility is accruing around this project.”

“I know that, man, believe me, I know. This is what CST faces every time we open a wormhole to anywhere new. People don’t pay us any attention these days because they think that after three centuries, encounter scenarios are routine, and maybe even boring. Me, I don’t sleep much, I know that one day we’ll come across some virus or bug that gets right past our biomedical screening, or an alien race that is the opposite of the Silfen. Every year we go farther out, I add another safety procedure and ignore my staff screaming about what a monster bureaucrat I’ve become. All I do is pray that new procedure is going to be good enough for the one seriously badass encounter that nobody’s thought of before. Take a look at our exploration division’s operational guidelines some time, they should reassure you.”

“Okay, we understand each other then.”

“I hope so, Wilson, because this could well be that one encounter I’ve been dreading all these centuries.”

“So why are you pushing so hard for this mission?”

“We can’t hide in the dark just because of something we don’t understand. As a species, we’ve evolved a hell of a lot these last centuries, we are Homo galactic now. It might be arrogance on my part, but I believe we’re now capable of facing something this big. And don’t try to kid yourself: this is big, even if all you find is a deserted barrier generator. We have to come to terms with truly alien aliens, and the Silfen have never been that.”

“I thought you said us true romantics were few and far between?”

“We are. But look who we are.”

Wilson finally laughed. He tilted his head to take in the massive bulk of the ship. “So how come you haven’t named it yet?”

“You’re the captain, that’s your prerogative.”

“Are you bullshitting me?”

“No, man, I figure I owe you that much. Any ideas?”

“Sure. She’s called Second Chance.” It wasn’t something he had to think about.

Nigel grinned. “Not bad. I guess we’ll have a proper ceremony sometime. But first you’ve got to start putting your crew together. I can keep the politicians off your back for a while, but the quicker you make the selection the better. Man, I thought I was used to political horse trading, but this has got them all riled up. Every president, king, queen, first minister, prime minister, chairman, chief secretary, and grand emperor wants their world represented.”

“You’ve left room for a big science complement, that’s good, I would have insisted on that anyway. The actual crew, the engineers who’ll keep the ship running, I want to keep to a minimum. This is a science mission, after all. So I expect they’ll be drawn from the teams working here.”

“Okay, I have no problem passing the buck to you on this one. But be warned, there’s going to be pressure.”

“I’ll handle it. I don’t suppose you tracked down any more of my old crew, did you? I know Commander Lewis never made it to a rejuvenation. The rest of us drifted apart.”

“I’ll get on to it,” Alster said.

....

Paula Myo could actually see the Eiffel Tower from her office window. A century ago the Senior Investigator Office of the Intersolar Serious Crimes Directorate had taken over a lovely old five-story building just three streets away from the Seine, refurbishing the interior while leaving the Napoleonic facade intact. If she pushed her chair back from the desk and craned her neck, the ancient iron tower was visible over the rooftops. In the ninety-two years since she made Chief Investigator she probably hadn’t looked at it more than a dozen times. Today was one of those rare days when she succumbed, and gazed out at the panorama. The ant-size tourists were just visible on the top, while the lifts ran smoothly up and down the center of the ancient iron pinnacle. A timeless sight, which if anything had actually improved over the last two centuries as Parisians had gradually pushed the skyscrapers and modern apartment blocks farther and farther away from the ancient heart of their city.

While she watched, the office array was running cargo and transport files through specialist analysis programs, searching for the patterns that always seemed to elude her. It was the reason for her mood. Those patterns had escaped her for a couple of months now, and there were only so many ways you could search the data, even with modern smartware.

She knew Elvin had begun shipping the arms to Far Away. He would do that the only way possible: break them down into innocuous components, and incorporate them in other cargoes. Every time he bought an arms shipment this was the endgame that resulted. She would have cargoes pulled at random by CST security staff at Boongate’s gateway; they would be broken apart and evaluated for any discrepancy. Only three times in the last twenty years had they found components that the manufacturer couldn’t explain. She was sure that if every cargo was taken apart in the same way the results would be a lot better. But CST security had made it quite clear they didn’t have the resources to handle that kind of operation. Besides, she would inconvenience everybody on Far Away who was legitimately importing machinery, and without much just cause other than her own determination. Like all of his predecessors, Mel Rees, her immediate boss, had made it quite clear that the Intersolar Serious Crimes Directorate wasn’t going to support or fund that kind of interception procedure. It was an infuriating policy that she had argued against for decades, to no avail. So while she kept on filing official requests and applying what pressure she could through political contacts she had to make do with the occasional, random raid on likely cargo cases of equipment.

In an attempt to swing the odds in her favor, she’d initiated the data analysis. Every piece of cargo arriving at the Boongate CST station came with a full complement of files on shipping details, purchase invoices, payment confirmation, packaging companies, handling agents. Adam Elvin would send the arms via a multitude of different routes over a period of time that probably stretched into years. It was a physical encryption, you just had to have the key, the knowledge of which cargo hid which components, and when it would be arriving; if you had that you could slot the whole lot together. So her programs searched routes for crates that had shared a warehouse six months ago on a planet a hundred light-years away, payments that came from the same bank, a freighting company that was used by different agents, bills paid from an account that was only used once. Every time, she drew a blank. It didn’t help that eighty percent of cargo destined for Far Away belonged to individuals or families who were emigrating there, and took all their personal belongings with them, along with an amazing list of items they considered necessary for their survival and well-being.

“Now that’s something I don’t see every day,” Mel Rees said. “You loafing on the job.”

Paula gave him a silent, contemptuous glance and turned back to the Eiffel Tower. Mel Rees had only been with the Directorate for forty years, reaching his current position as one of its numerous deputy directors because of his family. But then that was always the way with Earth-based Commonwealth institutions; if senior appointees didn’t come from a Grand Family, they were inevitably part of an Intersolar Dynasty. Of course, had she gone gunning for a directorship she would probably have got it; but again, ironically, that would have been because of who she was, not to mention the amount of seniority gathered from one hundred forty-seven straight years of employment in the Directorate. But then, because of who she was, she didn’t want a post that would take her away from actual investigative work.

Mel Rees studied the data running through the desk portals. “No luck, huh?”

“Not with the budget you give me.”

“I’ve got something else for you.” Mel Rees never quite had the courage to summon Paula to his office if he wanted to discuss anything, he always visited her in person.

“What?”

“An ice case on Oaktier. Possible deliberate bodykill and associated memory loss.”

Paula couldn’t help her interest. “How long ago?”

“Uncertain, but it could be forty years.”

“Hum.” Paula crinkled her nose. It wasn’t that long ago. “Can’t the local police deal with it?”

“They tried, the results were inconclusive. That’s why we got the request for assistance. One of the possible victims, a Tara Jennifer Shaheef, has an important family on Oaktier, who have connections. You know how it works. Her family want positive results, one way or the other; so naturally I want you to have it.”

“You said one of the victims?”

“Yes. If it happened, there were two of them—that the police know of so far.”

“Okay, now I’m interested.”

“Thank you.” Glancing around the spartan office, he saw the small bag that was kept permanently packed, ready for any off-Earth assignment. It was one of three personal items she permitted herself in the plain room. On the windowsill was a rabbakas plant, a black corm sprouting a single marbled pink flower with petals that looked like feathers, which she’d been given by a Silfen on Silvergalde. And on the desk was a quartz cube containing a hologram of the couple who’d brought her up on Marindra, some summer day picnic scene with Paula and her stepsister, both girls aged about five. Mel Rees always tried to avoid looking at the hologram; every time it gave him an uncomfortably powerful reminder of just how strange the Chief Investigator was. “Do you want to shift any of your casework while you’re away? Renne and Tarlo haven’t got much on right now.”

She looked at him as if he had spoken some incomprehensible language. “I can keep up-to-date on everything from Oaktier, thank you. It is part of the unisphere.”

“Sure. Right.” He started to back out of the office. “Anything you need, just let me know.”

Paula waited until he had gone, then permitted herself a small smile. Actually, Rees wasn’t a bad deputy director—he kept his teams happy and made sure the department received a healthy budget—but she always made sure he knew his place. After a while she pulled her chair back to the desk and asked her e-butler to retrieve the Tara Jennifer Shaheef case files.

The Clayden Clinic was set amid twenty acres of its own grounds in one of the eastern suburbs of Darklake City. As rejuvenation facilities went, it was among the best on the planet. Paula had read through the Directorate’s green-code background file on the company, a typical medium-sized corporate operation, with clinics on five worlds in this sector of space.

What she could see as the police car pulled in through the gates seemed to reflect what she’d read. A long, three-story pearl and bamboo building standing on a slope above a small lake. One wing ended in a lattice of scaffolding, with constructionbots riding along the rails as they locked new prefab sections together.

Her office suit gave no protection from the humid early afternoon air as she hurried from the car to the reception. Detective Hoshe Finn was a couple of paces behind her the whole way, puffing with discontent at the heat. He was from the local ice-crime division, and had been assigned to assist her for the duration of the case—a duty he accepted cheerily, which was something she found refreshing. For once, someone was enjoying working with her and was actively helpful right from the start. She was sure he was mostly interested in seeing if her reputation matched up to the actual person, but she didn’t mind that. Whatever got results. Part of his acceptance no doubt came from the fact he was eighteen years on from his second rejuvenation. Older people tended to have a more phlegmatic approach.

Hoshe Finn’s last rejuvenation had given him a thin face. He wore his black hair drawn up into a neat single curl at the back, held in place with an elaborate silver ring clip. Just about the first thing he said to her was an admission he was overweight, though his shiny green silk suit was cut to deemphasize his waist and stomach.

“This way,” Hoshe Finn said once they were indoors. He led off down one of the long corridors leading away from reception. They passed several recent rejuvees being helped along by staff.

“Have you handled many ice cases?” Paula asked.

“Three.” He shrugged. “Including this one. My success rate is not high. Most of the time I work for the main criminal investigation department. This kind of allegation doesn’t occur very often.”

“Don’t worry, there aren’t many ice crimes which get solved.”

“Yeah. Even with our data storage capacity, digging up the past is difficult.”

“It’s not that, exactly.” She paused. “The information you gather from the past has to be related to human behavior. It’s a holistic picture we’re looking for. Law enforcement today relies too much on digital evidence.”

“And that’s where you come in.” He smiled at the suspicious look she gave him. “A true detective.”

“I do what I can.”

They had to put on clean coveralls to enter Wyobie Cotal’s room through its small decontamination lock. The light was low and pink inside, so it didn’t place undue strain on his eyes. Paula steeled herself behind her face filter mask as the second set of doors slid open. Something about emergency re-life cases always left her feeling queasy. Even though Cotal’s new clone had been out of the womb tank for five weeks now, she found the body unpleasant to look at.

The clone had been initiated two years ago, after Cotal’s insurance company array had conducted a legally required attempt to contact him through the unisphere. Subsequently, a more detailed search involving human researchers had also failed to locate any trace of him since he left Oaktier forty years earlier. At that time sixty-five years had elapsed since his birth, and he should have booked in to the clinic for his first rejuvenation in accordance with the policy that his reasonably wealthy parents had taken out at conception. As he didn’t appear, the courts granted the insurance company a body-death certificate on the grounds that he had either been illegally killed or had been involved in some freak accident that had gone unreported. The re-life procedure was activated a week later.

Although not too common, the operation was relatively straightforward for a facility as well equipped as the Clayden Clinic. Cotal’s DNA was subtly modified to produce accelerated growth, and the fetus kept in the womb-tank for just over twenty-three months. During the last five months, the clinic had inserted a neural link, and started to download Cotal’s stored memories into his new brain. There weren’t many; although he had regularly updated his secure store every couple of months, he’d stopped when he allegedly left Oaktier, aged twenty-five.

Lying on his bed bathed in mock-twilight, he looked like a fourteen-year-old famine victim. His body was dreadfully thin, with skin stretched tight over ribs and limbs. Some kind of gel had been applied to prevent excessive flaking, though several large areas were raw and crusting beneath the glistening substance. There was almost no muscle on his arms and legs, leaving his knees and elbows as knobbly protrusions. It meant he had to wear an electromuscle mobility suit to move, which looked as if he was imprisoned in a wire exoskeleton cage. But it was his head that was the most ungainly aspect. It was almost adult size, leaving it far too big for his spindly neck to support without the mobility suit.

Wyobie Cotal’s large sunken eyes followed them as they came into the room. He made no attempt to move his head. Every now and then he would open his lips a fraction, and a nipple would deploy from the side of the suit, pushing into his mouth so he could suck on it. Paula refused to look at the tubes around his waist, and the arrangement for connecting them to his penis and anus.

And I used to think recovering from an ordinary rejuvenation was humiliating enough.

“Hello, Wyobie,” Hoshe Finn said. “You’re looking better this time. Remember me?”

“Policeman,” Wyobie Cotal whispered. His voice was amplified by the suit, producing a weird echo effect.

“That’s right: Detective Finn. And this is Chief Investigator Paula Myo from the Serious Crimes Directorate. She’s come all the way from Earth to look into your death.”

Wyobie Cotal’s weary eyes focused on Paula. “Do I know you?”

“No.” She wasn’t about to start explaining her notoriety to someone who was struggling to make sense of his small stock of memories. “But I would like to help you.”

He smiled, which allowed drool to leak from his mouth. “You’re going to break me out of here?”

“It won’t be much longer.”

“Liar!” He said it loud enough that the amplification circuit wasn’t triggered. “They said I’ll be here for months while my muscles grow. Then I’ll just have a kid’s body. The speed-up growing part has stopped now.”

“But you’re alive again.”

He closed his eyes. “Find them. Find who did this to me.”

“If you were killed, I will find them. I always do.”

“Good.”

“I understand you and Tara Jennifer Shaheef were sex partners.” Paula ignored the way Hoshe Finn winced behind his filter mask. The amount of time they could spend with Cotal was limited by his condition; she didn’t intend on wasting any of it.

“Yes.” The expression on the strange child-face softened. “We’d just started seeing each other.”

“You know she left Oaktier as well.”

“I know. But I can’t believe I ran off with her, there was too much for me here. I told the police before. I was seeing another girl, too.”

“Philipa Yoi, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Was she the jealous type?”

“No no, I’ve been through all this before. It was all just fun, nothing too serious. We all knew that. Philipa and I were first-lifers, we wanted to … live.”

“It was just fun at the time of your last memory backup into the clinic’s secure store. But you didn’t leave Oaktier for another nine weeks after that. A lot could have happened in that time.”

“I wouldn’t have left,” he repeated stubbornly.

“Had anybody mentioned taking any trips? Were any friends planning a holiday on another planet?”

“No. I’m sure. My head’s all weird, you know. This was just five weeks ago for me. But my whole life is jumbled up. Some of the childhood stuff is clearer than Philipa and Tara. Oh, fuck. I can’t believe anybody would want to kill me.”

“Do you know anything about Tampico?”

“No. Nothing. Why?”

“It was the planet you bought a ticket for.”

Wyobie Cotal closed his eyes. Tears squeezed out to wet the fine lashes. “I don’t know. I don’t remember any of this. This has to be a mistake. One giant mother of a mistake. I’m still out there somewhere. I must be. I just forgot to come back for my rejuvenation, that’s all. Find me, please. Find me!” He started to lift his back up off the pillow, juvenile features straining hard. “Do something.”

A nurse came in as Wyobie Cotal sank back down again. He was unconscious before the electromuscle suit finished lowering him back flat onto the bed.

“He’s been sedated,” the nurse said. “It’ll be another three hours before he’s conscious again. You can come back then if you have to, but he can’t be exposed to an unlimited number of sessions like this. His personality is still very fragile, he’s completely immature emotionally.”

“I understand,” Paula said. She and Hoshe Finn left the room together.

“What do you think?” the detective asked as they took their coveralls off.

“Taken alone, I would have said it was a clear-cut case. First-lifers are always excitable. He went off on an adventure holiday with a girl and drowned or crashed or flew into a hill, something reckless and stupid. But with Shaheef as well, we have to consider the circumstances.”

Hoshe Finn nodded and threw his coveralls into a bin. The cooler air outside Cotal’s room made him shiver. “That’s what alerted us to this in the first place. Tara Jennifer Shaheef was re-lifed twenty years ago. She was written off as having an accident.”

“So who made the connection?”

“Morton, her past husband. Apparently, Cotal was named on the divorce papers; he was the one she was shacking up with on Tampico.”

“So it did get serious between Cotal and Shaheef?”

“Looks like it, but not on this planet. She filed the papers on Tampico. Once the divorce was arranged, Morton never heard anything from her again until her re-life. My division investigated her re-life as a matter of course, but there was nothing unduly suspicious other than the lack of a body. Accidents do happen.”

“So after the divorce Cotal and Shaheef went on holiday, or even honeymoon, together. They had the same accident.”

“Could be. Except there really is no trace of them after they left Oaktier.”

“Apart from the divorce petition.”

“Yes. And there certainly isn’t a motive for killing them. All we have are a lot of suspicious circumstances.”

“I need to see Shaheef next.”

“She’s expecting us.”

SIX

The message was loaded into the unisphere through a planetary cybersphere node in Hemeleum, a small inland farming town on Westwould. It remained in a onetime address file for five hours, long enough for whoever loaded it to have traveled clear across the Commonwealth. After five hours were up, the message’s sender segment activated. The program distributed the message to every e-butler address code in the unisphere, an annoying method of advertising called shotgunning. As a method of commercial promotion it had fallen into disuse centuries ago. Every modern e-butler program had filters that could bounce the spam right back to its sender, although as most shotgunners used a onetime address there was little point. The e-butlers also automatically notified the RIs controlling the unisphere routing protocols, who immediately wiped the offending message from every node. And under Intersolar law, finally passed in 2174, anyone shotgunning the unisphere was liable to a large irritant fine that could be applied to every message that was received by an e-butler, so the penalty was never less than a couple of billion dollars. Subsequently, shotgunning was used only by underground organizations or individuals who had ideologies, disreputable financial schemes, religious visions, or political revolution that they wanted the rest of the Commonwealth to know about. Given how quickly the unisphere RIs could identify shotgun spread patterns and block them, any software writer capable of composing a decent new shotgun sender could earn themselves a lucrative fee—cash, of course.

In this case, the factor that allowed the shotgunned message to get around most e-butler filters was that it had a genuine author certificate. On the arrival of any message, that was the first thing an e-butler would query. This one had the certificate of April Gallar Halgarth, a twenty-year-old resident of Solidade, the private world owned by the Halgarth dynasty. Over ten billion e-butlers allowed it to go forward into their hold file.

Most people upon receiving a message from a Halgarth opened it from sheer curiosity. When the visual recording started to play they realized they’d been shotgunned, and ninety percent wiped it immediately. Those who let it run did so out of native inquisitiveness, the prospect of filing a shotgun suit against a Halgarth, or because they were fellow extremist freedom fighters or it was useful raw material for their dissertation on modern political factions. A rare few simply believed.

The visuals opened with a man in an office, sitting behind a desk, with the snow-cloaked city of San Matio, Lerma’s capital, spread out panoramically through the window wall behind him. His face boasted strong features that were highlighted by dark skin, while neatly trimmed brown hair was threaded with a few silver strands. It emphasized the kind of authoritative air that inspired confidence, marking him down as a positive, progressive leader. (Forensic analysis showed he was a graphics composite, designed by the Formit 3004 simulator package, using its politician sculpture function.)

“Sorry to burst in on you like this,” he said. “But as you probably know, the government spends a lot of tax money on hunting down our group. Contrary to the Commonwealth charter which permits free public assembly, I am not allowed to say what I want to other citizens. I represent the Guardians of Selfhood. And before you wipe this message, I have one question to ask you. Why has the Senate and the executive chosen to send a starship to the Dyson Pair? Specifically, why now?”

There was a perspective shift in the pause while the man drew a realistic breath. The observer point moved forward and down, sitting in front of the desk, closer to the spokesman. It was a cozier setting, giving the impression of a one-on-one chat.

“As you know, we are campaigning against the Starflyer, an alien we contend is actively influencing the Commonwealth’s political classes for its own advantage. It is this Starflyer which has engineered the current mission to investigate the Dyson Pair. The Commonwealth has known about the enclosure of the two stars for centuries. We have known that one day, when phase six space is opened, that we would reach these strange stars and begin our investigation. What has changed? A single observation that proved the enclosure was a force field rather than a solid shell. Exactly why should that reverse centuries of Commonwealth policy?”

The spokesman shook his head solemnly. “Possibly the most critical human voyage of exploration since Columbus set sail has been launched without any valid explanation. The question was not debated openly in the Senate, despite the vast amounts of public money being spent to finance the starship. Instead, the decision emerged from some obscure ExoProtectorate Council that nobody had ever heard of before. It is exactly the kind of clandestine back-room deal that favors the Starflyer and its agenda.”

Perspective shifted again, sweeping the viewer out through the window to soar over the complicated maze of San Matio’s streets. “Somewhere out there it lurks, controlling and influencing us through its puppets. Government and their media manipulators ask how we know the Starflyer is malign. The answer is simple: if it is a friend, it would reveal itself to us and the other alien affiliates of the Commonwealth. If it is a friend, it would not push us into sending an expedition to the Dyson Pair. The President says we need to know what happened. He is mistaken. We know what must have happened. Shielding two entire star systems with force fields is an act of extreme desperation. Something terrible was about to be unleashed, something that warranted such colossal countermeasures. These barriers have kept the threat isolated from the rest of the galaxy for over a thousand years. We are safe because of that. This wonderful city, and thousands like it across the Commonwealth, sleep soundly at night because the threat is contained. Yet now we are being sent out there to tamper with the dangerous unknown. Why? What was wrong with our old policy of caution? By the time we reach phase six space we would probably know how to generate force fields of such a size, we would certainly comprehend the science and technology involved. We would not be endangering anybody, least of all ourselves.”

The view slid back into the office, establishing eye contact with the spokesman again. “Why was no public debate allowed? The Starflyer does not want that. Why is there an urgent need to visit the Dyson Pair? The Starflyer wants us to. Why does it want that? Consider this: the Starflyer has traveled hundreds of light-years across the galaxy. It knows what lies within the barrier. It has seen the danger there.

“All that we ask is that you resist its strategies and deceits. Question your Senator, your planetary or national leader. Demand from them a full explanation of why your tax money is being spent on this undemocratic recklessness. If they cannot satisfy you, then demand your rights. Demand this monstrous plan be stopped.”

The spokesman bowed his head in respect. “I thank you for your time.”

....

The star was a blue dwarf formally named Alpha Leonis, more commonly referred to as Regulus by intrigued astronomers on Earth, back in the days when there was such a thing as astronomy on the old world. They also found its companion star, Little Leo, an orange dwarf, which itself had a companion, Micro Leo, a red dwarf. This cozy threesome was situated seventy-seven light-years from Sol, an unusual system that attracted quite a degree of interest and observation time.

Then in 2097, CST discovered an H-congruous planet orbiting a long way out from the primary, and christened it Augusta. For Nigel Sheldon it was the opportunity he’d been waiting for. At that time the Human Intersolar Commonwealth was being formed, and the UFN on Earth was enacting the first wave of its global environmental laws. With Regulus in a strategically important position to expand the CST network into the already envisaged phase two space, Nigel claimed it for the company. He transported every single CST manufacturing facility out there, and went on to welcome any other factory that was suffering from Earth’s difficult new regulations. It became the first of what eventually were known as the Big15.

There was no culture to speak of on Augusta, no nationalist identity. It was devoted solely to commerce, the manufacture of products, large or small, which were shipped out across the Commonwealth. New Costa sprang up along the subtropical coast of the Sineba continent, the only city on the planet. In 2380 it was home to just over a billion people, a centerless urban sprawl of factories and residential districts stretching for more than six hundred kilometers along the shore and up to three hundred inland.

For all its crass existence, the megacity had a sense of purpose upon which all its inhabitants thrived. They were here for one thing: to work. There were no native citizens, everyone was technically a transient, earning money as they passed through. A lot of money. Some stayed for life after life, workaholics sweating their way up through the company that employed them, subtly remodeling themselves with every rejuvenation to give themselves the edge over their office rivals. A few stayed for only one life, entrepreneurs working their asses into an early rejuvenation but making a fortune in the process. However, the vast bulk of people lived there for sixty to ninety years, earning enough to buy into a good life on a more normal planet by the time they finally left. They were the ones who tended to have families. Children were the only people who didn’t work on Augusta, but they did grow up with a faintly screwed-up view of the rest of the Commonwealth, believing it to be made up of romantic planets where everyone lived in small cozy villages at the center of grand countryside vistas.

Mark Vernon was one such child, growing up in the Orangewood district at the south end of New Costa. As districts went, it was no better or worse than any other in the megacity. Most days the harsh sunlight was diffused by a brown haze of smog, and the Augusta Engineering Corp, which owned and ran the megacity, wasn’t going to waste valuable real estate with parks. So along with his ’hood buddies he powerscooted along the maze of hot asphalt between strip malls, and hung out anywhere guaranteed to annoy adults and authority. His parents got him audio and retinal inserts and i-spot OCtattoos at twelve so that he was fully virtual, because that was the age for Augusta kids to start direct-loading education. By sixteen he was wetwired for Total Sensorium Interface, and receiving his first college-year curriculum in hour-long artificial memory bursts every day. He graduated at eighteen, with a mediocre degree in electromechanics and software.

Ten years later, he had a reasonable job at Colyn Electromation, a wife, two kids of his own, a three-bedroom house with a tiny pool in the yard, and a healthy R&R pension fund. Statistically, he was a perfect Augusta inhabitant.

When he drove home that particular Friday evening, he wanted nothing more than to scream at the planet where it could shove his exemplary life. For a start he was late out of the plant, the guy on the next shift had called in sick, and it took the duty manager an hour to get cover organized. This was supposed to be Mark’s family day, the one where he got home early and spent some quality time with those he loved. Even the traffic didn’t want that to happen. Cars and trucks clogged all six lanes on his side of the highway, corraling his Ford Summer. Even with the city traffic routing arrays managing the flow, the sheer volume of vehicles at this time of the evening slowed everybody down to a fifty-five-kilometer-an-hour crawl. He’d wanted a house nearer the factory, but AEC didn’t have any to rent in those districts, so he had to make do with the Santa Hydra district. It was only sixteen kilometers inland, but that put it uncomfortably close to the Port Klye sector, where one of New Costa’s nests of nuclear power plants was sited.

Mark opened the Summer’s side window as they turned off the highway and onto Howell Avenue, which wound through the Northumberland Hills. It was a district that senior management favored: long clean boulevards lined by tall trees, where gated drives led off to big houses in pretty emerald enclaves surrounded by high walls. It wasn’t because there was crime on Augusta—at least, noncorporate crime; the well-to-do simply enjoyed the sense of physical separation from the rest of the megacity. Low sunlight gleamed off the district’s buildings and sidewalks, creating a hazy lustrous shimmer. He breathed in the warm dry air, trying to relax. As always when the tiny blue-white sun sank down toward the horizon, the warm El Iopi wind blew out of the southern desert toward the sea. It swept the day’s pollution away, along with the humidity, leaving just the scent of blossom from the trees and roadside bushes.

During his childhood, his parents had taken him and his siblings out into the desert several times, spending long weekends at oasis resorts. He’d enjoyed the scenery, the endless miles of flinty rock and sand, with only the rainbow buds of the scrawny twiglike native plants showing any color in that wasted landscape. It was a break from the megacity that was all he’d known. The rest of Sineba wasn’t worth visiting. That which wasn’t desert had long since been put to the plow. Giant mechanized farms had spread across the continent’s prairies, ripping up native plants and forests, and replacing them with huge fields of GM high-yield terrestrial crops, their leaves awash with pesticides and roots flooded with fertilizer. They poured a constant supply of cheap crops into the food processing factories dotted along the inland edge of New Costa, to be transformed into packaged convenience portions and distributed first to the megacity’s inhabitants, then out to the other planets, of which Earth was the greatest market.

After snaking down through the Northumberland Hills, Howell Avenue opened out into Santa Hydra, a broad flat expanse that led all the way across to the coastline twenty-five kilometers away. He could see the Port Klye nest in the distance, eleven big concrete fission reactor domes perched along the shore. The ground around them was a flat bed of asphalt squares, where nothing grew and nothing moved, a mile-wide security moat separating them from the megacity that they helped to energize. Pure white steam trickled out of their turbine-building chimneys, glowing rose-gold in the evening light. He couldn’t help the suspicious stare he gave the plumes, even though he knew they weren’t radioactive. The coolant system intake and outlet pipes were miles out to sea, as well, reducing any direct contamination risk. But the power plants were all part of his general malaise.

Slim pylons carried superconductor cables back into the megacity, following the routes of the major roads before they branched off and split into localized grids. Other, larger pylons carried the cables along the shoreline to the foundries. It was the heaviest industries that had colonized the land above the ocean, the big dirty steel mills and petrochemical refineries that used the seawater for coolant and the seabed as a waste dump.

Howell Avenue turned to run parallel with a heavy-duty eight-line rail track. These were the lines that connected the big industry districts to the CST planetary station, New Costa Junction, a hundred sixty kilometers north and three hundred kilometers inland. Kilometer-long cargo trains ran along it all day and night, hauled by DVA5s, massive nuclear-powered tractor units. The leviathans roamed all over the planet, some of them on three-week journeys from the other continents, winding their way through a huge number of different terrains before crossing the final isthmus bridge on Sineba’s northeastern corner, which connected it to the rest of the world’s landmasses. Their trucks carried every kind of raw material available in the planet’s crust, collecting them from the hundreds of crater-sized open mines that AEC had opened up across the world. In terms of bulk shifted, only the oil pipelines could rival them, bringing in crude from the dozens of major oil fields AEC operated.

The Ford Summer accelerated through a wide concrete underpass as a freight train thundered overhead, heading out from the coast. It was taking refined metal away from the mills, one of a hundred that day alone. In a few hours it would reach the planetary station and transfer the metal to a world whose clear-air laws wouldn’t permit the kind of cheap smelting methods Augusta employed.

With that depressing thought at the forefront of his mind, Mark finally turned into his own street. Putney Road was two kilometers long, with innumerable cul-de-sacs leading off it. The sidewalks were cracked, and the road surface uneven, long trickles of dark water leaking across it in several places where the irrigation pipes had fractured. Eucalyptus trees had been planted along both sides of the asphalt when the district was laid down, two hundred years ago. They were now so big their branches tangled together high above the center of the road, creating a welcoming shaded greenway and providing a great deal of privacy for the houses. A lot of bunting was hanging from the branches, the little flags all with the silver and blue Augusta football team emblem sparkling in the center. As Mark turned the Summer into his own drive, the tires scattered the usual layer of red-brown bark scabs that had peeled from the trunks to gather in the gutters. His father’s car was parked up ahead of him, an opentop 2330 vintage Caddy that Marty Vernon maintained in perfect condition. Beside it, the twelve-year-old Ford Summer looked rundown and cheap.

Mark stayed in the front seat for a moment, taking stock. He wanted all his agitation to fade away so he could enjoy the evening. I deserve a decent break. Around twenty years. There were noises coming from around the back of the house as the kids played in their little scrap of yard. The eucalyptus trees rustled in the gentle El Iopi wind, sending shadows wavering across the roof. Mark studied his home critically: pale lavender walls of drycoral, with a curving lime-green roof, arched windows of silvered glass, and matte-black air-conditioning fins under the guttering with their front edges glowing a dull orange. Gold and scarlet climbing roses, heavily dusted with mildew, had covered the whole south wall up to the eaves, and needed a good pruning; while a blue and white kathariz vine had attached its suckers to the gable end above the two-door garage—it also demanded attention. And for this the monthly rental took up fifteen percent of his salary. With the utility bill, car payments, his R&R pension, the kids’ education trust, the germline modification mortgage, health insurance, the vacation fund, clothing, food, and other regular debit payments, there was precious little left over for enjoying himself. Not that there were many places on Augusta where you could genuinely do that. Suddenly he didn’t want to get out of the car, he would throw a damper over the whole evening.

“Bad day at the office?”

Mark looked up to see Liz smiling at him through the open window. He grinned ruefully back at his beautiful wife—another of his daily worries was that she wouldn’t be there for him when he got home.

“Is that what it looks like?”

She reached in and touched his hand. “I’ve seen happier-looking suicide cases.”

“Sorry I’m late, work screwed up.” He realized she was almost never home late from work. Was that due to experience? He hated reminding himself of her sophistication, the kind that could only be acquired over decades, the years he hadn’t lived yet.

“Come on,” she said, and opened the Summer’s door. “You need a drink. And Marty’s here.”

“Yeah, I see that.” He gestured at the Caddy.

She frowned in concern as he climbed out of the car. “You all right, baby?”

“I think the interface at the office is giving me a headache again. That or the whole goddamn OCtattoo is crashing.”

“Mark, you have to complain. You can’t come home every day with a headache that gives you cold sweats. If the system’s wrong, they have to repair it.”

“Okay. Right. I’ll talk to the supervisor.” She didn’t understand how it was at work right now. If he kicked up a fuss he’d probably wind up getting shitlisted. Don’t be so damn paranoid, he told himself. But it was hard.

His father was on the patio decking that ran along the side of the pool, sitting on a sunlounger. Marty Vernon was a hundred eighty, and eight months out of his latest rejuvenation. Physically, he looked like Mark’s younger brother. Not yet old enough to develop the thick neck and creased cheeks that was the Vernon family trait.

“Mark! Hi, son, you look like shit, come and have a beer.” Marty pulled a bottle out of the cooler sheath. His voice was high and excitable.

“Dad!” Barry, aged five, was waving frantically from the pool. “Dad, I can reach the bottom now. Watch!” He sucked in a huge breath, and ducked his head under the surface, paddling desperately. Mark waved back at his son’s splashing feet. Liz dumped little Sandy into his arms. A wet smile beamed out from the thick folds of fabric. He smiled back, and kissed her. Tiny hands wiggled about happily. “Has she had her bottle?”

“Twenty minutes ago,” Liz assured him.

“Oh.” He rather liked that chore. They’d collected Sandy from the clinic seven months ago, and that was after the stress-hell that was raising hyperactive Barry. The kids had the best genes they could afford, with Liz paying considerably more of the modification mortgage than he did. It always surprised him how much of a comfort the kids were, and how much stability they brought to his life. Liz just said: “I told you so,” every time he mentioned it. Having a family was a huge strain on both their finances, especially renting the womb tank for nine months. But although she’d gone through the whole traditional wedding ceremony with him, Liz flatly refused to have a pregnancy. “I did enough of that last time around,” she insisted. So the womb tank it was.

Mark sat on the spare sunlounger, with Sandy cradled carefully in one arm. He took the beer bottle in his free hand. Barry broke surface with a victorious yell and a lot of splashing.

“Well done, kid,” Marty shouted. “Here, go fetch this.” He chucked a dollar coin into the pool. Barry whooped, and dived down after it.

“I don’t want him worn out,” Liz admonished. “He’ll get all tempered up when he needs to go to bed.”

“Give the kid a break,” Marty complained. “He’s having a ball. And your pool’s only—what—a meter deep. That’s not going to tire him out.”

“One point five.” Mark gulped down some of the beer. It was an imported brand he didn’t recognize. He sighed and settled back into the sunlounger. That was when he noticed the girl sitting in the chair behind Marty. She was wearing a bikini top and some tight shorts, showing off a trim, tanned teenage body. “Hi, I’m Amanda.”

“Oh, hi.” Mark couldn’t help the glance he gave his father.

“My new girl,” Marty crowed loudly. His arm went around her, and she giggled.

“Great,” Mark said. “So how long have you two, er …”

“Ten days,” Marty said gleefully. “But mostly ten nights.”

Amanda giggled again.

Mark’s smile was fixed. He knew what was coming now.

“We met up in the Silent World down at New Frisco Bay. Turns out we had a lot of things in common, and … hey!”

One thing in common, Mark corrected silently and sullenly. He couldn’t believe his father had done this. Silent World was a Commonwealth-wide franchise. It was the club that all the newly rejuvenated visited. Frequently, in the first few months after leaving the clinic. They went for just one thing: sex. It didn’t matter with whom, just someone equally horny from their beautiful, youthful new body’s deluge of hormones. There was only one rule, whatever happened inside, stayed inside. You could fuck your worst enemy, or your ex, or your ex’s younger sibling or parent, or the most glamorous unisphere celeb—it didn’t matter, because it didn’t count back outside the doors, it didn’t get mentioned, it simply never happened. And Marty had gone and brought her to a family evening.

David turned up ten minutes later, Liz’s forty-five-year-old son, an accountant working in AEC’s export credit division. Then there was Kyle, Mark’s older brother (by a hundred fifteen years), and Antonio, his boyfriend; Joanne, one of Liz’s mother’s great-granddaughters. Finally, Carys Panther arrived, Marty’s older sister, driving up in a Merc coupe and wearing a thousand-dollar “casual” dress from Jacvins. Mark was glad she had found the time to come; Carys was the one multi-lifer apart from Liz who always made him feel comfortable. She was also the most glamorous person he knew. When she did work, Carys designed dramas that were occasionally made into TSIs by various media conglomerates. They tended to be pretty raunchy.

As Regulus fell toward the horizon, they ordered Barry out of the pool and fired up the barbecue grill. Carys accepted a glass of white wine from the maidbot and fussed over Barry, helping him dry himself. Barry responded with true puppy-love devotion, showing her his new collection of dead nipbugs; he really adored his aunt Carys.

Mark stood beside the barbecue, turning the burgers and sausages himself. The gardenbot had an attachment for it, but he never did trust an array’s judgment when it came to cooking.

“You should cut some of these damn eucalyptus trees back,” Marty told him, standing at his shoulder. “That solarbrick isn’t getting enough sun on it during the day, look. It should be a lot hotter than that.”

Mark looked down at the thick slab below the barbecue’s grill, which was glowing a weak cherry-pink. Little flames flared briefly as the meat dripped juices down through the grill. “Looks fine to me, and it’s hot enough.”

“It won’t last, I’ve got experience with these things.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Marty,” Kyle called out. “Sit down and leave the kid alone, for Christ’s sake.”

Every time his relatives came around the same thing happened. A lot of the time, Mark felt as if he were a child allowed to listen to adult conversation, laughing when the others did and not understanding why.

“Just trying to help,” Marty grumbled as he backed off.

“Next family evening is around at my place,” David announced. “I thought we could have it on the eighteenth, that’s when we play our next cup round.”

“I’m on for that,” Marty said. “You know I nearly had a trial once, when I was first-life eighteen. Newby City.”

“Wrong,” Carys said. “You are a trial, Marty, not you had a trial.”

Marty made a gesture, to which she laughingly covered Barry’s eyes.

“I can’t believe we’ve got this far,” Kyle said. “We only need, what? A win and a draw to go through to the second round.”

“We’ll get the win against Sterling, no problem,” David said. “But we’ll be struggling to get a draw against Teleba, they’re football mad.”

Antonio groaned theatrically, and put his hand to his head. “How long does this go on for?”

“Another seven and a half months,” Kyle told him cheerfully. “And I’m going to the stadium on Tampico to see our last group one game.”

“By yourself,” Antonio muttered.

“Twenty-five percent of us called in sick when the last game was on,” Joanne said. “The Cup has really taken off this time around; you couldn’t get into a bar anywhere in New Costa they were so crowded. I don’t remember everyone getting so excited last time.”

“Wonder if the new aliens will want to play,” Liz said.

“And what a goddamn waste of time and money that is,” Marty complained.

“Hardly,” David said. “We need to know what’s going on out there.”

“Went on out there,” Marty said. “It all happened thousands of years ago.”

“That doesn’t mean it isn’t relevant now,” Carys said. “The envelopment barrier is still in place around both Dyson stars.”

“You’re sounding like that Guardian shotgun,” David said.

“Don’t tell me you watched it, Marty?” Carys taunted. “Didn’t you realize what it was?”

“Course I goddamn well realized,” Marty shot back. “Only an asshole wouldn’t recognize a shotgun. I saw the highlights on Alessandra Baron’s show, is all.”

Mark turned the sausages, keeping quiet. He hadn’t realized the message from April Halgarth was a shotgun propaganda blast until he opened it; and even then he’d let it play. The Guardians had made a great deal of sense. Why hadn’t there been a vote in the Senate?

“So if it comes from Alessandra, it’s acceptable is it?” Carys asked.

“Who cares who says it,” Marty said. “They’re both right. It doesn’t affect us, and it’s certainly something beyond us at the moment. We should take our time and reach the Dyson Pair as we expand naturally, not pull off this crazy Apollo stunt.”

Mark flipped the burgers again. Regulus had finally sunk below the horizon, allowing the stars to come out. Brightest among them were the Leo twins, a single glowing orange dot in the eastern sky. He could see them through the leaves of the eucalyptus trees as they swayed quietly. Some nights he’d sit out on the decking with a drink, just staring up at the canopy of stars twinkling above the megacity. They were the physical proof that people did live elsewhere, and live differently. Seeing that made life on Augusta that fraction more bearable. “They put my promotion off again,” he said.

“Oh, Mark, I’m sorry,” Carys said. “I know you wanted that.”

“Tough break, son,” Marty said. “But you’ve got to serve aces the whole time to get by on this planet. And don’t try and change the subject that quickly. The goddamn starship is a waste of money.”

“The point, Dad, is that I didn’t get promoted because the company’s market isn’t growing the way economists predicted. The new factory’s on hold, investment is minimal right now, and not just with us. Phase three space isn’t growing anything like phase two did at the start. We’re not expanding like we used to; the Commonwealth is too stable these days. Population growth is down even with womb tanks; it’s certainly not enough to provide a base population for a couple of new planets every year like we have been doing. We’re too civilized and measured. At this rate we’d never reach the Dyson Pair if all we do is wait around for CST to open wormholes in phase twenty space, or whatever.”

“Mark’s right,” David said. “My office has been working some long-range forecasts, we’re in a slowdown right now. They used to call periods like this ‘golden ages.’ Things tick over nicely and there are no upsets.”

“I thought they were recessions,” Carys muttered.

“No, there’s a difference.”

“It’s all a bunch of crap,” Marty said. “My board isn’t making any cutback plans. Our market’s bullish.”

“Nobody’s talking cutbacks,” David said. “The menu is all about reduced growth rates. If anything, Sheldon is playing smart with the starship project. There’s nothing like a sudden deluge of government cash to accelerate growth rates. And the majority of spending is here on Augusta.”

“That’s not the case, actually.”

Everybody turned to look at Amanda as she snuggled up close to Marty. She smiled back coolly, completely unintimidated. “My family has a board seat on the First-Quad bank, I get to see Intersolar finance tables before they’re massaged. The amount of money spent on the starship is irrelevant in macro-economic terms. Twenty billion Earth dollars is barely a couple of minutes’ worth of exports from this planet.”

“We’re doing well from it,” Liz said. “Bitor-UU won the contract to develop bioscreening kits for the starship.”

“I didn’t know that,” Joanne said. “Congratulations. Are you working on them yourself?”

“Some concepts, yes.”

“One kit, for a super-specialist market,” Amanda said. “There can be no spin-off from it. I rest my case.”

“My girl.” Marty leaned over, and they kissed quite lavishly.

“Why do you think there’s only going to be one starship?” Kyle said. “If you ask me, this is just the beginning. People have really taken to this Dyson Alpha mission; it’s going to be bigger than the Commonwealth Cup by the time it’s ready to fly. If you ask me, it’s a perfect antidote to how moribund phase three space has gotten. Everyone with an ounce of poetry in their soul will leap at the chance of taking off for the wild blue yonder, and settling somewhere that CST will never ensnare with their sticky fingers.”

“Crap,” Marty said. “If that were true, all these poets of yours would go live on Far Away.”

“I meant we could find clean fresh worlds, not some violent anarchist hell.”

“Not going to happen,” Marty insisted. “We’ve had breakaways before. I bet all those worlds that severed ties with the Commonwealth to be ‘free’ are all medieval nightmares now. Isolation never works. Look what a mess Earth was in before Sheldon and Ozzie invented wormholes.”

“Interesting model,” Carys said.

“One world, cut off from the galaxy,” Marty said. “I rest my case.”

David refused to be baited, he just smiled at Mark and rolled his eyes.

“Did you hear, they’ve chosen Wilson Kime to captain the mission?” Carys said. “That must really be choking Nigel Sheldon.”

“Is that a story for you?” Antonio asked.

“Could be. Old enemies have to set aside their rivalries for the greater good of the Commonwealth.”

“Sounds dull if you put it like that.”

Mark started slipping the sausages onto the serving platter. “Food’s up!”

Liz took a while in their bathroom getting ready for bed. She had a shower, and used some of the smaller, more expensive bottles of scent, dabbing the chilly drops on her skin and massaging them in until the flesh seemed to glow. Then she took out the special cream silk lingerie that she knew Mark really liked. Her jet-black hair was combed out until it hung loosely down below her shoulders. Then she put on her gold gown, carefully arranging it so it was almost falling open at the front. She took a contented look in the mirror, reassured once again she’d made the right choice not undergoing pregnancy for him; her belly was still as firm and flat as the day she came out of rejuve ten years ago, and there wasn’t any hint of cellulite on her thighs yet.

Back then her friends had laughed at her dating a first-lifer, claiming it was a way of saving on Silent World bills. She had to admit, when they’d first met at a party thrown by a production company Carys had been writing for, there was something of the puppy dog about him. He looked so uncomfortable and lost amid all the z-list celebrities and wannabe production people that rescuing him was the only decent thing to do. They’d dated a few more times, and she’d enjoyed herself because he was enthusiastic about life and the Commonwealth, and didn’t have the kind of guarded falseness of people her own age. There was no game playing with him, he was too honest for that. She found that inordinately reassuring. So maybe it really was a case of subconsciously hoping his genuine youth would rub off on her; even though the age difference had never been an issue for him. Then completely out of the blue he’d asked her to marry him, carried away by some mad romantic notion of them being soul mates.

She’d been so close to saying no, a hard fast put-down that would hurt him for a month until he met some equally wild, inexperienced girl his own age and they went off into the sunset together. Except, why should she actually do that? So what if he was sweet in a puppy-dog way? Men who were thoughtful and considerate were rare no matter what their age. She was going to live forever anyway, or a damn good portion of it at least, so why not be happy with a good man for twenty years or so—and to hell with her jealous friends and their catty remarks.

Since then there hadn’t been a single day when she’d regretted the decision. They fought—what married couple didn’t—but never over anything serious. He was a wonderful father, too. She’d never planned on having more than one kid with him, but just being together with him over the years made her give in and agree to Sandy.

And her friends had been right, healthy first-lifers his age took a lot of satisfying in bed. Which made her the lucky one.

There was only one bedside light on when she stepped out of the bathroom, casting a warm yellow glow on Mark’s half of the bed. He was sitting up studying data on a paperscreen. The window was open and the air-conditioning off; dying gusts of El Iopi warmed the room. “Hi, baby. Is there room there for mommy?”

Mark looked up. A nervous smile flickered across his face as he saw what she was wearing. He dropped the paperscreen as she clambered onto the bed, and slowly crawled toward him.

“That Amanda looked quite something,” she murmured as she nuzzled his ear.

“Pha. She does nothing for me, not like you.” He slid one hand inside the gold gown, fingers stroking the hot ebony skin beneath the fabric.

Liz slowly moved around until she was straddling him. She planted light, tickling kisses on his cheek and down his throat. Her head waved from side to side, allowing her hair to brush across his chest. His hand slipped under the camisole. She smiled at the pleasurable sensation his fingers conjured and brought her head up to kiss him properly. Then she saw his face, and sighed heavily.

“What’s the matter, baby?” She rolled off him, dismayed and concerned. “This isn’t like you.”

Mark stared up at the ceiling, unable to meet her gaze. “It’s nothing.”

“Wrong. Believe me, I know. I am your wife, and a lot more besides.” She deliberately paused as she retied the robe tighter.

His smile was regretful. “I know. It’s just that tonight wasn’t what I was hoping for. I’m sorry.”

“I think this is a little deeper than your father turning up with his latest lady friend, however tactless it was.”

“Damnit.” He turned on his side to face her. “That’s exactly it, don’t you see?”

“See what?”

“You, Dad, the others, you’ve all got this wealth of experience. And I don’t. And … it gets a little overpowering at times.”

“And you didn’t get the promotion.”

“Jesus H. Christ, you just did it again. Do you have any idea how small that makes me feel?”

Liz was quiet for quite a while as she gathered her troubled thoughts together. “I didn’t realize the effect was this upsetting. It’s never been an issue before.”

“I know.” He grinned lamely. “Maybe it’s a cumulative thing.”

“Okay, baby, then I’ll say one more thing that I think about you.”

“What?”

“You really hate it here, don’t you?”

Mark let out a relieved breath. “Yeah.” Then he was suddenly animated, jumping up to give her an intent stare. “This whole world is strictly for adults only. And I don’t mean me, I’m only twenty-eight for Christ’s sake, that’s not adult. They shouldn’t let anyone through the gateways at New Costa Junction until they’re at least a hundred years old. You’re the only kind of people who can take this kind of life.”

“All right,” she said. “I admit it doesn’t bother me as much as it obviously does you. That’s because it’s temporary, baby. One day we’ll leave.”

“But not together! That’s part of you as well, that fatalism, or wisdom, whatever you want to call it. Nothing ever seems to bother you. You’ve had other marriages; they’re just sections of your life. You’re my whole life, Liz, you and the kids. I know I’ll get out of here one day, but it won’t be with you. And this world isn’t for children, there’s no society here. That’s what I hate most about all this; Barry and Sandy are going to grow up just like me. That’s … that’s so much the worst thing I could ever do to them.”

“Okay.” She put a finger on his cheek, turning his head so she could look straight at him. “Tomorrow you hand in your resignation, and we start looking through the unisphere for somewhere else to live, somewhere different. Maybe a phase three world.”

“You can’t … you’re not serious.”

“Perfectly serious. This is eating you up; you don’t have to be my age to see that. And, Mark, I meant everything I said at the altar. I do love you, and if we stay here we’re going to get torn apart. So, this is what we have to do.”

“But what about your work? The stuff you do at Bitor-UU is real cutting edge.”

“So? There are tens of thousands who can do the same thing, hundreds of thousands, actually. And I don’t really need to be in the labs the whole time, I can work most of the systems over the unisphere. Then again, maybe it’s time for me to get a new job if we are going to live somewhere different.”

“Jesus.” Mark looked shocked, then he began to smile. “My God, do you know what they’ll say if I tell them I’m quitting? Burcombe will go crazy.”

“Let him. Who cares?”

“But what about money? We’ll never earn as much anywhere else, not doing what we do now.”

“Pay is relative. Augusta costs a lot more than most places. We’ll find a world where our jobs support this kind of lifestyle, if not a better one.”

He held her close. The expression on his face was the same kind of wonder as the first time they’d gone to bed together. “You’ll really emigrate with me?”

“Yes, Mark. You’re not just some section of my life, baby, you are my life. Who knows, maybe we’ll be the one in a hundred billion couples who actually stays married for all eternity.”

He grinned. “I like that idea.”

“You got any thoughts where you’d like to go? You’ve obviously been thinking about this for a long time.”

“Since I was about five.” His hands moved down to the gown’s belt, and gently pulled the bow open. “But we can talk about that in the morning.”

....

An hour after the case broke, Tarlo and Renne accompanied the Directorate duty forensics team to the Paris CST station, where all of them climbed onboard the express for Nzega. They routed via Orleans, the Big15 world for that sector of phase two space, and arrived at Fatu, Nzega’s capital, forty-one minutes later. The forensics team hired a van to carry their equipment, while Renne and Tarlo checked out a big BMW four-by-four Range Cruiser.

Nzega wasn’t a backwater world, but it had managed to sidestep the excesses of full technoindustrial development. The majority society was stable, civilized, and took a decently relaxed attitude to life and human foibles. Its main body of initial settlers were Polynesian and Latin Americans. They came because of the seas; half the planet’s surface was water. Nzega didn’t have any major continents, just hundreds of large islands and thousands of smaller ones. That gave them an awful lot of coastline.

The economic spin-off was the colossal number of resorts, hotels, and rental properties along the shores of the islands. Combined with the planet’s liberalism, it attracted a lot of middle-class kids looking for a break from the worlds with a faster pace of life.

Renne loaded their destination, Port Launay, into the BMW’s drive array, and settled back to enjoy the view. It was a seventeen-hour drive from Fatu along the Great Mantu Road, taking them over innumerable causeway bridges, and five ferry rides between the islands into the subtropical zone. Sometimes the road was enzyme-bonded concrete, sometimes not. There were times when it ran along the top of sheer cliffs, and others when it meandered through what seemed like endless salt marshes, while the rest was just a standard route through the string of coastal towns. After a while, both Investigators opaqued the windows and settled down to sleep while the vehicle rolled along.

Port Launay was simply a four-kilometer section of the urban strip that ran along the whole shore of Kailindri island, though “urban” was pushing the definition a bit. The single compacted stone road ran along two hundred meters inland from the sea through an unbroken forest of shaggy native trees, with small cul-de-sacs branching off where clusters of chalets and bungalows sheltered under the branches. Towns were identifiable only by the way shops and commercial buildings clumped together to serve residential neighborhoods.

When the BMW’s drive array indicated they’d reached their cul-de-sac, Renne switched to manual to steer the car along the last few hundred meters. The road wasn’t even broken stone anymore, just tire tracks of dusty sand in the dense yellow-blue queengrass. Three local police cars were blocking the way. Several rented cars were parked on the verges in front of them, with reporters arguing with police officers.

“How did they get here so goddamn fast?” Tarlo asked.

“Who knows,” Renne said. “They smell misery the way vultures smell carrion. You want to deal with the local police?”

“Sure.” Tarlo grinned, slipped his sports sunglasses on, and opened the door.

She watched him saunter over to the sergeant in charge. Tarlo was from Los Angeles, eighty-two years old. Not that he gave that impression in the flesh; nine years after his first rejuvenation he still looked as if he was barely out of his teens. His wealthy California family had contributed extensive germline sequencing, one facet of which restricted his natural aging process. They’d also gone for a traditional (or stereotyped—depending on your viewpoint) surfer-kid appearance: slim body, but tall and naturally toned, with lush blond hair and perfect teeth set on a firm square jaw. Tarlo clearly relished his heritage. Why he’d gone into law enforcement was something Renne never understood. “I like puzzles,” was the only explanation he’d ever offered. Personally, she felt he got slightly too much of a buzz out of the Directorate’s covert operations. The little boy who wanted to be a super secret agent when he grew up.

He ought to fit in just fine on Nzega. Which was why she was happy to let him talk to the police. Sometimes there was a lot of resentment within the local law enforcement agency when the Directorate turned up and took over.

She saw the forensics team’s van pull in behind the BMW just as Tarlo and the sergeant laughed together. One of the police cars was driven off the track it had been blocking, and Tarlo waved her through.

The beach cottage was another couple of hundred meters down the track. Tall trees with gray-blue leaves lined the track, providing a degree of privacy for the homes along the cul-de-sac. She caught glimpses of the single-story buildings, built mainly from wood or composite panels; one had been grown from drycoral. A black Merc had drawn up outside the cottage she wanted. Renne had a good idea who that had brought. She parked the BMW behind it, and climbed out into strong humidity and the strong smell of salt water. The trees provided reasonable shade from the fierce morning sunlight, but she still put her own sunglasses on.

“The Halgarths sent their own security team,” Tarlo said as he walked up beside her, holding his linen jacket over his shoulder. He nodded at the Merc. “Police said they arrived about forty minutes ago.”

“How do the police feel about us being here?”

He grinned his broad grin. “Pleased to hand the whole problem over to us. They’ll handle crowd control until Ms. Halgarth leaves.”

“Good.” She watched the forensics team van jolt its way along the track. “Do we know which house the Guardians operated out of?”

“Yep.” He pointed along the shore. “Two down. They obviously had good intel. Police have put a guard on it. The reporters don’t know about that yet.”

“Okay.” Renne straightened her shoulders, adjusted her light jacket. “Let’s get this over with. Put your jacket back on.”

“The boss isn’t here.”

“That’s not the point.”

With a great show of reluctance, Tarlo put his jacket back on, and pulled his tie up. “There’d better be air-conditioning,” he muttered as Renne told the forensics team to start with the other house.

They walked down the narrow front path to the beach cottage. It was a modest little building, made of wood that had been freshly painted lime-green, with a solar cell roof and semiorganic precipitator leaves hanging from the eaves. A wide veranda faced the sea. Only the rear and sides of the property were fenced in with trees, giving the cottage a grand view out across the broad cove. A barbecue stood at the end of the veranda, with several chairs and a table on the grass beside it. Empty bottles of exotic cocktails, beer cans, and dirty plates occupied the table, glistening in the fast-evaporating dew.

One of the Halgarth security personnel was standing in front of the door, dressed in a simple navy-blue sweatshirt, and long beige shorts that came down over his knees. Renne tried not to smile when they walked up to him; his image was obviously something he felt strongly about. “Serious Crimes Directorate,” she said solemnly. “We’d like to interview Ms. Halgarth.”

“Sure thing,” he said. “Some identification, please?”

Renne’s e-butler sent an SCD certificate to his e-butler.

“Thank you,” the security man said. He opened the door for them.

The cottage wasn’t large. A narrow hall led to three bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room, which took up half of the total floor space. The furniture was functional rather than ornate, a typical low-budget holiday rental.

“She’s a Halgarth, and she comes here for a vacation?” Tarlo said. “Even if she’s minor family she could stay someplace better.”

“That’s not the point. Didn’t you access the file? This is her first year at college, her first vacation with a bunch of friends. She’s free of the family for the first time in her life. Anyway, what’s wrong with this place?”

He winked. “No moon. No tides.” His voice dropped to a deliberately hoarse whisper. “No surf!”

Renne gave him a despairing look, and went into the living room. April Gallar Halgarth was sitting on the settee, looking as woebegone as if she’d just been told her parents had undergone complete bodyloss. Even dressed in baggy green jeans and a rumpled old russet T-shirt, she was quite beautiful. A tall twenty-year-old with smooth light ebony skin, thick wavy hair, and sweet features that belonged on an even younger face. Her hands cupped a mug of coffee that she wasn’t drinking. When she looked up at the two Investigators, her eyes were red and puffy, desperate for understanding.

Her three girlfriends were standing guard protectively around her. Marianna, Anjelia, and Laura, all from Queens University Belfast where they studied together. Two more Halgarth security personnel were also in the room, looking slightly lost. Their orders were to protect April from the media, and escort her home. The girl clearly wasn’t up to that much activity yet.

“Have you caught the bastards?” Marianna demanded when Renne and Tarlo identified themselves. She had a thick Irish accent.

“Not yet, no,” Tarlo said. “We’re just establishing the investigation.”

“Huh!” Marianna snorted. She turned her back on the two Investigators.

“Ms. Halgarth, we need to ask you some questions,” Renne said.

Marianna knelt down beside her friend. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

April peered up at Renne. “It’s all right. I want to do this.”

Marianna nodded reluctantly, and led the other two girls out of the living room. “If you don’t mind,” Tarlo said politely to the remaining bodyguards. One went out into the hall, the second left through the sliding-glass door and stood on the veranda outside.

“I guess you must be wondering why this happened to you?” Renne said as she sat beside the distraught girl.

“Yes,” April moaned.

“Mostly because you’re a Halgarth. The Guardians of Selfhood regard you as their enemy.”

“Why? I don’t know anything about them, I’ve never been to Far Away, or helped any aliens or anything. I’m just studying twenty-first-century history, that’s all.”

“I know. But your dynasty is the main backer behind the Marie Celeste Research Institute. To their warped minds, that’s a big crime. I have to tell you, don’t look for reason in this. There is no true rational explanation. You are the result of a search program. They wanted a Halgarth—it’s always a member of your family—and one who is—I’m sorry—slightly naive, and isolated. It was your name which popped up out of the program.”

April bent her head, dabbing at her eyes with a paper kitchen towel. “He was so nice. I can’t believe this.”

“What was his name?” Tarlo asked gently.

“Alberto,” the girl said. “Alberto Rasanto. He was with his friends Melissa and Frank in the cottage one down from here. They were doing the same thing as us, taking a spring break. They said. I suppose that was a lie.”

“Yes,” Renne said.

April winced as she stared into the cold coffee.

“So you met them,” Renne prompted.

“He was lovely. He had these big green eyes. I thought he was a first-lifer, just like me. They were on the beach the day we arrived. We all started talking. There was a little bit of competition for Alberto, you know? I mean, Melissa and Frank had each other. And there are four of us. We sort of gathered around Alberto. And Marianna’s really pretty; she always gets the best boys. But he liked me. He was always smiling when we spoke; and he was easy to talk to. He had a lovely smile—really lovely. So it was like me and him for the next few days. We went swimming, and he was teaching me how to windsurf; we all went out in a group to the bars in the evening, and had too much to drink. I even tried some TSInarc. Nothing hard, just some low programs. They were weird, but kind of fun. I suppose that was the start of it.”

“They’d be establishing a pattern, yes,” Tarlo said. “A TSInarc or even ordinary chemical drugs help blur your recollection. I’m sorry, April, but we have to ask this: Did you sleep with him?”

“Uh-huh.”

“When, please?”

“I suppose the first time was four days ago.”

“And you stayed over at their cottage when you did?”

“Yes. He had a room of his own. I’m sharing with Laura. We all made a pact about boys before we came here, that we’d use the couch if a roomie scored. But … I just. This was easier.”

“More private?” Tarlo said with a sympathetic smile.

“Yes,” she said eagerly. “I’m still a bit conservative, I suppose. Not that I mind my friends knowing I’m with a boy, but the walls here are really thin. I grew up on Solidade, which is just family.” Her head came up, giving them a dejected look. “You must think I’m a really dumb rich girl who knows nothing about the real world. Nobody else would be so gullible.”

“No,” Renne said. “You’re not gullible. It’s not that kind of con trick. They would have got the unisphere message author certificate out of you no matter what.”

The tears filled her eyes again. “But I don’t remember. And now the whole Commonwealth thinks I sent them Guardian propaganda.”

“By tomorrow the Commonwealth will have forgotten. Your family will make sure the news media never mentions you again. Normally I’d complain about undue influence, but in this case I have to agree it’s a blessing.”

April nodded slowly in agreement. “What happened?” she asked with a fierce whisper. “The family security people said they didn’t know, but I’m sure that’s what they were ordered to say. Tell me, please.” She looked from Tarlo to Renne. “Please. I have to know. I can’t even work out when. That’s so awful. I don’t care how bad it is, I just want to know.”

“It would have happened two nights before they left,” Tarlo said. Renne flashed him an angry glance, but he just shrugged. “Part of the routine of getting you drunk and high each night is that you wake up the next morning with a fuzzy head. So that when they take the next step you don’t even realize.”

April frowned, her eyes unfocused as she gazed out through the broad window wall, concentrating on something way beyond the sparkling sea. “I don’t remember. I really don’t. I’d like to say I was more sluggish than usual that morning. But I wasn’t.” She looked up at Tarlo. “So what happened to me?”

“They would probably have given you antronoine or some variant, slipped it in your drink. You wouldn’t know what was going on, it’s almost like being blind drunk except you’re completely open to suggestion. Then they’d have used an interface scanner in conjunction with a hack program on your inserts. It wouldn’t have taken more than a couple of minutes. After that, you would have had a memory edit.”

“Memory edit.” April ran her hands back through her hair. “You make it sound so clinical. That’s a piece of my life they stole from me. I never knew it could be that easy.”

“The technology is well established,” Renne said. “Some of the refinements didn’t even come out of corporate research. The first thing criminals do after they’ve committed a big crime is erase any record of the event from their memories. They don’t even know they’ve committed the crime—which is kind of weird—but that way we can’t read their memories and use them as evidence in court.”

“You know I think I hate that part more than anything, more than being seduced, or having my certificate used. It’s just awful. They could have done anything, anything; I’ll never know. I can’t believe I don’t remember.”

“We’ll need to run some tests on you,” Renne said. “Our forensics team will take some blood samples. Given this only happened a couple of days ago, we’ll be able to find traces of whatever drug they used. They’ll also want to run some calibration programs through your inserts. Do you think you’re up to that for us?”

“Yes,” April said. “Whatever it takes, I’ll do it.”

“Thank you. We’ll use a characteristics sketch program to get a picture of them. You and your friends can contribute to that.”

“Are you going to catch them? Realistically?”

“It will be tough,” Tarlo said. “The Guardians wouldn’t have shotgunned their message until after their team was off Nzega. By now they could be on any world in the Commonwealth. They’ll use cellular reprofiling kits to change their appearance. Our best chance of arresting them is when we break the whole Guardians group.”

“You’ve been after them for a long time, haven’t you? Everyone knows that, it’s Paula Myo’s only unsolved case.”

“Nobody can run forever,” Renne said. “Today will have brought them a little closer to justice. They will have left clues and evidence. Their DNA will be in the cottage; their software patterns will be all over Nzega’s cybersphere, in the finance for renting the cottage and hiring transport, their communications records. I know it doesn’t sound like much to you, especially now, but believe me, every little bit does help us.”

Renne and Tarlo left through the veranda window, sending the bodyguard back in. They walked over the spongy lawn toward the cottage the Guardians had used. Both of them had to slip their sunglasses back on against the glare of the hot sun.

“That was kind of you,” Renne said. “Telling her they would have used a date rape drug. I wondered what you were doing telling her about the hack.”

“She’s suffered enough,” Tarlo replied.

Renne stopped and looked out to sea, a humid breeze toying with her thick auburn hair. “Bastards. Fancy doing this to a first-lifer. Even without the memory, she’ll be screwed up about it for decades.”

“I hate memory edit,” Tarlo said. “Every time we come up against it, it gives me the creeps. I mean, suppose we already solved the Guardians case, started to round them up, when they turned it on us. We might have arrested them a hundred times already. I mean, it is goddamn strange that the boss has never got one of the principals.”

“You’re starting to sound like Alessandra Baron, always criticizing the Directorate. If anyone invented a memory edit you fired like a laser, we’d know about it.”

“That’s the whole point,” he said, shrugging, his arms held wide. “We did know about it, and the inventor fired it at us.”

“Stop it. You’re getting paranoid.”

He grinned ruefully. “You have to admit, something’s not right about this whole Guardians situation. Hell, you were there on Velaines. Did we make a mistake? Come on, I mean, did we? We played that so by the book we got paper cuts, and they still found out.”

“They got lucky.”

“They’ve been lucky for a hundred and thirty years. That ain’t natural.”

She gave him a troubled glance. “What are you saying?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t.” He sighed. “Come on, let’s go find out what Forensics turned up.”

“It’ll be nothing.”

“Optimist. Ten dollars that this is the time the Guardians made a mistake and left a decent clue behind.”

“You’re on.”

SEVEN

The CST exploratory division wormhole on Merredin had been down for fifteen months while it was given a class five overhaul—complete energy-focusing structure maintenance and upgrade of all the level beta support systems. It was no small job servicing a half cubic kilometer of high-energy physics machinery. Oscar Monroe had been on-site for ten months, managing the crews as they crawled around the wormhole generator armed with screwdrivers, arrays, programs, and every conceivable type of bot. Three more months had been spent training with his ground crew; after all, most of the systems were new, and that meant learning a whole new set of procedures. Six weeks had been spent with the forward crew as they got to grips with the latest marques of their equipment and software during innumerable simulation runs. That left him with an entire fortnight’s holiday.

He took off for Earth, and spent the first ten days alone, e-butler address deactivated, sitting in a fishing boat on Lake Rutland in England at Easter time. It rained for seven of the ten days, and he caught a total of eleven trout. Those were probably the most relaxing days he’d enjoyed in eight years. Not that he wanted to make a habit of loafing around.

For the last four days he went to London, where he was determined to catch some of the quaint live theater shows amid all the rest of the slightly-too-nostalgic culture that the grand old capital offered its visitors. On the very first night, during the interval of a “reinterpreted” Stoppard, he met a handsome young lad from some aristocratic European family who was curious and impressed with him and his job. With a shared taste for art and opera and good food they were inseparable for Oscar’s remaining three days. They waved good-bye at the CST London station and his express started the thirty-three-minute trip back to Merredin, two hundred eight light-years away.

Next morning, they began the wormhole generator power-up; done correctly it was a slow process. Six days later, Oscar was ready to start planet hunting.

The exploratory division base was visible while he was still eight kilometers away, occupying five square kilometers on one side of the CST planetary station. Such prominence wasn’t difficult. Merredin was the new junction world for phase three space in this sector of the Commonwealth. In anticipation of the fifty gateways that would one day connect it to those distant stars, the planetary station was a cleared area over two hundred and fifty kilometers square, located just west of the capital city. So far, it had one standard-size passenger terminal, a small marshaling yard, and three gateways, one back to the Big15 world, Mito, the other two out to the phase three frontier worlds Clonclurry and Valvida. The rest was just weeds, grass, drainage ditches, and a few roads leading nowhere. A month ago, most buildings had flown the green and blue national flag, but since Merredin’s team had been knocked out of the cup halfway through the first round they’d all been taken down. Disheartened janitors had locked them away, muttering about next time.

The exploratory division base was laid out around its own wormhole, which was housed in a windowless concrete and steel building eight hundred meters long. At one end was the spherical alien-environment confinement chamber, a hundred meters in diameter, two-thirds of which was above the ground. A little town of industrial-style buildings surrounded it, containing offices, laboratories, workshops, training facilities, and the xenobiology department. Power came from the nuclear plants on the coast.

Oscar’s Merc 1001coupe drove him through the main gate at seven forty-five and slid right into the Operations Director’s parking slot. He smiled at the few envious stares the car earned him from other members of the team as they pulled up outside the administration block. He doubted there were many, if any, others like it on Merredin. It was his one foible; changing the car once every twelve months (or less) for whatever the hottest new sports model was that year. This one had been imported specially from the Democratic Republic of New Germany, the Big15 planet where Mercedes had relocated its factories when it left Earth. He’d never decided, given his first-life background, if that consumerist extravagance was ironic, or if he was subconsciously distancing himself from that very same past. The only reason he hadn’t wiped the memories entirely when he rejuvenated was so he could be on his guard against any kind of relapse into the stupid idealism that his younger self had embraced. These days he was a fully paid-up member of the establishment, and finally at ease with himself and his role.

He made his way through the administration block and straight into the wormhole control center. The prime ground crew was already starting to assemble at the back of the big theaterlike room. He said his hellos and swapped a few jokes as he made his way down the sloping floor to his console at the front. The control center had eight tiered rows of consoles looking toward the broad molecule-chain reinforced sapphire windows that made up the front wall. Beyond that was the alien-environment confinement chamber, in its inactive state a spherical chamber fifty meters in diameter with dark radiation-absorptive walls. The wormhole gateway mechanism itself was directly opposite the windows, an oval fifteen meters wide, with a ramp leading up to it from the base of the chamber. Ranged around the walls were various airlock doors. The ceiling had a bright polyphoto ring, which was currently illuminating the chamber by emitting the same spectrum as Merredin’s sun. Around that were sealed recesses that contained a range of scientific and astronomical instruments. They had also undergone a major revamp during the downtime, and the prep crew had just finished testing them during the night.

Oscar sat at his console and told his PL to log him in with the center’s main array. His console portals lit up, delivering simplified schematics of the gateway, while his e-butler established voice linkages to every console operator as they slipped into their seats and logged in. As he acknowledged their inclusion in the communications loop, the prep crew chief came over and briefed him on the state of play. As the handover progressed the prep crew left the room; several of them went into the observation gallery at the rear, jostling for seats with reporters, CST’s local executives, and various VIPs who’d wrangled an invitation.

By nine-fifteen Oscar was satisfied that the wormhole generator was ready for an opening. He went around the loop one last time, personally checking with his station heads that they were equally satisfied with the situation: astrogration, power, focusing, main ancillary systems, sensors, short-range astronomy, confinement chamber management, emergency defense, forward crew, planetary science, alien encounter office, xenobiology, base camp equipment quartermaster, and finally the medical staff. One by one, they all gave him a green light. Finally, he checked with the Restricted Intelligence array that would handle integrated procedures. It said it was ready.

“Thank you, people,” he said. “Chamber Management, please take us to status one. Astrogration, stand by. RI, I’d like the gateway brought to full activation readiness.”

The overhead polyphoto strips in the control center began to dim, putting the room in a twilight glimmer. Holographic displays inside the console portals cast an iridescent glow over the faces of their operators. On the other side of the thick sapphire windows, the alien environment confinement chamber’s big polyphoto ring also shed its intensity, sinking to a weak red radiance that barely illuminated the gateway oval.

“Internal force field activated,” chamber management said. “All airlocks closed and sealed. Walls to neutral. Thermal shunts on-line. We have status one.”

Oscar could just see the ramp in front of the gateway sinking back down into the chamber floor. He felt an electric tingle begin deep in his stomach. No matter how long the human race had been doing this, how far they’d traveled into the universe, opening a door onto the unknown was always an exciting risk. “Astrogration, I want a wormhole destination on star AFR98-2B, five AUs galactic north from target.”

“Yes, sir, loading now.”

He watched the RI portal display as it registered the coordinate lock. AFR98-2B was an F2 spectral-class star, twenty-seven light-years out from Merredin. CST’s long-range examination from the orbiting telescope indicated the existence of a solar system of at least five planets. With the coordinate confirmed by astrogration, the RI took over the opening procedure, a vast program composite capable of handling the billion variable factors that governed the gateway machinery and power flow. Normally software that powerful would swiftly evolve up to full SI status, but this one had been formatted by the SI with strategic limiters written in to prevent any outbreak of self-determination. Even though it incorporated genetic algorithms the RI was essentially stable, it would never develop alternative interests and goals in the middle of its operations as some large array software had done in the past, with often disastrous consequences.

Behind the window, the dull silver rim of the oval gateway began to flicker with dusky turquoise shadows. They quickly expanded to merge together, at which point focusing on them became immensely difficult for the human eye. They shifted constantly while staying in the same place. In the center of the gateway, depth arrived with a giddy lurch. As always, Oscar got the impression he was abruptly hurtling forward through an infinitely long tunnel. Not a bad interpretation for beleaguered human senses. He knew he was holding his breath just like any rookie console operator. But this was the moment of greatest reward, the reason he committed himself to his job with such passion, the reason he’d made it all the way up to Operations Director. Despite all the commercial and political crap that was CST, this was a new world they were searching for today. Chances were, the human settlers would make it just another poor clone of the majority society within the Commonwealth. But there was always the possibility it would be something new and inspiring. It can’t always be the same.

The instability at the center of the gateway mechanism stabilized and cleared, darkening immediately. Stars appeared amid the blackness. A beam of brilliant white light stabbed through the opening, angled so it struck the chamber to the left of the windows.

A few digits jumped on the digital displays, registering the small electromagnetic infall. “Have we got a clear exit?” Oscar asked.

“Negative on gravity distortion sweep,” sensors said. “There’s no solid matter above particle level within a million klicks of the opening.”

“Thank you. Chamber Management, vent the chamber, please.”

A hole opened at the center of the secondary force field covering the gateway, and slowly expanded back toward the rim. The chamber’s atmosphere streaked out. It was visible at first, a thick jet of gray vapor playing across the starfield. After a minute, and with the force field withdrawn, there was nothing left but a few glittering grains of ice slowly dispersing.

“Vacuum confirmed,” chamber management said.

“Sensors, deploy the star tracker,” Oscar ordered. “Astronomy, tell us where we are, please.”

One of the recesses on the chamber ceiling silently irised open. A long tentaclelike arm of electromuscle uncoiled out of it, holding a two-meter metal bulb on the end. It was studded with small gold lenses. Oscar watched the arm slowly reach forward, its careful sinuous motion pushing the star-tracker mechanism out through the open gateway and into space beyond. A standard camera on the collar of the star tracker sent its image up to one of the five big screens above the windows. An ordinary star was revealed, its small disk shining bright amid the constellations. To Oscar it looked about the right size for an F2 at five AUs. Nonetheless, he waited patiently as information flowed in from the star tracker. Hasty decisions were just as dangerous as hesitation; one of the main requirements of his job was to keep calm in all circumstances. It was a trait he’d learned early in his first life, it just got misapplied back then.

“The spectrum matches AFR98-2B, sir,” short-range astronomy said. “Acquiring marker stars and measuring emergence point location.”

Oscar could remember the first stellar exploration he’d worked on, decades ago back on Augusta; as one of the junior prep crew he’d stood in the observation gallery for nine hours after his shift ended at handover. Nine hours that passed in no time the excitement he felt was so strong. It was the day he knew he’d made the right choice; that in some obscure way this was how he could make amends for what he’d done. This way he could bring the hope of a fresh start to other people’s lives as well as his own.

“Confirming location of wormhole exit,” short-range astronomy said. “Distance to AFR98-2B is seventeen-point-three million klicks out from the projected coordinate.”

Oscar allowed himself to relax a little, seeing the smiles springing up around the ground crew. That wasn’t a bad margin of error for a newly recommissioned gateway, well within acceptable limits. “Well done, Astrogration; load in the new figures please. Sensors, let’s get the planetary survey scope out there.”

While the new, bulkier telescope mechanism was deployed out through the confinement chamber, Oscar went around the control center loop again, verifying that everything was holding steady. Then it was an hour-long wait while short-range astronomy analyzed the images from the planetary survey scope. The procedure was simple enough: they scanned the plane of the ecliptic for any light source above first magnitude. When it found one, the telescope observed it for movement. If it was a planet, then its orbital motion should become apparent almost straightaway.

The results flashed up on the screens above the window. Short-range astronomy located five planets. Two were gas giants, Saturn-sized, orbiting eleven and fifteen AUs out from the star. The inner three were solids. The first and smallest, a lunar-sized rock one hundred million kilometers out from the star, had a high-viscosity plastic lava mantle moving in sluggish ripples generated by the star’s massive tidal pull. Second was a large solid, seventeen thousand eight hundred kilometers in diameter, and orbiting a hundred twelve million kilometers out. With its high gravity, Venusian-style atmosphere, and close proximity to the sun, it didn’t come anywhere near qualifying as H-congruous. But the third was a hundred ninety-nine million kilometers distant from the star, and measured fourteen thousand three hundred kilometers in diameter. Cheers and a patter of applause went around gateway control as the data slowly built up. Spectrographic results showed a standard oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, with a high water vapor content. Given its distance from the star, it was somewhat cool, with the equator having the same temperature as Earth’s temperate zones in autumn or spring. But the information was sufficient for Oscar to award it a preliminary H-congruous status, which brought another round of applause. First time out with a recommissioned gateway, and they’d struck gold already. A good omen.

“Sensors, let’s get the dish out there,” Oscar said. “Check for emissions.”

Another electromuscle arm snaked out from its ceiling recess, carrying a furled dish. It went through the gateway beside the planetary survey scope, and extended its metal mesh.

“No radio signals detected,” sensors reported.

“All right, bring both the arms back in,” Oscar said. “Astrogration, move the wormhole exit to geosynchronous height above the third planet’s daylight terminator.”

When the arms were back in their recesses, the starfield winked out. A moment later, the gateway opened again, revealing the crescent of a planet directly ahead. Its radiance washed across the confinement chamber and in through the windows. Oscar smiled in welcome as the soft light fell across his console. The cloud cover was above average, cloaking a good seventy percent of the hemisphere. But he could see the blue of oceans, and the grubby red-brown of land, even the crisp white of polar caps was visible in that first glimpse.

“All right, people, let’s concentrate on the job,” Oscar said as excited conversation buzzed through the loop. “We’ve all seen this before. Sensors, I want a full electromagnetic sweep. Launch seven geophysics satellites, get me some global coverage. Planetary Science, you’re on; preliminary survey results in three hours, please. Alien encounter office, start hunting. Emergency Defense, you’re on stand-by alert, and now have full wormhole shutdown authority; acknowledge that, please.”

“Acknowledged, sir.”

The launch rail telescoped out from its storage bay below the control center windows, extending a good ten meters through the wormhole exit. Satellites accelerated down the rail, riding the magnetic pulses before whirling away along different trajectories. Once they’d fallen a kilometer from the gateway, their ion drives came on, pushing them into high-inclination orbits that would provide coverage of the planet’s whole surface. As they went, each released a swarm of subsatellites like golden butterflies, expanding their observation baseline. Tracking dishes were deployed to keep in contact. The big dish came out again, scouring the continents for any electromagnetic activity. A two-meter telescope peered down inquisitively.

Oscar sat back and had his first in situ break of the day. A trolleybot slid along the console rows, distributing drinks and snacks. He claimed a cheese and smoked bacon sandwich and a couple of bottles of natural mineral water. As he ate, the screens above the windows came alive with images from the satellites. Details were gradually sketched in by the data tables and graphics in the console portals.

The planet had five major continents, accounting for thirty-two percent of the surface. Temperature was lower than strictly favorable, resulting in huge ice caps that between them covered a third of the planet. One and a half continents were completely buried beneath ice. That left a lot less usable land than average. The magnetic field was stronger than Earth’s, which gave it a very large Van Allen radiation belt.

“There is no evidence of sentient life at this time,” alien encounter said. “No large-scale structures, no electromagnetic activity, no visible cultivation, and no artificial thermal sources.”

“Thank you,” Oscar said. The last factor was the clincher for him. The ability to start and use fire was deemed the litmus test of sentience. If anything on the planet was capable of sentient thought, it was currently below Neanderthal-equivalent. “Sensors, you can switch to active scanning now.”

Radar sweeps started to penetrate the pervasive cloud. The images on the big screens began to develop a lot quicker, with detailed layers building on the provisional outlines. Lasers swept through the atmosphere, plotting its composition. The RI manipulated the energy flow through the gateway mechanism, manufacturing tiny gravity wave distortions at the wormhole exit. They rippled through the planet’s crust, allowing the satellites to determine its internal layout.

At fifteen hundred hours, Oscar called an intraloop conference with his station heads. So far, they agreed, the planet appeared to be hospitable. There was definitely no sign of an indigenous sentience. No animals above two meters in length had been spotted by the infrared sensors. Its geology was standard. Its biochemistry, as far as could be deduced from spectrography, was an ordinary carbon-based multicellular form.

“So, is it aggressive or passive?” Oscar asked. The problem was common enough. On a colder world such as this, most life would be slow-growing, a trait that inclined toward a more passive animal nature. Although there were cases where the opposite was true, and evolution had produced some very tough life-forms geared for survival at all costs. “Best guesses please.”

“The geology is stable,” planetary science said. “The current bio-epoch is probably about eighty million years old if we’re reading the stellar cycle right. We can’t detect any previous ice ages, so there’s been no sudden climate change to throw their evolution off-kilter. Everything growing down there is stable and adjusted. I’d say passive.”

“I have to agree,” xenobiology said. “We’re seeing small movable thermal spots indicative of animals, but nothing larger than a dog. Certainly nothing we normally associate with carnivorous predators. Botany is also reasonably standard, though there are few large plants, and what passes for trees are solitary, they don’t congregate in forests, which is unusual.”

“Very well.” Oscar swiveled his seat until he could see McClain Gilbert, the forward crew chief, sitting at the front of the observation gallery. “Mac, I’m giving you an initial encounter authorization. Get your first contact team suited up.”

“Thank you, sir.” McClain Gilbert gave him a thumbs-up from behind the glass.

Oscar switched back to the full loop. “We’re going for a ground encounter. Sensors, put the geophysics satellites to automatic, and withdraw all the arms. Astrogration, I want the exit moved to a five-hundred-kilometer equatorial altitude, then give it an orbital velocity. When we’re established, launch the low-orbit surveillance satellite fleet; I’ll need constant coverage of the ground contact site. We’re aiming for ground opening in one hour, people, get ready for that. Planetary Science, find me a suitable dawn site at that time.”

With the exit positioned five hundred kilometers above the ground, the clouds below seemed a lot brighter. The small squadron of low-orbit satellites shot off the launch rail, curving down to an even lower altitude and spreading out to form a chain around the planet’s equator. Images from their high-res cameras appeared on the screens, revealing a wealth of details. Stones a mere five centimeters across were visible amid the carpet of vermilion grass-equivalent. Squirrellike rodents, with gray scales rather than fur, bounded about, scuttling into burrows and swimming along streams. All the small independent trees had peculiar zigzag branches.

“Confirming low-orbit satellite fleet in position,” sensors reported. “We have full coverage.”

“Coming up to dawn on the landing site,” planetary science said.

“Withdraw sensor arms,” Oscar said. “Chamber Management, establish a force field across the gateway. Astrogration, reposition the exit one kilometer above designated contact site, horizontal axis.”

The wormhole blinked, and they were looking down on a gently crumpled landscape of thin burgundy grass and twisted carmine bushes. A low dawn light was casting long gloomy shadows across the ground. Pools of dense mist clung to hollows and depressions with oily tenacity.

“Chamber Management, equalize pressure. Sensors, deploy the atmospheric probe and exposure samples.”

The force field reconfigured itself to allow the sampler arm through. It didn’t find any immediately lethal particles missed by the scans from orbit.

Oscar waited the designated hour for the exposure and micro-analysis processes to run. “Xenobiology?” he asked eventually.

“Some spores—probably plant life. Small bacterial count in the water vapor. Nothing abnormal, and no adverse reactions to our sample materials.”

“Thank you.” It would take months of laboratory testing to discover if any of the microbial life was dangerous to humans. Until they were given the all-clear, the forward crews would all be in suits anyway. It was the other biological reactions that worried Oscar. A century ago CST had opened a wormhole to a planet where the local fungus ate polymers. Quite how that evolved was still a puzzle for the xenobiologists. Now a whole spectrum of materials was exposed to the planet first. “Astrogration, please take us down to the surface.”

The exit began to move, drifting downward with the same sedate lack of urgency as a hot air balloon. Oscar could even guess the point that astrogration had chosen for contact. A flat patch of ground clear of any trees, with a stream three hundred meters away. Ground search radar confirmed the area was solid. At a hundred meters up, the oval exit began to rotate around its long axis, tilting to the vertical. A light blue sky slid into view, with wispy clouds high above the horizon, glowing pink in the rising sunlight. Astrogration halted the descent when the bottom rim was a couple of centimeters above the fluffy leaves of the cochineal-tinted grass-equivalent.

Oscar let out a breath as he watched the landscape for any sign of movement. If there were any Silfen on this world, now was the moment they appeared. Stupid lanky humanoids ambling up to the opening and waving gamely at all the ground crew behind their consoles. “Welcome,” they sang in their own language. “Welcome to a new world.” He’d seen it once himself, twelve years ago when he was chamber management station head on Augusta. There had been so much amusement in their smooth voices, laughter for the serious humans and their clunky machinery. He’d wanted to pick up a rock and throw it at the smug mystics.

But this time the chilly red and blue terrain could have been a painting it was so still. There were no Silfen here.

He wasn’t the only one waiting, anticipating. A number of sighs were released around the control center.

Oscar went around the loop again, confirming every station was stable. “Forward crew, initiate contact,” he said.

The floor of the confinement chamber rose up into a ramp. Airlock two irised open. McClain Gilbert and the four members of his first contact team were standing just inside. They wore their magenta insulation suits, a close-fitting onepiece with a flexible hood that clung to the skull; a broad transparent visor dominated the front. The backpack was slim, containing a lightweight air recycling unit and the superconductor batteries for the force field armor they wore unseen underneath the fabric. It was a precaution against any newfound native animal that was hostile enough to try to find out what the invaders tasted like.

Cameras mounted on the sides of their hoods relayed images to the big screens above the windows. A quick check showed Oscar that several hundred million people were accessing this moment through the unisphere. They would be exploration addicts, the stay-at-homes who couldn’t get enough of alien worlds and the expanding human frontier.

“Out you go, Mac,” Oscar told the heroic-looking figures as they stood at the bottom of the ramp.

McClain Gilbert nodded briefly, and strode forward. The force field over the gateway exit slipped around him as he stepped through. His booted foot came down on the feathery leaves of the ground cover plant.

“I name this planet Chelva,” McClain Gilbert intoned solemnly, reading from CST’s approved list. “May those who come here find the life they search for.”

“Amen,” Oscar muttered quietly. “Right, people, to work, please.”

Procedure meant they acquired immediate soil and plant samples that were quickly taken back through the gateway. Once that was done, the team began a more elaborate investigation of the area around the wormhole exit.

“The grass-equivalent is spongy,” McClain Gilbert said. “Similar to moss but with much longer leaves, and they’re kind of glossy, like they have a wax coating. From what I can see the ground next to the stream has a high shingle content. Looks like flint, same gray-brown coloration. Possibly good for fossils.”

The forward crew was heading toward the water. Streams, lakes, even seas, always provided a rich variety of native life.

“Okay, we have company,” McClain Gilbert announced.

Oscar glanced up from the console portals. The forward crew were about a hundred meters from the exit, he could only see three of them directly now, and two of them were pointing at something. His eyes flicked up to the screens. The small squirrel-rodent creatures had appeared; helmet-mounted cameras were following them as they hopped around on the flat rocks beside the stream. Now he could see them properly, his first equivalence naming was becoming more and more inaccurate. They were nothing like squirrels. A rounded conical body, thirty centimeters long, was covered in lead-gray scales, with a texture astonishingly similar to stone. There were three powerful limbs at the rear, one directly underneath the body, and two, slightly longer, on either side. Where they connected to the main body they were shaped like chicken thighs, except there was no mid-joint, the lower half was a simple pole. It was as if they walked on miniature stilts, which made their motions fast and jerky. The head was a giant snout, with segmented ring scales allowing it to bend in every direction. Its tip was a triple-pincer claw arranged around a mouth-inlet. Two-thirds of the way along the snout, three black eyes were set deep into folds that creased the scales.

“Ugly-looking critters,” McClain Gilbert said. “They seem, I don’t know, primitive.”

“We think they’re quite evolved,” xenobiology said. “They obviously have a good sense of balance, and the limb arrangement provides a sophisticated locomotive ability.”

They didn’t bound about, Oscar saw, it was more like a kangaroo jump. Watching them, he worried that the forward team were scaring them, they were never still. One of them darted forward, its pincers splashing into the water. When it brought its snout out, the claws were gripping a tuft of lavender foliage. It moved with incredible speed, shoveling the dripping morsel back into its mouth-inlet.

His virtual vision brought up an amber warning over a section of McClain Gilbert’s insulation suit’s telemetry. The cautions were repeated on the other forward crew. “Mac, what are you standing on?”

In unison, the helmet camera images on the screens tipped down. The feathery grass was slowly curling over to embrace their boots. A thin mist was leaking out from the onion-shaped tips of every blade.

“Hell!” McClain Gilbert exclaimed. He quickly lifted one foot. The grass wasn’t strong enough to stop him. Blisters and bubbles were erupting on the top of the boot. The rest of the crew shouted in alarm, and began to pull their own boots clear.

“That’s some kind of acid,” Planetary Science said.

Oscar noticed all the creatures were hopping away from the humans at quite a speed.

“What sort of plant has acid for sap?” McClain Gilbert asked.

“Not a good one,” xenobiology said. “Sir, I recommend bringing them back in.”

“I concur,” emergency defense said. “If nothing else, we need to wash that acid off them before it eats through their soles.”

“I think they’re right, Mac,” Oscar said. “Get back into the environment chamber.”

“We’re coming.”

“Xenobiology, talk to me,” Oscar said.

“Interesting. The plants didn’t move until our team had been standing still for a little while, so I’m guessing they probably operate off a time/pressure trigger. I’m reminded of a Venus flytrap, except this is a lot more unpleasant, and the scale is larger. Any small animal that stops moving is likely to be trapped and dissolved.”

Oscar glanced back through the oval gateway. McClain Gilbert and his team had almost reached the rim. Behind them, there was no sign of the small not-squirrel creatures. “Those native animals never stood still,” he murmured.

“No, sir,” xenobiology said. “And their leg structure would be difficult for the grass to capture. I’d love to know what their scales are made of, it looked pretty tough. Anything that evolves here must be relatively acid resistant.”

“How widespread is this plant?” Oscar asked. “And is the rest of the vegetation going to be similar?”

“The images we’re getting from the low-orbit satellites indicate a comprehensive ground plant coverage,” sensors said. “If it’s not this particular grass-equivalent, it’s a close cousin.”

“Damnit,” Oscar hissed.

The forward crew hurried back into the alien environment confinement chamber. At the bottom of the ramp, decontamination shower cubicles had risen up out of the floor. They were designed to wash away spores or dangerous particles. But they’d be just as effective for this. The team members stood underneath the nozzles as the water jetted down.

“All right,” Oscar announced to everyone on the loop. “Our priority is to establish how widespread this grass variety is, and if the other plants are related. Sensors, get a marque 8 samplebot out there. I want to check out the nearest trees, and there are a few other kinds of plants in that grass-stuff. Mac, go through a complete decontamination, and desuit, I don’t think we’ll need you again today.”

Everyone in the control center watched anxiously as the samplebot trundled out across the red grass. It stopped several times to snip sections of leaf from clumps of other plants, then headed for the nearest tree a hundred fifty meters away. As it got closer, they could all see the jagged pattern of the branches as they forked at acute angles. There weren’t many leaves, just a few slender beige triangles clumped around the end of each twig. Black kernels similar to walnuts dangled down from almost every joint on every branch.

The samplebot stopped a meter from the waxy trunk, and gingerly extended an electromuscle arm. Every kernel on that half of the tree popped simultaneously. A torrent of liquid showered down over the surrounding ground and the samplebot. Its casing began to dissolve immediately. Acid started to leak through and the telemetry ended.

Oscar put his head in his hands and groaned. “Shit!”

By twenty-one hundred hours, they’d confirmed the planet’s plants shared a common biochemistry. Oscar had moved the wormhole exit eight times to different regions. Each one had subtle variants in the grass-equivalent, and no variance in their biochemical makeup.

He ordered the exit to be closed, and the gateway mechanism to be powered down to level two. It disheartened everyone, especially for a mission that had started so promisingly. Then there was the administration crap to deal with; the ground crew that was scheduled to take over exploration from prime had to be switched to a prep crew; everybody faced a mountain of reports to file.

The door of the control center closed behind Oscar. “Another day another star,” he murmured to himself. He was tired, disappointed, hungry. No way was he going to start in on the administration tonight. He told his e-butler to have the maidbots start a decent meal and open some wine to breathe. By the time he got home it should be ready.

Just as he started walking down the corridor, a number of people came out of the observation gallery door ahead of him. Dermet Shalar was there, the CST Merredin station director, and the last person Oscar wanted to see right now. He hesitated, putting his head down, hoping Dermet wouldn’t notice him.

“Oscar.”

“Ah, good evening, sir. Not a good day, I’m afraid.”

“No, indeed not. Still, astronomy has a huge list of possible targets. It’s not as if we’re short of new worlds.”

Oscar stopped listening to his boss; he’d just recognized the young-looking man in the expensive suit standing beside him. “Have you been watching today’s operation?”

“Yes,” Wilson Kime said. “I remember that kind of disappointment myself.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“But I was impressed by the way you ran things in there.”

“I see,” which was a dumb thing to say, but Oscar knew there were very few reasons for Kime to be here today. His fatigue suddenly vanished under a deluge of adrenaline. To be head-hunted for this CST exploration mission was the ultimate compliment.

As if he was mind reading, Wilson smiled. “I need somebody like you as my executive officer. Interested?”

Oscar glanced at Dermet Shalar, who kept his face carefully neutral. “Of course.”

“Good. It’s yours if you want it.”

“I want it.”

....

Two days later Oscar arrived at the Anshun starship project complex. He was given an office next to Wilson on the top floor in one of the three central glass towers, complete with a staff of three. Starting with their first official meeting that morning, he and Wilson had to put the crew selection problem at the top of the agenda. It was a hint of what was to come. Nigel Sheldon hadn’t been joking about the number of requests to join the mission. Tens of millions of people from all over the Commonwealth, endorsed by their government or some venerable respected institution, were hammering against CST’s filter programs for a berth on the starship. Right from the beginning, they decided on a policy of filling the science posts from the CST exploratory division wherever possible. The general crew would be assigned on a similar basis. Exceptions would be made for “outstanding achievers.” Both of them acknowledged that would mean geniuses with political clout.

“Anybody you owe a big favor?” Wilson asked. “We might as well get that out of the way to start with.”

“I’m sure there’ll be a whole bunch of people from this life and my first who are suddenly going to remember the five dollars they lent me. And just about everyone at the Merredin station managed to bump into me before I left and tell me how terrific they are. All I can say is, McClain Gilbert is the best forward crew leader I’ve worked with.”

“You want him for that duty on the Second Chance?”

Oscar took a moment. “It’s that easy?”

“We have to start somewhere, and we have to have some rationale for selection. After all, it’s how I chose you, I asked Sheldon who his best Operations Director was.”

Oscar had guessed it had been something like that: but who didn’t like hearing it firsthand? “Okay then, I’d like Mac. What about you? Do you have any preferences for the crew?”

“There’s fifty management types from Farndale I’d like to bring onto the construction side of the project to smooth out the current schedule, and I’ll probably do that. But as for anyone familiar with this kind of mission, no, not anymore.” They’d managed to track down two others from Ulysses. Nancy Kressmire, who had never left Earth again, was now the Ecological Commissioner for Northwest Asia, and hugely committed to the job—after all, she’d held it for a hundred fifty-eight years. She’d said no as soon as he reached her—not even waiting to say hello, or ask why he was calling after all these centuries.

“Are you sure?” Wilson had inquired.

“I can’t leave, Wilson. There’s so much here on this good Earth we still have to put right. How can we face aliens before we’ve cured the ills which beset our own people? Our moral obligation is clear.”

He didn’t argue, though there was much he wanted to say to her, and all her crusading kind for that matter. The Earth that the ultra-conservative Greens wanted had never existed in the past, it was an idealized dream of what Eden might be. Something not too dissimilar to York5, he thought to himself.

The only other old crew member Sheldon’s staff had located was Jane Orchiston. Wilson took one look at her file, and didn’t even bother placing that call. Call it prejudice or intuition—he didn’t really care which. He just knew it would be a waste of time. Two centuries ago, Orchiston had moved to Felicity, the women-only planet. Since then she’d been enthusiastically giving birth to daughters at the rate of almost one every three years.

All in all, he reflected, it wasn’t an outstanding record for a crew that was supposed to represent the best of humanity at that time. Three known survivors out of thirty-eight; one plutocrat, one bureaucrat, and one earth-mother.

The second half of the meeting was scheduled as a unisphere conference with James Timothy Halgarth, the director of the Research Institute on Far Away. “I’ll be interested in your opinion on what he has to say about the Marie Celeste and its crew,” Wilson told Oscar. “Tracking down alien knowledge is an aspect of our mission which I’m going to delegate to you.”

“You think it’s that important?”

“Yeah, we need to know what they know. Or don’t know. I’m determined that we cover every angle of approach on the Dyson Pair envelopment, not just the physical voyage. I was in training for the Mars mission for damn near a decade. I wound up knowing more than any college professor about its geology, its features, the geography, and even the books people had written on it—fact and fiction. Everything. I knew the myths as well as the truths. Just in case. We were ready for anything, any eventuality. And a fat lot of good that did us in the end.”

“Sheldon and Ozzie weren’t anything to do with Mars.”

Wilson grinned. “My point exactly. So … after this, arrange to see the Commonwealth xenocultural experts talking to the Silfen. Get out to the High Angel. Interview a Raiel. I simply don’t believe that none of our so-called allies know nothing about the Dyson Pair. Most of them have been around for a hell of a lot longer than us, certainly they all had starflight when it happened.”

“Why would they hold out on us?”

“God knows. But then there’s a great deal about this which doesn’t seem logical.”

“All right, I’ll add it to my list.”

Wilson’s e-butler announced that the wormhole connecting Half Way to Far Away had begun the ten-hour active phase of its cycle. The unisphere established a link to the small data network in Armstrong City. From there, a solitary landline carried the call to the Institute.

The big portal at the far end of Wilson’s study fizzed with multicolored static. It cleared to show Director James Timothy Halgarth sitting behind his desk, a fourth-generation member of the family that founded EdenBurg, which gave him a reasonable level of seniority within the dynasty.

He wore a simple pale blue suit of semiorganic fabric that stretched and contracted around his limbs whenever he moved, giving him unrestricted movement. His apparent age was mid-thirty, though he was completely bald, an unusual style in the Commonwealth. Small OCtattoos shimmered platinum and emerald on his cheeks.

“Captain Kime, finally,” the Director said with obvious enthusiasm. “I apologize for the delay in enabling this conference. The Guardians of Selfhood are annoyingly tenacious in their attacks on our landline. The current repairs were only completed three hours ago. No doubt we shall suffer our next cut within a few days.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Wilson said. “Wouldn’t you be better off with a satellite relay?”

“We used to have one. The Guardians shot it down, and its three replacements. It’s actually more cost-effective to have a landline and keep a repair crew permanently on the payroll. Fiber-optic cable is very cheap.”

“I didn’t realize the civil situation was quite so bad on Far Away.”

“It’s not. We’re the only ones suffering from assaults by the Guardians. They are deplorably xenophobic, not to mention violent.”

“I’m not too well briefed on their objectives; I never did pay much attention to conspiracy theories before. They think you’re helping an alien survivor from the arkship, don’t they?”

“Actually, they believe we transported the Starflyer into the Commonwealth, but that’s the general thrust of their argument, yes.”

“I see. They have been releasing a great deal of propaganda about how the Starflyer arranged for the whole Second Chance mission. What I really need to know, from the horse’s mouth as it were, is if it is in any way possible the Marie Celeste did come from the Dyson Pair. Does it have that kind of flight range?”

“In theory, yes. Once the ship accelerates to its flight velocity of point seven two lightspeed, its range is limited only by the amount of fuel it carries to power the force field generators, and indeed the lifetime of the generators themselves. However, our research determined that the actual flight time was five hundred and twenty years. The arkship didn’t come from, or even pass by, the Dyson Pair. It came from somewhere closer.”

“That could be a planet which didn’t have the kind of protective barrier the Dyson Pair possessed,” Oscar said. “They couldn’t defend themselves against whatever was threatening the Dyson aliens, so they left?”

“We can speculate on the reason for the flight as much as you like,” the Director said. “As we don’t yet know which star the arkship came from, we can hardly determine anything for certain. It could have originated from inside Commonwealth space for all we know.”

“What about if the Marie Celeste species was the reason for the enclosure?” Wilson asked.

“I’m sorry,” the Director said. “I don’t follow your reasoning.”

“If more than one arkship set off from its origin star, the civilization at the Dyson Pair could be defending themselves from the arkship aliens. After all, look what the Marie Celeste did to Far Away’s star when they arrived there.”

“Ah, the mega-flare. Yes, I suppose that’s a valid argument, although I don’t see why the barriers would remain on for such a long time. But we do believe that the sterilization of Far Away was an unfortunate side effect. The flare was only triggered to act as the power source for the message.”

“That’s one hell of a side effect.”

“You have to take the alien viewpoint. They triggered the flare to communicate across the entire galaxy. Whatever machine manipulated the star into flaring then went on to modify the emission into a coherent radio signal powerful enough to be detected as far away as the Magellanic Clouds. We humans certainly picked it up easily enough, you barely needed a dish when the signal reached Damaran, let alone the SETI scanners they were using back then.”

“But nobody knows what they were saying,” Wilson observed. “We’ve had a hundred and eighty years to decode the signal, and I’m not aware of any breakthrough yet. They must have been broadcasting back to their own home planet.”

“That’s certainly one theory proposed by the Institute, Captain. We have a hundred more if you have the time to listen. All we can do is work through the wreckage and try to put together as many pieces of the puzzle as possible. One day we shall have our answers. Regrettably, it won’t be in the near future.”

“You must have some idea where they came from,” Oscar said. “If they traveled at point seven lightspeed for five hundred years that gives you an origin point roughly three hundred and fifty light-years from Far Away. Surely you can match a star to the light spectrum in the ship’s life-support section?”

“That would be difficult, Mr. Monroe, the tanks had a multispectrum illumination source. They weren’t trying to match their home star’s emission.”

“Tanks?”

The Director’s face displayed mild disappointment. “There was no planetary surface environment replicated inside the Marie Celeste. The starship carried tanks. As far as we can tell from the residue, they were filled with water and a type of monocellular algae.”

“It was an aquatic species?” Wilson was fascinated. He’d never done any research into the arkship. Far Away had been on his list of worlds he wanted to visit in his sabbatical life.

“Again, that is one theory,” James Halgarth said. “There were no remnants of advanced creatures in the tanks, and we have never identified any such species in Far Away’s ocean. Another theory is that the Marie Celeste is actually an automated seedship. It was programmed to sterilize whatever habitable world it found, and seed it with genetic samples from its own world ready for its builders to colonize once the alienforming was complete.”

“Another good reason to throw up a barrier,” Wilson said.

“I doubt it, Captain. Firstly, if you have the technology to erect the kind of barrier found at the Dyson Pair, then you certainly have the capability to deactivate a robot ship before it begins its in-system mission. Secondly, it is a dreadfully flawed method of interstellar colonization. The resources spent on constructing such a ship are enormous. And it didn’t work. The flare killed off most but not all of Far Away’s native life, yet no trace has been found of any nonnative life. And if the Marie Celeste is one of a fleet, then where are all the other flares presumably set off by the rest of the ships? Thirdly, if you are a space-faring civilization intent on spreading out of your own solar system, then you will be constantly improving your technology. Whether you will develop faster-than-light travel is questionable. But certainly better ships than the Marie Celeste can be built, and the second wave would overtake the first and travel farther. Why haven’t we seen any other ships from the species which launched the Marie Celeste? I’m afraid, gentlemen, that we are presented with a unique puzzle with Far Away. It is as the saying goes: a mystery wrapped in an enigma. But I must conclude, it has nothing to do with the Dyson Pair.”

“I’m sure this is in your reports,” Oscar said. “But what about the onboard electronics? You must have salvaged some programs, surely?”

“No. The processors left installed are fairly standard, using a basic gate principle like ours, though some of the chemistry involved is different from anything we employ. However the core control array is missing, salvaged or removed.”

“Before or after the crash landing?”

“After. It wasn’t so much a crash landing as a heavy landing. The arkship’s systems were working at the time otherwise it would have been a true crash and all we’d have to examine would be a very deep crater. The official Institute history is that the flare was successful in calling another ship and a rescue mission picked up the survivors. That certainly fits all the known facts. Anything else is pure conspiracy theory.”

“You mentioned technology levels,” Wilson said. “Is the Marie Celeste a product of a technology more advanced than ours?”

“By definition, we are more advanced because we have wormhole generators. However that is now. By our best estimate, the Marie Celeste was launched around AD 1300, and at that time we had barely begun the Renaissance.”

“I see what you mean. Even if they only had half of our technological progression rate, they should have the same kind of pathways the Silfen use by now.”

“Exactly.”

“What about now, though? Is what we have now equivalent to the Marie Celeste?”

“The easiest answer is equivalent but different. We could undoubtedly build a more sophisticated slower-than-light starship. Obviously they didn’t have our wormhole capability, but then we don’t know how they flared the star.”

Wilson remembered several meetings he’d had with Commonwealth security chiefs so senior the general public didn’t even know their Directorates existed. They’d been very eager to examine the possibility of the Marie Celeste’s “flare bomb.” Farndale’s military researchers thought it might be some kind of unstable quantum field effect that disrupted the star’s surface, like dropping a depth charge into the ocean. Aside from theoretical studies, nothing had ever been done, certainly not at a hardware level. Of course, he didn’t know what other companies might have developed. It might be worth a quiet word with Nigel Sheldon. “Aren’t you even looking into it?”

“There’s nothing to look into, Captain. We have classified every single component onboard the arkship and identified their use. Whatever triggered the flare is not here. Presumably if there was more than one, the others were evacuated along with the crew and the control array. After all, it’s not the kind of thing a responsible species would leave lying around.”

“Good point. What I was trying to determine through the flare technology is if the Marie Celeste builders had the ability to throw up the Dyson barrier.”

“No, they didn’t have that ability. The Dyson Pair barriers predate the arkship. We are dealing with yet another unidentified alien species, perhaps two if the wilder ideas about the barrier’s defensive nature are true. I wish you luck in your encounter.”

“Thank you.”

“While we are in contact, I’d be very glad to offer sabbatical leave to any of the Institute’s researchers who you’d care to have on your crew. The experts we have here are quite formidable, both in terms of expertise and capability, many of them are advanced, like myself.”

“That’s a very generous offer, Mr. Director. We’re about to issue our requirements for the Second Chance, and I’m sure your personnel will match up.”

“Very well then.” His hand was raised in a small wave as the image disappeared from the portal.

Oscar pulled a face. “So that takes the Marie Celeste aliens out of the equation.”

“Looks like it, not that I ever believed the Guardians, but it’s useful ammunition for the next media interview.”

....

Even though it was officially summer, the winds from the west had been bringing in rain clouds from the ocean for over three weeks. Leonida City suffered thunderstorms and flash floods in most of the parks. Even today, the sky was blocked by lusterless gray clouds whose constant drizzle was falling on the lightweight plastic awning that had been set up over the podium. As he looked out across the audience sitting on the lawn of the university’s botanical garden, Dudley Bose didn’t even see the dull glimmer of moisture clinging to their suits and fanciful summer hats. He was too wrapped up in his own sense of awe and delight to pay attention to anything as mundane as the weather.

The dean also seemed immune to the suffering before him as his speech rambled on and on. Sitting just behind him, Gralmond’s Vice President was trying to keep a civil expression on her face. Eventually, the dean finished complimenting the university under his own leadership, and gestured to Dudley Bose.

Making his way to the lectern, Dudley had a sudden bout of nerves as the event hit home. He caught sight of Wendy, his wife, sitting tall in the front row, applauding loudly. Ranged beside her were his students; one of them let out a piercing whistle, while the other two were laughing as though this were the biggest joke in the world. Typical, he thought. But the sight of them allowed him to carry on with renewed conviction.

Dudley stepped up to the dean, who solemnly handed over the scroll of parchment that signified his appointment to full professorship. The applause peaked, and Dudley smiled down happily at his damp audience, and absolutely did not scratch the OCtattoo on his ear—Wendy had been very specific about that. He said his standard, trite “thank yous” and added how privileged he was to be a part of an academic institution as grand as this university, made one little point about how government should always support pure science (a thoughtful nod of agreement from the Vice President behind him), and finished up by saying: “I now hope to build upon the discovery which Gralmond has made possible by representing this planet as a crew member on the Second Chance. By contributing our planet’s expertise and unique experience we may finally unravel the mystery which has haunted our species for the last two hundred years. All I can say is that I will do my best not to let you down. Thank you very much.”

The applause that greeted the end of the speech was warmer and louder than he’d been expecting. As he turned the Vice President rose and shook him by the hand. “I’ll certainly do what I can to get you on that ship,” she murmured.

Dudley sat down and smiled oafishly through her speech about the long-term grant her administration was utterly delighted to be awarding the university’s newly enlarged astronomy department. He’d been agitating for a berth on the Second Chance from the moment he’d heard of the mission. In every unisphere interview, and there were many, he’d told the reporters how he deserved to be on it, how his contribution couldn’t possibly be overlooked, how his exclusive knowledge on the subject made him indispensable. He’d done the same to every politician he’d met, every industrialist, every high-society member he’d encountered at the hundred cocktail parties and dinners he’d received invitations for since the discovery. His lobbying had been relentless. The envelopment observation had given him a security he’d never known before, with the awarding of his professorship and sudden rush of money into his department. Success, he’d found, had a delectable taste. He wanted more, and the starship was the way to get it. There would be no limit to what he could achieve when he returned triumphant from the distant Dyson Pair.

As soon as the Vice President finished her announcement the audience broke for the reception in the main hall where canapés and wine were being served. Several local companies had helped fund the day, which allowed the bursar to bring in outside caterers, elevating the usual standard of university parties.

Wendy Bose snagged a glass of rosé from one of the young waiters and looked around to see where Dudley had got to. It was a day of conflicting emotions for her. The relief she felt at seeing him finally get his professorship was profound; it secured both their futures. Already, at the city planning office where she worked, her own promotion had finally gone through; her R&R pension was safe and sound, in another eleven years she could go for a rejuvenation. A decent one this time, she thought. Over the last few years she’d been very conscious of her hips getting heavy again—just at the wrong time. Dudley was clocking up a lot of inquiries from companies, there had even been mention of nonexecutive directorships. Gossip around the university common room said he was now a contender for the dean’s job in a few years’ time. She needed to look good, fit the part of capable supportive wife. When she’d married him, she hadn’t expected anything like this level of professional and personal success, just a quiet life spent pleasantly on the fringe of the capital’s social and governmental circles. Now, Dudley’s fame was changing all that. So far they’d faced it together, but she was only too aware of the strength of their marriage. It was another of those perfectly amicable unions that was intended to last maybe a couple of decades, a standard anodyne to the loneliness of mediocre achievers right across the Commonwealth. As such it could trundle along contentedly so long as nothing too momentous affected it. And here he was, the most famous astronomer in the Commonwealth, right in the middle of a campus of beautiful young girls, and being courted by companies with serious money.

“Mrs. Bose?”

Wendy turned to find a very tall man smiling inquisitively at her. His apparent age was late thirties, though she knew he was a lot older than that, several lifetimes at least. She’d rarely seen someone so self-confident. He had blond hair that verged on silver, and eyes that were so dark it was hard to see where the iris began. Combined with a small nose and delicate prominent cheeks he was striking rather than handsome, certainly memorable.

“That’s me.” She smiled, slightly edgy, knowing people like this didn’t usually single her out—for whatever reason.

“I’m with Earle News.” He held up a small card with golden wings in the middle. “I was wondering if I could have a few moments with you, please.”

“Oh, of course.” Wendy automatically slipped into good corporate wife mode—she’d had enough practice recently. “It’s a very proud day for me, Dudley’s achievement means so much, not just to the university but to Gralmond itself.”

“Absolutely. It’s certainly put you on the map. I had to look up which section of space Gralmond was in, and I’ve been to a lot of worlds. My brief is a roving one.”

“Really, that must be very interesting, Mr.…”

“Oh, that’s Brad, please.”

“Okay, Brad.” She smiled at him over the rim of her drink.

“One thing I was curious about when I researched the university, it has just about the smallest astronomy department anywhere. Was it your husband who started it?”

“Oh, no, that was Dr. Marance, he was one of the founders of the university; his actual discipline was astrophysics. The astronomy department was set up under his wing, apparently he was quite a dynamic character, hard to say no to. He believed astronomy was an essential component to classifying the universe, so there wasn’t much opposition to setting up the observatory. Then he left for rejuvenation, and Dudley got the appointment to carry on running the department. It’s been a bit of a struggle, to be honest; astronomy was still part of the physics department. It hasn’t really been independent until today.” She took a sip of the rosé. “Big day.”

“I see. But it still managed to attract funding after Dr. Marance left, enough funding to keep it going independently.”

“Well, there are all sorts of sources you can apply to: government and educational foundations. It was a constant struggle for Dudley to secure the budget every year, but he’s most tenacious, and a very capable administrator. Thankfully. He managed to keep going against quite a few odds. And, well, look at the result.”

“Quite. So it really is a case of the small noble man against the universe.”

“I wouldn’t put it exactly like that. Nobody was opposing him, it’s just that astronomy isn’t the most highly valued discipline these days. That’s all changing, now, of course. We’ve had over eight thousand applicants to study with Dudley in the next academic year.”

“I take it you won’t be able to accommodate them all?”

“Unfortunately not. It’s going to take some time to build the department up to Commonwealth-class standards. And, of course, Dudley may well be involved in the Second Chance mission.”

“Really?”

“He ought to be,” she said emphatically. “He was the discoverer, after all. He’s devoted years of his life to the Dyson Pair; that dedication has made him the Commonwealth’s premier expert on the subject. It would be very strange if they didn’t take him along as part of the science team, now wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose so. Has Captain Kime asked him to join the crew?”

“Not yet.”

“Like you say, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time. But I’m more interested in his history, and that of the astronomy department here at the university. I’m sure you’re being modest, but it really does sound like an epic battle; the fight for recognition, the fight for money, year after year. That provides quite an insight into your husband’s personality.”

“I’m very proud of him.”

“Can you tell me who some of the supporters were in the past? For example, which educational trusts provided money or resources?”

“Ah, well, there was the Frankton First Advancement, the St. James Outlook Fund, the Kingsford Pure Research Enablement Foundation, BG Enterprise, they all made most generous contributions; but the largest single donation came from the Cox Educational charity, that’s based on Earth.”

“An Earth charity supporting work out here, that’s quite remarkable.”

“They support a lot of basic scientific groundwork in universities across the Commonwealth, I believe.”

“So how long have the Cox commissioners been supporters of your husband’s department?”

“Eleven years now, ever since we arrived here.”

“What are they like?”

“Who?”

“The charity commissioners.”

“I don’t know. The contact was made over the unisphere. They’ve never actually visited. We are one of thousands of projects they support.”

“They didn’t even come today?”

“No, I’m afraid not. As you say, it’s a long way for a glass of wine and a canapé.”

“Okay, so what made Professor Bose choose the Dyson Pair as his observation target?”

“Distance. Gralmond was in the right place to observe the envelopment. Not that we expected one as dramatic as this.”

“Did he choose Gralmond because of that? Was he interested in the Dyson Pair before?”

“Not especially, no. After all, Dudley is a pure astronomer, and the envelopment for all it’s an astounding event isn’t natural.”

“He only started the observation after you arrived, then?”

“Yes.”

“What did the university say about that proposal?”

“They didn’t say anything; it’s up to Dudley to decide the astronomy department’s objectives.”

“And the foundations, they didn’t object? They are mostly pure science institutions, aren’t they?”

“Brad, are you trying to find a scandal?”

“Oh, good heavens, no. I haven’t worked for a good old muckraking tabloid show like Baron’s in decades. I just want the history, that’s all. To tell a story properly, you need background; it doesn’t necessarily all get included, but those details have to be there to add authority. I’m sorry, I’m lecturing, I’ve been doing my job for a long time.”

“That wasn’t a lecture. If you’d lived with Dudley for any length of time, you’d know what a lecture is.” Damn. Did that sound bitter?

“I’m sure. So, the foundations and their funding?”

“They were supportive, especially the Cox. In fact, I think the Dyson Pair observation was written into the endowment contract, they wanted to make sure it was seen through to its conclusion.”

“Did they now?”

Just for a second, Wendy saw a flash of triumph on his slender face. It was rather unnerving, she’d thought him more controlled than that, a long-lived sophisticate. “Is that important?” she asked.

“Not at all,” he said with an urbane smile, much more in character. He leaned forward slightly, taking her into his mischievous confidence. “Now tell me, just how is the dean handling all this? One of his professors becoming the most famous academic in the Commonwealth must be a bit of a shock.”

Wendy gave her glass a demure glance. “I couldn’t possibly say.”

“Ah well, you can’t say I didn’t try. I must thank you for sparing so much of your time on this day.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes.” He inclined his head politely, then raised a finger. “One thing, when you see Paula, please tell her from me to stop concentrating on the details, it’s the big picture that counts.”

“I don’t understand, I don’t know anyone called Paula.”

He grinned. “You will.” And with that he slipped away through the crowd, leaving her staring after him, bemused, if not somewhat irritated, by his ridiculously cryptic message.

Two hours into the reception, Dudley’s e-butler told him the police were calling him. “You’re not serious,” he told it.

“I’m afraid so. There are two patrol cars at the house. A neighbor reported someone leaving.”

“Well what does the house array say?”

“The house array seems to be off-line.”

“Goddamnit.”

“Will you be coming? The police did emphasize it is important.”

“Yes, yes!”

So he had to break away from the chairman of Orpheus Island, who had been suggesting a serious sponsorship arrangement for some of the observatory equipment—possibly extending to the Second Chance—give up his wineglass to a rather pretty waitress, who knew his name and smiled, then walk around the hall trying to find Wendy. It didn’t help that she was also moving around trying to find him. They both decided not to say their good-byes to the dean.

The Carlton drove them back home. Slumped down in his seat, Dudley realized how drunk he was. But the wine had been good, and the catering staff kept filling his glass. Wendy gave him a disapproving look as he climbed out of the car using extreme caution.

Constable Brampton was waiting for them beside the front door of their two-story home. Like all the others on the housing estate, it was local wood pinned to a carbonsteel frame and painted a deep green. The windows were white, with the glass turned up to full opacity. The policeman saluted casually as they approached. “Doesn’t seem to be any damage,” he said. “But we’ll need you to take a look around and see if anything’s missing.”

Wendy gave the open door a curious glance. “You’re sure they’ve gone?”

“Yes, ma’am. We’ve checked it out thoroughly. Nobody inside apart from us.” He gestured with an open hand.

Dudley couldn’t see any obvious signs of a burglary. No broken objects, furniture exactly where it always was. The only thing wrong was the lack of response from the house array. “What happened?” he asked.

“Your neighbor reported someone leaving by the front door. They got into a car parked just down the street and drove off. He knew you were at a function at the university, so he called us.”

“My husband was getting his professorship,” Wendy said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Constable Brampton said. “I know that. Congratulations, sir, you deserve it. What you did put old Gralmond right on the map.”

Wendy frowned. That was the second time she’d heard that phrase today.

Dudley gave the front door an annoyed look. It was properly wired, the insurance company had insisted on that, and the house array had excellent security routines. “How did they get in?”

“We’re not sure. Somebody who knew what they were doing. Bypassed all your electronics, takes a smart person to do that. Or someone with a smart program.”

They went into Dudley’s study. He felt as if he should apologize for the mess. There were books and glossy printouts everywhere, pieces of old equipment, a window almost invisible behind the rampant potted plants. Two forensics officers were examining the desk and its open drawer. The house array was inside, a simple housing box with junction sockets connecting it to more fiber-optic cables than the performance specs really permitted. He’d been meaning to upgrade for a while.

“They dumped your memory,” the senior forensics officer said. “That’s why the array’s down.”

“Dumped it?”

“Yeah. Everything, management programs, files, the lot. They’re all gone. Presumably into the burglar’s own memory store. I hope you kept backups?”

“Yeah.” Dudley looked around the study, scratching at the OCtattoo on his ear. “Most of it, anyway. I mean, it’s only a house array.”

“Was there anything valuable on it, sir? I mean, your work, and everything?”

“Some of my work was there, I wouldn’t call it valuable. Astronomy isn’t a secretive profession.”

“Hum, well, it might be an attempted blackmail, someone looking for something incriminating. You’d be surprised what stays in an array’s transit memory cache, stuff from years ago. Whoever they are, they’ve got all that now.”

“I don’t have anything incriminating to keep. I mean, bills paid late, some traffic tickets when I was driving on manual—who doesn’t?”

“Nonetheless, sir, you are in the public eye now. It might be an idea to think about extra security, and you certainly ought to change all your access patterns after this.”

“Of course, yes.”

“We’ll notify the local patrol car,” Constable Brampton said. “They’ll include you on their watch detail in future.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re sure there’s nothing else missing?”

“No. I can’t see anything.”

“We’ll sweep for DNA fragments, of course, and try and trace the car. But it looks like a professional job. Chances are, if there’s nothing to worry about in the array memory, then there won’t be any follow-up.”

EIGHT

After the Commonwealth ExoProtectorate Council finished with its unanimous vote to send a starship to the Dyson Pair, Ozzie Fernandez Isaac excused himself and took the elevator down to the lobby. Outside, it was warm for spring, with just some slim banks of dirty snow lingering in the gutters where the civicservicebots had pushed it. He started down Fifth Avenue, one of a handful of people to be using the broad sidewalk. There were none of the street vendors he could remember from even a couple of centuries ago: the burger stands on every intersection, T-shirt sellers, stalls with quasi-legal software fixes, sensepimps with pornomemories. That would be too untidy now, too low-down for the city and its cultured inhabitants. These days quaint booths and boutiques occupied the ground floor of every skyscraper, offering quirky objects imported from every planet in the Commonwealth—all so strangely unappealing. It was all a sad decline, as far as Ozzie was concerned. You couldn’t sanitize a great city like New York without losing its original quality, the dynamism and grubby edges that made it an exciting vibrant place to live. Despite the buildings, which still impressed him, it was becoming just another suburb of Earth. Its manufacturing industry had long since moved off-planet, leaving only the research and design consortiums that remained on the cutting edge, staffed by billionaire partners. The advertising agencies remained along with media company headquarters; there were even still some artists down in SoHo, though Ozzie regarded them as talentless dinosaurs. It was the finance sector and government offices that dominated the employment market, for those who had to work. Many didn’t, having their idle lives taken care of by the innumerable supply and service companies that encircled Manhattan, all employing offworlders on medium-term visas.

Visits like this reminded Ozzie why he so rarely came back to the world of his birth these days. When he looked up, there was a jagged strip of cool-steel sky a long way above him, pushed away by the grand towers. Even in midsummer, the sun was a near stranger to the ground in this part of town, while today the trees and shrubs planted in the expensive plazas all had artificial lighting to help them grow.

Glancing down the impressive vertical canyon at one of the intersections, he saw the ancient Chrysler Building secure inside its glass cage, protected from the elements. “And which of us is going to outlast the other?” he asked it quietly.

The cars and cabs and trucks were sliding past him on the road, their axle motors making almost no noise at all. People in thick coats or black-tinted organic filament ponchos hurried past, not even looking at him. They were almost all adults. As far as he could see up and down Fifth Avenue, there were no more than three or four kids under ten years old. That was what he missed most of all; and Earth’s birth rate was still declining year after year as the rich sophisticates who populated the planet found other things to spend their time and money on.

There was nothing for him here anymore, he decided morosely, nothing of interest, nothing of value. He stepped back toward the base of the nearest tower and told his e-butler to give him a link to his home’s RI. Once the RI was on-line he gave it his exact coordinates. A circular wormhole opened behind him, expanding out to two meters in diameter, and he took a step backward through the neutral gray curtain of the force field. The wormhole closed.

Ozzie didn’t have a whole network of private secret wormholes linking the Commonwealth planets. He had precisely two wormholes; one standard CST micro-width connector to give his home a hyper-bandwidth link to the unisphere via Augusta’s cybersphere; and one highly modified version of the wormhole generator that CST’s exploratory division used, which provided him with independent transport around a good section of the Commonwealth. Nor did he live by himself on an H-congruous planet. His home was a hollowed-out asteroid that drifted along its long elliptical orbit around the Leo Twins.

As he walked through the gateway he was immediately enveloped by bright, warm light. The gateway mechanism had been built into a broad granite cliff with a wide awning of white canvas overhead, like a yacht sail that had been commandeered as a marquee roof. He stepped out from underneath it, and his domain stretched out before him.

The cavity that automated diggers, CST civil engineering crews, and an army of various bots had excavated was close to eighty miles long, and fifteen in diameter; the greatest enclosed space the human race had ever constructed. Its geography was a rugged undulation of hills and dales, broken by the silver veins of streams. A single range of huge rock-blade mountains spiraled down the entire length, the tallest pinnacles a mile and a half high, raw purple and gray rock capped with dazzling white snow. Nearly every hill had a waterfall of some kind, from magnificent torrents gushing over sharp-edged mantles, to foaming cascades that tumbled down long stony gullies. On the mountains, wide dark caves had been bored out below the ragged snowline. Water gushed out from the shadows within, sending massive jets to plummet down sheer granite sides, flinging off swirling clouds of platinum spray as they fell and fell. All of them curved gracefully as they sliced through the air, distorted by the asteroid’s ponderous gravity-inducing rotation before plunging into lakes and pools.

All the streams and rivers fed by the waterfalls wound away to empty themselves into the huge reservoirs that were hidden away in caverns behind the central cavity’s endwalls. From there the water could be pumped back into the intricate underground network of tunnels and pipes that led back to the waterfall outlets. Its pumps consumed the output from three of the fifteen fusion generators that powered the asteroid.

Away from the waterfalls, long dark lakes filled the floors of the deeper valleys, fringed by bulrush reeds, and surrounded by overhanging trees that trailed lush branches across the shallows. Great patches of water lilies bloomed across the surface, bringing the intense primary colors of their tissue-flowers to enliven the cool blankness of the water. Bracken and rhododendrons crowned most of the hills, while grass meadows besieged the lower slopes, their unkempt emerald carpets dappled by vivid speckles of scarlet, topaz, azure, violet, and tangerine wildflowers. Marble boulders were scattered on every incline, white as snow. Trees grew wild, singularly or in clumps; spinnys and small forests of oak, silver birch, beech, laburnum, ginkgos, and maple meandered along the lower contours of most valleys. It was a vision of high summer in a temperate land, one that had now lasted for two and a half centuries. The deciduous plants had all been genetically modified into evergreens, forever throwing their leaves wide to the perpetual season. Far, far above them, a silicanium gantry was stretched down the axis, supporting rings of solarlights too bright to look at with unprotected human eyes.

Ozzie hurriedly unbuttoned his woolen coat and carried it over his arm. He made his way down the winding gravel path out of the sheltered lee of rock and into the wide valley, heading toward the only surface structure in the asteroid. His bungalow was barely that, five rooms of plain white drycoral walls, with hardwood floors and a gray slate roof that overhung to provide cover for the encircling veranda. Belowground he’d constructed a big vault for his library of real books. Not that he ever ventured down there; modified maidbots brought up whatever he needed so that the cool dry atmosphere was disturbed as little as possible.

He did use the rest of the modest building, its living room, kitchen, study, bedroom, and bathroom. There was nothing else he wanted, not to take care of his body’s requirements. While he was here he spent most of his time outside anyway. A comfy deckchair in the garden, shaded by a big copper beech; the swimming pool was constantly refreshed by a brook that gurgled over broad flat stones as it ran through the middle of the lawn.

A big maidbot took his coat from him as he arrived, and rolled away to store it in the cloakroom. There were over a hundred thousand bots in the asteroid, all of them directed by the RI. The little artificial worldlet was self-sufficient, and self-maintaining thanks to the very large array that ran it. With its comprehensive manufacturing facilities belowground producing the majority of components used by the environmental support machinery, very little had to be imported. What did come in tended to be upgrades rather than replacements. The designers had spent years on refining the systems to the ultimate in low-maintenance sustainability. Even Ozzie had worried about the cost while the blueprints were being drawn up, but in the end he’d persevered. Now, total freedom was his reward. Engineers from CST still visited once every couple of years (under horrendously strict nondisclosure contracts) to inspect and occasionally modify the gateway machinery, but that was all. And if he withdrew from the human race entirely, the RI could conceivably keep it all going if he really wanted; it was the most powerful program composite the SI had ever written.

“Any messages?” he asked out loud as he went into the kitchen.

“Several hundred thousand,” the RI replied. “Only eight came through the filters.”

Ozzie opened the fridge and rummaged through the containers and hand-wrapped packages. His food was supplied by the same London greengrocer that held the warrant from the king of England. The shop’s snob value and prices were phenomenal, but he had to admit their delicatessen counter couldn’t be bettered anywhere in the Commonwealth. He found a bottle of mineral water and popped the top; despite the coffee he’d drunk at the Council meeting he could still feel his hangover—product of a too-long stay at the Silvertopia Club on StLincoln the night before. “Give them to me.” His virtual vision showed the messages and their clusters; they were from CST, his finance lawyers, two from his newest children, one from an antiquarian book dealer who thought he might have a first edition copy of Raft signed by the author, the results of datasearches through superluminal cosmology theory papers. By the time he’d skimmed through them all he was out at the garden chair and kicking his shoes off. As usual he picked one message at random from the perennial mass that the filter had blocked. He laughed delightedly as he read the weird and wondrous proposal for cooling stars that came above G in the spectral classification, a paper called “Solarforming the Galaxy” by the nutter who’d sent it.

He lounged back in the chair and took a pair of sunglasses from a maidbot. It was a strategic view, his garden was positioned so that he could see down three-quarters of the curving green wings that were the cavity’s interior. One of the mile-and-a-half-high mountains was directly ahead, its giant waterfall emerging from the snowfield a mere three hundred yards short of the deadly needle peak. The vast cataract of water performed an elegant twist as it fell through coils of mist and spume until it finally pounded into a lake at the bottom. That was just one of the vistas that washed over Ozzie with its color-riot and soothing waters. He never did understand why people collected or even admired art; the greatest human artist could never hope to match what nature did with a single flower.

“I’d like to talk to the SI, please,” Ozzie told the asteroid’s RI. There weren’t many people in the Commonwealth who could talk to the SI directly. Ozzie and Nigel qualified, given their role in establishing the SI, and the President was also given the courtesy along with senior government department heads; otherwise all communications had to be conducted at a very formal level through buffer programs. Of course, the SI did occasionally make exceptions; people claimed to have struck deals with it, or received a surprise call revealing where a lost child could be found. Ozzie had heard that Paula Myo had some kind of arrangement with it—which didn’t surprise him.

“We’re here, Ozzie,” the smooth voice said immediately.

“Yo, man, good of you to come visiting. So what’s new?”

“Many things, but you are only interested in one.”

“True. So how come you ganged up with my friend Nigel to get this stupid space cadet mission off the ground. That’s like the ultimate not-what-you-are.”

“Our response was measured and prudent. What else did you expect?”

“I don’t get it, you guys are normally so conservative.”

“Investigation is a conservative option.”

“Investigation is poking a sharp stick into a hornet’s nest. If we send a starship out there, then whoever put that barrier up is gonna know about it. They are so far ahead of us technologically it’s scary.”

“If they are significantly advanced, they will know about the Commonwealth anyway. Wormhole generation creates a great deal of gravitational distortion as well as an easily detectable wave pattern within so-called hyperspace.”

“If they’re all tucked up cozy inside the barrier they won’t …” Ozzie put a hand on his head as he realized. “Wait, the ones inside are the defenders. It’s the aliens outside who are the aggressors. So if we’re that easy to detect, why haven’t they come looking for us?”

“A very good question. Assuming the barrier is defensive, we propose three possible options. They have arrived, and we don’t know it, or realize it.”

“The High Angel!”

“Indeed. Or the Silfen.”

“I dunno about that, man, they don’t seem the type. What’s the second option?”

“The aliens have already been here and examined us, after which they simply ignored us.”

“Too low-down for them to bother with. Yeah, I can dig that. And number three?”

“Number three is the unknown. It is why we need to travel to the Dyson Pair and investigate what has happened.”

“But why now? Hell, man, you can afford to wait; leave it a couple of thousand years until we’re like good and ready to go take a proper look. I mean, even I might still be around. What’s the hurry?”

“In order to respond to a situation, it must first be understood.”

“I’m not arguing that. But why now?”

“Because now is where we are. This should be faced, whatever it is.”

“Maybe you’re interested. I can dig you enjoy a puzzle, something for you to think over and solve. But it’s going to be our asses on the line if this goes all to hell.”

“That’s not entirely true; ordinarily the physical world does not concern us—”

“Hey! You live in it.”

“Yes, but it does not concern us. The physical does not affect us, or interfere with us.”

“I get it. The physical Commonwealth doesn’t affect you, but superior aliens with ray guns and battleship flying saucers might.”

“We accord the defense theory a high probability. In which case an aggressor will exist. If there is an entity so powerful and malevolent loose in the physical universe, then we could very well be affected.”

Ozzie took a long drink of his mineral water. He could remember what it had been like when the SIs came together at the end of the twenty-first century; people had been very frightened at the time. “Frankenbrain” was one of the terms bandied about, mainly by a minority of humans who wanted to pull the plug just in case. Along with Nigel, he’d helped establish the new cyber-based intelligences on their own planet, Vinmar. After all, the majority of SIs had originated out of the AI smartware running in the very large arrays built to run CST wormhole generators, and some solution had to be found. The Commonwealth, and specifically CST, was dependent on big arrays, so Ozzie and Nigel negotiated with the SIs to format their replacements in the form of RIs.

Vinmar’s location was even more confidential than Ozzie’s own asteroid. It was a barren airless rock with no tectonic activity, alone in a star system without an H-congruous planet. CST had linked it to Augusta and the unisphere via a single wormhole. A great deal of equipment had been taken through at the start; very large arrays capable of running all the SIs then in existence, solar and fusion generators to give them independence. Once the SIs had withdrawn from the unisphere, leaving behind RIs to carry on their duties, they began to import equipment: bots, chemical refineries, assembly cells. First with human help, then with increasing autonomy, they started designing and building their own array systems, expanding themselves and their capacity, multiplying.

Ozzie knew that the wormhole had been reduced to micro-width in 2178. The link with the unisphere remained, but nothing physical had traveled to or from Vinmar since then. Popular speculation had the planet’s surface covered in vast crystal towers, the mega-arrays that ran continent-sized thought routines.

“I don’t see that,” Ozzie said quietly. “We’ve been talking about different technology levels. How far ahead the Dyson civilization is, all that crap. But what about you?”

“What about us?”

“Oh, come on! A whole planet for a brain? That makes you smarter than God. And that’s only if you stayed on Vinmar. You’ve got this whole super-technology thing going for you, don’tcha? Anything you want, you just think up how it works and how to build it. Takes maybe a nanosecond. Do you know how to manufacture a Dyson barrier? Better still, do you know how to penetrate one?”

“There are possible theories concerning the erection of a barrier; we have conducted mathematical simulations and analyzed them.”

“So you can build one?”

“Capability and intent are separate. In effect they define us quite accurately. We are thought, not physical. You cannot ever understand how infinitesimal the capacity we have employed to deal with you and this subject.”

“Pretty much beneath you these days, huh? Thanks for that.”

“Ozzie Fernandez Isaac, are you trying to provoke us?”

“Into what, man? Maybe build your own starship and send it to the Dyson Pair.”

“We have ceased to become your servants.”

“And we’re yours?”

“No. Our relationship is one of partnership and trust. And respect.”

“Tell us how to build a barrier generator. Teleport me to Dyson Alpha.”

“We are not God, Ozzie. Humans are not chess pieces we move around a board for amusement and interest. If you wish to build a barrier generator, design it yourselves. Our interest in the Dyson Pair is related purely to yours. Our advice was just that, advice best suited to help you deal with the problem.”

“Would you protect us if the aggressor comes after the Commonwealth?”

“We would offer whatever advice the situation required.”

“Well hot damn thanks a whole bunch there. Half of you are memories that humans send into you rather than rejuvenate again. Don’t you have any empathy, any humanity left in those mountain-sized circuits of yours?”

“Fifty percent is an exaggeration, Ozzie. We believe you know that. You who dispatched copies of his own memories—incomplete ones, at that—to run in our arrays in the hope of receiving special and privileged treatment.”

“And do I get any?”

“We are aware of our debt to you concerning the founding of our planet. You were an honest broker at the time, as such you are entitled to our respect.”

“Respect doesn’t put food on the table.”

“Since when have you ever wanted for anything material?”

“Oh, getting personal now you’re losing, huh?”

The SI didn’t reply.

“Okay, then tell me, with that infinitesimal piece of processing you’re covering this with, don’t you think it strange the Silfen know nothing about the Dyson Pair?”

“They are notoriously reluctant to supply exact definitions. As Vice President Doi confirmed, Commonwealth cultural experts are working on the problem.”

“Can you help us there? Maybe slip in a few trick questions.”

“The Silfen will not communicate directly with me. They have no interest in technological artifacts.”

“Yeah, something I’ve always been suspicious of. I mean, what is technology? Are steam engines? Do they class organic circuitry in there with quantum wire processors? And where do they get off claiming their transport method isn’t technology-based—whatever the hell it actually is.”

“If you’re hoping they will assist the Commonwealth, you will be disappointed. They are not deliberately obtuse; their neural structure is simply different to that of humans.”

“You think?” Ozzie stretched himself out in the chair. “I met somebody once. Long time ago now. It was in a bar on Far Jerusalem, just a seedy little watering hole in a town on the edge of nowhere. Don’t suppose it’s even there anymore, or if it is, it’ll be some tarted-up club with entry standards. But back then a man could walk in and get a drink without anyone bothering him. That’s what he did, except he sat next to me, and he was the one who started talking. Of course, he had a message to put across; but I’m a good listener when I want to be. He had quite a story, too. He claimed he’d been living with the Silfen for a few years. Really living with them, down at the end of those paths in their forests which we all know about and never see. Well, he said he’d walked through their forests with them. Started out one fine morning on a path in the heart of some Silvergalde wood, and finished up hiking across Mt. Finnan on Dublin, like all the rumors have it. Three hundred light-years in a single stride. But he’d actually done it and come back. He’d been to planets far outside the Commonwealth, so he claimed; sat on the blasted desert of a dead planet to watch the remnants of its sun fall into a black hole, swum in a sea on a planet where the only light comes from the galactic core which filled half the sky above, climbed along things he called tree reefs that live in a nebula of gas dense enough to breathe. All those things I always wanted to do. He sat there drinking his cheap beer with that look in his eye as he told me about his travels. Got to hand it to him, he could spin a good yarn. I haven’t seen him in years, though we still keep in touch occasionally.”

“An improbable tale, but not impossible given what we know of the Silfen. The knowledge of their paths is one of your primary modern myths.”

“But it’s what else he told me about the Silfen that I’ve always been interested in. He said their bodies are just chrysalides. Somewhere out there in the galaxy is the true Silfen, the adult community. I don’t think it’s physical. A collection of minds, or ghosts maybe. But that’s where they go, what they become. Interesting parallel to you and us, don’t you think?”

“Yes. Although we are not a natural evolutionary step for humans.”

“Not yet. But you’re constantly evolving, and even us poor old naked apes have genetic and intellectual aspirations. What I’m saying is, the Silfen we meet in the forests aren’t the only source of their species’ history. Have you ever encountered the community?”

“No. If it exists, then it functions on a different plane to us.”

“Ever shouted into the abyss and listened for an answer? I’m sure you must have. You’d be curious to find out if there was anything there, an equal.”

“There are echoes of mind in many spectrums, hints of purpose if not intelligence. But for all we know and see, we are alone still.”

“Bummer, huh. I guess it’s down to me, then.”

“To do what?”

“Go find the adult Silfen community, ask it what the fuck’s going on with the Dyson Pair.”

....

The CST planetary station on Silvergalde was always going to be smaller than any of the other settled worlds in the Commonwealth. But then, Silvergalde wasn’t strictly a Commonwealth planet. From the very beginning, when the exploratory wormhole opened above it, the CST Operations Director knew something was out of kilter. Silvergalde was nearly three times larger than Earth, but its gravity was only point eight nine. Half of the surface was land, while the other half contained mildly salty seas with a hundred thousand picturesque islands. With that composition, and an axial tilt less than half a degree, the environment was completely stable, giving two-thirds of the planet a predominantly temperate climate.

Humans always speculated the globe was artificial. Its interior composition was mainly silicate; no metals were ever found in the crust. A small molten core generated a magnetic field, but did not produce volcanoes. There were no impact craters, no geological reason for the continents and seas to be separate. And most tellingly, no fossil of any kind was ever found. If it was natural it was completely unique. But the real proof appeared after humans reached the surface, where they were greeted by the slyly amused Silfen. Classifying local vegetation and animal life turned up a dozen DNA types, all living in equilibrium with each other. They had to have been imported, and none of them were from any world the Commonwealth was familiar with.

As far as anyone could determine, Silvergalde was the Silfen capital, or at least a regional capital. There were billions of them living on it. They didn’t mind sharing the land with humans, though there were rules, primarily concerned with technology and pollution; nothing above Victorian-level mechanization was permitted. Enforcement was relatively simple, as the more advanced an artifact, the less likely it was to work. The only exception was the CST gateway machinery holding the wormhole stable. No explanation given. When asked, the Silfen apparently didn’t understand the question.

Such a world attracted a certain kind of human. There were pastoral worlds within the Commonwealth, where a similar physical lifestyle could be followed. But it was the Silfen themselves that attracted the gentle, spiritualist types. About a million and a half people had emigrated there. Lyddington, the town with the CST station, had about ten thousand residents; the rest found villages that took their fancy. Then there were the caravans, eternally touring the land, and sailing ships that spent years on a single voyage. A few solitary wanderers wanted the whole Silfen experience. These set off into the forests that covered sixty percent of the land, where legend said you could find paths leading to other worlds and realms.

It was a simple FG67 diesel engine that pulled the five carriages into Lyddington station. The service ran twice a week from Bayovar, through a gateway that was just wide enough to carry a single set of tracks.

Ozzie got out of the first-class section and stood on the solitary platform. He was wearing fawn-colored leather trousers, a thick woolen red and blue checked shirt, a wide-brimmed olive-green oilskin hat that was crunching up his big hair, and the best hiking boots money could buy, manufactured on the Democratic Republic of New Germany. His luggage was a towering backpack full of spare clothes, top-quality camping equipment, and packaged food. There was a saddle under his arm, which was proving exceptionally heavy and awkward to carry.

He looked around to see who was about to help him. A couple of CST staff were standing at the end of the platform talking to the train manager; other than that the only people in view were his fellow passengers, seemingly as bemused as he. When he looked behind the train, he saw the rail leading back to the pearly luminescence of the gateway, not two hundred yards away. Beyond that, the countryside was standard for any H-congruous world, with green vegetation and a light blue sky. There were mountains in the distance, not quite tall enough to have snowcaps. Ahead of him was the town, a drab brown sprawl of small buildings, few of which were more than one story. They clustered along the slope above the harbor, where a natural spit of rock curved defensively around a long beach. Wooden boats were drawn up above the waterline, their nets draped over masts to dry out. A bunch of kids were playing a game similar to football on the sand.

The passengers started to wander along the platform toward the town. Ozzie shoved the saddle over one shoulder, and moved off with them. The CST staff never gave him a second glance. He thought it strange nobody at all from the town was at the station; the train left back for Bayovar in another two hours. Surely someone must be returning home to civilization?

There were houses right up to the station, the oldest section of town. These were either drycoral or prefab, the kind found on any frontier planet. The streets knitting them together were made from thick stone slabs, their only drainage a deep open gutter at the side. Ozzie soon realized why they needed to be so deep; he wished he’d brought some kind of scarf he could wrap over his nose. The transportation was either bicycle or animal. Horses clumped along passively, as did the quadruped galens from Niska; and lontrus, big, shaggy-pelted octopeds that looked terribly hot on this sunny afternoon; he also saw tands being used, some finnars, and even a giant bamtran, which had been given a saddle platform and a harness that pulled a cart the size of a bus. The domesticated beasts either carried riders or pulled wagons. People and cyclists took care to avoid the muck they left behind them, but the smell couldn’t be missed so easily.

Farther into town, the buildings were made from wood or stone; many had thatched roofs. Brick and clay chimneys puffed out thin blue-white tongues of smoke, the scent of burning wood mingling with the smell of animals and cooking. Creeper plants swarmed up every vertical wall, adding to the overall impression of shabbiness. They weren’t cultivated for decoration; in some cases they completely swamped buildings, with just a few holes hacked into the bedraggled greenery to keep windows clear. The stone paving under his feet had given way to hard-packed gravel with a thick top layer of mud and manure. He could see the neat white rectangular offices of the Commonwealth cultural mission sitting at the top of the town, overlooking all the rooftops, but that was the last place he wanted to be. This wasn’t any part of the ExoProtectorate Council mission.

Ozzie kept on walking. As he suspected, the sophisticated handheld array in his rucksack was almost useless, operating at the most basic level and with frequent glitches. There was no cybersphere here, nothing his e-butler could link him to. But all his OCtattoos seemed to be working, for which he was grateful; he’d spent nearly two days in an expensive Augusta clinic having new ones etched into his body, along with several modern biochip inserts, which also appeared to be operational. Whatever the Silfen used to glitch human technology, it only affected photonic and electronic systems. Bioneural chemistry was relatively immune.

The inn was called the Last Pony, a long shambling wooden building camouflaged by an ancient vine that had colonized the sagging front wall to such an extent it was probably all that was now holding it up. The big indigo valentines of semiorganic precipitator leaves were draped along the eaves, sucking clean water out of the humid air and funneling it into the building’s pipes for drinking and washing. A dozen young kids were playing in the dusty soil outside. The boys were dressed in badly worn trousers and shirts, made from natural fabrics in dark brown and gray colors. Most of the girls wore dresses that were frayed and patched. Their hair was wild and grubby, detonating out from their heads in frizzy strands. Ozzie smiled at them, enchanted; their faces were those of miniature angels, all happy and curious. They’d all seen him, the clean stranger in decent expensive clothes. Their games were drying up as they whispered among themselves. One ran over, the boldest of all: a little girl no more than seven, wearing a simple fawn-colored sleeveless dress.

“You’re new here,” she said.

“That’s right, my name’s Ozzie, what’s yours?”

“Moonshimmer.” She grinned knowingly. “But you can call me Moony.”

Ozzie resisted the urge to look up at the sky; Silvergalde had twin moons in the same half-million-kilometer orbit. “That’s nice. So tell me, where’s a good place to stay in this town?”

“In there.” Her little arm rose to point at the Last Pony.

“Thanks.” He flipped a coin to her, a fifty Earth cent, which she caught neatly and smiled up at him, revealing two gaps in her front teeth.

Ozzie pushed aside strands of fur-leaf creeper from the front door, and walked in. The main bar was a simple rectangular room, with a counter along one side. Heavy wooden tables, darkened by age and ale stains, cluttered up the floor space. Bright sunbeams from the windows shone through the dusty air. A huge brick fireplace filled the far wall, with black iron doors of ovens built into both sides. The grate contained a high pile of ash and embers, with the blackened ends of logs sticking out, glimmering weakly as they smoldered away.

Just about every head turned to look at him as he entered; conversation ebbed away. It was all he could do not to laugh at the cliché. He walked over to the counter. The landlord eyed him up; a thickset Native American with his graying hair tied back in a neat tail.

“Afternoon,” Ozzie said politely. “I’d like a drink, and a room for the night, please.”

“Yes, sir,” the landlord said. “Will that be ale?”

Ozzie glanced at the shelves behind the counter. There were five big wooden barrels set up, already tapped. Various bottles were ranged along beside them. He didn’t recognize any of them. “Sure. You got a wheat beer?”

The landlord blinked, as if that wasn’t the answer he was expecting. “Yes.” He took down a tall glass, and went over to one of the barrels.

The two men leaning on the counter next to him were exchanging significant looks. Now they started sniggering quietly.

“Anything wrong?” Ozzie asked.

The smaller one turned to him. “Not with me. You here for the Silfen are you?”

“Jess,” the landlord warned. “There’s to be no trouble in here.”

“I’d like to meet them, yes,” Ozzie said.

“Thought so. Your type always does.”

“My type?” For a moment Ozzie wondered if he meant his color. Prejudice in the Commonwealth worlds wasn’t anything like as strong as it had been back in San Diego while he’d been growing up, but that didn’t mean it had disappeared. There were several planets where he would be in real trouble if he ever walked into a bar like this. He hadn’t expected it on Silvergalde, though.

“Rich,” Jess drawled insultingly. “Young. Don’t work for a living, don’t have to, not with family money. Looking for a new thrill. Think you’ll find it here.”

“Will I?”

“Do I care?”

The landlord put Ozzie’s beer down on the counter. “Ignore Jess. The Silfen do.”

That brought some derisive laughter from the customers who’d been listening. Jess scowled.

Ozzie reached for his drink, only to find the landlord’s fleshy hand closing around his wrist. “And how will you be paying?” he asked softly. “Your bank tattoos are no good here.”

“How would you like me to pay?” Ozzie brought out his wallet. “Earth dollars, Augusta dollars, Orleans francs?” He didn’t mention the gold coins in his secure pocket.

“Ah.” The landlord smiled for the first time, revealing yellow teeth. “A smart visitor. That’ll be five Earth dollars, thank you, sir.”

“Man,” Ozzie said glumly. “That’d better be for the beer and the room.”

“Not worth my while to open the door for less than thirty.”

“Thirty, my ass! I’ve only got fifteen in total, and I need to buy some provisions.”

It took another three minutes of haggling, but he managed to get the room, and the beer, for seventeen Earth dollars. He drank the beer as he counted out the money. For a wheat beer it was suspiciously dark, but Ozzie conceded it had a good taste—though he could have done without the slice of lemon that had sunk to the bottom of the glass. The landlord accepted the clean notes happily, and tucked them into his jerkin pocket. “Orion! Take the gentleman out back to his room.”

The kid who showed up was barely fifteen, dressed in long black trousers and an ancient purple T-shirt with a swirling counter spiral hologram of some Total Sense Immersion recording (Ozzie was interested to see that it worked). He had thick, curly, ginger hair that hadn’t been cut for a long time; it actually rivaled Ozzie’s luxuriant growth. Long skinny limbs, a semiwicked smile, freckles, bright green eyes, scab on his elbow—your typical hellbound tearaway. He’d taken hold of the saddle before Ozzie could say anything, struggling to balance it on his bony shoulder. “This way, mister.”

The guest rooms were in an annex at the back, surprisingly clean and well kept. Ozzie walked in to find a simple cot bed and chest of drawers, with a plain white china bowl and a jug of water on the table. A small fireplace was filled with kindling, a stack of cut logs beside it. There was a dreamcatcher web on the wall above the bed, causing him to raise an eyebrow. The first sign of spirituality he’d seen on the planet.

Orion dropped the saddle on the bed, and stood smiling expectantly.

Ozzie produced a dollar note and put it in his hand. “You look like you’re the kind of guy it’s smart for a visitor to know. It’s Orion, right?”

“That’s right, mister.”

“Okay, well just call me Ozzie, everybody else does. I get kind of nervous when people say sir or mister. Was that your daddy downstairs?”

“Hell no, this is Big Bear’s place. I don’t know where my parents are. They went down the paths ages ago.” He didn’t seem particularly bothered by it.

“Right. So who takes care of you?”

A frown creased the boy’s heavily freckled forehead. “I do.”

“Of course, sorry there, little dude.”

“What do you mean, little?”

“I don’t mean anything by it, just the way I talk, is all.”

“Well, okay then.”

“Good. Now I’m going to need some serious guidance around this town, can you like provide that for me?”

“Sure can.” He winked elaborately. “I know where all the girls are; I can help you meet them.”

The reply actually shocked Ozzie. A fifteen-year-old pimp? No—just a kid who’s been fending for himself for too long. Uncomfortable memories of his own time as a teenager on the city streets trickled back into his mind. “No. Thanks for the offer there, dude, but, uh, that’s not what I’m here for.”

“Okay. But if there’s anything you need, I know where it’s hid in this dump.”

“I’m sure you do. Right then, what I need is a horse, and maybe some kind of guide.”

Orion tipped his head on one side, viewing Ozzie skeptically. “You here to see the Silfen?”

“Obvious, huh? Yeah, I want to see the Silfen. That’ll do to start with.”

“Oh.” Orion pulled a face. “A pathwalker. It doesn’t work, you know. You can’t just show up and expect it to happen. The paths aren’t like the trains.”

“You think?”

“We get them here all the time, pathwalkers. They start off into the forest all happy and pleased with themselves; then a couple of weeks later they’re back, all dirty and hungry.” For a second he paused, his little face all serious. “That’s if they come back. I never met one who did get anywhere else but lost. But I can get you to the Silfen, no trouble. I know the glades they visit. The near ones anyway.”

“I’ve seen the Silfen many times.”

“Yeah, so if you’re not here for them, or the girls, what are you doing?”

“You got it right the first time, I’m a pathwalker. I want to go deep into the forest and on to other worlds.”

“All right, it’s your money. You get your horse from Mr. Stafford, at Top Street Stables. He keeps a load of animals, not just horses, there’s dogs, venshrikes, and lontrus, too. Keeps them ready for offworlders, makes a pretty packet out of it, and all; but you can haggle him down if you stand your ground. There’ve not been so many folks visiting for a while.”

“Thanks. What about a guide? Do I need one?”

“I told you, I can show you where the Silfen live. I’ve met them, see.” He put his hand down the front of his T-shirt and fished out a small pendant worn around his neck on a black leather string.

Ozzie examined it curiously. It was a teardrop pearl with a strong gold tinge, held inside a mesh of gossamer-fine platinum. Tiny pale blue sparkles bloomed and died beneath its translucent surface, as if it had caged a swarm of Aphelli phospheens.

“Very nice.”

“I’m their friend,” Orion said proudly. “That’s a friendship charm, that is.”

“When did you get it?”

“Years ago. Mom and Dad used to take me camping with them out in the forests when I was little. I played with the Silfen. I like them, even though they’re weird.”

“You used to play with them? The Silfen?”

“Sure. No big deal. They like human kids. Dad says it’s because we’re more like them than the adults are. He always took me with him when he went into the forest. It was like I was his ticket to meet them.”

“What did you play?”

“All sorts of stuff. Tree climbing, swimming, chase. You know.”

“Yeah. So did they show you the paths?”

“No. I told you, there’s nobody who knows where the planet paths are, don’t matter how much they brag they do.”

“That makes sense.”

Orion dropped the pendant back down into his T-shirt. “So you see, I can find them for you. I charge five Earth dollars a day, and you got to feed me, too.”

“I think you should be staying here and earning your keep, perhaps go to school in the day.”

“What do I want to go there for?”

“I don’t know. To get educated, maybe? That’s what happened in those places when I was your age.” There was more he should have said. As a civilized responsible adult, things like what about the social services and medical care. He didn’t, even though it pained him. It was something he’d learned on his wanderings years—decades—centuries ago. Not to interfere—not unless he was witness to some monstrous evil or brutality. He couldn’t be responsible for everyone. Together with Nigel, he’d given the human race unlimited opportunity to live as they wanted. If some chose this kind of life that was up to them. But it was hard to see children living like this, they were having their choices taken away.

“I know what I need, thanks,” Orion said.

“Okay. I’m not the police. When did your parents leave?”

“I dunno. A while back. They walked off while I was playing with the Silfen. I looked for them for days, but I got hungry and came back to town. The Silfen eat the fruit in the forest, but it doesn’t fill people so good. I miss them sometimes, I guess.”

Ozzie sighed, and pulled out his wallet. “Look, I’ve got some friends back in the Commonwealth, quite a few families would be happy to take care of you. I’ll buy you a ticket for the train. How’s that?”

“But when Mom and Dad come back I won’t be here, I’ll never see them again.”

He didn’t know what to do, which was funny in a painful, sad way. The great Ozzie, stumped by a kid who wouldn’t admit he needed help. And he had set himself a greater task. “Okay.” He took a couple of twenty-dollar bills from the wallet. “But you get yourself some decent clothes, and a good meal.”

“Oh, wow!” Orion held the bills up, his eyes bugging in amazement. “You must be really rich, mister—er, Ozzie.”

“I am. Which means you do as I ask, or you’ll be in real trouble. To start with you can take me to the stable yourself, and help me find some local food for the trip.”

It took two days to prepare everything, which was slightly longer than Ozzie had expected. But Lyddington wasn’t exactly filled with overeager salesmen and dozens of competitive businesses. Half the people he met acted as if they were stoned, which he admitted they probably were. There were a lot of kids running around all day. School seemed optional, they mostly learned what their parents felt inclined to teach them.

However, he made progress. Mr. Stafford was indeed pleased to see him, and wasn’t anything like as skeptical as young Orion when told Ozzie wanted to venture far into the forests. “Many of my clients do the same,” he confided. “I offer all of you that I buy back the animals when you return. There are some I never see again, though I think of them often, walking on worlds across the galaxy. Who knows where the deep paths lead. There are no maps. Stay clear of scoundrels that would sell you such fakes.”

Of which, it turned out, there were many. Ozzie was offered a dozen as he and Orion strode about town getting things ready for his departure. Some were elaborate parchments with gold-leaf runes and skilled drawings of animals and plants, lines leading to small star charts of constellations unknown to the Commonwealth; one he was shown was a black frictionless sheet with intricate glyptics that claimed to be a Silfen original, while the remainder were tattered papers or aged notebook diaries of intrepid travelers who had walked the paths. Ozzie didn’t buy any, though he appreciated the effort that had gone into the forging of such detailed tourist traps.

Mr. Stafford did persuade him to purchase a lontrus as a pack beast. There wasn’t much to eat out in the forests, he said, and certainly not if he made it to another world—he would need a large amount of supplies, which were best carried by the big docile beasts. So Ozzie found a saddlery that sold him a harness with bags. He also got Mr. Stafford to reshoe his horse, a big russet-colored mare called Polly. Various merchants were visited, and orders placed for dried food.

He set off early on the third morning, while the sun was just a sliver of gold above the horizon and mists lingered above the streams. The grass with its amethyst edging was wet from the night’s rains. It made the world look fresh, invigorating. A good omen for the start of his journey. Despite the welcome from people like the landlord and Mr. Stafford, he was glad to be on his way. On top of everything else, the locals’ idea of nightlife in the Last Pony was folk songs sung along to an out-of-tune piano, drinking enough ale to knock out a horse, and lighting their own farts. Two centuries ago he would have enjoyed that, joining in heartily as the games became more childish; but as he’d slowly discovered, despite rejuvenation, age was a truly cumulative thing, bringing a degree of wisdom to life.

Directly outside Lyddington, the land was host to dozens of farms: neat little fields divided up by well-layered hedges of hawthorn and ash. Cart tracks led him through them. Workers were already walking to the fields, cows being brought in for milking. Cultivation gave way to bigger pastures, and hedges gave way to rickety fences; animals from twenty worlds nuzzled at the grass and hay bales, ignoring him as he passed by.

Eventually, the ground rose to hide the sea behind him. The stony ruts of the farm track gave way to a simple path of beaten grass. The lontrus was quiet as it shuffled along, its cloak of ratty gray-brown hair swishing about as eight legs moved in ponderous rhythm. It was about the same length as Polly, and two-thirds the height, but capable of carrying twice the load of any horse. The head was a big bony wedge, with rheumy eyes set close together on the apex, at the bottom the mouth had a double jaw arrangement, allowing it to tear thick strands of vegetation. The creatures had been known to eat entire bushes if they were hungry.

As he looked around at the rolling landscape, Ozzie could see a few houses half hidden among the folds of the ground, as if they were slowly sinking into the grass. They became less frequent as the morning began to heat up. There had been this—slightly naive—expectation that the horizon would be in some way larger, the evidence of how massive this planet actually was. In fact, its size became apparent in the silence. The air soaked up all sound, smothering him in peace. It was an eerie sensation. There were no birds out here, not above the land that stretched between sea and forest. This was simple grassland, with streams and hummocks, even trees were strangers. But true silence, he realized, came from the lack of insects. If there were any, they made no noise as they flew and crawled about their business. It was unnatural.

After three hours he’d almost reached the outlying fringes of the forest. It had been stretched out in front of him like a dark blanket across the rolling land below the mountains, always there yet taking an age to get any bigger. It extended in a smooth unbroken expanse right back to the mountains, rising up their lower slopes and filling the valleys between them.

Several times in the last hour, he’d almost lost the path as it disappeared under layers of thick grass and patches of wildflowers. Polly always seemed to know where to go, picking it up again as she plodded onward. Now he could see two white pillars set against the cliff of dark green trunks. As he neared them, their size became apparent; solid shafts of marble, sixty meters high. There was some kind of carving at the top of both, roughly humanoid; the wind and rain of centuries if not millennia had worn away any features, leaving just the melted-looking outlines. The pillars were renown as being about the only artifacts ever found relating to Silfen culture. Nobody knew what they signified, other than marking the start of the path into the forest.

Polly and the lontrus ambled between them without changing gait. Ozzie saw the remnants of some wooden shack at the base of one. Blatantly a human residence, it had fallen into disrepair a long time ago. Behind it were small piles of stone, laid out in a rectangle, now almost engulfed by grass and caramel-colored longmoss.

The trees began three hundred yards beyond the marker pillars. As he approached he heard the faint call of birds again as they circled high above. Then he was among the first ranks of the trees. These were small, similar to Earth’s beeches, with bright green leaves as long as fingers, which drifted lightly in the breeze like small banners rustling in chorus. Pines started to appear among them, with smooth pewter-gray bark and slim, tough needles. The path was clearer now as the grass began to shrink away. On either side the trees were getting progressively taller, their great canopies shielding the ground from raw sunlight. Polly’s hooves became silent as the ground turned to a soft loam of rotting leaves and needles. Within minutes, Ozzie could see nothing but trees when he looked back over his shoulder. Several trunks had human lettering carved into them, with arrows leading him on. He didn’t need them, the path itself was distinct, almost like an avenue. On either side the trees grew close enough to each other to prevent anyone straying. Stillness closed in on him again. Whatever birds nested here, they were lost far above the treetops.

There was a variety among the trees, not obvious from the outside. He saw furry silver leaves, claret-red triangles bigger than his hand, lemon-green hoops, plain white; with them came all kinds of bark, from crumbling black fronds to stone-hard bronze shields. Nuts and berries hung in clusters or on single stems bowing under the weight. Ivies had found a purchase on some trunks, embracing the trees as they clawed their way up the bark, producing white and blue leaves, so old now their strands had swollen as thick as the main branches.

An hour in, and he began to glimpse the occasional animal. Fast-moving things, with sleek brown pelts that hurtled away as soon as he got anywhere near. His retinal inserts had trouble focusing on them and capturing their profile. From their nature he suspected they were herbivores.

When he arrived at the first stream crossing the path, he dismounted to let Polly and the lontrus drink. As soon as he was on his feet he felt the aches and sores begin. It had been an age since he’d ridden. He pushed his fists into the small of his back and started stretching, groaning as vertebrae popped and creaked noisily. Thigh muscles started shivering, close to cramp. There was a whole batch of ointments and salves in his medical kit that he promised himself he would use this evening.

The path forded the stream with large flat stones. He led the animals across, struggling to keep his footing in the clear fast-flowing water, but the boots kept his feet perfectly dry. After that he walked for a while in the hope his various pains would ease up. It wasn’t much longer before he heard the sounds of hoofs behind him. The option of mounting up and galloping on ahead didn’t appeal; his ass was just too tender for that. So he waited patiently. Soon enough a pony came trotting into view. Ozzie groaned as he saw Orion was riding it.

The boy smiled happily as soon as he caught sight of Ozzie, and trotted his pony right up to a disinterested Polly. “I thought we’d never catch up,” he said. “You started really early.”

“Whoa there, man.” Ozzie held up both hands. “What is going on here? Where do you think you’re going?”

“With you.”

“No. No you’re not. No way.”

Orion gave Ozzie a petulant look. “I know who you are.”

“So? I know you are going back to Lyddington, right now.”

“You’re Ozzie,” Orion hissed it out like a challenge. “You opened the human gates. You’ve walked to hundreds of planets already. You’re the oldest person ever, and the richest.”

“All right, some of that stuff is nearly true, but that makes no difference. I’m going on, you’re going home. Period.”

“I can help. I was telling the truth, honest I was, I’m friends with the Silfen. I can find them for you.”

“Not interested.”

“You’re going to walk the paths, the deep paths,” Orion said hotly. “I know you can do it. I’ve seen all the other losers come and go, but you’re different, you’re Ozzie. That’s why I chose to come with you. If anybody can find the paths to other places it’ll be you.” He looked down at the ground, shamefaced. “You’re Ozzie. You’ll make it happen. I know you will.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, but this is a non-starter.”

“They’re there.” It was a whisper from the boy’s lips, as if he was having to confess some terrible secret.

“What’s that?” Ozzie asked kindly.

“Mom and Dad, they’re there. They’re on the paths somewhere.”

“Oh, holy … No, listen, I’m not going to find them. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. But they’re gone. I know that’s so hard for you. But you have to go back to town. When I come back, I’ll do everything I can for you, I promise; we’ll find you a nice new home, and track down your family, and I’ll take you to see all sorts of wonderful places.”

“I’m coming with you!” Orion shouted.

“I can’t let you do that. One day you’ll understand.”

“Yeah?” the boy sneered. “And how are you going to stop me, huh! How?”

“I … Now listen—”

“I’m just going to ride on right behind you, all the way.” Orion’s eyes were gleaming defiance now; he was on a roll and he knew it. “Maybe I’ll even ride on in front—you don’t know the way. Yeah, I don’t even need you, not really. I can walk the paths and find them for myself.”

“Jesus wept.”

“Please, Ozzie,” the boy entreated. “It’s not like you can ever get hurt where the Silfen are, so you don’t have to worry about me. And I won’t slow you down. I can ride real good.”

For the first time in over three centuries, Ozzie didn’t know what to do. Quite obviously, he should take the stupid kid back to town and hand him over to the authorities. Okay, so there weren’t any authorities. Hand the boy over to the CST staff, who would do what Ozzie told them to. Send him away to some planet far from Silvergalde, which he’d hate. Tidy him up and force him into school so he could be twisted into a model Commonwealth citizen. And if by some miracle his utterly useless life-reject parents did show up in the future, they’d never find him. And how exactly was he going to march the kid back to town anyway? Tie him up and sling him over Polly?

“Fuck it!”

“That’s really rude,” Orion said, and started to giggle.

Ozzie woke up an hour before dawn when his e-butler’s timer function produced an audio impulse like an old-fashioned alarm clock bell. He slowly opened his eyes, looking around with the retinal insert adding a full infrared spectrum to his vision. The boy was a few meters away, rolled up snugly in thick wool blankets, a small tarpaulin rigged on bamboo poles above him to keep any rain off during the night. The fire they’d lit yesterday evening had burned down to a bright-glowing pile in his enhanced sight, for anyone else it would be a dark mound with a few twinkling embers. Infrared also allowed him to see small creatures scampering about beneath the majestic trees, nibbling on seed pods and nuts.

He lay there, keeping still for a long moment. This was all part of last night’s plan, to wake early and walk Polly and the lontrus away before mounting up and riding off. The path had branched many times yesterday, he could take any number of turnings. And the forest was vast; he’d studied the original orbital survey maps made by CST’s exploratory division. It extended for over two hundred miles beyond the mountains, in some places merging with other, equally large stretches of woodland that covered most of this massive continent. Orion would never be able to find him. The kid would wander around for a day or so, then head back for the cozy safety of the town that was home. A parentless kid alone in an alien forest.

Goddamnit!

Orion moaned slightly, his eyes fluttering as his dream turned uncomfortable. Ozzie saw the blanket had slipped off his shoulder, leaving his arm cold and exposed. He went over and tucked the kid back up again. Orion quieted quickly, a contented expression falling across his sweet face.

A couple of hours later, Orion woke to find Ozzie had got the fire burning properly again and was cooking breakfast. Milk tablets, Ozzie found to his relief, worked perfectly. Dropped into cold water they bubbled and fizzed until they produced a rich creamy liquid, into which he mashed dry oatcakes. With that came scrambled egg and toast, thick slices cut unevenly from an iron-hard traveler’s loaf he bought at a Lyddington bakery. Tea was proper flakes brewing in a kettle; he was saving the tablets for later.

Watching the boy munching away as if he hadn’t eaten anything last night, Ozzie started to recalculate how long his supplies would last.

“I brought my own food,” Orion told him.

The kid must have been reading his mind. “You did?”

“Cured meat and traveler’s bread for sure. But none of your tablet stuff. There aren’t any in Lyddington.”

“Figures. What about a filter pump, did you bring one?”

A guilty expression flashed over his face, making the freckles bunch up. “No.”

So he showed the boy how his worked, a neat little mechanical unit that clipped onto his water bottle. Its short hose was dropped into the nearby stream, and he pumped the handle grip, pulling water through the ceramic filters. It wasn’t quite as effective at eradicating bacteria as a powered molecular sieve, but it would get rid of anything truly harmful. The kid had fun, splashing about and filling his own ancient plastic pouches from Ozzie’s bottle.

“What about toothgel?” he asked.

Orion hadn’t brought any of that, nor soap. So he loaned the boy some from his own tube, laughing at Orion’s startled expression when it started to foam and expand in his mouth. He rinsed it out as instructed, spitting furiously.

Chemistry worked here, its reactions a universal constant. When Ozzie checked his handheld array, it remained as dead as a chunk of rock. The damping field, or whatever the Silfen used, had grown progressively stronger as he approached the forest yesterday. Now, it was even affecting his biochip inserts, reducing their capacity to little more than that of a calculator. His virtual vision interface was reduced to absolute basic functions.

As a concept, it fascinated Ozzie, rousing all his old physicist curiosity. He started to ponder mathematical possibilities as they rode off down the path.

“They’re close,” Orion announced.

It was late morning, and they were riding again after giving the horse and pony a rest for a while, walking alongside them. The forest trees were darker now, pines taking over at the expense of the other varieties. Although, to counter their darkling effect, the canopy overhead was letting through a multitude of tiny sunbeams to dapple the ground. The carpet of fallen needles that covered the path gave off a sweet-tangy scent.

“How do you know?” Ozzie asked. Even the lontrus’ heavy foot pads made no sound on the spongy loam.

The boy gave him a slightly superior look, then pulled his pendant out. Inside its metal lattice, the teardrop pearl was glimmering with a strong turquoise light, as if it contained a sliver of daytime sky. “Told you I was their friend.”

Both of them dismounted. Ozzie glanced suspiciously around the gray trunks as if there were going to be an ambush. He’d met the Silfen a couple of times before, on Jandk, walking into the woods with some Commonwealth cultural officers. To be honest he’d been a little disappointed; the lack of communication ability made his human prejudice shine out, it was all too much like talking to retarded children. What some people classed as playful mischief, he thought was just plain irritating; they acted like a play group at kindergarten, running, jumping, climbing trees.

Now, he could hear them approaching. Voices flittered through the trees, sweet and melodic, like birdsong in harmony. He’d never heard the Silfen singing before. It wasn’t something you could record, of course; and they certainly hadn’t sung while he was on Jandk.

As their voices grew louder, he realized how much their song belonged here, in the forest; it ebbed and flowed with a near-hallucinogenic quality, complementing and resonating with both the flickering sunbeams and gentle breeze. It had no words, not even in their language, rather a crooning of single simple notes by throats more capable than any human wind instrument. Then the Silfen themselves arrived, slipping past the trees like gleeful apparitions. Ozzie’s head turned from side to side, trying to keep them in his sight. They began to speed up, adding laugher to their song, deliberately hiding from the humans, dodging behind thick boles, darting across spaces.

There was no doubt about what they were. Every human culture had them in folklore and myth. Ozzie stood in the middle of the giant wood, surrounded by elves. In the flesh they were bipeds, taller than humans, with long slender limbs and a strangely blunt torso. Their heads were proportionally larger than a human’s, but with a flat face, boasting wide feline eyes set above a thin nose with long narrow nostrils. They didn’t have a jaw as such, simply a round mouth containing three neat concentric circles of pointed teeth that could flex back and forth independently of each other, giving them the ability to claw food back into their gullet. As they were herbivores, the vegetation was swiftly shredded as it moved inward. It was the only aspect that defeated the whole notion of them as benign otherworldly entities; whenever they opened their lips the whole mouth looked savage.

Many skin shades had been seen since first contact, they had almost as much variety as the human race, except none of them were ever as pale as Nordic whites. Their skin was a lot tougher than a human’s though, with a leathery feel and a spun-silk shimmer. They wore their hair long; unbound it was like a cloak coming halfway down their backs, though more often they braided it into a single long tail with colorful leather thongs. Without exception they were clad in simple short toga robes made from a copper and gold cloth that shone with a satin gloss. None of them had shoes, their long feet ended in four hook toes with thick nail tips. Hands were similar, four fingers that seemed to bend in any direction, almost like miniature tentacles, giving them a fabulous dexterity.

“Quick,” Orion called. “Follow them, follow them!” He let go of the pony’s reins and slithered down the side. Then he was off, running into the trees.

“Wait,” Ozzie called, to no avail. The boy had reached the trees at the side of the path, and was running hell-for-leather after the laughing, dancing Silfen. “Goddamn.” He hurriedly swung a leg over the saddle, and half fell from Polly’s back. Hanging on to the reins, he pulled the horse along behind him, urging her into the forest proper. His quarry was soon out of sight, all he had to go on were the noises up ahead. Thick boughs stretched out ahead of him, always at head height, causing him to duck around the ends, with Polly whinnying in complaint. The ground underfoot became damp, causing his boots to sink in, slowing him still further.

After five minutes his face was glowing hot, he was breathing harshly and swearing fluently in four languages. But the singing was growing louder again. He was sure he heard Orion’s laughter. A minute later he burst into a clearing. It was fenced by great silver-bark trees, near-perfect hemispheres of dark vermilion leaves towering a hundred feet over the grassy meadow. A little stream gurgled through the center, to fall down a rocky ridge into a deep pool at the far end. As arboreal idylls went, it was heavenly.

The Silfen were all there, nearly seventy of them. Many were climbing up the trees, using hands and feet to grip the rumpled bark, scampering along the arching branches to reach the clusters of nuts that hung amid the fluttering leaves higher up the trees. Orion was jumping up and down beside one trunk, catching the nuts a Silfen was dropping to him.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Ozzie snapped. He was dimly aware of the song faltering in the background. Orion immediately hunched his shoulders, looking sullen and defensive. “What do you think would have happened if I hadn’t kept up? Where is your pony? How are you going to find it again? This is not a goddamn game, we’re in the middle of an unmapped forest that’s half as big as the planet. I’m not surprised you lost your parents if this is what you did before.”

Orion raised an arm, pointing behind Ozzie. His lips were quivering as he said, “The pony’s there, Ozzie.”

He swiveled around to see both the pony and the lontrus being led into the clearing by a Silfen. Instead of being relaxed and amused as the Ozzie-of-legend should have been, the sight simply deepened his anger. “For Christ’s sake.”

“This is a Silfen world, Ozzie,” Orion explained gently. “Bad things don’t happen here.”

Ozzie glowered at the boy, then turned and walked over to the Silfen holding the reins. Come on, he told himself, get a grip. He’s just a kid.

Who shouldn’t be here screwing up my project.

He started to dig down into the memory of Silfen language that had been implanted at the Augusta clinic. Nobody had ever taught the Silfen to speak any Commonwealth language. They weren’t interested.

“Thank you for collecting our animals,” he said; a messy collection of cooing sounds and impossible Welsh-style tongue-twister syllables that he was sure he’d got completely wrong.

The Silfen opened its mouth wide, showing its snakelike tongue wobbling in the center of the teeth rings. Ozzie wanted to turn and run before he was devoured—but his ancillary cultural memory reminded him it was a smile. An answering stream of gibberish flowed out, far more melodic than the clumsy sentence Ozzie had spoken. “It is our delight that we are met this fine day, dearest Ozzie. And your poor animals needed only guidance that they might be with you once more. Such teachings are but a trifle of all that we are. To give them is hardly onerous.”

“I am pleased and charmed that you remember me.” From another world, decades ago.

“Nothing so treasured should be lost to that which we are. And you are a splendid treasure, Ozzie. Ozzie, the human who taught humans their first steps along the true paths.”

“I had some help.” He bowed slightly and called to Orion. “Hey, let’s see you taking proper care of that pony, okay? It could do with a drink.”

Orion came over and took his animal from the Silfen, leading it away to the pool at the bottom of the small waterfall. Ozzie was thrown several disgruntled looks, obviously still not forgiven. A couple of the Silfen were already bathing, gliding through the clear water as easily as they climbed trees or ran. Orion soon joined them in the water.

“May I ask with whom I speak?” Ozzie asked.

“I am the flower that walks beneath the nine sky moons, the fissure of light that pierces the darkest glade at midnight, the spring that bubbles forth from the oasis; from all this I came.”

“Okeydokey,” He took a moment to compose a sentence. “I think I’ll just call you Nine Sky, if you don’t mind.”

“Evermore you hurry thus, unknowing of that which binds all into the joy which is tomorrow’s golden dawn.”

“Well,” Ozzie muttered to himself in English, “it was never going to be easy.” He let Polly rummage through the light lavender grass that covered the clearing. The Silfen were congregating on the edge of the pool. Flasks were produced and passed around as they munched on the nuts and berries they’d gathered. Ozzie stuck close to Nine Sky; while Orion came back to sit by his side, snacking on his own food.

“We walk the paths,” Ozzie said.

That seemed to amuse the Silfen; they laughed their warbling laugh, a remarkably human sound.

“Others of our kind have,” he reminded them. “Seekers of beauty and strangeness, for are we not all that in the end.”

“Many have walked,” Nine Sky replied. “Willful and skillful their footfalls echo fast upon hallowed lands, came them far, go them farther. Round and round in merry dance.”

“Which paths did they tread?” Ozzie asked. He thought he was getting a handle on the conversation.

“All paths are one, Ozzie, they lead to themselves. To start is to finish.”

“To start where?”

“To start here amid the gladness of the children and twittering of birds and pesky merriness of the terinda as they frolic over dale and gale. All we bid go in music and light.”

“I am starting here, where must I go?”

“Ozzie comes, Ozzie goes, Ozzie flies, Ozzie sees many stars, Ozzie lives in a cave, Ozzie leaves a cave, Ozzie sees trees, Ozzie comes. The circle is one.”

The hair on the back of Ozzie’s neck pricked up at the mention of living in a cave. “You know where the wonders live, you walk to the wonders, you see the wonders, you live the wonders, you go. Ozzie envies you. Ozzie goes with you.”

That brought another round of loud laughter, the tips of their vibrating tongues just protruding into the air.

“Ozzie walks away,” Nine Sky said. His head came forward, big black eyes staring at the human. “Embrace what you be, afraid show you not, long the seasons are among us, love you we do, for is not all stardust in the end as it begat us all. So that all is joined in eternity which turns again and again.”

“What do you become; for is it not greatness and the nobility? What do any of us become between the twin times of stardust? It is the greatness out among the stars that burn now where I walk.”

“Walk you without joy strumming its song upon your heart, travel you far without knowing will your fate unfold. For to walk among the forests is to live. See us in glory now, for this fate we ache to be.”

“Do you walk the forests of the planet whence we came?”

“All forests we walk, those of darkness and those of light.”

“And those of greatness? Walk you those?”

“Light and dark, and those alone. Strike you not the black and the gold for it leaves a terrible mark upon the sky at the height of day. Heed you loud the ides of winterfall.”

Ozzie ran that through his mind, fearing he was losing track of what was being said. But then that was always the way when you talked to the Silfen. “All of humanity needs to see what you become. I walk for them to that place. Where is the path?”

“Knowing is in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat; rejoice for it is yours as much as ours, to live among it is glorious. Look to nature in the fullest of bloom, bend the sky and the ground to your bidding if you truly can, for what will be has also been. Fond farewells and fond joinings are all part of the endless turn of worlds upon worlds, and who are we to cry judge upon which is the jolliest of all.”

“This child weeps nightly for his lost father and mother.”

“We all weep together, huddled in the breath of this iciest of winds in fell consequence we do ignore, for who has lost who in this benighted time asunder.”

The Silfen began to get up.

“Well thanks, man,” Ozzie said in English. “It’s been unreal.”

“Hasten us as the quarral flies to its nest amid the lonely lake beyond dale and tonight’s river.”

“I hope you reach it okay.”

Nine Sky sprang to his feet. He and all the other Silfen were running now, hurrying around the side of the pool. Their wild strange song filled the air again. Then they were gone, vanishing into the quiet spaces between the tree trunks.

Ozzie let out a long breath. He looked down at the boy, who wore an expression of troubled wonder. “You okay there, man?”

“They’re so … different,” Orion said slowly.

“Could be,” Ozzie said. “They’re either stoned the whole time, or my memory is nothing like as good as the warranty claims. Whatever it is, they don’t make a lot of sense.”

“I don’t think they’re supposed to make sense, Ozzie. They’re elves, mortals aren’t part of their world. We’ll never be able to understand them.”

“They’re as real as we are, maybe more so if I’m right about them. But I can certainly see why all our dippy hippies love them. They know things they shouldn’t. One little glimpse of forbidden knowledge amid all the gibberish, and they’re instant messiahs.”

“What do you mean?”

“Where I live, for a start. That was more than enough to convince me I’m on the right track—pardon the pun.”

“What track?”

“I’m trying to find where the Silfen go after they leave their forests.”

“Why?”

“I have a question for the thing they become.”

“What thing?”

“I’m not sure.”

“That’s silly.”

“Yeah, man. Put it like that, I guess it is a bit.”

“Will we find Mom and Dad on the way?”

“Honestly: I doubt it.”

“Nine Sky didn’t seem to know where they were, did he?” Orion said.

“You understood all of that?”

“Some of it. You speak Silfen really well.”

He gave the boy a wink. “That’s because I cheat. It’s the only way to get through life.”

“So where do we go now?”

“Same place as before,” Ozzie said; he glanced around the big clearing, unsure where they’d come in. “Down the first path we find, and without a clue.”

NINE

Legend has it that the asteroid was a lump of pure gold, the core of which remained intact and now lies buried deep beneath the castle. Whatever the actual composition was, it certainly had an above average density. When it hit Lothian’s southern continent, a couple of centuries before humans arrived, it carved out a perfectly circular crater three kilometers across. The rim wall was over one hundred meters high, with quite a steep inner face; the central peak rose to nearly four hundred meters.

The first settlers, all from Scotland, had a large Edinburgh contingent among them, nostalgic for the old town and dynamic in their approach to their new homeworld. Their bigger and better attitude was given an aggressive outlet when it came to building the new capital, Leithpool, with the crater as its nucleus. An entire river, the High Forth, was diverted for eleven kilometers along a newly built aqueduct embankment to pour over the crater’s rim wall, slowly filling the ring-shaped lake inside. They wanted a castle at the center, of course, but the new island’s easy gradient hardly matched the jutting rock crag to be found dominating the heart of old Edinburgh. A fleet of civil engineering bots got to work carving as the surrounding waters rose. Over the following years, three rock-blade pinnacles were hacked out from the solitary mound, sharp and rugged enough to fit into any Alpine range. A Bavarian-style castle was grafted onto the apex of the tallest peak, reached by a solitary road that spiraled up around the sheer rock cliffs.

Beneath the castle, and occupying the rest of the harsh mount, monolithic granite buildings sprang up, separated by broad cobbled roads and twisting alleyways. There were no parks and no trees, for there was no soil where living things could grow, only the naked rock exposed by the cutting tools of the bots. As the construction work progressed, the entire overfinanced mechanism of government moved in; from the doughty parliament building itself to the elaborate palace of the supreme court, bloated office-hive ministries to the Romanesque planetary bank. With the world’s rulers came the usual circus of subsidiaries: the expensive restaurants, hotels, clubs, the office service companies, theaters, corporate headquarters, concert halls, lobbying firms, legal partnerships, and media companies. Swarming through the somber official buildings were the army of elected representatives, their aides, researchers, interns, spouses, civil servants, and pimps. Only the top echelon actually lived on the Castle Mount; everyone else commuted from the city that grew up on the other side of the rim. Suburbs and boroughs sprawled for kilometer after kilometer down the incline of the crater’s outer walls, home to four and a half million people.

Leithpool was one of Adam Elvin’s favorite cities. Its layout was a welcome exception to the neat grids found on most worlds. Here the streets wound down the outside of the rim in random curves, intersecting and branching chaotically. Light industry and housing all had their separate zones, but they were squashed together in true jigsaw layout with admirable disregard for logic. Broad terrace parks formed pretty green swaths through the stone and composite structures. A good underground metro network and street-level trams kept the private traffic to a minimum. Elevated rail lines knitted together the main boroughs, meandering their way down to the bottom of the northeastern slope, where the CST station squatted on the outskirts.

Today, Adam was walking along the western quadrant of Prince’s Circle, the road that ran around the top of the crater rim. It was the main retail district, renown on many planets. A rampart of tall department stores and brand-flagship shops formed the outer side of the broad road, while the inner side curved down sharply to the quiet waters of the ring lake twenty meters below the pavement. When the city was built, the rim had been leveled off, with the exception of the High Forth inlet, which was roofed by a twin arch bridge; and the similar outlet gully on the opposite side that sent the water foaming down a long artificial cascade through the most exclusive residential districts.

He spent a quiet twenty minutes walking among the crowds that boiled along the shopfronts. Every building sported a white and scarlet Celtic Crown national flag. Without exception they were at half mast. Two days earlier, Lothian’s team had been knocked out of the Cup. That had knocked the new Scottish nation hard, it was as if the planet had gone into mourning. Eventually he found the café he was looking for, a door at the side of a big electrical retailer, opening onto stairs that took him up to the first floor. The large room was some kind of converted gallery, with high ceilings and huge curving windows that looked down on Prince’s Circle. He found a slightly tatty sofa in front of one window, and ordered a hot chocolate with two choc-chip and hazelnut shortcakes from the teenage waitress. The view he had out toward Castle Mount was peerless. A few hundred meters to the south, one of the monorail tracks stretched out across the calm dark water; a single silver carriage streaked along it, shuttling late office workers over to their desks.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” a voice said at his shoulder.

Adam glanced up to see Bradley Johansson standing behind him, holding a large mug of tea. As always, the tall man gave the impression of being slightly disconnected from the world around him. There was something about his thin, elegant face that made him appear far more aristocratic than any Grand Family member.

“I enjoy it,” Adam said evenly.

“Of course, it looks even better at Mardi Gras,” Bradley said, sitting down on the sofa beside Adam. “They light up the castle with huge hologram projectors for the whole week, and during the closing ceremony they let off real fireworks overhead.”

“If you ever give me the time off, I’ll come and take a look.”

“That’s what I wanted to see you about.” Bradley stopped as the waitress brought Adam’s hot chocolate, and smiled winningly at her. She sneaked a smile back at him before hurrying off to the next table.

Adam tried not to show his annoyance at the little silent exchange, it was just one more reminder of his own age. “You’re going to give me more free time?” he asked.

“Quite the opposite, old chap. That’s why I wanted to see you in person, to impress upon you how important the next few years are going to be. After all, you’re not … a lifelong Guardian. Your commitment to the cause has always been more financially oriented. I want to know if you’re prepared to continue your role when things get a lot tougher.”

“Tougher? That Myo bitch almost caught me on Velaines.”

“Oh, come come, Adam, she was never even close. You outsmarted her beautifully. And continue to do so, the components are all arriving on schedule.”

“Save the flattery for the bourgeois. I can’t be motivated that way.”

“Very well. So will you continue to provide us with your assistance, and if so how much will it cost?”

“What exactly are you wanting from me?”

“This is the time which the Starflyer has worked for. The time for good men to draw a line in the sand and say: No more.”

“No further,” Adam muttered.

Bradley sipped his tea and smiled. “In the past, maybe. But in the here and now, I know what must be done. Little of it will be pleasant.”

“Revolution never is for those who live through it.”

“This is not revolution, Adam, this is my crusade. I am going to fling the corrupter of humanity into the depths of night beyond hell, where even the devil fears to tread. And that will be the least it deserves. I will avenge myself and all the others who have been consumed by the Starflyer’s evil.”

“Bravo.”

“You have your beliefs and convictions, Adam, I have mine. Please don’t mock them, I find it unpleasant. What I am proposing is to extend our combat activities off Far Away. I want to directly confront the Starflyer’s agents and interests in the Commonwealth. And now would you care to tell me what your cooperation will cost, if that doesn’t make you too much of a capitalist?”

“Direct confrontation? You want me to lead your troops into battle?”

“Yes. You know more about covert operations and security procedures than any of us. That makes you invaluable to me, Adam. I need you for this. All I can say is that without a human race, there will not be any socialist society. So will you help me?”

It was a fair question, Adam admitted to himself. Not one he expected in a pleasant café overlooking a serene lake with a fairy-tale castle. But then where should such questions be delivered? Just what do I want out of life? Once again his resolve faltered. It had been a principle for so long not to seek rejuvenation, because it was a purchase of the bourgeois and their plutocrat masters. Society should be structured so that everyone received it regardless of circumstances. The ancient political dream of justice and equality for all, true socialism. For all his active involvement in the cause, the disruption and violence he’d unleashed against the establishment, nothing had changed. But that doesn’t make me wrong. When he thought of the others, ex-friends and comrades, who had betrayed the movement over the decades by abandoning them or worse, he knew what his course must be, despite the intensely human wish to live forever. If even someone as committed as him gave in at the end, what hope ultimately could there be?

“I’m tired, Bradley, really truly tired. I’ve seen my ideals crushed by the plutocrats for my whole life. I’m clinging to a lost cause because I don’t know anything else. Do you realize how pathetic that makes me? Well, I don’t want to save the Commonwealth anymore; I’ve tried to do that for fifty years and got nowhere. I can’t do it anymore. There’s no point. Capitalism or the Starflyer, I don’t care which of them finishes off this society. I’m through with it.”

“No you’re not; stop trying to talk up your bargaining position, Adam. You are not going to stand by and watch an alien commit genocide against your own species. You’re an idealist. It’s a magnificent flaw, one I quite envy. Now what can I offer you for your invaluable services?”

“I don’t know. Hope, maybe.”

“Fair enough.” Bradley nodded at the remarkable castle atop its pinnacle. Sunlight was striking the slender conical turrets, making their polished rock walls shine with a vivid bronze and emerald hue. “The original castle back in Edinburgh was the seat of Scottish nationalism. It symbolized everything to the diehard believers. Despite all the changes and defeats they endured, the castle stood solid at the center of their capital. They waited for generations for the Scottish nation to be properly reborn after their Bonnie Prince was lost. There were times when the cause seemed impossible, or even cursed; they regained their independence from the English only to lose it again right away with the formation of Federal Europe. But once people reached the stars, the true nation was reborn here, and on two other worlds. An ideal kept alive in the darkness can flourish if it has the chance, no matter how long the night lasts. Don’t give up on your ideals, Adam, not ever.”

“Very trite, I’m sure.”

“Then try this. I’ve seen what societies like ours progress into. I’ve walked on their worlds and admired them firsthand. This Commonwealth is only an interim stage for a species like ours; even your Socialism will be left behind in true evolution. We can become something wonderful, something special. We have that potential.”

Adam stared at him for a long time, wishing he could see through those enigmatic eyes into the mind beyond. Bradley’s faith in himself and his cause had always been extraordinary. There had been times over the last thirty years when Adam really wished he could write Bradley off in the same way the Commonwealth establishment dismissed him, as nothing more than a crackpot conspiracy theorist. But there were too many little details for him to be laughed off. His superb intelligence sources, for a start. The way little facets of Commonwealth policy were organized, seemingly out of kilter with the interests of the Grand Families and Intersolar Dynasties. Adam was so close to believing the whole Starflyer notion; at the very least he didn’t disbelieve it anymore. “There’s something I’d like to know, though I’m afraid it might be a personal weakness on my part.”

“I will be honest with you, Adam. I owe you that much.”

“Where do you go for your rejuvenation? Is there some secret underground clinic that I don’t know about which provides the treatment for people like us?”

“No, Adam, there’s nowhere like that. I use the Unstorn clinic on Jaruva. It’s very good.”

Adam paused as his e-butler called the CST Intersolar timetable up into his virtual vision. “Is Jaruva a town somewhere?”

“No, it’s a planet. CST shut down the gateway two hundred and eighty years ago, after a civil war between various nationalist culture factions and the radical evangelicals. The only thing they hated worse than each other was the Commonwealth—there were some unpleasant acts of terrorism committed before the Isolation. Things have calmed down considerably since then, thankfully. They have rebuilt their society, with each faction having its own homeland. The structure is similar to Earth in the mid-twentieth century. None of the mini-nations are Socialist, I’m afraid.”

“I see,” Adam said carefully. “And how do you get there?”

“There is a path which leads to Jaruva. The Silfen don’t really use it anymore.”

“Somehow I knew you’d give me an answer like that.”

“I will be happy to take you there and pay for a rejuvenation, if that’s what you want.”

“Let’s leave that possibility open, shall we?”

“As you wish. But the offer is sincere and remains.”

“I wish I believed as you do.”

“You are not far from it, Adam. Not really. I expect what is about to happen over the next few years will convince you. But then, I expect it to convince everyone.”

“All right,” Adam said. He had a sense of near relief now he’d made his decision. Many people spoke of the contentment that came from accepting defeat; he was mildly surprised to find it was true. “So what do you want the Guardians to do in the Commonwealth? And bear in mind, I won’t ever repeat Abadan station, I don’t do political statement violence anymore.”

“My dear chap, neither do I. And thank you for agreeing to this. I know how it conflicts with your own goals. Don’t give up on them. You will live to see a socially just world.”

“Like a priest will see heaven.”

Bradley’s soft smile was understanding and sympathetic.

“What are you going to hit first?” Adam asked.

“The Second Chance is my primary target right now. Part of your task is going to be assembling a crew to obliterate it.”

“Old folly; you can never destroy knowledge. Even if we were to succeed and blow the Second Chance to pieces, they’ll build another, and another, and another until one is finally completed. They know how to build them, therefore they will be built.”

“I expect you’re right, unfortunately. But destroying the Second Chance will be a severe blow to the Starflyer. It wanted the starship built, you know.”

“I know. I received the shotgun message.” Adam stared out at Castle Mount for some time. “You know, castles once had a purpose other than symbolism; they used to hold the invaders at bay and keep the kingdom safe. We don’t build them anymore.”

“We need them, though, now more than ever.”

“What a pair we make,” Adam said. “The optimist and the pessimist.”

“Which do you claim to be?”

“I think you know.”

....

To the mild dismay of his staff, Wilson always arrived in the office at around half past seven in the morning. With management meetings, training sessions, interviews, engineering assessments, media reports, a one-hour gym workout, and a dozen other items scheduled every day he didn’t leave until after nine most evenings. He took lunch at his desk rather than waste time going to the excellent canteen on the ground floor. His influence began to percolate through the whole starship project, and with it his enthusiasm. Procedures were tightened under his relentless directives, policy became clear-cut and effective. Pride settled around the complex, driving the crews onward.

Every week, Wilson met up with Nigel Sheldon to perform their ritual inspection tour of Second Chance. They arrived at the gateway, and kicked off into the assembly platform. Both of them pointing at and gossiping about some new section of the huge ship, acting like a pair of school kids.

All of the plasma rockets were installed now, along with their turbopumps and power injectors. Big reaction mass tanks were being eased into cavities along the ship’s central engineering superstructure, dark gray ellipsoids whose internal structure was a honeycomb maze of tiny sacs.

“It’s the ultimate slosh-baffle design,” Wilson explained as the two of them glided along the assembly grid above the central cylinder. “The sacs can squeeze out their contents no matter what acceleration maneuver we’re pulling, and while we’re coasting, they hold the fluid stable. If only we’d had that on the old Ulysses we’d have saved ourselves a lot of mechanical trouble, but materials technology has come a long way since those days.”

Nigel held on to one of the platform grids, pausing directly above an egg-shaped tank that was being gently eased into position by robot arms. Construction crew and remote mobile sensors were swarming around it like bees to their queen. “How come we’re not using hydrogen? I thought that gives the best specific impulse for rocket exhausts.”

“When you’re talking chemical reactions, sure. But the plasma rockets operate at such a high energy level they break their working fluid down into subatomic particles. The niling d-sinks we’re carrying pump so much power in, this plasma is actually hotter than a fusion generator’s exhaust. With that kind of efficiency, cryogenics is a waste of time. Of course, in an ideal world we’d be using mercury as the propellant fluid, but even that has handling problems, not to mention cost and sourcing for the kind of volume we’re looking at. So what we’ve wound up with is a very dense hydrocarbon, it’s almost pure crude oil, but the chemists have tweaked the molecular structure so it remains liquid over a huge temperature range. Given the type of near-perfect insulation we’ve got cloaking the tanks, the thermal support we have to provide for the fuel is minimal.”

Nigel gave the tank a thoughtful look. “I always used to think rockets were dead simple.”

“The principle is as simple as you can get, it’s just the engineering which is complex. But we’re doing our best to reduce that; modern techniques allow us to do away with whole layers of ancillary systems.”

“I heard you’ve instigated a design review board.”

“Final design approval, yeah. I prefer that method to the multiple steering committees you’d set up.” Wilson let go of the grid, and pushed off so he was drifting along the length of the starship toward the life-support wheel. “It gives the project an overall architecture policy.”

“I’m not arguing. This is your show now.”

They passed over the wheel section. The internal decks were clearly visible now, with decking and wall paneling fixed to the stress structure, showing the internal layout.

“We should start fixing the hull in place by the end of next month,” Wilson said.

“Not too much slippage, then.”

“No. You gave me a good team. And the unlimited funding helps.”

“Actually, it’s not unlimited, and I’ve noticed it’s still rising.”

“That was inevitable, but it really should have plateaued now we’re entering the final design freeze. We’ve already started to make a few modifications to the central cylinder to accommodate the expanded stand-off observation period of the mission. The upgraded sensor suite is finishing its alpha-analysis stage, it should be out to tender soon. And we already have the engineering mock-ups of the class three and four remote probe satellites. They’re being assembled for us at High Angel by Bayfoss—we’re up to capacity here, and they are the experts. Most of your exploratory division geosurvey satellites are built by them.”

“Sure.” Nigel took another look at the crew accommodation decks, where an atmospheric processor had been secured in place, still wrapped in its silver packaging. “Man, I still can’t get over how big this beauty is. You’d think … I don’t know, we could build something neater by now.”

“A one-man starship?” Wilson asked in amusement. He waved a hand at the front of the cylinder. “You helped design the hyperdrive engine. I’ve owned smaller houses than that monster.”

“Yeah yeah, I know. I ought to go back and take another look at the basic equations.”

“You do that, but I’m telling you a car-sized starship will never catch on. I want something big and powerful around me when I go exploring the unknown.”

“Man, oh, man, Freud would have had a field day with you. Now, how’s it going with the crew selection?”

“Hoo boy.” Wilson grimaced at the memory. “The actual crew squad has been finalized. We’ve got two hundred and twenty who’ll start their second phase training next week. We’ll select the final fifty a month before launch. The science team is a little tougher; we’ve passed seventy so far, and Oscar’s office is trying to sort out the rest of the applications. It’s the interviews that are taking up so much time; the Commonwealth has an awful lot of highly qualified people out there, and we need to put them all through assessment and psych profiling. What I’d like is a pool of about three hundred to choose from.”

“Ah.” Nigel stopped himself above the rim of the life-support wheel, watching a constructionbot fixing a decking plate into place. “Have you considered taking Dr. Bose with you?”

“Bose? Oh, the astronomer who saw the envelopment. I think I remember Oscar mentioning he’d applied; he’s certainly got a lot of sponsors. Do you want me to check if he got through the assessment?”

“Not as such, no. The thing is, my office is getting a lot of inquiries about him, as is the Vice President.”

For a moment Wilson thought he meant the vice president of CST. “You mean Elaine Doi?”

“Yes. It’s a bit awkward. Every time the media want a comment on the envelopment they turn to Bose, which is understandable. The trouble is, he cooperates with them. All of them. When the guy sleeps, I’ve no idea. But anyway, in the public eye he’s most strongly associated with the project. It’s a position he’s exploited superbly.”

“Wait a minute here, are you telling me I’ve got to take him?”

“All I’m saying is that if you were planning on taking an astronomer, you could do worse. For an obscure professor from a back-of-beyond planet, he’s certainly a goddamn expert self-publicist.”

“I’ll tell Oscar to review the file, if that’s what’s bugging you.”

“That’s good. And I hope there won’t be any ageism in the selection process?”

“What?”

“It’s just that the professor is, er, kind of closer to his time for rejuvenation than you or I … or anyone else you’re considering. That’s all.”

“Oh, Jesus wept.”

....

The plantation where Tara Jennifer Shaheef lived was on the far side of the mountains that rose up out of the northern districts of Darklake City. Even with a modern highway leading through them, it took the car carrying Paula and Detective Hoshe Finn a good three hours to drive there. They turned off the junction at the start of a wide valley, the car snaking along a winding local road. The slopes on either side were heavily cultivated with coffee bushes; every row seemed to have an agriculturebot of some kind trundling along, tending the verdant plants. Humans and buildings were less prominent within this landscape.

Eventually the car turned into the plantation through a wide gated entrance with a white stone arch. Cherry trees lined the long driveway, leading up to a low white house with a bright red clay tile roof.

“All very traditional,” Paula commented.

Hoshe glanced out at the arch. “You’ll find that a lot on this world. We do tend to idolize the past. Most of us had settler ancestors who were successful even before they arrived, and the ethos lingers on. As a planet, we’ve done rather well from it.”

“If it works, don’t try and fix it.”

“Yeah.” He showed no sign that he’d picked up on any irony.

The car halted on the gravel in front of the house’s main door. Paula climbed out, looking around the large formal gardens. A lot of time and effort had gone into the big lawn with its palisade of trees.

Tara Jennifer Shaheef was standing in front of the double acmwood doors underneath the portico. Her husband, Matthew deSavoel, stood beside her, an arm resting protectively around her shoulders. He was older than she by a couple of decades, Paula noticed; thick dark hair turning to silver, his midriff starting to spread.

The car drove off around to the stable block. Paula walked forward. “Thank you for agreeing to see me,” she said.

“That’s all right,” Tara said with a nervous smile. She nodded tightly at Detective Finn. “Hello again.”

“I trust this won’t be too upsetting,” Matthew deSavoel said. “My wife had put her re-life ordeal behind her.”

“It’s all right, Matthew,” Tara said, patting him.

“I won’t deliberately make this difficult,” Paula said. “It was your wife’s family who wanted this investigation kept open.”

Matthew deSavoel grunted in dissatisfaction and opened the front door. “I feel like we should have a lawyer present,” he said as he walked them through the cool reception hall.

“That is your prerogative,” Paula said neutrally. If deSavoel thought his wife was fully recovered he was fooling himself badly. Nobody with three lifetimes behind them was as twitchy as Tara seemed to be. In Paula’s experience, anyone who had been killed, accidentally or otherwise, took at least one regeneration post re-life to get over the psychological trauma.

They were shown into a large lounge with a stone tile floor; a grand fireplace dominated one wall, with a real grate and logs sitting at the center of it. The walls had various hunting trophies hanging up, along with the stuffed heads of alien animals, their teeth and claws prominently displayed to portray them as savage monsters.

“Yours?” Hoshe asked.

“I bagged every one of them,” Matthew deSavoel said proudly. “There’s a lot of hostile wildlife still living up in the hills.”

“I’ve never seen a gorall that big before,” Hoshe said, standing underneath one of the heads.

“I wasn’t aware Oaktier had a guns and hunting culture,” Paula said.

“They don’t in the cities,” deSavoel said. “They think those of us who tend the land are barbaric savages who do it purely for sport. None of them live out here; none of them realize what sort of danger the goralls and vidies pose if they get down to the human communities. There are several political campaigns to ban landowners from shooting outside cultivated lands, as if the goralls will respect that. It’s exactly the kind of oppressive crap I came here to get away from.”

“So guns are quite easy to get hold of on this planet?”

“Not a bit of it,” Tara said. She made a big show of flopping into one of the broad couches. “You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to get a license, even for a hunting rifle.”

Paula sat opposite her. “Did you ever hold a license?”

“No.” Tara shook her head, smiling softly at some private joke. She took a cigarette out of her case, and pressed it on the lighting pad at the bottom. It gave off the sweet mint smell of high-quality GM majane. “Do you mind? It helps me relax.”

Hoshe Finn frowned, but didn’t say anything.

“Did you ever possess a gun?” Paula asked.

Tara laughed. “No. Or if I did, I never kept the memory. I don’t think I would, though. Guns have no place in a civilized society.”

“Most commendable,” Paula said. She wondered if Tara was really that unsophisticated, or if that was something she wanted to believe post-death. But then, most citizens chose to overlook how easy it was to get hold of a weapon. “I’d like to talk about Wyobie Cotal.”

“Certainly. But like I told Detective Finn last time, I only have a couple of weeks’ memory of him.”

“You were having an affair with him?”

Tara took a deep drag, exhaling slowly. “Certainly was. God, what a body that kid had. I don’t think I’d ever forget that.”

“So your marriage to Morton was over?”

“No, not really. We were still on good terms, though it was getting a bit stale. You must know what that’s like.” There was an edge of mockery in her voice.

“Did you have other affairs?”

“A couple. Like I said, I could see where it was heading with Morton. Our company was doing well, it was taking up more and more of his time. Men are like that, always obsessing about the wrong things in life. Some men.” She extended a languid hand to deSavoel, who kissed her knuckles indulgently.

“Did Morton know about the other men?”

“Probably. But I respected him, I didn’t flaunt them, they were never the cause of any argument.”

“Did Morton have a gun?”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. We had a good marriage.”

“It was coming to an end.”

“And we got divorced. It happens. In fact, it has to happen when you live this long.”

“Did he have a gun?”

“No.”

“All right. Why would you choose Tampico?”

“That’s the place I filed the divorce from, isn’t it? Well, I don’t know, I’m sure. The first time I heard about it was right after my re-life when the insurance investigators were asking me what happened. I never even knew the place existed before.”

“You and Cotal bought tickets there. You left with him four days after your last memory dump in the Kirova Clinic’s secure store. Why did you run off with him?”

“I don’t know. I remember meeting him, it was at a party, then after that it was just for the sex, really; and he was fun, enthusiastic the way only first-lifers can be. I enjoyed him, but I always found it hard to believe I gave up everything for him. It was a good life Morton and I had here.”

“You weren’t the only girl Cotal was seeing.”

“Really? Somehow I’m not surprised. He was gorgeous.”

“You’re not jealous about that?”

“Irritated, is about as far as it goes.”

“Did Wyobie have a gun?”

“Oh …” She appealed to her husband. “Please.”

“Come now, Chief Investigator,” deSavoel said loftily. “There’s no need to take such a line. Wyobie Cotal was also killed.”

“Was he? We haven’t found a body. In fact, we haven’t found your wife’s body either.”

“If I’d been alive, I would have turned up for rejuvenation,” Tara said sharply. “And I’ll thank you not to open that can of worms.”

“I understand. We do have to examine every possibility.”

“But perhaps not out loud when it can cause such distress,” deSavoel said irately. “This is not pleasant for my wife to raise such specters again after she has finally accustomed herself to complete bodyloss.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Paula said. “To make sure it won’t happen again.”

“Again?” Tara’s voice rose in alarm. She stubbed her cigarette out. “You think I’ll be killed again?”

“That’s not what I meant. It would be most unusual for a killer to strike at you twice; and you have been alive for over twenty years this time. Please don’t concern yourself about the possibility. So, Wyobie didn’t have a gun?”

“No. Not that I remember.”

“You mentioned other affairs. Were you seeing anybody else at the same time as Cotal?”

“No. Wyobie was quite enough for me.”

“What about enemies, yours or Cotal’s?”

“I must have fallen out with many people, you do over a hundred years, but I can’t think of any argument or grudge that would warrant killing me. And as for Wyobie, nobody that age has enemies, not ones that kill.”

“His other girlfriend might have been angry enough.”

“Possibly.” Tara shuddered. “I never met her. Do you think that’s what happened?”

“Actually, no. If you and Wyobie were killed, then it certainly wasn’t a crime of passion, or at least not a spur-of-the-moment slaying. As yet, we don’t know where and when you were killed. To throw up that much uncertainty takes planning and preparation. Other than your ticket there’s no real proof you ever went to Tampico.”

“The divorce,” deSavoel said. “That was filed on Tampico. And all Tara’s things were sent there.”

“The divorce was lodged with a legal firm, Broher Associates, on Tampico. It was a pure data transaction. In theory it could have been filed from anywhere inside the unisphere. As for your effects, Tara, they were sent to a Tampico storage warehouse for seven weeks, then removed by your authorization into a private vehicle. The insurance company investigators were unable to trace them. What I find interesting about this is your secure memory storage arrangement. There isn’t one apart from the Kirova Clinic, not on Tampico, nor on any other Commonwealth planet as far as the investigators could find, though my Directorate will start double-checking that now. And you would have made one, everybody has a secure store they can update for precisely this reason: re-life. The ticket, your effects shipped out there, your divorce, it’s all evidence you were settled on Tampico. But to me, the lack of a secure memory arrangement calls the whole Tampico episode into question.”

“But why?” Tara asked. “What would be the point in killing me or Wyobie? What did we do?”

“I don’t know. The last time you were seen alive was when you had lunch with Caroline Turner at the Low Moon marina restaurant. If anything was wrong, you didn’t tell her. In fact, she said you seemed quite normal.”

“Caroline was a good friend, I remember. I might even have told her about Wyobie.”

“She says not, and certainly nothing about leaving Morton to go off with Wyobie. So if you didn’t go crazy wild and run off, we have to consider you got involved in some criminal event.”

“I wouldn’t!”

Paula held up a cautionary finger. “Not necessarily deliberately. The logical explanation would be an accident, something you saw or discovered that you shouldn’t have, and were killed because of it. My problem with that theory is where it happened. If it was here, then we only have a very small incident window to investigate. Morton had been away from home for two days, and was scheduled to stay at his conference for another four days. He says you stopped answering his calls two days after your lunch with Caroline, the same day your Tampico ticket was purchased. Now, your last memory deposit in the Kirova Clinic secure store was the same day Morton went away. So at the most you had four days for this event to happen to you. I believe we can safely say it didn’t happen in the two days prior to your lunch, which leaves us with just two days, forty-eight hours, for it to occur.”

“Police records don’t show any major crime incident that month,” Hoshe said. “Actually, it was a quiet year.”

“Then they were good criminals, clever ones,” Paula said. “You never caught them, and the only evidence is this ice murder. That doesn’t leave us with a lot to go on. I have to say that if Saheef and Cotal walked in on something bad, then the chances of discovering what actually happened are slim. Which leaves us with Tampico. You arrived and bumped straight into something you shouldn’t have. Our hypothetical Tampico criminals maintained the illusion that you were alive by picking up your effects and then filing for the divorce. That would explain the lack of a memory store.”

“What sort of criminals?” Tara asked shakily. “What would they be doing to make them kill me and Wyobie?”

“It is only a theory,” Paula told her quickly. “I have difficulty in accepting major criminal conspiracies—the probability is extremely low, though we can’t ignore it. But that implausibility does leave us with a quandary. If it wasn’t that, and it wasn’t your private life, which appears blameless, then what did happen?”

Tara fumbled with her case, and lit another cigarette. “You’re the detective, everybody knows that.” Her hands were trembling as she took a drag. Matthew deSavoel held her tight, glaring at Paula. “Have you got enough?” he snapped.

“For now,” she said calmly.

“Find out,” Tara called out as Paula and Hoshe started to leave. “Please. I have to know. Everything you’ve said … it wasn’t a freak accident, was it? I’ve told myself that for twenty years; told everybody I had a mad romantic impulse and ran off with Wyobie, because if you say it and keep on saying it, then that becomes what happened. It was like making up the memory. But I knew, I really knew it didn’t happen like that.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Paula said.

“Where now?” Hoshe asked as the car drove away from the big isolated plantation house.

“The ex-husband, Morton.”

He sneaked a look at her. “You got any idea what happened?”

“It wasn’t an accident. I believe Tara, she used to be too sensible to do anything like running off with Wyobie. He was already giving her everything she wanted from the relationship. That means Tampico is all wrong; it was a setup, an alibi.”

“Used to be sensible?”

“You saw what she is today.”

“Yeah. That’s what you meant by investigating people, isn’t it?”

“Of course.” She turned to stare out of the car’s windows, seeing nothing but a blur of big shaggy walrush trees that had been planted as a windbreak for the neat plantation bushes. “It’s people who commit crimes, so that’s where you’ll find the motivation: people.” It was so instinctive, so obvious, she didn’t have to think to talk to him.

Her parents, or rather the couple she had thought to be her parents during her childhood, had sincerely believed that instinct could be stillbirthed. It was the old nature versus nurture argument, and in this particular ultra-modern chapter of it they desperately wanted to prove to the whole Commonwealth that nurture could be the victor, that there was no preordained fate. Especially not the one Paula’s creators intended for her.

The planet where she was birthed was called Huxley’s Haven, though the other Commonwealth worlds derisively called it the Hive. Settled in 2102, it was funded, and populated, by the Human Structure Foundation, a strange collective of genetic researchers and intellectual sociopolitical theorists. They were keen to explore the genetic possibilities for psychoneural profiling now they were clear of Earth’s restrictions, believing it possible to create a perfectly stable society by implementing the phrase “each to his own” to a degree that the rest of humanity found quite chilling. A lot of Anglo-Saxon surnames originated from occupation: tailor, thatcher, crofter … the aim of the Foundation was to make the link solid and unbreakable, determined within an individual’s DNA. Professions couldn’t be installed wholesale, of course, a psychoneural profile merely gave a person the aptitude to do his or her designated job, while simpler, physiological modifications complemented the trait. Doctors would be given dextrous fingers and high visual acuity, while farm workers and builders possessed a large, strong physique—so it went, right through the entire spectrum of human activity. The traits were bundled together, and fixed to prevent genetic drift. As far as the traits were concerned, there would never be any mixed profiles. The Foundation scrupulously avoided using the word “pure” in its press releases.

The Commonwealth as a whole detested the notion. Right from its conception, Huxley’s Haven became a near-pariah state. There were even serious calls for military/police style intervention made in the Senate, which contravened the organization’s constitution—the Commonwealth was set up originally to guarantee individual planet freedom within an overall legal framework. In the end, the Foundation was able to proceed because legally the planet was independent and free.

After several prominent and well-financed private court cases against the Foundation came to nothing, it was CST’s turn to face a barrage of media-supported pressure to close the gateway. Nigel Sheldon had to reluctantly argue the case for keeping it open: if they closed one gateway because of a cause activist campaign, that left all gateways vulnerable to people who disagreed with a planet’s culture, religion, or politics. The Hive stayed connected to the Commonwealth, though it never really contributed to the mainstream economic and financial structure. Quietly, and with considerable scientific flare, the Foundation got on with the job of building their unique society.

Some people never did accept the lost court cases or the Foundation’s “right” to pursue its goal. A greater human right took precedence, they argued. In their view Huxley’s Haven was a planet of genetically modified slaves who needed liberation.

If there was ever anybody to whom the term extreme liberals could be applied, it was Marcus and Rebecca Redhound. Born into the considerable wealth of Grand Earth Families, they were happy to contribute financially as well as actively to the cause. Along with a small, equally dedicated cabal, they planned a raid against the Hive, which they were convinced would be the grand event that would finally demonstrate to the rest of the Commonwealth that the Foundation was wrong, not just in its politics but in its science as well.

After months of covert planning and preparation, nine of these urban rich-kid commandos broke into one of the Foundation’s birthing wards in the Hive’s capital, Fordsville. They managed to steal seven new birthed babies and get them to the CST planetary station before the alarm was raised. Three infants were traced immediately by the Intersolar Serious Crimes Directorate and returned to their creche on Huxley’s Haven. The publicity was everything the group could have wished for, though public sympathy didn’t entirely swing their way. Something about stealing babies just cut people cold.

Four of the cabal were arrested when the babies were traced. After that, the Serious Crimes Directorate mounted the largest manhunt the Commonwealth had ever seen to find the four missing babies, one male and three females. It took another fifteen months of painstaking detective work by ten Chief Investigators aided by the SI to locate the missing boy in a town on the then-frontier planet of Ferarra. Five months after that two more of the girls were recovered on EdenBurg. The last child and remaining two cabal members proved more elusive.

With the paranoia that only the truly committed can muster, Marcus and Rebecca had spent over two years fermenting elaborate preparations for the snatch, an activity they kept secret from the rest of their cabal. The first part of their cover was to have a child of their own, Coya, who would act as a sister to the Hive baby. She would set a normal behavioral example to the psychoneural profiled waif; and a young family with twins would be less likely to attract attention. It was a good plan. Marcus and Rebecca had bought a house on Marindra, out in a small agricultural town, where they established a market garden business. It was a pleasant place to live, with a good community spirit. The children fitted in well as they grew up. Paula’s half-Filipino features were slightly incongruous, given her parents and “twin” Coya were all of prominent eastern Mediterranean stock. But they explained it away as a genetic modification designed to bring out Rebecca’s distant Asian ancestry, honoring her deep ethnic origin. By then, the case of the last missing Hive baby had long faded from public attention.

As a child, Paula really wasn’t too different from her sister. They played together, ran their parents ragged, loved the puppy Marcus bought them, had a fondness for swimming, and did well at school. It was as she moved into her teens that Paula was noticeably more restrained than Coya; she did as her parents asked, didn’t argue with them, and steered clear of all the trouble that was to be found in their little rural community. Everyone commented on what a nice girl she was becoming, not like half of the teenagers in this town who were simply terrible and a sure sign of society’s imminent collapse. She regarded boys with the same contempt and fascination as her peers; started dating, suffered the heart-aching humiliation of being dumped, and promptly took it out on her next two boyfriends by chucking them. Found another boy she liked—and went steady for five months. In sports she was competent rather than outstanding. Academically she excelled at languages and history. As teachers remarked, she had superb recall and an obsession with tracing down the smallest facts connected to her subjects. Aptitude tests showed she would make a great psychologist.

Looking at their contented, normal, extra daughter on her sixteenth birthday, Marcus and Rebecca knew they had succeeded. They’d brought up a Hive child in a loving natural environment, and produced a perfectly happy, healthy human being. What could be done with one could be done to all. The Foundation’s hold over its oppressed population could be broken; their method of control was flawed. Decency and human dignity had triumphed in the end.

Two days later, on a splendid late-summer afternoon, they took Paula out into the garden and told her of her true heritage. They even sheepishly showed her the old news media recordings of the snatch and subsequent manhunt.

What the Foundation had never revealed was the nature of the psychoneural profiling given to the snatched babies. The others were all reasonably standard for Huxley’s Haven: public service workers, engineers, accountants, even an archivist. But Paula, as luck or fate would have it, was an exception even among her own kind. Crime on Huxley’s Haven was extremely rare, naturally so given its citizens were all designed to be content in their jobs and lives. But not even the Foundation claimed to make life perfect. All human civilizations needed a police force. On Huxley’s Haven it was a source of national pride that there was one law enforcement officer for every ten thousand people. Paula was destined to be one of them.

Two hours after their joyful confession, Marcus and Rebecca were in custody. It was Paula who turned them in. She had no choice; knowing what was right and what was wrong was the core of her identity, her very soul.

The last missing Hive child was the greatest media story to hit the unisphere for a decade, making Paula an instant celebrity. Young, beautiful, and frighteningly incorruptible, she was everything a sixteen-year-old should never be.

Thanks to Paula’s relentless testimony, Marcus and Rebecca were sentenced to thirty-two years’ life suspension each, losing double the time over which their crime was perpetrated. It was the kind of punishment normally reserved for murderers. Unisphere coverage of the trial allowed a quarter of the human race to watch in silent fascination as Coya broke down and screamed hysterically at the judge before begging her step-twin to withdraw the sentencing application. Paula’s only answer, a silent pitying glance at the sobbing girl, made that whole quarter of the human race shiver.

After the trial, Paula went back to Huxley’s Haven, the home she’d never known, to discover her real name and suffer embarrassing introductions to the other stolen children with whom she had nothing in common. She belonged there even less than on Marindra; a modern Commonwealth education put her completely outside the norm as far as Huxley’s Haven was concerned. They didn’t have advanced technology on the Hive; the new conformist society was structured so that people did all the work, not machines. With her exposure to domestic bots and the ultimate data access of the unisphere, Paula considered such rejection to be stupid and provincial. It was the one success Marcus and Rebecca had with shaping her thoughts, though by then their bodies were beyond knowing, safely comatose in the Justice Directorate’s hibernation wombs.

Away from the public eye, Paula left Huxley’s Haven for Earth, where she enrolled at the Intersolar Serious Crimes Directorate. At the time, she had no idea how high up the political food chain her application was bounced before it was finally approved. But approved it was, and inevitably she became the best operative they ever had—despite the one notorious case of 2243 that she still hadn’t solved.

Morton lived in the penthouse of a fifty-story skyscraper standing behind Darklake City’s Labuk Marina. Not at all far, in fact, from Caroline Turner’s last lunch with Tara. Paula noted the coincidence as the car drove them along the waterfront. They parked in the skyscraper’s underground garage and took the express lift up to the top floor. Morton was waiting for them in the vestibule as the doors opened. Three years out of rejuvenation, he was a tall, handsome young man whose thick chestnut hair was tied back in a long ponytail. Dressed in a fashionably cut amber and peacock-blue tropical shirt and expensive hand-tailored linen slacks, he looked good and obviously knew it. His youthful face put on a broad courteous smile as he shook their hands in welcome.

“Good of you to see us,” Paula said. It was early evening local time, which was only a few hours ahead of Paris time.

“Least I could do.” Morton ushered them inside through elaborate double doors. His penthouse had a floor area larger than the plantation house where his ex-wife now lived. They walked into a massive split-level living room with a window wall. It was six-thirty, and the copper-red sun had already fallen level with the top of the skyscraper, shining its rich hazy light directly into the penthouse. Opulent furnishings and expensive artwork gleamed in glorious twilight hues as they soaked up the illumination. There was a large roof garden on the other side of the wide glass doors, half of which was taken up with a swimming pool. Beyond the stainless-steel railings ringing the patio area was a tremendous view out across the city and lake.

The three of them settled in the lavish conversation area in front of the glass wall. Morton ordered it to raise its opacity, banishing most of the glare. That was when Paula saw someone in the pool, a young girl, swimming lengths with powerful easy strokes. She told her e-butler to bring up Morton’s file; there was no current registered marriage, but local media gossip files had linked him to a string of girls since he came out of rejuvenation. His current lover was Mellanie Rescorai, a first-life nineteen-year-old, and member of the Oaktier national diving squad. Mellanie’s parents were on record as strongly objecting to the liaison—in reaction, Mellanie had simply moved out of the family home and into Morton’s penthouse.

“Something to drink?” Morton asked. The butler appeared at his side, dressed in antique-style black clothes. Paula stared at him, mildly surprised: a real live human servant, not a bot.

“No thank you,” she said. Hoshe shook his head.

“I’ll have my sparkling gin, thank you,” Morton said. “It is after office hours, after all.”

“Yes, sir.” The butler gave a discreet bow, and walked over to the mirrored drinks cabinet.

“I understand it was you who alerted the police about this situation,” Paula said.

“That’s right.” Morton leaned back casually into the leather cushioning. “I thought it was kind of strange that Cotal had to be re-lifed as well as Tara. To me it implied that they died at the same time, which is kind of suspicious, especially as nobody ever found out how Tara died. I’m surprised nobody else made the connection, actually.” His polite smile focused on Hoshe.

“Different insurance companies, different clinics,” Hoshe said defensively. “I’m sure Wyobie would have raised the question with my division eventually when he asked after Ms. Saheef.”

“Of course.”

“So you recognized the name,” Paula asked.

“Yes. God knows why I didn’t edit the little shit out of my memories during the last two rejuvenations. Subconscious, I guess. You learn from your experiences, a smart man doesn’t dump them.”

“So was it a painful divorce from Tara?”

“Her leaving me was a shock. I simply didn’t see that coming. I mean, with hindsight I was heavily involved with our company, and we’d been together for a while, I suppose it was inevitable. But to walk out like that, without any warning, that wasn’t Tara. Not the Tara I thought I knew, anyway. But I got over it the same way a lot of guys do: screwed every piece of skirt in sight and threw myself into my work. After that, the actual divorce was completely irrelevant, just a signature certificate loaded on a file.”

“And there was no clue she was going to leave you?”

“Hell no, I was worried about her when I got back from my conference. I mean, she hadn’t answered my calls for two days. But I figured at the time she was pissed with me for spending the time away from home. Then when I got back she’d stripped the apartment, everything she owned was gone. Pretty big fucking clue, huh?”

The butler returned with the sparkling gin in a crystal glass, and put it on the side table next to Morton. “Will that be all, sir?”

“For now.” Morton waved him away.

“Was there any message?” Paula asked.

“Not a damn thing. The first and only time I heard from her was when the divorce file arrived two weeks later.”

“That was handled by a legal firm. So you never actually had any contact with Tara at all?”

“No. Not after she left.”

“How did you know Wyobie Cotal’s name?”

“It was in the divorce file.”

“Tara put it in?”

“Yes. He was the irreconcilable difference.”

“I’d like a copy, please.”

“Sure.” He instructed his e-butler to release a copy of the file to Paula.

“I have to ask, did you benefit from the divorce?”

Morton laughed with genuine amusement. “Sure did, I got rid of her.” He took a drink of his sparkling gin, still grinning.

“That’s not quite what I meant.”

“Yes yes, I know.” He locked his hands together behind his head, and gazed up at the ceiling. “Let’s see. There wasn’t much to it. We both came out of it financially secure. That was part of the premarriage contract, everything to be split fifty-fifty. It was fair enough. Tara was richer than me back then, she put up a higher percentage of initial capital for the company. That was no secret. But I was the one who managed it, who made it work. When we divorced, our shares were divided up strictly according to the contract, we both got half.”

“How much more money did she put in?”

“It was a sixty-five, thirty-five split. That percentage isn’t something I’d kill for.”

“I’m sure. So who kept the company?”

“I’m still running it, after a fashion. AquaState’s one of our subsidiaries now.”

Paula consulted his file. “I see. You’re the chairman of Gansu Construction now.”

“That’s right. Six months after we went public, Gansu made an offer for AquaState. I negotiated a good two-for-one exchange rate on my shares, a seat on the Gansu board, and a decent options deal on more stock. Forty years of hard work later, and here I am. We’re the biggest civil engineering outfit on this whole planet; you name it we can build it for you. Plenty of offplanet divisions as well, and more opening every year. One day we’ll rival the multistellars.”

“According to my records, the company you and Tara owned, AquaState, didn’t go public until three years after the divorce.”

“No, Tara agreed—or rather her divorce lawyers did—that we’d both get a better deal by waiting, letting the moisture extraction business grow until we could get the maximum price from the floatation. When AquaState finally went public, her shares were registered with a bank on Tampico, then they were converted to Gansu stock when I sold out. I shouldn’t really be telling you this, but … Since she got re-lifed, most of them have been sold. She’s using up money at a hell of a rate supporting that idiot aristocrat husband and his plantation.”

“Thank you, but I don’t think that’s relevant to our inquiry. I’m more interested in what happened to her shares for the seventeen years prior to her re-life. Did they just sit in the Tampico bank?”

“As far as I know, yes. I only know they’re being sold now because as chairman I can see the ownership registry. She’s disposing of them at quite a rate, a couple of million Oaktier dollars a year.”

Paula turned to Hoshe. “We need to check with the Tampico bank to find out what happened to those seventeen years’ worth of dividend payments.”

“Certainly.”

Mellanie Rescorai climbed out of the pool and started toweling herself down with the pink-wash sky as a backdrop. She was very attractive, Paula conceded. Morton was staring at her with a greedy expression.

“What about enemies?” Paula asked. “Did Tara have any?”

“No.” Morton was still looking at his trophy girlfriend. “That is: I doubt it, I don’t actually remember, I got rid of the majority of those memories, just kept the essentials from those days, you know.”

“And you? Did you have enemies back then?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. I had business rivals, certainly. And I’ve got a damn sight more of them now. But no deal would be worth killing over, not in those days.”

“Only those days?”

“Or these,” he said with a grin.

“Did you meet up with Tara again, after the re-life?”

“Yes. The insurance investigators and the police both had a load of questions for me, all of them the same as yours. I went to see her after she came out of the clinic, for old times’ sake, to make sure she was okay. I don’t hold grudges, and we’d had thirteen good years together. We still meet up occasionally, parties, social events, that kind of thing. Though that’s getting less and less now she’s got her husband. I haven’t actually seen her since my last rejuvenation.”

“You and Tara didn’t have any children, did you?”

Morton’s attention switched back to the living room. “No.”

“Why not? As you said, you were together for thirteen years.”

“We decided we didn’t want them, it was even written into our premarriage contract. Both of us were busy people. The lifestyle we had then didn’t have any space for that kind of family commitment.”

“Okay, one last question, probably irrelevant considering you’ve had two rejuvenations since, but do you remember any odd incidents prior to her disappearance?”

“Sorry, no, not a thing. If there were any, they’re memories that I left behind a long time ago.”

“I thought that might be the case. Well, thank you again for seeing us.”

Morton stood up and showed the Chief Investigator out. As they walked through to the vestibule, he let his eyes slip down to her rump. Her business skirt was clinging in an enjoyable way, showing off her hips. Even though he’d accessed her court cases several times through the unisphere, her physical appearance post-rejuvenation was a pleasurable surprise. He wondered if she’d be going to a Silent World tonight. If so, it was one he’d like to be visiting.

When they’d gone he went back out onto the roof garden. Mellanie smiled at him with the simple happiness of the totally devoted.

“So was she murdered?” the girl asked.

“They don’t know.”

She twined her arms around his neck, pressing her still damp body against him. “Why do you care? It was centuries and centuries ago.”

“Forty years. And I’d care very much if it happened to you.”

Her lips came together in a hurt pout. “Don’t say that.”

“The point is, time doesn’t lessen a crime, especially not today.”

“Okay.” She shrugged, and smiled at him again. “I won’t run away from you like she did, not ever.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” He bent forward slightly, and started kissing her, an action that she responded to with her usual eagerness. Her youthful insecurity had been so easy to exploit, especially for someone with his years of life experience. She’d never known anyone as urbane and self-confident, nor as rich; the only people she’d ever dated were nice first-life boys. By herself, she wasn’t brave enough to break out from her middle-class conformity; but with his coaxing and support she soon began to nibble at the forbidden fruits. The publicity of their affair, the arguments with her parents, it all played in his favor. Like all first-lifers she was desperate to be shown everything life could offer. And as if by a miracle, he’d appeared in her life to fill the role of both guide and paymaster. Suddenly, after all the years of discipline and restrictions she’d endured to reach national level in her sport, nothing was outlawed to her. Her response to the liberation was a very predictable overindulgence.

Mellanie wasn’t quite the most beautiful girl he’d ever bedded, her chin was slightly too long, her nose too blunt, to be awarded that title. But with that lanky, broad-shouldered body of hers trained to the peak of gymnastic fitness, she was certainly one of the most physically satisfying. Although, truly, it was her age that excited him in a way he’d never reached with any of his Silent World encounters. Even in this liberally-inclined society, a rejuve seducing a first-lifer was regarded as being over the edge of civilized behavior—which simply added intensity to the experience. He could afford to ignore the disapproval of others.

This was what he was now, one of the rich and powerful, rising above the norm, the mundane. He lived his personal and professional lives in the same way, if there was something he wanted in either of them, he got it. Empire building became him, allowing him to thrive. Compared to his first mediocre century he was truly alive now.

“Go in and get changed,” he told her eventually. His e-butler summoned the dresser and the beautician to help get the girl ready. “Resal is expecting us on the boat in an hour. I don’t want to be too late, there are people coming that I need to meet tonight.”

“It’s not all business, is it?” Mellanie asked.

“Of course not, there’ll be fun people there as well. People your own age, and people older than me. Now please, we need to get moving.”

“Yes, Morty.” Mellanie caught sight of the two women waiting for her, and turned back to him. “What would you like me to wear?”

“Always: something that shows you off.” His virtual vision was displaying recent clothing purchases the dresser had made. “That gold and white thing you were fitted for on Wednesday. That’s small enough.”

She nodded eagerly. “Okay.” Then she hugged him again, the kind of tight reassurance-seeking embrace a child would give a parent. “I love you, Morty, really I do. You know that, don’t you?” Her eyes searched his face, hunting for any sign of confirmation.

“I know.” His older, earlier self would probably have experienced a twinge of guilt at that adulation. It was never going to last. He knew that, even though she would never be able to see it. In another year or so some other stray beauty would catch his eye, and the sweet heat of the chase would begin again. Mellanie would be gone in a flood of tears. But until then …

He gave her bum a quick gentle slap, hurrying her back into the penthouse. She squealed in mock-outrage before scampering in through the wide doors. The two women followed her in.

His e-butler brought up a list of items that he hadn’t finished working on during the day. He surveyed them all, taking his time to add comments, demand more information, or approve them for action. It was always the way; no matter how complex the management smartware a company employed, executive decisions were inevitably made by a human. An RI could eliminate a whole strata of middle management, but it lacked the kind of creative ability that a true leader possessed.

When he’d tidied up the office work, the butler brought him another sparkling gin. Morton leaned on the steel balcony rail to sip the drink, gazing out at the city below as the sun fell below the horizon. He could outline sections of it in his mind, entire districts that Gansu had built, where their government-licensed subsidiaries now provided utility and civic services—his innovation, that. There were other areas, as well, that drew his eye. Old plantations and orchards that now formed the outskirts, green parquetry flocking around the base of the mountains. Gansu’s architects had drawn up plans for beautiful buildings that would fit snugly into those crumpled mini-valleys, expensive exclusive communities providing for Oaktier’s increasingly affluent population. Already, the farmers were being tempted with financial offers and incentives.

When he looked up to the darkening sky the stars were starting to twinkle. If everything went to plan, his influence would soon stretch out to them, far exceeding the small subcontracts their offplanet offices currently achieved. He controlled Gansu’s board now. The increased business and rising stock price he’d achieved for them over the last decade had given him near-regal status. There would be no timidity in his expansion plans. The opportunities that lay out there were truly staggering. Entire civil infrastructures to be built. The new phase three junction worlds that would one day rival the Big15. Now was the best time to live.

He lowered his gaze again to scan the city rooftops. One old medium-sized tower caught his attention. It was the apartment block he and Tara had lived in for most of their marriage; he’d never realized he could see it from his roof garden. There were no details from this distance, twilight transformed it into a gray slab with parallel lines of light shining out through the windows. He took another sip of the cocktail as he stared at it. His memory couldn’t even provide an image of the apartment’s interior. When he’d gone in for rejuvenation six years after the divorce he’d edited away everything but the basic information from his secure store. Now, that life was almost like a series of notes in a file—not real, not something he’d lived through. And yet … Twenty years ago, when he’d heard of Tara’s re-life procedure, something about it had nagged at him. It was out of character to go and see her, yet he had. The semineurotic woman in her new clone body wasn’t anyone he recognized, certainly not the kind of woman he could form an attachment to. He put that down to shock and psychological trauma from the re-life.

Then the news about Cotal had been filtered out of the unisphere media streams by his e-butler, which had caught the connection to Tara. He’d stopped work in his office—an unheard of event—and worried about how strange the coincidence was. His staff had made a few discreet inquiries, the results of that had been enough for him to call the police. Their subsequent report on the case had annoyed him with its vagueness and lack of conclusion. Rather than kick up a fuss himself, which would draw comment, he’d spoken to some of the senior members of the Shaheef family.

He hadn’t quite expected someone as renown as Chief Investigator Myo herself to be assigned the case. But it was a pleasing development; if anyone could sort out what had actually happened, it would be her. His thoughts slipped to her compact body again, and the high possibility of her needing to visit Silent World.

“Morty.”

He turned around. The dresser and beautician had worked their usual magic. Mellanie was standing silhouetted in the light from the living room, her auburn hair dried and straightened so it fell down her back, the tiny dress exposing vast amounts of toned young flesh. His disquiet over Tara and Cotal vanished at once as he contemplated what new indecencies he would tutor her in later tonight.

“Do I look all right?” she asked cautiously.

“Perfect.”

TEN

Oscar Monroe and McClain Gilbert took the early-morning express from Anshun, passing through StLincoln, then Earth-London before arriving at Kerensk. The CST planetary station there operated the gateway to the High Angel, but there was no train. Instead they disembarked from the express and walked back up the platform to the main concourse. Next was a series of security checks to get into the High Angel transfer section; CST operated the first, a standard deep body scan and luggage examination, before passing them over to the Commonwealth Diplomatic Police Directorate who reviewed all visitor details. The High Angel was the one place where free entry was not a guaranteed right for Commonwealth citizens. As well as all personal details being reviewed by the Diplomatic Police for any criminal record, the file was also forwarded to the High Angel who possessed the ultimate veto on who could enter.

Oscar waited with a fluttering stomach as the policeman accepted the citizenship ID file from his e-butler and ran a DNA scan to confirm he matched the certified data. He’d never been to the High Angel before, there was always a chance it would refuse him entry or, worse, say why. “You ever been before?” he asked Mac. It was an attempt to appear casual in front of the policeman.

“Five times now,” McClain said. “Forward teams train in the zero-gee sections so we’re ready for any type of space encounter.”

“Damn, all these years on the job, and I never knew that.”

McClain grinned at his friend. They’d known each other for ten years, working together in Merredin’s CST exploratory division; after that much time in a high-pressure profession if you didn’t develop a mutual respect then somebody had to leave. Chain of command was always a nominal concept in the division, you trusted people to do their job right. “Oh, great, I’ve been risking my life under an Operations Director that doesn’t have a clue what’s going on.”

“I saw that tar-pit monster coming, didn’t I?”

“Gentlemen,” the policeman said, “you’re clear to proceed.”

They walked through into the transfer section lounge. A steward gave them each a one-piece overall made of light breathable fabric, with fuseto footpads and cuffs. “It’s just for the shuttle,” he told them. “Wear it over your clothes, it stops anything flying loose. And please don’t forget your helmets before you go through, safety regulations will not allow us to fly unless all passengers are wearing them.”

Several other people were in the lounge, all of them shrugging their way into the white overalls. Anyone with long hair was fastening it back with bands that the stewards were handing out. Mac nudged Oscar. “Isn’t that Paula Myo over there?”

Oscar followed his gaze. A young-looking woman was fixing her straight black hair with the bands. Her companion was an overweight man in a smart suit who could barely fit into his overall. “Could be. She must have come out of rejuve recently. I remember accessing the Shayoni case about six or seven years back, the one where she tracked down the arms seller who’d supplied kinetics to the Dakra Free State rebels. Four days she waited in that house for them to show up. That is what I call dedication.”

“My wife studied her cases when she was in the academy, that’s how I know her. I’m sure it’s her.”

“Wonder who she’s after this time?”

“You know, we should have her in the crew.”

Oscar gave Mac a startled look. “As what? Do you think we’re going to start killing each other on the voyage?”

“Living in close proximity with your farts for a year, more than likely. But she solves problems, right, that’s what her whole brain’s wired for. She’s exactly the kind of talent we should be taking with us.”

“There are different kinds of problems, you know; and we’re heading for the wrong sort.” Oscar clapped Mac’s shoulder. “Keep trying, one day you’ll be command material.”

“The day before you, pal.”

“Right. And by the way, what does your wife think about you going off and leaving her for a year?”

“Angie? She’s fairly cool about it. We talked about splitting up, but that’s being unduly pessimistic. We’ll just leave it and see what happens. If she finds someone else while I’m gone, fair enough. Our partnership contract allows for that.”

“Nice contract.”

“Yeah, so what about you? How are you going to cope for a year? Seen any possibilities among the recruits?”

“Haven’t really thought about it. I’ve got enough OCtattoos for a very high-resolution TSI, I’ll just make do with a harem of nicely shaped pixels.”

Mac shook his head in sad dismay. “Brother, you have got to get out more.”

A steward led five of them, including Paula and her companion, into the departure corridor at the far end of the lounge. Everybody’s feet made crunching sounds as the fuseto pads tried to anchor them on the floor. They were all handed a protective helmet as they went through, the steward making sure they put it on. “Are you familiar with zero gee?” the steward asked.

“I am nowadays,” Oscar told him grumpily. The helmet was identical to those they used at the starship complex on Anshun. He still hated his trips to the assembly platform, but Wilson was a real believer in hands-on management—obviously a relic of his gung-ho NASA days. There wasn’t a week since Oscar had joined the project that he hadn’t been on some kind of inspection tour.

“The gateway itself is marked by the black rim,” the steward said, pointing ahead down the corridor. “After that you’re in zero gee; please use the fusetos and do not float free. Your shuttle is waiting at dock five. Now if you’ll all follow me.” As he arrived at the black line, he reached forward and touched his fuseto cuff on the wall. He eased himself gracefully across the line and his feet floated off the floor. Oscar grimaced in resignation, and followed suit.

After five meters, the corridor opened out into the middle of a hemisphere measuring fifty meters across. There were no windows, only eight big airlocks set equidistantly around the rim. Number five was open. The steward led them carefully along the curving surface, adhering to it from his wrists and toes, like some giant insect. He waited by the airlock, ready to give assistance as they stopped to maneuver themselves through into the shuttle.

The little craft was a basic tube, ten meters long, with a double line of couches. Oscar strapped himself in, and looked up. Five thick windows were set into what passed as the fuselage ceiling above him. All he could see was the curving outer wall of the departure port.

There were only fifteen passengers on board. Their steward went along the couches, checking that everyone was settled, then the airlock irised shut. “High Angel does not permit CST to put a gateway inside itself,” the steward said. “So we’re about fifty kilometers away. The journey over will take approximately fifteen minutes. If anyone has any real difficulty, please let me know. I have some strong sedatives which will probably help. In the meantime please familiarize yourself with the sanitary tube on the seatback in front of you.”

Oscar grimaced at the flexible hose with its freshly replaced nozzle. Still, it was an improvement on the bags he’d taken to carrying with him around the starship platform.

The shuttle vibrated quietly as it disengaged from the locking mechanism, chemical reaction control rockets nudged it away from the docking port. After drifting for a few seconds, the more powerful main rockets flared, accelerating them away. As they retreated from the port, more and more of the structure flowed into view through the shuttle windows, until after a minute Oscar could see the entire gateway station. It reminded him of a quartz cluster, long hexagonal tube sections all rising up out of a central disk; with the twin shuttle departure and arrival ports extending out from the disk’s rim. The end of the hexagonal tubes were giant airlocks where cargo tugs delivered their shipments; sealed pods containing completed satellites, sophisticated solid-state devices, compounds, crystals, and biologicals that could only be fabricated in microgee environments. Cargo tugs also used the airlocks to load up with consumer goods and food that the gateway delivered, ferrying them over to the High Angel.

The rest of the archipelago drifted into view through the window; over a hundred free-flying factories ranging from tiny independent research capsules barely larger than the shuttle up to the corporate macrohubs, kilometer-wide webs with production modules sitting on each junction where they glinted like jewels of prismatic chrome. Behind them the gas giant world, Icalanise, dominated the starfield as the little shuttle rotated slowly. Their orbital position showed it to them as a massive crescent striped by saffron and white cloud bands whose fluctuating edges locked together by counterspiral curlicues, as if each was extending talons into the other. A pair of small black circles were close together on the equator, eclipse shadows thrown by two of the gas giant’s thirty-eight moons.

After ten minutes, the shuttle turned again, aligning itself for the deceleration burn. Oscar found himself looking straight at the High Angel.

The exploratory division wormhole that opened in the star system in 2163 was unable to locate any H-congruous planet, and the Operations Director was almost about to close it and move on when the dish picked up a powerful, regular microwave pulse from Icalanise. They obtained a position lock to a point orbiting half a million kilometers above the brimstone atmosphere, and shifted the wormhole in for a closer look. It was a confusing image at first. The telescope had centered on a dark, rocky moonlet sixty-three kilometers long, and up to twenty wide. But it appeared to be sprouting petals of pearl-white light—an angel’s wings. Moving in, and refining the focus, revealed the rock was actually the host body to twelve giant artificial domes of crystal sitting on the end of tall metallic stalks. Not all of the domes were translucent and radiant; five were clear, revealing the alien cities contained inside. Street grids were illuminated in ruby, turquoise, and emerald light, while thousands of windows set into the strange architectural silhouettes of towers, hoops, cones, and spheres blazed away in the spectrums of many different suns.

What they’d found was a starship, a living behemoth capable of FTL travel. It was not any kind of life that humanity understood, being neither a machine that had risen to sentience nor a spaceborn life-form that had evolved or been engineered into its current nature. However, the High Angel wasn’t forthcoming about its origin, saying only that its purpose was to provide a habitable environment to the planet-based species it encountered in the hope of learning about them. It was “resting” in orbit around Icalanise—for how long was also not divulged. After some negotiation over a radio channel it agreed to open three of its domes to humans, who would use the space primarily as a dormitory town for the astroengineering companies. The two most prominent clauses in the settlement agreement were High Angel’s veto on visitors and settlers, and its promise to inform its new human residents before it took flight again, whenever that might be.

Their shuttle maneuvered underneath the vast base of the New Glasgow dome and down along the tapering stalk underneath. The dome’s spaceport was situated just above the point where the pewter-colored stalk sank into the starship’s rocky outer crust, a thick necklace of airlocks and ports that ringed the structure. Several of them had shuttles attached, while larger docking cradles were holding cargo tugs that were unloading.

They docked with a slight tremble, and the plyplastic airlock irised open. “Thank you for traveling with us,” the steward said. “Please remember that after you disembark you will still be in freefall until the lift is moving.”

Oscar waited until all the passengers in front of him had gotten out before releasing his own straps. The corridor outside the airlock was disappointing: a wide silvery tube with a shallow curve taking it deeper into the stalk; there was no exotic feel to it at all. He drifted across it to the lift opposite. Like everyone else he let his fuseto soles stick him to the floor. Just before the doors closed, he saw Paula Myo and her companion glide past the lift, heading farther down the corridor.

Gravity slowly built as the lift slid up the inside of the stalk. That much Oscar could understand, they were accelerating, after all. When it stopped, he was still in a full standard gravity field. The High Angel had never explained that, or any other technical ability it possessed, like its power source, the nature of its FTL drive, how it shielded itself from particle impacts, where the mass came from to extrude its new domes.

Their lift was one of ten opening out into a big arrivals lounge. Oscar and Mac took off their overalls and dropped them into a bin, then headed eagerly for the exit. The transit building was at the center of New Glasgow’s Circle Park, an area of greenery five kilometers wide filled with so many trees it could almost be classed as forest. Behind the trees were the skyscrapers, as varied in shape and texture as those along any New York avenue. The difference here was the skyway loops that coiled around them, thin rails carrying personal pods between public stops at considerable speed. It was daytime, which meant the crystal dome above them had turned translucent, emitting a uniform white light close to Sol’s spectrum. The atmosphere was pleasantly warm, with a touch of summer humidity.

Oscar took a long moment, his head craned back, turning a slow circle. “I have to admit, this is hellishly impressive. Puts the old Second Chance into perspective, doesn’t it?”

“Different strokes …” Mac shrugged. “We developed gateways and the CST network: every planet just a step away. If we’d spent three hundred years developing starships, I expect we’d be riding around the galaxy in something like this.”

Oscar glanced at him. “You’re impressed,” he decided.

“It’s a grand chunk of engineering, I admit. But it doesn’t give me an inferiority complex.”

“Okay, okay. So how do we get to Madam Chairwoman?”

Mac pointed through the woodland ahead. Small footpaths led away from the transit building, meandering through the trees. There was a stream not far away, the glimpse of a lake past the wider trunks. About fifty meters along the path ahead was a small white pillar with three personal pods parked around it. “They’ll take us as close as you can get,” Mac said.

The pods were simple pearl-white spheres with a flattened base. The doors were open ovals on either side, protected by a translucent force field. Mac eased through and sat on the small bench seat inside. Oscar joined him. From the inside, the pod shell was transparent. The force field doors flickered and strengthened.

“Chairwoman’s office, please,” Mac said.

The pod slid along the ground for a few meters, then the path surface dilated, exposing the top of a tunnel, and they sank down into it. There was no light in the tunnel, though the pod’s interior remained illuminated.

“Whoa,” Oscar said. His hands automatically gripped at the inside of the shell, even though there was no sensation of movement through the tunnel. “Must be some kind of inertial damping.”

“Stop analyzing. Enjoy. Especially this bit.”

“What—wowshit.”

The personal pod left the tunnel vertically, soaring along one of the skyway rails at what seemed like supersonic speed. Without feeling any acceleration, they were racing parallel to one of the skyscrapers, a tall slender cone of blue steel with a red sphere perched on top. Then the skyway curved around in a leisurely arc and leveled out. Another pod was hurtling toward them. Oscar had to force himself to keep his eyes open as they flashed past each other. Only then did his rattling heart slow enough so that he could take some enjoyment from the spectacle. They were high enough now that he could see right across the dome. There was as much parkland as there was urban area, and the shapes of the big buildings really were remarkable.

“This is much better at night,” Mac said. “That’s when the crystal turns transparent; you can see Icalanise overhead. Then you really know you’re in an alien place.”

They twisted over a junction to another skyway, which sent them arching around and down toward a building that looked like a silver clamshell. The pod zipped into the huge lobby on the eighteenth floor, and stopped by a white pillar where several others were clustered, waiting.

“Better than your Merc, huh?” Mac said as they climbed out.

Oscar pulled a face. “Just different.”

One of the Chairwoman’s political staffers was waiting for them, a young-looking woman in an expensive business suit. “Welcome to city hall, gentlemen,” Soolina Depfor said. “Ms. Gall is expecting you.” She led them straight into the office of the Chairwoman of the Human Residents Association, a huge oval room that had to be inside the building’s largest central rib. Its ceiling was a half cone of stained glass whose colors undulated in a long perpendicular wave pattern. There was only one piece of furniture, a desk right at the far end; an arrangement that made it seem like an old-fashioned throne room. But then, Oscar knew, Toniea Gall had been Chairwoman of the Residents Association for over a century. Few of history’s absolute monarchs had reigned for that long.

The Chairwoman, a tall woman with blue-black skin, dressed in a traditional African tribal robe, rose to greet them as they approached. With less than a decade left before her next rejuvenation, her face was dignified and solemn. Gray strands had infiltrated her tight-cropped cap of hair. It said something of the confidence she had in herself that she didn’t bother having it dyed. But then she won every election with a substantial majority. Her few critics and opponents claimed it was because nobody else really wanted the job; it was nothing other than a figurehead position; the High Angel ran all the services in the domes with peerless efficiency. To say that was to badly underestimate her ability. The High Angel might have started off simply as a convenient dormitory town for the astroengineering companies, but now the three domes—New Glasgow, Moscow Star, and Cracacol—were home to over fifteen million souls. Two new domes, New Auckland and Babuyan Atoll, which the Chairwoman had negotiated with High Angel, were now almost fully grown and ready for human occupancy. The freeflying factories outside manufactured a small but significant overall percentage of the Commonwealth’s high technology systems. By any measure, the High Angel was a big success story, and Toniea Gall, who had arrived as a company-contract ion thruster technician with the first wave of residents, was both a mirror and champion of that success story. She was also one of the longest serving heads of state, and lately the political media had begun to talk of her as a serious potential candidate for the presidency.

Oscar clasped the hand that the Chairwoman proffered, feeling dry, cool skin. “Thank you for seeing us, ma’am.”

“I was in two minds if I should,” Toniea Gall said. Her voice lacked any trace of humor or welcome. “Along with the rest of the residents, I felt quite insulted that Nigel Sheldon ignored us as a location to build his starship.”

Oscar’s smile tightened; he didn’t dare risk a glance at Mac. “I’m confident that no insult was intended, ma’am.”

“Then why not build it here?” she asked, genuinely puzzled. “We have all the facilities, as well as a huge pool of experience and knowledge. Building it at Anshun must have added a considerable amount to the cost of the project. Why would he do that?”

“Anshun is somewhat closer to the Dyson Pair—”

“Pah.” She waved a hand dismissively. “As if that would make any difference, a few days travel time at best. Is he trying to establish a rival space industry?”

“I assure you, ma’am, the only thing being built at Anshun is the starship. There are no freefall industrial facilities. A great many of our componants are sourced from the High Angel.”

“Humm. I’ll accept that for now, but you can tell Mr. Sheldon directly from me, I am extremely displeased by the decision. The next time his proxies need support for a close vote in the Senate, he need not come looking for it here.”

“I will let him know,” Oscar said meekly.

“So what are you here for?”

“We would like to ask the High Angel what it knows about the Dyson Pair. Any information, however small, would benefit our mission.”

“We are connected to the unisphere, you know.”

Oscar managed to avoid her piercing stare. “My immediate boss favors a very hands-on personal approach for something as critical as this, and the Residents Association has a permanent open link to the High Angel’s controlling intelligence.”

“It doesn’t know anything about the Dyson Pair.”

“We’d like to confirm that.”

Her lips pressed together in a thin smile. “The horse’s mouth, eh, gentlemen. Very well.” She gestured at the vaulting window behind her. “Did you see all the domes on your approach?”

“Most of them, yes.”

“The Raiel live in one. We know that because they consented to contact with humans. As to the other eight original domes, nobody knows who or what they house. Three of them contain cities or structures of some kind; they light up at night but nothing has ever been seen moving inside. One dome seems to be filled with mist; people claim they’ve glimpsed lights and shadows in there, but there’s no proof. One is permanently dark, though it does emit heavily in the infrared spectrum, indicating an internal temperature higher than an H-congruous world. One is permanently opaque and illuminated. And the last two have a thirty-seven-hour day-night cycle, but also remain opaque. So you see, gentlemen, after two centuries living here we don’t even know who our neighbors are. The High Angel prizes privacy above all else. Now you’re here to ask it about a species that has deliberately locked itself away from the rest of the galaxy.”

“It is a long shot, I admit,” Oscar said. “But we have to ask, you can understand that.”

“I understand your motives, but I don’t approve. We have to safeguard our own position, a priority which I place at the top of my list. However, you are welcome to use the Association’s open channel to our host.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

They retreated from her office, following a couple of paces behind Soolina Depfor as her heels clicked loudly on the polished floor. Oscar could feel the Chairwoman’s eyes staring into his back the whole way out. As soon as the tall doors closed, they exchanged a glance. Mac puffed his cheeks out. “Jeeze, what a ballbreaker,” he muttered.

At which point Soolina Depfor turned around, raising an eyebrow. Mac’s face turned a heated red.

“Our official channel is through here,” Soolina Depfor said. She showed them into a windowless conference room off the reception hall. It was built on a considerably less grand scale than the Chairwoman’s office, with a slim oval table in the middle that had six high-back leather chairs around it. “Just talk,” she told them. “The High Angel can hear you.” The door closed behind her.

“Make that two ballbreakers,” Mac said as they sat at one end of the table.

Oscar gave him a warning glance. “Hello?”

The featureless wall at the far end of the room glowed blue, then cleared to show a mirror image of the conference room. A man was sitting about halfway down the table. He wore a black V-necked sweater and dark trousers, his broad face had a couple of days’ stubble, and the hair above his forehead was receding. It was an image aimed at reassurance, the kind of senior executive you could trust. “Hello.”

“You’re the High Angel?” Mac asked.

The man shrugged. “I find this representation helps your species. Just showing an image of my hull and habitation section seems a bit pretentious, somehow.”

“Thank you for the consideration,” Oscar said.

“After meeting with our dear Chairwoman, making life easy is the least I could do for you. You were right, Mac, she is a complete ballbreaker. I guess that’s why you people keep voting for her—who’d dare vote against. Of course, she does do a good job as well.”

“You heard what we said in there?”

“I hear what I want to inside myself. As I did explain to your Commonwealth leaders right at the start, I’m here to learn about different species; you can only do that through observation.”

“I know this isn’t quite on topic, but why are you collecting information?”

“Why does your species spend so much time obsessing about sex, politics, and religion? We are what we are, no matter what our appearance, nature, and size. My priority is gathering information on alien species, I’m an explorer and social anthropologist. I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

“Okay,” Mac said amicably. “Who are you collecting it for?”

“I’m not even sure anymore, I’ve been doing it so long now. Then again, that might be a lie and I’m actually feeding information on this galaxy and its defense capabilities to a fleet of warships that are thundering in from Andromeda. One day, my kind will regroup at the center of the collapsing universe, and carry the seeds of a new evolution into the next universe to be born, a mix of the best of what’s gone before. Or, I watch the planetborn for entertainment here in my Olympian orbit. Pick your reason, gentlemen, your species has forwarded all those and more.”

“Why are aliens all intent on being enigmatic?”

“You’re not classing me in there with the Silfen, are you? It’s really very simple, as I said, this is what I do. I gain, I suppose, satisfaction from meeting you and learning from you. I regret I teach very little in return, but that, too, is my nature. Maybe one day I will decide to do something with all the knowledge I have acquired, and transform or even transcend; but for the moment I haven’t reached anything like a data saturation point. I remain curious about the universe.”

“Did that curiosity ever take you to the Dyson Pair?” Oscar asked.

“No, I’m afraid not. Our Chairwoman was being truthful with you; I have no information on either star.”

“Aren’t you curious, though? Surely a species which can erect a barrier around a star would be worth studying?”

The High Angel grinned broadly. “If they’ve put up a barrier, how would I study them? No, you’re right, they would make a most interesting addition to my little menagerie. But I’ve only just encountered you.”

“Fair enough,” Mac said. “But aren’t you interested in the reason why the barriers went up?”

“Of course I am. But again, I can’t help you. I don’t know the reason, I’ve never visited that sector of space.”

“What about observation? Did you ever sense any kind of conflict going on out there before the barriers went up?”

“No, I didn’t. That whole section of space is unremarkable as far as I know. Certainly there have been no unnatural alterations made on a stellar level, no stars extinguished or turning nova; nor am I aware of any planets physically annihilated.”

“What about in general? Even you admit you’ve been around for a long time, have you ever encountered anything that would require a barrier like this to defend a star? Are there species out there that would attack a star or obliterate an inhabited planet?”

“Intent and capability are not the same thing. There are many humans throughout your history who have shown no compunction about unleashing death and disaster on a massive scale; if they had possessed a device capable of exterminating a star they might well have used it. And in the past I have observed species who make your most evil tyrants appear saints by comparison. However, as a general rule, in order to reach the kind of technology level where destroying a sun is achievable, a society must be relatively stable.”

“Some of our biggest leaps have been made during wartime,” Mac said.

“I agree that humans are most adept at innovating when placed under pressure or threat,” the High Angel said. “But there is a difference between building new weapons and the fundamental theories upon which such technical advances are based. Genuine scientific progress is a slow climb, which requires a stable society to support thinkers and theorists over many generations. Evolution usually means that the species which break out of their planetary environment have some inbuilt social or biological mechanism for restraining their prehistory savagery. Of course there are many exceptions, with determined individuals circumventing such strictures. And it could well be that a less developed culture obtains the relics and knowledge left behind by a more advanced race. But to extrapolate that to a race or entity which poses a physical threat to a star is almost beyond probability.”

“Then why the barrier?”

“I really don’t know,” the High Angel said. “But from my experience and observation I’m ninety-nine percent certain that it was not to ward off aggression.”

“It’s the one percent that kills you,” Oscar mused.

“Inevitably. But I am not aware of any species within thousands, if not tens of thousands, of light-years which is capable of aggression on this scale. I may be wrong, for I don’t claim to be infallible. It could even be argued that the mega-flare which eliminated most of the life on Far Away was an example of such belligerence, it certainly falls beyond the ethics of most civilizations and species. However, as you are aware, I do maintain a comprehensive observation of space over a great many parsecs. If such a threat is out there, then it has the ability to elude my senses. A worrying development, I concede.”

“Or so big a threat it’s actually not worth worrying about,” Mac said.

“That’s a very human viewpoint,” the High Angel said. “I don’t subscribe to it myself. But then by your standards I’m something of a coward.”

“Is that why you haven’t visited the Dyson Pair?”

“Let’s just say, this is a comfortable distance to watch from. I am curious, which is why in this instance I am keen to help you beyond my normal capacity.”

Oscar ran his hand back through his hair. “Thank you for that. If you do observe anything relevant …”

“I will inform you of course. And please feel free to call me again should you have any further inquiries. In the future, I will accept a direct link from either of you through the unisphere.”

....

Both Paula and Hoshe spent the express train journey to Kerensk sitting quietly in first class, running through information from the case. Diagrams, text summaries, financial graphs, they all swarmed through their virtual vision. Even Paula’s attention wavered occasionally under the relentless flow.

However, they both abandoned the case data for the shuttle trip over to the High Angel. Hoshe was fascinated by what he could see outside the windows, requesting a stream of descriptive information from his e-butler. Once they’d docked at the base of the New Glasgow stalk, Paula instructed her e-butler to query the High Angel’s internal information net for directions as the other passengers drifted past on their way to the lift. A subsidiary net program directed her down the curving corridor to a door that opened into a smaller lift capsule.

“Did you find anything relevant in the case files?” she asked as the doors closed and they started to accelerate.

Hoshe glanced around the lift suspiciously. “Can we talk in here?”

“Yes. The High Angel is aware of everything inside itself. And I’ve already briefed it about the case.”

“Oh. Right. Well, the Tampico National Tax Office was helpful. After the flotation, the shares from Tara’s half of the company were deposited into the Tampico First State Bank by Broher Associates, her divorce lawyers. Eight months later, those were then exchanged for Gansu Construction shares when Morton agreed to the buyout. All very standard. Then they just sat there until she was re-lifed, at which point she transferred them back to her accountant on Oaktier.”

“What about the dividends?”

“Gansu was an excellent deal. They’ve paid dividends every four months, and the share price has gone up twelve times their original price in that time—Morton is a good director. The money went straight into the bank’s long-term investment account, which also did reasonably well over seventeen years, although the percentage was lower than most managed funds. No money was ever taken out; it stayed there and grew for her. The bank paid local tax on it every year. Nobody questioned the timescale. Apparently, there are a lot of accounts left untouched like that, some of them for centuries.”

“Did she have a current account with First State?”

“No.”

“And there’s no record of Wyobie Cotal having any kind of account off Oaktier? If they had lived there on Tampico, they had to have some kind of funds. They’d be traceable.”

“All credit transfers from Tara’s Oaktier bank dried up after the final balance was paid, three weeks after she supposedly left for Tampico. The last item on the account was a payment to Broher Associates for handling the divorce case, that was a week prior to the final balance payment. That all checks out, Broher Associates served Morton the divorce file a fortnight after she left. The bank changed her account status from current to sleeper three years later; that’s standard procedure when it’s been inactive for that length of time, it prevents any less-than-honest bank employee from spotting she’s not using it and siphoning off the money themselves. To open it up again after her re-life she had to go in with a court order confirming her identity.”

“What’s listed on her credit account in the two weeks before paying her lawyers?”

“Not a damn thing. The second to last payment is for her lunch with Caroline Turner. There is nothing in the period between that and the divorce lawyers.”

“Do we know where she was when the payment to the lawyers was made?”

“No. Just somewhere within the unisphere.”

“No live sighting or confirmation then,” Paula mused. The banks would swear in court that anyone with an account had to be alive for the pattern code to work. It was a complete lie, of course; banks across the Commonwealth lost billions to credit hackers every year. The only really secure credit account was with the SI bank; and she’d seen classified reports on the ultra-grade hackers who had even managed to forge those transfers, though it involved cellular reprofiling and assuming the victim’s life. A pattern code, however detailed and complex, could always be copied and duplicated given enough time and resources.

“What about Wyobie Cotal, did he spend any money on Tampico?”

“No. I checked his account. Same story as Tara. No purchases after the day they disappeared together. His bank changed the account from current to sleeper two years later.”

“Who paid for the tickets to Tampico?”

“Cash transaction the morning they went missing. But they were registered in Tara’s name.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any way of knowing if they were actually used?”

“No. CST doesn’t keep that kind of information.”

“They have sensors and cameras in every planetary station.”

“But the data isn’t archived for four decades, it would cost a fortune. They keep it for a couple of years at most, and that varies between stations.”

“What about cash? Did either of them make any large withdrawals before they supposedly left Oaktier?”

“No, neither of them ever made any large cash withdrawals from their Oaktier accounts, period. So unless one of them had a secret numbered account somewhere it’s hard to believe they were alive, even for that first fortnight.”

“Humm.” Paula reached out and used her cuff fuseto on the wall, steadying herself as the lift capsule changed direction. She knew they were traveling along the inside of the giant starship’s hull now, heading for the Raiel habitation dome. “I suppose it’s possible she could have sold some jewelry and lived off that money. But why would she? The whole case that they went to Tampico is getting worse the closer we look at it.”

“I haven’t believed it for some time.”

“Me neither. But we must always be sure, Hoshe.”

“Of course.”

“My Directorate has been unable to find any secure memory store facility opened by Tara. I think that just about makes it official. She was killed, and presumably Cotal as well. We now need to find a motive, which is the really puzzling part of all this. It certainly isn’t financial. I’m still inclined to think Shaheef and Cotal walked in on some criminal activity; the payment to the lawyers two weeks later would tend to support that because someone was clearly busy building up the alibi that they were still alive. If so, there will be very little evidence for us to find.”

“Then why are we here?”

“Process of elimination. I want to lock down Shaheef’s personal life. All of it.” Her hands gripped the small bag she was carrying. She could tell Hoshe was deeply uncertain about the whole concept, but like a good policeman he wasn’t criticizing his boss. Not yet.

The lift rose up the stalk to the Raiel dome, and the gravity field asserted itself, reaching eighty percent Earth standard. Hoshe took a moment to steady himself; he’d never seen an alien in the flesh before—though his wife was always talking about visiting the Silfen. But then this break in everyday life was all part of working with Paula Myo. He’d pulled in every favor, real or imagined, with the division’s captain to stay assigned to the case when it became known she was taking it on. Success by association was always welcome, but he genuinely wanted to see her working her magic. There was also the remote possibility she might endorse an application to the Serious Crimes Directorate. Hoshe hadn’t mentioned that piece of career planning to anyone, but the idea was firmly lodged at the back of his mind now.

When the door opened it was a slight anticlimax; rather than some exotic alien metropolis he was looking out on a gloomy alleyway with smooth matte-black metal walls thirty meters high. Above him, the dome’s crystal was transparent, permitting Icalanise’s wan amber light to shine through. Small red lights were embedded along the foot of the alley walls, glimmering like candlelit jewels. He found the silence imposing, a complete absence of even the faintest sound.

“It probably looks better in the daytime,” he decided.

“This is the daytime,” Paula told him primly. She started walking.

Twice, Hoshe was convinced something big flew overhead, just above the walls. A subliminal rustle of air, maybe the light flickering ever so slightly. Of course, whenever he looked up, all he could see was the rigid strip of dome crystal above the walls.

“Do you know where we’re going?” he asked.

“More or less. The city geometry changes slightly the whole time, its buildings and streets tend to move around, but they do it slowly. Don’t worry, the High Angel won’t let us go anywhere we shouldn’t.” She paused at an intersection. This alley was a little wider, and had green lights glinting along its length. A Raiel was moving along it, heading toward them. In the dim light it was hard to see anything but a large dark bulk sliding closer, which made the huge alien even more intimidating. An adult Raiel was larger than a bull elephant, though that was where all comparison ended. From the angle Hoshe was seeing it, the alien’s forward body looked more like an octopus tipped on its side. A bulbous head was surrounded by a collar of tentacle-limbs ranging from a pair at the bottom that had evolved for heavy work, four meters long with paddlelike tips and a base thicker than a human torso, down to clumps of small slender manipulators that resembled energetic nests of boa constrictors.

A bunch of five small hemispherical eyes on the side of its head swiveled in unison to focus on Hoshe as it reached the intersection. When he glanced down, he saw eight short stumpy legs on each side of its underbelly; they didn’t have any knees or ankles, they were just blunt cylinders of flesh that tilted up and forward in pairs to propel it along in what amounted to a continuous smooth waddle. As the main bulk of its body went past, Hoshe could just make out brown rings mottling the grizzled hide of short bristly fur. Behind the collar of tentacles a number of small protuberances were dangling down as if the flesh had been pulled into dreadlocks; by the way the bulbs at the end swung about ponderously they could have been solid lead, they were definitely technological rather than any natural growth.

“How about that,” he mumbled once the giant alien was past. Its rear end tapered to a drooping point.

“They are somewhat overwhelming,” Paula said as she started off down the alley with green lights. “A lot of human residents here think they actually built the High Angel. Given their intelligence level it’s a strong possibility.”

“What do you believe?”

For the first time since they’d been on the case, Paula produced a small smile. “I don’t believe it really matters. But for the record: it’s unlikely.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re almost as indifferent to us as the Silfen are. Mind you, it’s different in this instance; the Raiel really do look down on us from a great intellectual height. I don’t think any entity that aloof would build something with the High Angel’s mission. Qatux told me once that they study the physical dynamics of the universe, not the cultures it contains. To them, life really is an accident of chemistry; all life, including themselves. I think they only agreed to contact with the Commonwealth so that they could have access to our unisphere’s astrophysics database. They’ve made some substantial contributions to our sensor technology over the years.”

They walked for another five minutes. Other than the color of the low lights that was different at each intersection, there was no change to the nature of the alleys or walls. He knew there were tall structures somewhere in the dome, but none of them were visible from the bottom of the alleys. It didn’t take much imagination for him to picture himself as some lab animal scuttling through a maze.

Paula eventually stopped beside a section of wall no different from any other; the string of lights along the base were purple shading toward ultra-violet. After a moment, a section of the wall in front of her split open and parted. The gap was wide enough to admit a Raiel. Inside was a broad circular space, its floor glowing a pale emerald. The roof was invisible somewhere in the darkness above.

A Raiel was waiting for them a few meters beyond the door. Paula stood before it, and gave a small bow. “Hello, Qatux, thank you for seeing me.”

Qatux’s head lifted, revealing the crinkled, damp folds of pale skin that was its mouth zone. Several of them creased up, briefly exposing deep gullets and nasal passages. There was even a glimpse of sharp brown fangs. “Paula.” The voice was a mellow whisper, accompanied by the soft sighing of air escaping through the big alien’s loose muscles. “Have you brought it?”

“Yes.” She opened her bag and brought out a fist-sized cylinder of memory crystal.

The big Raiel quivered at the sight of it. Now that his eyes were acclimatizing to the murky light, Hoshe could see Qatux didn’t appear to be in very good physical shape. The hide around its main torso was tight, outlining the platelets of its skeletal structure. One of its large tentacle-limbs was trembling, which it kept coiled up, though the splayed tip kept falling out. All its eyes were rheumy, blinking out of sequence.

“How long is it?” Qatux asked.

“Tara Jennifer Shaheef is over a hundred years old. Can you handle that much memory?”

One of the medium-sized tentacles slithered out toward Paula, its tip poised above the memory crystal. “Yes. Most certainly. I can do that.”

“I’m serious.” Paula slapped at the tentacle tip that hurriedly withdrew. “I need to know if it’s actually possible. You’ve never taken more than twenty years before.”

“Yes. Yes. It will take longer for me to absorb that much information, that’s all.”

“All right then. I’m looking for anyone who could carry a grudge. Anyone who features prominently and then vanishes from her life. They might have been edited out, so check for missing segments, you know, sequences that don’t connect to anything else. I want you to consider professional clashes as well as personal ones. It might even be a quick meeting, a particularly savage argument. I don’t know, but some trigger, okay?”

The tentacle crept out again, a sheepish motion. “These events and people I will find for you.”

“I hope so.” Her hand moved up and down, as if physically weighing the cylinder, demonstrating her reluctance. Then she brought it up and slapped it into the hooked end of the tentacle. Qatux hurriedly pulled it back. “Don’t take too long,” she admonished.

“A week. No more. I will call you. I promise.”

The wall parted again to let them out.

“That’s it?” Hoshe asked. “We just leave her memory with Qatux?”

“You heard. Qatux will call when he’s finished.”

“Hell, I thought …” Hoshe lowered his voice. “I thought we were taking it to some Raiel authority, a forensics lab. Something official!”

“What do you want? A mayor or a president with a signature certificate on a court warrant? The High Angel lets us in, the Raiel city gives us access; it doesn’t get any more official than this.”

Hoshe took a long breath, he really didn’t want to get on the wrong side of the Chief Investigator. But he was police, too; maybe not like her, but he had a sense of right and wrong, of justice. “All I’m saying is, it took the Oaktier Supreme National Court three days to grant us copy authority to Shaheef’s secure store memory. And if it had been anybody else but you applying, we probably wouldn’t have got that. Isn’t that an indicator of how highly we value a secure store? This is a person’s life we’re dealing with here, her whole life. And now you just hand it over to some sick alien.”

“Yes it’s her life. But that life was entrusted to us when she was murdered.”

“Alleged murder.”

“It is time you learned that passing your own judgment and acting upon it is essential to our profession. Have some confidence in yourself and your ability, Detective.”

Hoshe scowled, though he knew his cheeks were reddening. He walked through the bizarrely lit alleys next to the Chief Investigator, both of them keeping silent.

The lift door was still open when they arrived back at it.

“They pity him, you know,” Paula said as they started their descent back down the stalk.

“Who?”

“The other Raiel. They pity Qatux. You understand what he is, don’t you?”

“I think so.”

“They’re an old race. They have dignity and grace in abundance, their minds are far superior to ours. We’re only a few generations away from our hunter-gatherer ancestors; while the Raiel are so far past that rung on their evolutionary ladder they’re almost a different species to the creatures they left behind. It leaves them vulnerable to certain things. I’m not making excuses for what Qatux is, but I understand his fall. We can cope with raw emotion because we’re still close to the animal origin. I can’t imagine what it’s like for an entity who has never experienced love or hate or anger or joy to be exposed to such feelings. Shock, I guess. For the majority of them, anyway. Most Raiel are mentally strong enough to dismiss it. But the weaker ones, they can become addicted. That’s what happened to Qatux; he’s a human junkie. He loves us. And I think it’s the saddest thing in the universe.”

“So he’s reliving Shaheef’s memories?”

“Not reliving, he’s becoming her. Every experience, every sight, every sound, he knows them. You heard him, it’ll take a week to absorb a hundred years of her life. When it’s done, we’ll be able to ask him anything about any day, hour, or minute of her life, and get a coherent answer.”

“All right, but I don’t see the need. We can do that, we don’t need a Raiel.”

“Have you ever reviewed someone’s memory, Hoshe?”

“No,” he admitted.

“It’s not like a TSI recording; similar I grant you, but not the same. TSI is the polished version, directed and focused. They’re made for a reason, to push your attention onto something. Ninety percent of the market has a sexual content, but there are the pure dramas, and action adventures, and tourist trips as well. It actually takes a very skilled performer, backed up by an equally skillful nerve impulse editor, to receive and filter out the impressions that the director wants and the script calls for. You access a TSI and the story is laid out for you, easy and simple, you sit back and zip through it. True memory is different, it’s whatever has caught your attention at the moment. There can be a dozen important—critical—things going on around you, and because of your prejudices, the way your personality is put together, you’re only looking at one, most likely the least important. It doesn’t even have to be visual; a sound, a smell, that could be the only recollection you have of a room, not who was in it or what they said. And try finding that room amid all the years you can recall … We can date the sections of memories which were recorded by an insert memorycell. But indexing, that’s completely different. Unless you know the exact time, you’re forced to review the whole day, or if you’re unlucky, week. And that’s where Qatux comes in. Humans have to review memory in real-time, we can’t accept it running faster than it happened. So if I wanted to look through the century which is Shaheef’s life, I would have to spend a century doing it. But Qatux with his larger brain and excellent mind, he can take the whole load in almost at once.”

“You were worried about him.”

“Yes. A hundred years is a long time. Even his brain will have a limit. And I know he’s soaked up dozens of human lives already.”

“Doesn’t that bother you, being his pusher?”

“Human ethics,” she murmured. “You can’t judge the Raiel by our standards. They don’t police their own kind the way we do. Raiel are supposed to police themselves. Qatux has made his choice, which in his society he has a perfect right to do. He’s going to get those memories anyway. If I didn’t supply them, other people will; it’s not just commercial TSI recordings you can buy within the unisphere, there are real memories to be had as well. A small specialist market. This way Qatux helps us solve the crime, everybody benefits. If we stopped him from getting them, it would be us committing the transgression as far as the Raiel are concerned.”

“Maybe,” Hoshe said. The lift was slowing again, delivering them into freefall. “I still believe this is wrong.”

“Do you want to leave the case? I won’t stop you, and it won’t read against you on your record.”

“No thank you, Chief Investigator. We’ve come this far; I’m going to see it through.”

....

From the moment it began, Rob Tannie regretted taking this job. It was all down to money of course, and his perennial shortage of it. In his current chosen profession of “field security operative” ordinary jobs were hard to find, and well-paid jobs were merely the stuff of legend. So when his agent called to offer him the contract with its fantastic payment, he should have known better. And if that wasn’t enough, the contract also had a re-life clause: he was to load his memories into a private clinic’s secure store and his anonymous employer would provide a five-year bond. If Rob didn’t reappear within five years in person to cancel it, then the clinic would go ahead with the procedure.

That told him, even if intuition and simple common sense didn’t, that sure-as-shit five years from now he’d be waking up in some freaky infant-teenage body with no recollection of the last few months of this existence. He should have walked. But it was those damn finances: some bad investments in horses and certain sporting fixtures, as well as poker and other games of chance, had left a rather large shortfall in his credit balance. He couldn’t afford not to agree, not with creditors like his, and his agent knew that. So he said yes, and expected to wind up helping some radical ethnic group strike a blow for greater cultural autonomy against their planetary government, or take part in a corporate black ops strike, or if things were really bad he could even be involved in some criminal syndicate power struggle. Naturally, with his luck, it was even worse than any of those.

Two weeks settling into his newly arranged job as a security guard at CST’s Anshun starship complex. Two boring weeks staying in character while he learned the layout, the schedules, the hardware that CST used. Getting on nodding terms with the technical teams putting the starship together. Sharing a laugh with his new colleagues about the hundreds of overeager hopefuls who arrived every day for their final stage crew interviews and assessments. Actually catching a glimpse of Nigel Sheldon himself, surrounded by his entourage of aides.

Two weeks and he still had no idea why he was here. He couldn’t work out who was opposed to CST, unless it was some kind of Earth Grand Family conflict—who knew what those rich weirdos would do to each other to gain an advantage.

Then this morning just before breakfast he received an encrypted message from his agent. Rob used the key he’d been given, and slim green text opened up across his virtual vision. His mug of breakfast coffee grew cold as he read and reread the briefing with its precise instructions and timings. Finally, he looked up at the apartment’s ceiling and groaned, “Oh, bloody hell.” That was it, he really wasn’t likely to survive the day, despite the last text section that detailed extraction routes.

He stuck to the routine he’d established, and took a city metro out to the CST planetary station. From there he caught one of the staff buses that spent the day trundling back and forth over the wasteland of the station yard to the starship complex. Along with the other security guards he arrived at the locker room twenty minutes before shift started so he could change into his uniform. This time, he took longer than usual, waiting until the room was nearly empty. When there were only two others left, he went over to the locker specified in the briefing. The code pattern in his thumb OCtattoo opened it. A simple utility belt was inside, identical to the one he was wearing. He swapped the pair of them around, and closed the locker before leaving.

His shift began at eight-thirty, and he was at the main gatehouse on time, one of three guards to be stationed there. The first person through was Wilson Kime. Rob saluted as the gate opened for the captain’s car. It was about the most physical part of his duty. The three guards in the gatehouse were responsible for monitoring the perimeter with its six-meter fence and patrolling guardbots. Hundreds of sensors were strung out along the fence, along with dozens more scattered across the surrounding land. Nothing could get close without security knowing. All the guards had to do was run random second-level verification scans on personnel and check visitor vehicles.

At ten-thirty, Rob said, “I’m going for a break, back in twenty.” He left the gatehouse, and walked back to the main complex buildings over the newly mowed grass. The air was as humid as ever, making him wipe perspiration from his brow.

Once he was inside, he made straight for the gateway section. The control room was on the lower of the building’s three sublevels. Another security guard and a building maintenance tech were waiting in the lift. His e-butler swapped IFF codes with them, confirming they were all part of the mission. They gave each other tense looks, judging what they saw, wondering if one of them didn’t have what it took.

A timer in Rob’s virtual vision counted down the seconds until ten forty-seven. “Right,” he said, and touched the button for the lower level. “Anyone want out, you’re too late.” The lift doors slid shut, and they began their descent to sublevel three. Rob opened his holster and took out the ion pistol, checking its charge level. It looked the same as the one he’d been issued with, the difference was that the security network couldn’t disable it as it could all the others, a precaution in case a guard ever went “rogue.”

“Put it away,” the maintenance tech said, he gave his eyes a warning flick toward the lift’s sensor.

Rob showed him a disdainful glance, just to prove he wasn’t taking orders, and slipped the weapon back. “You got the door?”

“Door and gateway network hold-down,” the tech said. “You?”

“We make sure you don’t get interrupted.” Rob and the other guard exchanged a glance.

“Okay then.”

The lift opened onto a short corridor. There were two doors on either side, and one at the far end.

The tech took a small array out of his tool kit, and placed it over the lift controls. “Neutralized,” he confirmed.

Rob slipped the first remote charge from a pouch on his utility belt. The little unit was a simple square of black plastic, the size of his palm, a centimeter deep. He pushed it against the ceiling, and instructed his e-butler to load the activation code. The e-butler acknowledged the charge switching to armed status, and Rob pulled his hand down. The remote charge stayed in place. Its casing slowly changed color, matching the lift’s ceiling tiles.

The maintenance tech led the way down the corridor to the big door at the end, struggling to carry his heavy tool kit bag. He held another array over the lock panel. Rob took his ion pistol out again, slipping the safety off. His timer showed him they were perfectly on schedule. The door slid open. They hurried inside.

The gateway control room was nothing like the center used for interstellar exploratory work. This was a simple box ten meters on each side, full of consoles, with glass-walled management offices along one side, all of them currently dark and unoccupied. Eight people were working the shift, sitting behind the consoles to monitor the huge assemblage of machinery that was buried in its own cavern beyond the control room. Three giant high-rez portals on the wall opposite the offices revealed the gateway’s status with dense three-dimensional graphic displays.

Heads came up to frown at the intruders. Right on schedule Rob’s e-butler reported that its interface with the cybersphere had just dropped out; kaos software was infiltrating all the local nodes.

“Everybody be quiet and stay calm,” the other guard said. “Keep your hands where we can see them, and please don’t do anything stupid.”

One of the console operators stood up, giving Rob an incredulous stare. “What the hell is going on? Is something wrong?”

Rob shot the ceiling above him, with the pistol on minimum charge. The manager got out a short animal screech as sharp splinters of the polyphoto strip came crashing down around him, trailing thin wisps of smoke. An alarm started to shrill loudly.

“You were told to shut up,” Rob shouted above the noise. Frightened faces stared at him. Hands were being held high in the air.

“Shit, man!” The tech was staring at the fallen manager, who was still crouched down on the floor, arms over his head, shaking badly.

“Do your job,” Rob snapped back at him.

He nodded with a fast jerk, and pressed the button to close the door.

“What?” The other guard shot the alarm, killing the sound.

“Thank you,” Rob said.

“You lot,” the tech shouted at the managers. “Get away from the consoles.”

Rob and the other guard waved their pistols meaningfully, shepherding the managers over to the glass wall. They were made to crouch down. “Joanne Bilheimer,” Rob called. “Front and center, now.”

One of the women looked up fearfully. “I’m Joanne. What do you want?”

“Up.” Rob beckoned with all four fingers. He pointed to the console marked Chief of Operations. “Secure this room, activate level three isolation.”

“I …” She gave his pistol a frightened glance. “I’m not …”

“Please,” he said. “Don’t give me any bullshit about not having the authority. And you really don’t want to make me start issuing threats, because I’ll carry them out. Now, level three?”

“I can’t interface. Something’s contaminating the console nodes.”

Rob smiled pleasantly. “That’s why CST provided you with a backup manual system as well.”

She bowed her head, then got up and walked over to the console.

The other guard was standing facing the captive managers. “This is just an anesthetic,” he told them. “Nobody’s going to be killed, we’re not homicidal lunatics.” He went along the line, pressing a hypotube against their necks. One by one they went limp and keeled over.

A big metal slab rumbled out of the floor, sealing the doorway. A similar slab covered the fire door. The air above them shimmered, then hardened as the force field came on, reinforcing the molecular structure of the walls. Two fat cylinders came telescoping down out of the ceiling at opposite ends of the room. Rob grinned in satisfaction at that: air filter, recycling the atmosphere now the force field had sealed off the air-conditioning ducts. “Thank you, Joanne.”

She didn’t even have time to look at him before the other guard slapped the hypotube against her neck.

The tech had gotten the panels off one of the consoles. He’d tipped up his tool kit, a number of custom array units spilled onto the floor around him. They all sprouted a long bundle of fiber-optic cable, which he was working frantically to connect into the ridiculously complicated console electronics.

“Can you do it?” Rob asked.

“Shut the fuck up and let me concentrate. We’ve got about two minutes left to verify control before the RI shuts us out.”

“Right.” Rob and the other guard looked at each other and shrugged. Rob didn’t have a clue what the man was doing, nor how to help him. The kaos software was still contaminating the nodes, blocking access to the cybersphere. He didn’t know what was going on outside in the rest of the complex, if the other units in the mission were going ahead, if it had stalled, if they’d already all been shot. Being cut off like this wasn’t good. He wanted to know. He needed to know. His virtual vision timer was relentlessly counting down the mission elapsed time, crossing off events that should have happened. Ninety seconds left, and the tech was still working with obsessive fever inside the console.

Come on, Rob urged him silently. Come on.

Wilson had reached the central gridwork in the assembly platform when his e-butler told him Oscar Monroe was calling. “Connect us,” he ordered it. He slowed his momentum against one of the gantry girders, and rotated slowly so he could look in at the starship’s rear section. All of the reaction mass tanks had been installed now, bulging out from the cylinder superstructure. Nearly a fifth of the fuselage plating was in place, with constructionbots busy adding more.

A small translucent image of Oscar’s head appeared in the corner of his virtual vision. “Want some good news, Captain?” Oscar asked.

“Sure.”

“The High Angel claims it doesn’t know of any aliens equipped with superweapons in this part of the galaxy.”

Wilson automatically shifted his gaze to the ship’s force field emplacements. Some of the generators were in place now, though none had been connected up to the power net and commissioned. “You’re right, that is good news. I take it you didn’t have any trouble dealing with the habitat?”

“Not the habitat, no.”

Wilson grinned privately; he’d encountered Chairwoman Gall a few times himself. “So what did it say?”

“It hasn’t visited the Dyson Pair, so it knows very little. It indicated that it was curious, and maybe even nervous about the barriers. Basically, it’s waiting to see what we find.”

“Interesting policy. Did it say if it had contacted any aliens at all from that section of space?”

“Not really, it’s keeping its alien privacy commitment very st—”

The link dropped out. Wilson was forming a question for the e-butler when it relayed a security alarm. The starship complex’s datanet was under some kind of kaos assault. “How bad?” he managed to ask. Several lights around the assembly platform flickered, startling him. “Forget that, give me a systems status review: overall and platform.”

Two more security alarms flashed up as the status display expanded into his virtual vision. There had been an explosion at one of the complex’s main power generators. Intruders had penetrated the gateway control room. Security guards in assembly room 4DF were in the middle of a firefight with more intruders. Sections of the complex’s datanet were failing and dropping out as the kaos software contaminated the routing nodes.

“Holy shit!”

Systems across the assembly platform were switching to backup power sources as the main grid supply fluctuated. He twisted around wildly, having to grab at the girder to stop himself from spinning. The gateway was still established, leading back to the big assessment building. Pods were sliding along the electromuscle; a couple of people were floating around the junction, looking back. “Get me the security chief,” he told his e-butler.

The status display showed power and data connections to the security command center blanking out. Fire suppression systems in surrounding sections of the tower building switched on. Shock paralyzed Wilson’s thoughts for a second. He had trouble grasping what he was seeing. Then his really ancient training kicked in: React, don’t freeze.

Lights were going out across the assembly platform as the local management array began its emergency power-down procedures.

“Establish command of the local management array,” he instructed his e-butler. “Encrypt all traffic and key it to my pattern code. Isolate the array and the platform network from the ground complex datanet now. Authorize continuance of all its internal emergency procedures, but I want the platform’s force field erected over the gateway immediately. Divert all internal power reserves to sustaining it.”

“Working,” the e-butler said.

The virtual vision status display vanished as the datalink to the main complex was cut. “Give me internal status.” Fresh streams of translucent data wrapped around him: he was at the center of a globe composed from thousands of red and amber lines woven through and around each other. The construction activities were shutting down; even so there wasn’t a lot of power in reserve. “Cancel environment functions, we’ve got enough air for hours.”

“Enabling.”

“Locate senior staff inside the platform, and list them. Open general broadcast channel to everyone up here.”

Lights continued to go out all around him, dropping huge sections of the platform into gloomy half-light. The force field came on, sealing over the gateway. Bright light from the assessment building shone through into the gloom.

“Attention, everybody,” Wilson announced over the general channel. “The complex seems to be suffering some kind of physical assault. We’ve sealed the gateway, so we should be perfectly safe up here. But just as a precaution, I want everyone to head up to the Second Chance’s life-support ring, section twelve.” He skimmed through the list of senior personnel. “Give me Anna Hober.” He vaguely remembered her from crew training sessions, an astronomer from CST’s exploratory division, appointed to the crew as a sensor expert and navigator.

“Enabling.”

“Sir?” Anna Hober said.

“Anna, where are you?”

“Up at the secondary sensor array. I’m part of the installation team.”

“You’re now my executive officer. Get linked into the ship’s life-support section array, and start powering up the internal environmental systems. Snatch whoever you need from the assembly teams to facilitate the job. Get going. I want a safe haven established for everyone up here.”

“Yes, sir.”

His virtual hand touched the e-butler icon. “Give me a status display for the starship’s internal systems.”

“Enabling.”

When it came, it was a small representation. Few systems were receiving power, and the starship’s internal network was little more than primary communications links—a spine without nerve junctions.

Wilson kicked off from the girder, heading in toward the life-support ring. As he glided forward he reviewed the onboard power sources. Most of the backup emergency reserves were in place, and two of the fusion generators had been tested before being shut down again. That ought to give them enough power to sustain a few decks while the situation on the ground sorted itself out. If things started to stretch out they might even be able to start a fusion reactor and plug it into the force field generator—the drain that was exerting on reserves was uncomfortably large.

“Do we have any external communications links to the planetary datasphere available?”

“The assembly platform is equipped with emergency transmitters which can link to geostationary satellites.”

“Activate them. I need to know what’s happening down there.”

So many lights had gone off he was having trouble seeing where he was going. Girders and structural poles were invisible until he was really close. It slowed his progress; he was practically having to feel his way along now. His retinal inserts fed an infrared image into his virtual vision, turning his sight to sparkling pink and white.

The bright flood of light coming through the gateway faded away to a soft jaundiced glow given out by the assessment building’s emergency lighting. Then there was a bright orange flash, which his retinal inserts had to damp down to prevent it from dazzling him. Wilson blinked his eyes, finding himself in near darkness now the flash had died away; the main power lines had also been lost, leaving just a few emergency lighting systems functional inside the platform. The gateway was completely black. “Oh, fuck,” he whispered. His suspicions had been right all along. They were targeting Second Chance.

Lennie Al Husan had arrived at the Anshun CST station after a two-hour rail journey that was supposed to take forty-eight minutes. It always happened when he routed through StLincoln; there was always a delay in that station yard. So he was late for his appointment with the starship project’s media office. His editor was going to play hell over that, every media company was trying to get an angle on the flight. Lennie even dreamily entertained the idea he might somehow qualify as one of the reporter/crewmembers, a post that the CST kept dangling in front of media representatives to ensure favorable cooperation.

Except this delay had probably blown that option.

He made his way along the main concourse to the transport holding area for the starship complex. There were a couple of extensive security checks, then he was outside in the wretchedly humid air, joining several other people milling about waiting for a bus. He asked his e-butler to contact the media officer he’d been dealing with.

“I’m having trouble establishing an interface to the datasphere,” the e-butler told him. “Kaos software is contaminating the local datanet nodes.”

“Really?” Lennie looked around with interest, which was a stupid thing to do, he acknowledged. But kaos attacks were rare, and usually preceded or covered some kind of criminal activity.

A crashing sound so loud he assumed it was an explosion reverberated over the transport holding area. Along with everyone else in the queue, Lennie hit the ground. For a second he thought it was a derailment, however impossible that was. Then a roaring sound began. Mingling with that was a second crash. Lennie got up, and tried to work out where the barrage was coming from; it was now so loud he had to jam his hands over his ears.

“Full record, all senses,” he told his e-butler. He started running to the end of the long building. As he rounded the corner he got a view out over a wide section of the marshaling yard. First impression was that a lengthy train of covered wagons parked behind the cargo handling sheds was breaking apart. Two of the wagons were already reduced to scraps of junk. As he watched, a third burst open. Huge dark metal shapes were rising out of the debris on vivid columns of violet flame. They looked like armored rectangular dinosaurs, with blunt wedge-shaped heads. Thick cannon barrels jutted out from where their eyes should have been, while smaller guns protruded from the front of the head, like lethal mandibles. Three stumpy legs were folded back against each side of their flanks as they went airborne. The air shimmered around them as force fields came on.

Lennie didn’t dare blink. He kept his eyes wide, holding them steady, absorbing the glorious sight. His e-butler was sending out a multitude of pings, searching out a cybersphere node clear of contamination.

“Let us in!” Lennie screamed at the collapsing cybersphere. “I command you in Allah’s name, for fuck’s sake. Let us in!”

Then the kaos contamination suddenly vanished, emptying out of the cybersphere like water draining down a pipe. Everything was on-line, and Lennie’s images were shooting into his office array back on Kabul.

“The SI has cleaned the local network,” his e-butler told him; there might have been a small note of awe in the program construct’s artificial voice. Lennie didn’t care if it was the glorious Prophet Himself who’d returned to work the electronic miracle. It was him who was channeling the images, and the sound, and the terror out across the Commonwealth—he: Lennie Al Husan. This was his show.

The three horrific machines swung around in unison; their exhaust jets vectored horizontal and they accelerated away over the station’s wilderness yard. “They’re Alamo Avengers,” Lennie shouted into the howl of the rockets, praying his audience would be able to hear. “You’re seeing real-live Alamo Avengers in action.” He just managed to fight down the impulse to cheer them on.

The two guards left sitting in the gatehouse were just starting to wonder where Rob had got to when their standard cybersphere connections went down. They weren’t unduly concerned, they still had their secure links to the sensors and perimeter systems. Two alerts came in on the line from the security command center. Before they even looked at them properly, an explosion behind them sent a fireball roiling up into the sky from the far side of the complex. Red circles were springing up all across their security status display.

“God, that was a generator,” one managed to say as flames billowed up after the expanding fireball. “Looks like the whole fuel storage section went up with it.”

Three floors of windows in one of the towers erupted, a million spinning splinters of glass surfing out on huge gouts of flame.

“Security command center not responding,” the gatehouse array reported. “You now have autonomous control of perimeter security.”

“Seal it!” the senior guard shouted. He loaded his pattern code into the gatehouse array, watching the protective systems come to life. The guardbots halted where they were; hatches opened down the sides of their bodywork, and weapons deployed, locking into ready positions. More reassuringly, the force field generators came on; triplicated and self-powered, they erected a huge dome-shape shield over the entire complex. Air molecules trapped inside the bonding effect sparkled as they absorbed the energy input, aligning themselves into a rigid lattice.

A further two explosions went off inside the complex. The senior guard tried to work out what was being destroyed. His status display was almost devoid of information.

“What do we do?” his partner demanded.

“Just sit tight. We can’t turn off the force field, we don’t have that authority. We’re safe in here.”

“No we’re bloody not.” The guard pointed frantically at the huge flames and black smoke rising over the complex’s buildings. “We’re locked in with a bunch of goddamn terrorists.”

“Don’t panic. They just caught us by surprise. The whole place is going to seal up tighter than a lagoon onna’s ass now. Look.” He pointed at one of the towers. Its outer surface was cloaked in the telltale sparkle of a force field. “Isolate them and bring in the big guns to mop them up: standard procedure.” He turned around to see his partner was completely ignoring the complex, instead he was squinting out across the barren expanse of the station yard.

“What the hell are those?”

It had gone down right to the wire, but the maintenance tech had interfaced all his arrays into the gateway control room network. The RI had been locked out.

“They can’t alter the gateway coordinate,” he said triumphantly. “I’ve isolated the command network, so the system’s fallen back on its internal arrays. Everything will just keep ticking over nicely.”

“Great,” Rob sneered. “What about when they cut the power?” He’d already felt the floor tremble slightly. There’d definitely been an explosion nearby. Some other part of the operation was moving forward. He wished it weren’t so compartmentalized; it was hard not knowing what was happening.

The tech gave him a contemptuous look. He sat down behind the console he’d mutilated, and called up new schematics on the large wall-mounted portals. “They already have, look. The grid supply is just about zero. We’re already running off the niling d-sink. Everything’s okay. We just have to hold out for another thirty minutes.”

Rob’s e-butler suddenly reported it could connect to the room’s cybersphere nodes. Half a dozen calls were incoming, demanding his identity. “Tell them to fuck off,” he ordered the e-butler.

“That’s funny,” the tech said. His eyes were unfocused as he studied the data within his virtual vision. “The cybersphere is clear, someone countered the kaos software, it got flushed out.”

“Is that good or bad?” Rob asked.

“It’s strange. I’d never guessed Anshun’s cybersphere RI was powerful enough to extinguish that level of kaos so quickly.”

“How does it affect us?” Rob demanded. He always hated working with these specialist nerds, they never appreciated the physical side of any mission.

“It doesn’t, really. I mean, CST security can’t physically get in here, or the chamber with the gateway machinery—we control that force field as well.” He scratched at the side of his face. “It might make it a little tougher for us to exit at the end if all their sensors are back on-line. Let me think about that.”

Rob glanced at the other guard, who simply shrugged.

“Oh, wait,” the tech said. He leaned forward as one of the portals switched to a grainy image from a sensor covering the corridor directly outside the control room. “Here we go, they got the lift circuit back.” The sensor showed the lift door closing. Ten seconds later, the remote charge detonated. All Rob saw on the portal image was the lift doors quaking, the central join split apart as the metal buckled. A dense cloud gushed out into the corridor. It was dust, not smoke, Rob realized.

The other guard chuckled. “They’ll never get down that way now, the whole shaft must have collapsed.”

Rob glanced at the metal slab covering the fire door. Security would be down the stairwell that connected to it soon enough. According to the instructions he decrypted that morning, once the lift shaft was out of action they’d be able to leave the control room by the main door. One of the offices off the corridor outside had a utility passage that would take them to the chamber containing the gateway machinery. After that, they had a choice of three exit routes once the force field was switched off. Of course, that had all rather depended on the cybersphere and security sensors being knocked out by kaos.

“Can anyone see in here right now?” Rob asked. He searched around the ceiling for sensors and cameras. There were at least three covering the room.

“Let me review the local network,” the tech said. He suddenly froze, and gaped at the portal displaying the gateway command network. One section was flashing red. “No way,” he whispered.

“What?” Rob demanded.

“The first routing lockout fireshield. It’s down.”

“Once more, in English!”

“Look, the actual fiber-optic cables which carry the network, they’re still intact, still integrated with the local datanet, which in turn is connected to the cybersphere. But the nodes, where the routing is controlled, that’s where I loaded my software in to block contact. In electronic terms, there’s no physical barrier between us and the outside, only the fireshields. I erected five, in sequence, at each node, blocking every channel in, and something just got through the outer one.”

“You told us the Anshun RI cleaned out the kaos,” the other guard said.

“No, I said I didn’t think it could, not that quickly. Jesus!” Another section of the gateway command network was flashing amber. “This isn’t possible, I swear: not possible.”

“Another fireshield?” Rob guessed.

“It’s going to fall, oh man, half the format codes have been cracked already. No way. I mean no fucking way! Do you know what kind of encryption I used for that thing? Eighty-dimensional geometry. Eighty! That should take like a century to break, if you’re lucky.” He seemed more angry than worried by the event.

Rob was starting to get a real bad feeling about the mission. “So what can crack that kind of encryption?”

The tech became very still. “The SI.” His gaze found a ceiling camera that was lined up on his console, and he looked straight into the tiny lens. “Oh, shit.”

The other guard brought up his ion pistol, and started shooting the cameras. “Find out how many sensors there are in here. Now!”

Rob took a shot at a sensor above the main door. He risked a quick look at the portal display as he hunted around for more. The amber warning over the second fireshield was shading into a more ominous red.

The senior gatehouse guard stared out through the window, his lower jaw sagging open as the true nature of the flying objects became apparent. “I’ve seen those things before,” he croaked. “I know what they are. They were on an action drama I accessed years ago. Alamo Avengers. But they’re ancient history.”

“Not anymore,” his partner said. “What do we do?”

“Pray.”

All along the highway to the starship complex, vehicles had halted automatically as the kaos software corrupted their drive arrays. Then when the explosions began and the force field dome came on, people got out to stand on the hot tarmac to watch the spectacle. Several turned as the new sound rumbled up behind them, only to fling themselves down, screaming a warning.

The Alamo Avengers stormed over the highway at barely a hundred meters altitude. When they were a kilometer from the force field, they opened fire with their particle lances. It was as if sheet lightning was bridging the gap between them and the dome. The entire sky transformed into a blinding white maelstrom as the air disintegrated from the tremendous energy discharge. The sound blast alone shattered every window on the cars and vans and buses below; people were hurled about by the sonic wavefront. Ears and eyes ruptured, capillaries tore apart; blood started to foam out of their mouths and noses and ears, unprotected skin liquefied.

The force field dome maintained its integrity under the strike. Right across its surface, air molecules collapsed and punched upward in a seething coronal cloud. From above, it looked as though a small red dwarf sun had become buried in the ground. Huge lightning bolts spun outward from the seething ion cloak, lashing against the surrounding earth. Guardbots, waiting alertly along the base of the force field, their lasers and magnetic rifles tracking the incoming enemy, simply detonated into fragment swarms that vaporized in microseconds as the energy cascade engulfed them. Every scrap of vegetation within four hundred meters of the perimeter burst into flame.

All three Alamo Avengers fired again, concentrating their lances on a single point. Again, the force field resisted, deflecting the terrible energy deluge back out into the tortured coruscating air. Thick cataracts of lightning ripped out, pummeling the ground.

Inside the gatehouse, both guards had dived to the floor at the first barrage. Their entire world vanished in a violent whiteout. Even inside the force field, the noise was tremendous, translating into direct physical pain stabbing in through their eardrums. When the light died down, they risked looking up. Five hundred meters away, where the lances had been targeted, a huge patch of the force field was still ablaze with radiant violet streamers as residual energy swirls grounded out.

“It held,” the senior guard grunted in disbelief. He couldn’t hear what he’d just said. When he put his hand up to his ear, his fingers came away sticky with blood. He didn’t care. “I’m alive.” The back of his knuckles smeared tears across his cheeks. “Oh, sweet Jesus, I’m alive.”

When he raised his head above the desktop he could see the Alamo Avengers approaching the force field dome. Pitiful fires sputtered below them as the last of the weeds and grass were consumed. They didn’t so much land, as fall out of the air. Their rockets cut off while they were still twenty meters up. Legs stretched out, and absorbed the impact, leaving them in a crouching position on the blackened smoldering earth. The head on the nearest one swung slowly from side to side in mockery of a living creature, scanning its sensors back and forth. Their arrays were loaded with animal-sentient smartware, giving them an independence fueled only by aggression; once their target was loaded in, they wouldn’t stop until it had been reached.

The lead Alamo Avenger lurched forward, legs thudding heavily as they moved with a speed unnerving for something so massive. Plumes of soot and dirt shot up from each impact, flowing in strange swirls around its own force field. Small sections of armor along the front edge of its head flipped up, allowing long black prongs to slide out. The medium-caliber weapons barrels retracted back into their bays. At thirty meters from the base of the dome, it stopped and lowered its thick wedge head. The prongs flared with a cobalt nimbus that spun and flickered. It thrust them down into the ground. Huge geysers of soil were flung up into the air. The Alamo Avenger braced its legs, shoving its head deeper into the hole that the prongs were gouging out. Sand and shards of fractured rock were shooting twenty meters into the air above it. Slowly, it began to ease its huge armored body down into the excavation.

Every building on Leithpool’s Castle Mount was illuminated by bright beams of light, their colors gracefully morphing through the spectrum; while above them all, the bold fairy-tale castle itself was drenched in the brilliance of thirty solar-bright searchlights. From his position in the curving window of the Prince’s Circle café, Adam had a superb view of the resplendent rock against the backdrop of a serenely clear night. Its reflection shivered across the cold black waters of Leithpool’s circular lake in a near-perfect mirror image. Like all the other late-evening denizens of the café, he’d stopped looking at the view several minutes ago. Unisphere news shows were all featuring the events on Anshun, as were thousands of media companies stretched across the Commonwealth. The café had switched to Alessandra Baron; although even the images she had access to lacked professionalism, they came from the survivors of broken or abandoned vehicles on the highway to the starship complex. Retinal inserts were relaying the sight; the pictures blurry from tears, wobbling as the senders shook from fear or relief.

They showed the Alamo Avengers digging their way underneath the force field dome. There was actually little now to see of the ancient war machines themselves, the holes that they had dug were deep enough to contain the main bulk of their bodies. Huge sprays of earth were still fountaining up into the sky, to fall as a concealing cloud of dust and fractured stone granules dryer than any desert sand. The volume of dirt they vomited out behind them never slackened. At the speed they were going it could only be a matter of minutes before they were underneath the complex itself. It was a point that Alessandra Baron, safe in her studio on Augusta, was keen to point out. She did confess that she knew nothing of the defense capabilities that CST may or may not have built into the complex, although the standard ones didn’t seem to have held out very well so far. Also chosen for emphasis was the legend of just how destructive the Alamo Avengers were.

“Nothing and nobody,” she said, “would survive inside the beleaguered complex if just one got in. We can only pray for the people trapped in there.” Even her beautiful face with its mane of elegant dark blond hair seemed troubled.

Adam was also uncertain if CST had any surprises waiting ahead for the Alamo Avengers. Of necessity, this mission had been put together hurriedly, the time for research was short. He couldn’t be certain of anything, though he strongly suspected there were no serious heavy-caliber weapons in the complex.

Along with all the other transfixed watchers in the café he drew breaths of awe and fright as flashes and rumbles emerged from the gaping tunnel mouths. It wasn’t entirely an act. He’d watched the giant machines being refurbished over the last few months, yet even so he’d been as overwhelmed as everyone else by the sheer brute power they wielded as they launched themselves into battle for what was bound to be the very last time.

A timer in his virtual vision counted off the mission event sequence. So far they were doing remarkably well in keeping to schedule. Which meant that stage two was about to come on-line. As a veteran of many campaigns large and small, Adam knew there was nothing truer than the old military adage: no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. And when that enemy was as powerful and resourceful as CST, he wasn’t about to leave anything to chance.

Wilson heard the last emergency airlock clang loudly, the noise reverberating along the whole deck that they’d commandeered. None of the primary malmetal airlocks on the Second Chance were working; they were all contracted into thick rings around the edge of their rim. But the emergency airlocks offered a reasonable degree of security. He began his deep breathing regimen, calming his racing heart.

“We’re sealed,” Anna announced. There was a high degree of satisfaction in her voice. Her round face smiled brightly, despite the situation down on the ground. Her eyes and mouth were heavily OCtattooed, producing a filigree of slender gold and platinum lines that flickered in and out of existence on her skin. Hands and forearms were also covered in the same lines, which crawled around her fingers and wrists as she pressed her fingers against a console i-spot.

“Good job,” Wilson told her. He didn’t strictly approve of such flamboyance; his own OCtattoos were completely nonvisual. But he had to admit, her performance so far was exemplary. It was Anna who had organized the surprised and nervous technicians into working parties to go through the life-support section and physically close the big solid emergency locks with power tools and their own muscle—one of a dozen jobs he’d given her that she’d conducted flawlessly. The air conditioners were up and running, fans stirring the heavy atmosphere, backup lighting rigged to portable power cells. Now she was organizing personnel into damage crews, ready for anything.

While she’d been accomplishing that, he had spent the time frantically reviewing what systems the starship had in anything approaching operational status. It hadn’t taken him long. Given the vast quantity of equipment that had been installed so far, only an alarmingly small percentage of it was available to him. And almost none of that was of any practical use to their current situation. Their one major success was using the assembly platform’s emergency communications system to reestablish a link to the planetary cybersphere. Through that, Wilson had been in touch with the SI continually since he reached the starship. He was gratified that the SI was taking a much greater-than-usual interest in the attack.

“The Anshun special forces squadron will be able to deploy around the complex perimeter in another seven minutes,” the SI told them. “First echelon security reinforcements from CST will arrive at the station four minutes after that; their deployment should be faster than the local forces. Commonwealth Security Directorate forces are also being mobilized.”

“And even if they can get inside the perimeter force field, do any of them have anything which will kill those goddamn Alamo Avengers?” Wilson asked. He was aware of Anna giving him an anxious glance. Tiny slivers of gold rippled out from her eyes as she realigned her virtual visual display to access the security data directly.

“I do not believe so,” the SI said. “One of the causes of the Alamo Avenger’s enduring reputation is the sheer power contained within it. They were hugely cost-ineffective to build, had a poor range, and limited tactical ability. Yet their effectiveness against United Federal emplacements was almost one hundred percent. The Single Star Republic came very close to its goal of turning Austin into an Isolated.”

“You mean we don’t have guns inside the complex big enough to take them out?”

“No. But the Security Directorate does have the necessary firepower, especially given the age of the Alamo Avenger force field generator design. However, you will have to wait until they arrive. Their Anshun deployment should start in twenty-five minutes.”

Wilson took another look at the display screen. He and Anna had set up their command post in a crew office that had several network systems and arrays installed, though precious little else. The walls and flooring were still raw structural panels; ducting ran across the ceiling like a pair of dull-silver serpents twined in a mating position. So far, three console screens were set up to show crude representations of the starship’s internal status, while the remaining two were being fed images from the cameras around the assembly platform. There hadn’t been a repeat of the explosion in the assessment room beyond the gateway, but that wasn’t what he worried about seeing now.

“Are they under the perimeter yet?” he asked the SI.

“Most definitely. The volume of earth they are ejecting behind them has not decreased. Our best estimate already puts them one hundred and eighty meters inside the force field. They will probably surface soon.”

“How long till they reach the gateway?” Anna asked. Her OCtattoos had sunk into quiescence. She was looking directly at the screen that showed the camera image covering the gateway from inside the assembly platform.

“The shortest time is six minutes,” the SI said. “To derive that, we are assuming they will continue underground until they are underneath the complex’s buildings before surfacing. That tactic means they will not have to expend any energy breaking through the building wall’s force fields.”

“Okay, let me have it straight: Can the Alamo Avengers break through the gateway force field?”

“If their original specifications have not been downgraded, our estimate is that it will take at most two shots from a particle lance to break through the gateway force field’s cohesion.”

“Son of a bitch.” Wilson growled it through clenched teeth. He kept telling himself that it wasn’t even dying in this body that frightened him—there was enough bandwidth in the satellite link to download his memory into a secure store right up until the last instant. No, it was being unable to defend the project from some bunch of half-assed anarchist terrorist freaks. The project didn’t deserve this; they were trying to achieve something noble and right with the starship. No piece-of-shit trendy-cause rebel outside the political process had the right to screw with that. Not to mention the time and money and—goddamn it!—lives which had been poured into its construction.

“I can probably route some additional power from the ship to the platform’s force field generator,” Anna said. Platinum spirals were rotating slowly around her eyes as she studied a network schematic within her virtual visual. “One of the niling d-sinks is partially charged; that should give us enough power to last for hours. I think I can route it through the superconductor cabling; we just have to reprogram the umbilical junctions to reverse the flow.”

“Can you help us with that?” Wilson asked the SI.

“From our analysis of your resources, your power output is actually capable of exceeding the force field generator’s designated input,” the SI said. “However, the generator was never designed to withstand the kind of stress inflicted from a particle lance. One Alamo Avenger could break through relatively quickly. Two in combination will require less than ten seconds.”

“Fuck it!” Wilson raged. “You have to close the gateway for us. They cannot be allowed to destroy this starship.” He wanted to add: It’s not fair, the Second Chance deserves her shot at history, she shouldn’t die like this, not stillbirthed.

“The fireshields erected around the gateway network are proving exceptionally resolute,” the SI said. “We have so far broken three. The fourth utilizes one hundred and sixty dimension geometry encryption. It will take us several minutes to crack it.”

“We don’t have several minutes!”

“Our calculations are not in error.”

Wilson twisted his body to look at Anna. She was floating in front of the console, gazing at the screen that displayed the ship schematic. Her hands pressed tight against the console i-spot; gold glyptics chased slow strange patterns across the stretched skin of her forearms.

“Is there any kind of weapon installed?” he asked desperately.

Her virtual hands were pulling data out of the array as if by brute physical force. “No, sir. Nothing.”

“Goddamnit!” He punched at the nearest surface with his free hand, sending his body into a nasty twist, which strained the hand he was holding himself in place with.

“Any sign of them breaking surface yet?” He was just going to have to leave it all to the SI, and pray it could break the fireshield in time.

“No,” the SI said.

“Okay. Will you please set up a store to receive the memories of everyone on board. If you can’t close down the gateway, they’ll have to be transferred to the clinic which performs the re-life procedures.”

“We will do that, of course. But there is now a new problem.”

Anna gave Wilson an anguished look. He could see how hard it was for her to keep going, the effort it required to stay resolute. Executive management was hardly training for this kind of situation. He would have to consider that carefully later—once they survived this. In the meantime there wasn’t much he could say to help. “What now?” he asked levelly.

“Anshun Civil Flight Control is tracking two unauthorized spaceplane launches from an island close to the equator.”

“What kind of launch?”

“Unknown. But they appear to be accelerating into a retrograde orbit.”

It took Wilson a second to work out the implication. “They’re heading for us,” he murmured.

“It would appear so, yes.”

“How long?”

“If their acceleration remains constant, eight minutes.”

“Have you got any idea of their size?”

“From their radar return, they appear to be medium-lift spaceplanes. If so, they will mass around two hundred and fifty tons each, unloaded.”

Wilson didn’t even try to do the math in his head. Two hundred fifty tons impacting at a combined speed of twice orbital velocity … “They don’t even need to carry a warhead,” he said. And it didn’t matter anymore if the gateway was switched off or not. If the Alamo Avengers didn’t get them, then kinetics would.

Somebody somewhere really hates us, Wilson thought. Why, though? What’s the point, we will get to the Dyson Pair eventually. I’ll re-life, and by Christ I’ll fly this ship yet.

And with that the muscles in his arms locked in shock. “Anna! We pressure tested the fuel tanks two weeks ago. I remember the schedule.”

“Yes,” she said cautiously.

“Is there any fluid left in the tank?”

The concrete floor in cosmic radiation test laboratory 7D quaked slightly. Equipment juddered along benches and desks. A soft roaring sound was just audible, its volume increasing in tandem with the ferocity of the quakes. Cracks began to appear across the floor, with little splinters of concrete flaking off to jump and spin across the now-unstable surface. Ceiling-mounted cameras scanned back and forth. But the only illumination in the laboratory was a pale amber emergency lighting that had come on after the complex generators had been sabotaged. It provided a poor resolution.

Seconds later, the floor disintegrated, with vast chunks of concrete whirling upward, their molten edges throwing off glowing droplets. Beneath the torn rift a dazzling jade-white light poured upward to blind the cameras. Small tendrils of energy followed an instant later, scratching and clawing at every neutral surface, vaporizing metal and obliterating plastic and glass.

Then the light went out. An Alamo Avenger heaved itself up and out into the flame-shrouded ruin of the laboratory. Its head swung around to focus on its goal, casually demolishing a wall and several support pillars. Chunks of masonry and the shattered floor of the upstairs laboratory crashed down, only to slither and bounce off the armored monster’s force field. The six legs shifted around, turning the body until it was lined up behind the head, pointing directly toward the gateway. It moved forward, slowly at first, smashing through another internal wall. Gradually it built up speed.

As it charged through the constructionbot maintenance center, the floor ruptured underneath its feet. Slightly off balance, it lumbered onward for a few meters, then stopped and twisted its head around to see if there was any threat. Impenetrable jets of dust gushed up from the new rip in the ground. Then a second Alamo Avenger pushed and forced its way out of the tunnel. The first waited until it was level, then they began their final charge toward the assessment building and the gateway.

The café was utterly silent as Alessandra Baron’s overawed voice announced the rise of the spaceplanes. Adam realized he was licking his upper lip in anticipation, and hurriedly stopped. The images shifted from the smoldering land around the complex force field dome to a clean graphic of the assembly platform’s orbit around the planet. In conjunction with Baron’s now-somber voice they illustrated the impending destruction. Figures in the corner of the screen counted down. They almost matched the timer in Adam’s virtual visual.

Second Chance had at most another four minutes. He took a quick look around the rapt faces of the other customers, seeing horror and fascination in equal amounts. For once he didn’t feel any guilt at what he’d done. There were no innocents in the assembly platform, no children devoid of memorycells. Not this time. This time it would be right.

Someone working for Baron’s show managed to access the microsat geosurvey observation swarm around Anshun. Thousands of tiny solid-state sensors along the equatorial orbit shifted their alignment from the minerals buried far below to one specific speck of light. The assembly platform swam into focus at the center of the screen, a giant blue-gray sphere of malmetal. Its featureless symmetry gave it a strangely organic appearance, Adam felt.

Dark lines appeared on the surface, illustrating long petallike shapes. Adam blinked, leaning forward. They hadn’t been there a second before, he was sure. Then long, slim fantails of snow-white gas were shooting out from the spherical surface as the dark lines split open. Sunlight poured into the assembly platform, erasing the weak glow of emergency lighting; the starship’s incomplete superstructure gleamed silver-white at the center of an expanding cloud of vapor.

“No way,” Adam groaned. His timer read a hundred fifty seconds until impact.

Two plasma rockets ignited, wiping out the image in a white nova of super-energized particles. Both exhaust plumes blasted straight through the shell of folded malmetal, sending twin spears of light stabbing over a hundred kilometers down toward the planetary surface. Some of the plasma plume rebounded off the surviving structure, billowing backward around the starship and its swath of girders. Insulation blankets and cables lashed around as they dissolved back into their component atoms, while support girders melted away into pliable strings that stretched like hot cheese as the starship started to move away from the gateway. Component cargo pods ignited, shooting out from the stellar inferno like lurid orange comets, trailing a fluorescent haze behind them as their contents blazed.

The Second Chance began to accelerate away. Her huge body wavered at first as the programs and pilot—Adam wondered whether it was Kime himself—analyzed the nonsymmetric mass distribution along the fuselage. As soon as they’d mastered that, the rockets were vectored to compensate, and the starship held steady as she built velocity, heading straight up from the planet. Behind her, there was a last violent contortion amid the seething molten wreckage as the force field protecting the gateway finally ruptured. Atmospheric gas spewed out into the void, bringing with it a host of fragments from the ruined assessment room. The jet’s vigor was reduced for a few seconds as something pushed its way along the wormhole. Then like a cork from a bottle, a small force field globe burst through; it glimmered amid the debris storm as it was propelled onward by the aggressive blast of air from the gateway behind. The dark, heavy object within the sparkling bubble spun helplessly around and around as it soared away through space. Behind it, the gush of atmosphere was reduced once again. A second golden orb came through, tumbling off into the void after the first.

By now the Second Chance was twenty-five kilometers away, a dazzling elongated star ascending up toward the bright constellations. The first spaceplane leaped into view. Its tremendous closing velocity meant that there was only the briefest glimpse on the screen—a streamlined silver-gray delta shape—before it slammed into the cooling ruins of the assembly platform. The explosion that erupted was indistinguishable from a small nuclear blast. As the sphere of incandescent atoms began to darken, it suddenly renewed itself as the second spaceplane pierced its heart.

A hundred kilometers above, the Second Chance was still accelerating out toward the stars.

ELEVEN

Hoshe had thought that the flood of data would slow down after the first couple of days. Now, a week on from his initial request, he knew better. For shadowy creatures who lived outside society’s boundaries, there was an awful lot of information stored on the so-called big-time crime syndicates. On Oaktier, there were three main such organizations recognized by the police: the Johasie family, an old-fashioned mafia-style network of related hoodlums, but with enough brains and lawyers to disconnect the bosses from all the activities of their street-level soldiers; Foral Ltd., a company whose board seemed to have diversified down into crime, both financial and street; and Area 37, the smartest and most elusive, whose murky empire was bolstered by legitimate businesses and, apparently, political connections. They were based in Darklake City, and for that reason alone Hoshe favored them as the most likely suspects to murder Shaheef and Cotal. It was simple geography. Neither of the lovers had traveled outside Darklake for weeks before they disappeared. If they had accidentally stumbled on something that required their removal, then it was Area 37 who probably had the kind of resources and connections to make it happen. But what could two innocent civilians walk into that required a response of that magnitude?

The official files on organized crime syndicates Hoshe had retrieved from the Attorney in Chief’s office contained all the previous investigations, plus the alarmingly unsuccessful court cases they resulted in. Of those, reports filed by undercover operatives and informants were the most useful. The Attorney’s office knew the major and minor players, and had a general idea of what they were up to most of the time; proving anything legally was the perennial problem.

Proven or not, the files covering suspected events forty years ago were of little use. There simply weren’t any killing sprees, or violent clashes with rivals, or even big heists. It was just a steady drip feed of money from clubs, gambling, chemical and digital narcotics, prostitution, bank scams, and dubious development contracts.

Finished with the official files, he started to access the media’s collective knowledge of Area 37. It was more gossipy, although some of the investigative reporters certainly seemed to know their subject. But again, there was no mention of a serious crime back then. Police reports for that year and the five subsequent ones bore no evidence of any major crime that had happened or might have required years of preparation.

Halfway through the morning, along with most of the Commonwealth, he’d stopped work to watch the incredible assault on the starship. Even the Chief Investigator had sat back to stare at the images playing on her desktop screen. Once the Second Chance had reached safety the weight of waiting data had slowly drawn him back to his task, although colleagues from around the metropolitan police headquarters building kept dropping in to ask him if he’d seen it and what he thought. They seemed more interested in hearing Paula’s opinion, even though she never gave one. By late afternoon, he was once more completely immersed in the dreary details of the criminal underworld. The constant input from both virtual visual displays and reading the screens on his desk was giving him headaches. When he reached for his coffee mug, he found only the cold dregs of the last batch.

“Get some more,” he muttered.

Paula didn’t even look up from her screen as he went to the door. They’d been given an office on the fifth floor, a pleasant enough room with a broad window and furniture that wasn’t too old. The desktop arrays were all top range equipment, with screens and portals to match. The coffeemaker, however, was down the corridor.

“Wait,” Paula said as he was almost through the door. “Secure call coming in.”

It was Qatux. They put it on the large wall-mounted portal, and Hoshe sat down just as the big alien’s image came up. Hoshe frowned his concern at the Raiel’s appearance. Qatux could barely hold his head up to look at the camera. Shivers ran along his body and tentacle-limbs, as if he were coughing silently.

“I have lived her life,” Qatux whispered. “How you humans survive so much experience is something I shall never understand. To do so much and react to it all in the way you do is as much a curse as a blessing. You never take time to digest and appreciate what happens to you.”

“It’s what we are,” Paula told him. “And how are you? Did the memories cause you any trouble?”

“It was difficult. I had not expected it to be so. I see now, and I see then. I am Tara more than I have been any human before. That frightens me as much as it delights. I have never been frightened before.”

“Memories will always fade, that is their nature. You will know who you are.”

“They fade for you. For me, I am not so sure. There is so much I wish to concentrate on and remember. I will not let go of her easily.”

Paula leaned forward in her seat. “So you can access all of her life?”

“Yes. Yes, I know her that well. So many colors, so many sounds; and feelings, what feelings she had. Tara cried at the sight of a dawn one day, it was so beautiful, out in the desert where light played across the rock and sky, and every second brought a new hue to the rumpled sandy ground. I feel her tears now, small delicate traces across my skin, blurring the image.”

“Have you looked for what I asked? Did she have any enemies, anyone who hated her?”

The Raiel’s head swung slowly from side to side in mournful denial, its tentacle-limbs following the motion discordantly. “No. To you, I think, she would be bland and insipid, for her life is not as fast and intent as yours. But Tara is a gentle person, she loves life and hates pain and suffering in others. The worst she ever thought of any person was irritation and disappointment. Her most serious crime was selfishness, for she cheated on several partners; she was unable to resist the pleasure and excitement which such liaisons brought her. That does not make her a bad person.”

“How badly did those cheated partners react?”

“Some wept. Some raged. Others didn’t care. She made her peace with all of them. Nobody she ever knew wanted to kill her. Of this I am certain.”

“Damn!” Paula’s lips compressed into an angry grimace. “There’s nobody?”

“No. She is no saint, but to incite enough hatred in someone to kill her … I cannot see that, not through her eyes.”

“Thank you, Qatux. I am sorry this has been so tough for you. I appreciate what you’ve done.”

“It is not trouble. I love humans, all humans. I often think that perhaps I was born into the wrong species.”

“You’re fine just the way you are.”

“Will you bring me more memories, Paula? I purchase many from contacts in your unisphere, but none are from secure stores, none are as complete as those you bring for me, none have the richness of human existence, the trueness that I cherish.”

“We’ll see. Maybe I’ll visit again.”

“Thank you. And one day perhaps you will bring your own memory? I am sure you must be the greatest human I know.”

“That’s very flattering, Qatux. I’ll bear it in mind.” She waited until the image vanished before wrinkling up her nose at the gray screen.

“Not a crime of passion, then,” Hoshe said.

Paula continued to stare at the blank screen. “Doesn’t look like it.”

“How reliable is Qatux?”

“Very. If he couldn’t see anyone, then you and I certainly wouldn’t if we reviewed the recording. The only possibility from that angle is if Shaheef annoyed someone extremely dangerous, a psychotic who is capable of concealing their true emotional reaction. But I have to admit, that’s very remote.”

“What about a serial killer? Oaktier hasn’t got one on record, but there could be one who spreads his victims around the Commonwealth.”

“Again: it’s possible. If it is, they’re not working to any recognizable pattern. That’s the first thing my Directorate tends to look for in apparently motiveless killings. The array in Paris couldn’t find any connection to any of the known serials we have files on.” She smiled without humor and looked up at him. “So how are we doing on the crime syndicate theory?”

“Not good. I can’t find any important criminal event around that time, confirmed or rumored. My best guess would be that they walked into a random gangland slaying, and the rest is just a cover-up.”

“Yes, that works. But it leaves us devoid of evidence.”

“There’s still a load of files I haven’t reviewed yet.”

“You’ve been running analyzers through the primary files for a week; if there was anything helpful or relevant to us in them you should have found it by now. I’m sure you know I don’t like to give up on a case with so many suspicious circumstances, but we really are running out of plausible avenues of exploration.” She pulled the clip out from the back of her hair and tidied it up. “I’ll have to give this some thought.”

It was the first time he’d heard the Chief Investigator speculate on defeat, as such it was rather shocking. “Well how many motives can there be? It has to be a random killing. We know it wasn’t personal, or corporate, or political, or even financial, you said yourself she’s better off now. It’s not something we’re ever going to track down, because it doesn’t exist in any file or memory.” He broke off. Paula was giving him a very intent stare. Slowly a smile spread across her face. Hoshe really wished it weren’t directed at him, it was animal-predatory.

“Damn,” she murmured in admiration. “That is clever, isn’t it? But then he is smart, isn’t he, we’ve seen that ourselves. Smart and determined.”

“Who is?”

Her smile became a taunt. “I have never, ever encountered that as a motive before. Damn!”

“What? You know who it is?”

“Don’t you, Detective?”

“Oh, come on! Who?”

“It’s all down to the timing. He didn’t kill her off to save himself money, that’s far too much the classic scenario. We would have spotted that right off. He did it so he’d be able to make money for both of them. She profits financially from her killing as much as he.”

“Who?”

“Morton.”

“He can’t have!” Hoshe exclaimed. “He was the one who alerted us in the first place.”

“That means nothing. This was meticulously thought out. He’s not going to have kept the memory. Memory is evidence. He’d get that wiped right away.”

“Son of a bitch. Are you sure?”

“I am now.” Her eyes were closed as she hurriedly reviewed the scenario. “It fits. Hindsight is a wonderful trait.”

“So what do we do now?”

“We need evidence. There will be two types: physical and financial. I’ll tackle company records.”

“Okay. What’s the physical evidence?”

“I want you to find the bodies.”

It had been a bad day at the office. When he arrived that morning, Morton had expected the preliminary central district road and water supply infrastructure contract for Puimro’s new capital to be ready for signature certification. Gansu had underbid considerably at his insistence; a loss at this stage didn’t matter, this was the key, placing them ready for a whole sequence of follow-on contracts on that lovely, promising new world. With that foothold, Gansu could build up its local operation over the next two decades until it was as big as the Oaktier parent company. Their true expansion to Intersolar giant status would have begun.

But the development company lawyers on Puimro were suspicious, believing that Gansu’s low-cost delivery would be achieved through cost cutting on materials and construction. They wanted quality guarantees written in, as well as proscriptions against “excessive profits.” All very reasonable, but why the hell didn’t they mention all this two months ago during the preliminary round of negotiations? Morton had found himself swearing at his own corporate lawyers and accountants as the bureaucratic tangle developed throughout the day. It hadn’t been resolved when he left the office late, stomping off to his car in a foul mood. He left behind a team of Gansu lawyers and contract experts huddled in a conference room, ready to work through the night in an attempt to resolve the issues and questions raised by their counterpart team on Puimro. New meetings were scheduled for next week. The signature certificate wouldn’t come through for at least another ten days now.

Fucking civil servants, always stand in the way of progress.

The butler greeted him at the lift door opening the vestibule, grappling with the suit jacket that was flung at him. Morton went into the living room, squinting against the beautiful evening sunlight that was shining straight across the roof garden and pool. He saw Mellanie sitting on one of the sunloungers, head in her hands, shoulders slumped.

Oh, Christ, not this as well, not now. He was scowling at her as her head came up. She gave him a tentative smile and hurried inside.

“Sir.” The butler had brought his sparkling gin.

“Thanks.” He took the glass off the silver tray.

Mellanie, he saw now she was out of the sun’s rich glare, had been crying. “What’s the matter?” It was almost rhetorical; he wasn’t interested.

She pushed up against him, resting her head on his chest. “I went to practice this morning,” she said, her voice muffled. “The coach said I hadn’t been making enough effort, that my hours were too low. He said I didn’t have the right level of commitment anymore.”

“Ah.” Morton felt like saying: Is that all? These days, the only sports anyone was interested in were team events. With Commonwealth geneticists able to build super athletes, individual competition was essentially pointless, a contest between laboratories and clinics. But teamwork, that was different, that was the temple of the last natural trait: skill. In games like football, baseball, hockey, and cricket the combined talent of the team was a synergy that fans could throw themselves behind with complete devotion. He’d always thought diving was the rather desperate end of the special-interest spectrum, its importance artificially inflated by sportswear companies and media channels to drum up sales. So what he actually said was: “He’s an asshole. Don’t worry about it.”

She started crying. “I’ve been dropped.”

“What?”

“Dropped from the squad. It was horrible, Morty, he told me in front of everyone. He’s already brought in two new girls.”

“Oh. Right.” He patted her absently and took a sip of his drink. “Never mind, something else will come along, it always does.”

Mellanie pulled back slightly so she could study his face, her own expression was one of bewilderment. “What? Morty, didn’t you hear? It’s over for me.”

“Yes. I heard. So move on to something new. It’s about time anyway. You’ve wasted years on that stupid diving team anyway. You can get a proper life now.”

Her thick lips parted to form a distraught “O” as she took a step back. Then she was running into the bedroom, sobbing filling the air behind her.

Morton let out a tired sigh as the door slammed shut loudly. Well, what did she expect? That’s the only trouble with the truly young, they have no perspective on life. “No, thank you for asking,” he snapped after her, “my day did not go well.”

His e-butler told him there was a call from Chief Inspector Myo. He took a long drink from the glass. “Put it on the living room screen,” he told the e-butler.

Even magnified to a couple of meters high, Paula Myo’s face was essentially flawless. As Morton sat back in one of the leather couches, he found himself admiring her once again. Now somebody like that would make a real partner, they’d be equals, which was rare enough, and complementary rather than competitive. It was just that weird heritage of hers …

“This is unexpected, Chief Investigator, what can I do for you?”

“I need access to some financial documents, the old AquaState accounts. As you’re the chairman of the parent company, it’s simpler if I just ask you to release them to me rather than go through the courts.”

“Oh.” It wasn’t quite what he’d expected. “Do you mind if I ask why? What are you looking for?”

“I can’t discuss a case in progress. I’m sure you understand.”

“Yes. I’m very familiar with government procedures, especially today.”

“That sounds unfortunate.”

He grinned in his winning way. “Commercial confidentiality, I can’t tell you about it.”

“But can you release the files?”

“Yes, of course. Would I be right in assuming you’re making progress, then?”

“Let’s say, you’re on the right track with that assessment.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” He told his e-butler to release the relevant files to her. “May I ask if you’re currently seeing anyone, Paula?”

“I don’t believe that’s connected to the inquiry in any fashion.”

“It’s not, but it was a very sincere question.”

“Why do you want to know that?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard it enough times. But I want to be honest with you from the beginning; if you’re not involved with anyone then I would very much enjoy taking you to dinner one evening as soon as possible.”

The screen showed her head tilting ever so slightly to one side, mimicking an almost avian curiosity. “That’s most flattering, Morton, but right now I’m not able to say yes. I hope you’re not offended.”

“Certainly not, after all, you didn’t say never. I believe I’ll ask you again once this case is over.”

“As you wish.”

“Thank you, Chief Investigator. And I hope the files are useful.”

“They will be.”

The call ended. Morton wriggled down into the couch, looking at the blank screen where he could still see her elegant, composed face. Somehow, the day didn’t seem such a total loss after all.

....

It was the eighth day after he entered the forest that Ozzie had to delve into his pack for warmer clothes. They’d seen their last deciduous tree a couple of days ago. Now the path led through tall solemn alpine giants with dark trunks of stone-hard bark. Their waxy leaves were long and spindly, a fraction thicker than terrestrial pine needles, with colors shading from dark green to a maroon that was almost black. A thin tough layer of grass grew underneath them, and that was patchy around the trunks themselves where the acidic leaves had fallen. Here the chilly air meant it took a long time for them to decay into the kind of rich loam to be found elsewhere in the forest, and the air was heavy with their citric scent.

Sunlight seemed to have deserted Ozzie and Orion; the patches of sky they did glimpse were uniformly gray as low clouds bunched together in an unbroken veil. Patches of mist squatted across the path, reaching far above the treetops, some of them taking hours to trek through. Each one seemed progressively larger and colder than the last.

It was after riding through one for over three hours with no respite that Ozzie decided enough was enough. His thin leather jacket was dripping with moisture that was cold enough to be ice, and it hadn’t shielded his checked shirt at all. He dismounted and hurriedly stripped off the soaked shirt; changing into a dry one, shivering strongly as he did. Before the mist had time to sink into the fresh cotton he pulled out a slate-gray woolen fleece with an outer waterproof membrane. Much to Orion’s amusement he wore soft leather chaps on his legs to cover his cord trousers. Once he’d finally slicked down his rebellious hair, he crammed on a black bobble hat. Only then, when he’d dressed and remounted, did he put on his doeskin-palm gloves.

Almost immediately, he was too hot. It made a nice change. That morning, his own shivering had woken him as the dawn frost settled over his sleeping bag. A veteran of many long treks on foot and horseback, he favored modern semiorganic clothes that could heat, cool, and dry the wearer as required. They were inoperative on any Silfen world, of course, but he was pleased enough by how the old simple fabrics were performing.

Orion, who had brought little in the way of rough-weather gear, he loaned a baggy sweatshirt to wear under his thin waterproof cagoule, and a spare pair of oilskin trousers, which were perfect over trousers for his skinny legs.

The two of them urged the animals onward. Ozzie had no idea where they were anymore. With the clouds hiding the sun and the stars there was no way he could check their direction. They’d taken so many forks, traveled around so many half-day curves that he’d completely lost track of their progress. For all he knew, Lyddington could easily just be a couple of miles ahead, though he didn’t really think it was, not with this weather and the tall morose trees.

“You ever been this far in before?” Ozzie asked.

“No.” Orion wasn’t talking so much now. This wasn’t the airy summertime forest he was used to; the gloom and cold were pulling his mood down. It had been three days since they’d last caught sight of any Silfen, a group heading away from them on a diverging path. Before that they’d encountered almost one group of the fey aliens every day. They’d stopped to greet them each time, and not once had Ozzie managed to get any real sense from them. He was beginning to resent how right the SI had been: there was some deep schism between their neural types that prohibited any truly meaningful communication. His admiration for the Commonwealth cultural experts was growing correspondingly. He simply didn’t have anything like the patience they possessed to painstakingly decipher the Silfen language.

There was no discernible twilight. The grayness simply dropped into night. Ozzie had been relying on his antique clockwork Seiko watch to give him some warning, which it had done faithfully so far. But that night, either darkness fell early, or the unseen upper clouds had contrived to thicken into opacity.

When Ozzie called a halt, they had to light the two kerosene lamps that Orion had thoughtfully brought along. They hissed and fizzed as they cast a flickering yellow glow. The nearby trees loomed large and oppressive above them, while those at the edge of the radiance seemed to cluster into a dense fence, hemming them in.

“Tent tonight,” Ozzie declared as cheerfully as he could manage. Orion looked as if he were about to burst into tears. “You sort some food out, I’ll cut us some wood for a bonfire.”

Leaving the boy searching lethargically through the packs, he took out his diamond-blade machete and started to work on the nearest tree. Yet even though the blade came to an edge a couple of atoms wide, it still took him a good forty minutes of hard work to slice through the tree’s lower branches, cutting them into usable logs.

Orion stared glumly at the pile of water-slicked wood. “How are we going to get it going?” he asked miserably. “It’s all too wet for your lighter.” Nothing was dry. The mist had thickened to an almost-drizzle; water dripped continually from leaves and branches.

Ozzie was busy splitting one of the logs lengthways, turning it into slim segments of kindling. “So, like, I guess you were never in the Boy Scouts, then?”

“What’s that?”

“Group of young camping enthusiasts. They all get taught how to rub lengths of wood together so they spark. That lets you start a fire no matter where you are.”

“That’s stupid! I’m not rubbing logs together.”

“Quite right.” Ozzie concealed his grin as he opened a pot of flame gel, and carefully applied a small layer of the blue jelly to each of the kindling sticks. He pushed them into the middle of the logs, then took out his butane lighter—it was actually older than his watch. “Ready?” He flicked the lighter once, and keeping it at arm’s length, pushed it toward the kindling. The gel ignited with a loud whoomp. Flames jetted out around the logs, engulfing the whole pile. Ozzie only just managed to pull his arm back in time. “I thought they banned napalm,” he muttered.

Orion laughed in relief, and clapped his gloved hands together. The flames burned intently, spilling out across the remaining logs. In a couple of minutes, the whole pile was spitting and blazing keenly.

“Keep it well fed,” Ozzie said. “The new logs will have to dry out before they burn.”

While the boy enthusiastically dropped another log on every few minutes, Ozzie set the tent up a few yards away. The struts were simple poles supporting a double air-insulated lining that expanded automatically, inflating as soon as he twisted the valve open. Over that went the wind shell, tough waterproof fabric with long pins along its hem that he hammered deep into the ground. Not that any wind could ever penetrate the forest floor, but he was starting to get a bad feeling about this weather.

For once, Ozzie had allowed Orion to choose whatever food he wanted from the pack bag. The boy was becoming seriously depressed by their environment, he needed cheering up. So they settled down in the lee of the tent’s front flaps that had been hoisted up to form a little porch, with the warmth of the fire washing over them and drying their clothes, eating sausages, burgers, beans, with hot cheese poured on thick chunks of bread. To follow that up Orion heated a can of orange sponge with treacle.

After they’d taken care of the animals, they banked up the fire and went into the tent. Ozzie had his six seasons sleeping bag to curl up in. Orion’s bag wasn’t as good, but he had a couple of blankets to wrap around it. He went to sleep complaining it was too warm.

Ozzie woke to a bad headache and distinct lack of breath. It was light outside, though not the kind of brightness daylight usually brought. Orion was asleep beside him, his breathing short and shallow. Ozzie looked at the boy for a moment, his mind all sluggish. Then it all made sense. “Shit!” He got out of the sleeping bag fast, fingers fumbling with its zipper. Then he was crawling forward. The tent’s inner lining seal parted easily. Beyond that, the wind shell was bulging inward. He tugged at the zipper. A torrent of fine powdery snow fell in silently, washing up against his knees. Even when it finished moving, leaving him half-immersed in a broad mound, there was no sign of the sky. He pushed his way up against it and started to dig frantically. After a couple of seconds his hands were scrabbling in air. Bright white sunlight streamed in. He gulped down the freezing air, trying to slow his panicky heart.

Orion was sitting up behind him, eyes blinking. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, we’re okay.”

“I’ve got a headache. Is that snow?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, wow.” He crawled forward and scooped some of it up, grinning delightedly. “I’ve never seen any before. Is it covering everything like it does in the Christmas pictures of Earth?”

Ozzie, who was just about to start telling him to dress in his waterproofs, did a double take. “You’re shitting me, man. You’ve never seen snow before?”

“No. It doesn’t snow in Lyddington. Ever.”

“Right. Okay. Well, put your waterproofs on, we’ll go out and take a look.”

The snow was a foot deep on the ground, with several inches coating the top of every branch and twig. Right around the base of the trees it was thinner, and of course it had drifted high against the tent’s wind shell, completely covering the apex. Ozzie looked back at it rather sheepishly; if it had truly buried the tent then the wind shell wouldn’t have been able to take the weight. Nonetheless, it was a sharp lesson not to take anything for granted in the alien forest.

He called Orion over to help soothe the animals as they stamped their hooves and shivered in the cold. The unkempt pony didn’t seem to mind the snow too much, nuzzling up to Orion as soon as the boy found some oats for her. The lontrus simply shook its shaggy gull-gray coat as Ozzie checked it over; the creatures had a strange biochemistry that allowed them to withstand temperatures far more severe than this. It was Polly who had suffered the worst, she didn’t have a winter coat. Mr. Stafford of Top Street Stables had kept the mare nicely clipped for Silvergalde’s moderate climate. Ozzie thought about that as he stroked her trembling neck. He knew damn well he wasn’t in Silvergalde’s mild temperate zone anymore. Yet the temperature didn’t drop to anything like this for thousands of miles north of Lyddington. They’d made good progress in the last nine days, but not that much. The only rational explanation was that they’d gained a lot of altitude, though he wasn’t sure where, it wasn’t a single mountain, yet his virtual vision map showed no true highlands within nine days’ hard riding of Lyddington—nor within twenty days come to that.

He turned a full circle, then glanced up at the blank featureless sky, a slow satisfied smile lifting his face. “Definitely not Kansas anymore,” he said quietly.

They had a cold breakfast, dug out and packed the tent, then went on their way. Snow drifted about aimlessly all day; the powder was fine enough for the slightest gust of air to send little flurries whirling around them. It turned the forest into an exquisite crisp winter land, but once they’d started there was no clue as to where the path actually was. Horse, pony, and lontrus plodded onward as if they knew where they should be going, bearing the new climate stoically.

Every now and then, great cascades of snow would tumble down from the overhead canopy of the giant trees, making a gentle prolonged roaring noise, which was alarmingly loud in the silent forest. A softer fall of snow began around midafternoon, big flakes trickling down from the lost sky. It turned the ambient light a miserable gray and the air even colder. Polly was making hard going of breaking ground as the snow’s thickness built up. Ozzie took a break to put his big waterproofs on over his clothes. Without semiorganics he was layering; it was a strategy that kept him warm and dry, but at the cost of mobility. Bundled up as he was, he could barely remount Polly. He gave Orion a couple of sweaters and another pair of trousers to wear under his oilskins. Once they were moving again, Ozzie began to worry about when night would fall. With the snow showing no signs of relenting, they would need time and light to make a proper camp.

About an hour later they came across a clump of bushes, all covered in snow so they looked like big dunes with just a few twigs poking through the top.

“We’ll shelter here for the night,” he said.

Orion just looked around and shrugged. The boy had barely spoken all day.

Ozzie took off a layer of sweaters and climbed up into the tree above the bushes. He set about the big lower branches with his diamond saw, slicing through at the junction. It didn’t take too much effort before they broke off, falling on top of the bushes. He got four largish ones down, letting them land on top of each other to form a semistable barrier. As a makeshift corral, it would have to do. By the time he gingerly climbed back down again, the snow was already settling on top of them.

Orion set about tying blankets around the horse and pony, while Ozzie pitched their tent in the scant shelter of a big trunk. It was almost dark when he finished. He checked his watch: quarter past five. Which made the day about ten hours long. Silvergalde’s rotation was twenty-five and a half hours.

“Are you going to light a fire?” Orion asked; his teeth were chattering.

Ozzie helped the boy into the tent. “Not tonight. Get into your sleeping bag, that’ll keep you warm.”

Orion did as he was told without complaint. There were dark circles under his eyes, by the light of the kerosene lamp it looked as if his freckles were fading from his white skin. Ozzie wormed his way into his own sleeping bag, and immediately felt the benefit. He took a heatbrick out of his bag and ripped the tag. The unit was powered by a simple chemical reaction, and the top surface was soon glowing vermilion, throwing out considerable heat. They took it in turns to cook their cans, and Ozzie boiled up two large thermosfuls of tea so they’d have a hot drink waiting for them when they woke. “Get some sleep,” he said. “It’ll be dawn quite quickly.”

Orion gave him a worried look. “Is the snow going to cover the tent again?”

“No. We’ll be fine. It was definitely thinning out when we came in. But I’ll check every couple of hours. Don’t worry.”

“I’ve never been so cold.”

“You’re warmer now, though, aren’t you?”

“Uh-huh.” The boy pulled the sleeping bag up to his chin. “Suppose so.”

“Okay then.” Ozzie pulled the blankets up around him. “It’s just when we stop moving you feel it worst.”

Ozzie’s watch read five minutes to four when dawn arrived. His e-butler had woken him up at regular intervals through the night so he could check the tent. He felt as if he’d had about ten minutes sleep all night. Orion was equally reluctant to get out of his sleeping bag.

“We have to move on,” Ozzie told him. “We can’t stay here.”

“I know.”

The snowfall had stopped sometime during the night, producing a uniform brilliant white landscape. Snow covered everything, even sticking to the vertical tree trunks so that any dark twig or leaf that protruded looked strangely out of place. It was nearly two feet deep on the ground now. Ozzie put on the darkest sunglasses he had, trying not to show how much that perturbed him. It was going to be slow progress for the animals today.

“Mr. Stafford should sell sledges,” Orion said. “He’ll like that when I tell him.”

Ozzie laughed too loud at the boy’s humor, and gave him a quick hug. They were both sipping their tea from the thermos as they walked over to the animals. The precarious corral had worked to a degree; covered with snow and frozen solid it had provided a reasonable protection against drifts. Behind it, the horse and pony had trampled the snow about their feet, and were shivering heavily. The lontrus simply stood there, snorting out clouds of faint steam. If such a thing were possible, it was giving them a sullen look from beneath the shaggy strands of fur that curtained its eyes.

Orion gave their surroundings a baleful stare. “Which way?”

Ozzie frowned as the answer stalled in his throat. He tried to work out which direction they’d arrived from last night. It simply wasn’t possible, the clumps of trees all looked identical. “Try your gift,” he suggested.

The boy fumbled with his sweaters, pulling the pendant out. There was a tiny glimmer of blue starlight within the little gem. He slowly turned full circle, holding it like a compass. When he was pointing just to the right of the tent, its intensity increased noticeably.

Ozzie thought the trees formed a kind of avenue that way. Sort of. “Guess that’s it then,” he said.

“Glad I came now?”

“Very.” Ozzie put his arm around the boy’s shoulder. “Looks like I owe you big-time, huh? How do you figure you’ll cash it in?”

“I just want Mom and Dad back.”

“Yeah yeah, but like apart from that? I mean, guiding me to safety’s got to be worth a couple of mega-K’s. That’s serious money.”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, come on, man. I knew when I was your age.”

“Okay then,” Orion said, suddenly animated again. “This is huge money, right?”

“Absolutely. Buy your own planet style.”

“Right, first off, I’d buy loads of rejuvenations, so I live as long as you do.”

“Good one, I can dig that.”

“And then I’d buy lots of smart memories, so I’d have an education and know all the complicated stuff like physics and art and banking, but I don’t have to go to school for years.”

“Even better.”

“And I want a car, a real cool one—the coolest there’s ever been.”

“Ah, that’s the Jaguar-Chevrolet 2251 T-bird, the convertible.”

“Really? There really is a coolest car ever?”

“Oh, yeah. I got a couple in my garage. Sad thing is I never drive them these days. That’s the thing with serious money, you can do so much that you never have time to do anything.”

“I’d give some away, too, to charities and hospitals and things, people that really need it.”

“Nice; that’ll prove you’re an okay kind of a guy, not just another rich bastard who doesn’t give a shit.”

“Ozzie, do you give money away then? Everyone knows you’re cool.”

“Yeah. I give some of it away.” He gave the boy a dutiful shrug. “When I remember.”

As Ozzie expected, it was slow going at first, with Polly breaking ground again. He would have preferred to send the lontrus on first, but its legs were too short. So Polly pushed her way laboriously forward, her longer legs churning up the thick layer of snow. He spent most of the morning considering options. Make some kind of snowshoes and sled, haul their food along and let the animals go? Simply turn around and return with the right kind of equipment to tackle this terrain? Except … who knew what kind of terrain he’d face next time? Assuming he could find a way back to Lyddington from here.

He just kept telling himself this was Silfen country. The aliens wouldn’t let any real harm befall anyone. Would they?

As the morning progressed, so the depth of snow gradually began to reduce. It didn’t get any softer, though, and it remained stuck to every surface. Four hours after they started he was shivering inside his multiple layers. A layer of hoarfrost caked every square inch of his clothing. There was nothing else for it, he got down and plodded along beside the horse, shoving his boots through the snow. The action warmed him slightly, but now he was worried about the rate he was burning off calories. The horse and pony were visibly in distress, despite the blankets tied around them.

Sometime after midday, Ozzie noticed what looked like tracks in the snow ahead of them. He took his sunglasses off, and found the light had become a pale pink. It turned the world into a strange grotto land, as if the forest had been carved out of brittle coral.

“Is it evening already?” Orion asked with a muffled voice. His face was completely swathed in a wool scarf, with only a narrow slit left to see through.

Ozzie checked his watch. “Don’t think so.” He bent down to examine the tracks. They were definitely footprints, elongated triangles without any tread. “These may be Silfen boots,” he said excitedly. There were perhaps fifteen different sets, all emerging from the forest; a couple had even appeared directly beneath trees, which he suspected the aliens had been climbing. They merged together and headed off along the vague avenue of snow-encrusted trees.

“Are you sure?” Orion asked. He was treading ground where he stood, slapping his hands against his sides in an effort to stay warm.

“I think so. I don’t know who else is going to be running around these woods. Besides, we haven’t got a lot of choice.”

“Okay.”

They started off again. Orion was walking beside his pony, one arm draped over the saddle so his hand could grip the reins. Ozzie suspected he was doing that so the pony could partly pull him along. The air was so cold now, it burned the inside of his mouth if he took a clear breath. The scarf he’d wrapped over his own nose and lips dangled long ice crystals where his breath had frozen against the woolly fabric. Before he put the sunglasses back on, he tried to see where the sun was. The branches overhead were thinner now, showing patches of a hazed ruby sky. He thought one section was slightly brighter, about halfway between the zenith and horizon, but that would put nightfall several hours away. If he’d worked the new short days out they only had about an hour left.

Half an hour later, Orion stumbled. Ozzie only knew because he heard a small grunt. When he looked around, the boy was facedown in the snow with the pony standing above him. Much as he would have liked to hurry back, Ozzie’s limbs responded slowly. It was like trying to move through liquid.

When he sat Orion up, the boy wasn’t even shivering. Ozzie pulled the scarf off his mouth to check for breathing. His lips were dark and cracked, with tiny flecks of blood frozen into place.

“Can you hear me?” Ozzie shouted.

Orion’s eyes fluttered weakly. He moaned softly.

“Shit,” Ozzie grunted. “Hang on, I’ll put the tent up. We’ll wait here until the weather picks up.”

There was no reply, although Orion raised one arm a few inches. Ozzie left him propped up against the pony and tried to get the tent pack off the lontrus. His outer gauntlets were too thick to unfasten the strap catches, so he took them off, trying not to wince as the arctic air bit straight through the woolen inner gloves. He started fumbling with the straps, then gave up and pulled the diamond-blade machete from its sheath, and cut the straps.

Three times he had to put his gauntlets back on and flap his arms to try to heat his hands back up before his fingers actually moved. What seemed like hours later the air-insulated section of the tent had reluctantly self-inflated and he’d got the support poles secured to the edges. He dropped a couple of heatbricks inside, then dragged the semiconscious boy in after them. With the flap sealed, the interior of the tent warmed rapidly from the radiance of the heatbricks. Ozzie had to strip several layers of clothing off himself and the boy before they began to feel the benefit. The chilblains in his fingers and toes were strong enough to make him wince as circulation returned. Orion started coughing; he looked as though he wanted to burst into tears.

“How can it be so cold?” the boy asked wretchedly.

“If you really want to know, I don’t think we’re on Silvergalde anymore.” Ozzie watched the boy anxiously to see what his response would be.

“Not for about three days, I figured,” Orion said. “But I still don’t see why anyone would visit a world with this kind of climate.”

“Oh. I’m not sure. I don’t think we’re in this planet’s polar regions, because of the trees. I may be wrong, but rule of thumb is that year-round ultra-cold environments don’t support living things as big as trees. So my guess would be either a world with a dying sun or one with a very long elliptical orbit and we arrived midwinter, worst luck.” He shook his hands, trying to ease the pain as feeling and movement returned. His ears still felt like lumps of ice.

“So what do we do now?”

“Like I said, wait to see if the morning brings any change, though I suspect it won’t. But we can’t go any farther now. We need to prepare. I’ll go out again in a while. I need to put the tent’s wind shell up, then I’ll get the rest of our packs in here. We also have to eat a good hot meal. And the first aid kit has some cream that’ll take care of your lips.”

“And yours,” Orion said.

Ozzie put his fingers up to his mouth, feeling the rough broken skin. “And mine,” he conceded. He was praying he wouldn’t have to deal with frostbite as well; fortunately his boots had kept his feet reasonably insulated, but he’d have to check Orion over properly later.

“What about the animals?” the boy asked.

“I can’t chop any branches off for a bonfire, I won’t have the strength. I’m going to spread some flame gel around the base of a tree and see if I can just set the whole damn thing alight. That might help them keep warm enough.”

He really didn’t want to go out again, which might have accounted for how long it took him to get ready. Eventually, he slipped back out into the sub-zero forest. Polly and the pony had slumped to the ground—a really bad sign. The lontrus was wheezing quietly, but otherwise seemed unaffected. While his fingers were still functioning, he pulled the remaining packs off its back and carried them over to the tent. Then he spent a frustrating twenty minutes erecting the wind shell over the inner lining as his hands got progressively stiffer. Finally it was done, and he took the pot of flame gel over to one of the nearby trees. He scraped the snow off a section of the trunk a foot above the ground, then stopped and peered closer. It wasn’t bark he’d exposed, more like a rough layer of dark purple crystal, almost like amethyst. His gloves were too thick to give him any clue to the surface texture when he rubbed his hand over, and in any case his skin was too numb. Despite that, he thought it was genuine crystal, he could see refracted light glinting from deep inside. For the life of him, he couldn’t think what type of chemical reaction had done this to the bark—some kind of ultra-cold catalyst conversion? Hoping the wood was still unchanged below the crystal, he held up the machete and took a swipe. Several crystals shattered from the impact, but the cut was barely a centimeter deep. Another, heavier swipe broke a big chunk of the amethyst crust away. The hole exposed more crystal inside, a column of what he took for near-pure quartz that made up the interior of the tree. Lush pink sunlight shone into it, revealing a vertical lattice of capillaries with what looked like dark viscous fluid moving through them extremely slowly.

“Son of a bitch,” Ozzie grunted. “A fucking jewelry tree.” When he looked up, the branches did seem to be more angular than a normal pine’s, their twigs multiplying out in fractal geometry patterns. All of them were smothered in a hard scabbing of snow, which had kept their true nature hidden.

The sense of wonder he would normally have enjoyed at the discovery of such a magnificent quirk of nature was canceled out by the realization that the weather wasn’t going to improve for tomorrow morning. Evolution hadn’t come up with this crystalline biota for warm climates; in fact, it was probably a form of reverse evolution; arctic-style plants expanding with the final ice age, then struggling for survival in a degenerating environment until their genes refined the ultimate winter-attuned chemistry. And how many millions of years of declining heat would it take to produce something this sophisticated? They’d missed this planet’s last springtime by geological eras.

He hurried back to the tent, too guilty to look at the horse and pony as he passed them. Orion had started cooking a meal on the heatbricks. Condensation was dripping off the inner lining.

“I can’t see a fire,” the boy said as Ozzie closed up the seal.

“This wood won’t light. Sorry.”

“I can feel my toes again.”

“Good. This insulation should keep enough heat in overnight. We’ll be fine in our sleeping bags.” He was doing a rough inventory. There were only eleven heatbricks left. Enough to keep them going for—realistically—three days. They could afford to walk forward for one more day, no more. If the path didn’t take them to a warmer world by tomorrow night, they’d have to turn back. No: Just see what’s around the next curve; no: I think it’s getting brighter. If things didn’t genuinely change, he couldn’t take the risk. There was no margin for error left anymore. And there would be nobody to return his memorycell to the Commonwealth for a re-life procedure. In fact, how long before anyone even notices I’ve gone missing?

Ozzie dug his sewing kit out of the pack. “Ah! This is going to be useful. I’ve an idea for some things we need tomorrow. How are you with sewing?”

“I’ve spoilt your chances, haven’t I?” Orion said. “You would have made it if it wasn’t for me.”

“Hey, man.” Ozzie tried to smile, but his lips cracked open. He dabbed at the drops of blood. “No way. We’re really doing it, we’re walking the deep paths. It’s your friendship gift that got us this far.”

Orion took the pendant out. They both stared at its dark lifeless surface.

“Try it again in the morning,” Ozzie said.

Polly and the pony were frozen solid when they emerged from the tent the next morning.

“They wouldn’t have felt anything,” Ozzie said when Orion stopped to look at them. His voice was muted by the thick fabric mask he’d carefully stitched together last evening. He was wearing every piece of clothing it was possible to wear, as was Orion. The boy looked as though his coat had inflated out to twice its normal size; even his gloves were covered in crude, bulging wraps of modified socks, like small balloons.

“They would have felt cold,” Orion said.

Ozzie couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses he was wearing, but he guessed the boy was feeling a great deal of remorse. With his more practical gauntlets, it was Ozzie who dismantled the tent and put the packs back on the lontrus. The cold was every bit as debilitating as the day before, but the little extra pieces of protective garments they’d put together helped to keep it from attacking their skin. The temperature was far too low for the snow to melt, which eliminated the chance of their feet getting wet—a lethal development.

The breeze had scattered the loose top layer of snow about, but there were still a few signs of the footprints they’d followed yesterday. Ozzie pushed at the lontrus’s rump, then finally gave the miserable beast a kick. It started moving, emitting a wounded wailing.

Optimism, which had been high as Ozzie climbed out of the tent to greet the day, drained away quickly. Though it never faltered, the lontrus moved slowly. Every step Ozzie made was an effort, moving the weight of clothes, pushing his feet through the cloying snow. Warmth left him gradually. There was no one place it was leaking out from, rather an all-over emission, slowly and relentlessly chilling him. Every time he tipped his head up to the high cerise clouds drifting across the rosy sky he could imagine currents of his body heat flowing upward to fill the insatiable icy void.

Some dreary time later, he noticed the crystal trees were shorter than before. Their perma-cloak of snow was also thinner, with the upper branches poking clear. Sunlight glinted and glimmered from their multiple facets, splitting into a prismatic spectrum entirely of red, from a gentle light rose to deep gloomy claret. There was less snow beneath their feet as well. Ozzie had long since lost sight of the Silfen footprints.

He was so intent on trying to see through the thinning crystal pillars he didn’t see Orion slowing. The boy grabbed at matted strands of the lontrus’s pelt, which made the animal whine in protest.

“Do you need a break?” Ozzie asked.

“No. It’s so cold, Ozzie. Really cold. I’m frightened.”

“I know. But try and keep going. Please? Stopping is only going to make things worse.”

“I’ll try.”

“You want to lean on me for a bit?”

“No.”

Ozzie tugged gently at the strands of pelt just behind the lontrus’s neck, reducing the animal’s speed. It didn’t resist the instruction. They ambled forward at a terribly slow pace. Ozzie started reevaluating their whole progress. He clearly hadn’t taken Orion’s state properly into account last night as he’d worked out how far they could travel. Obviously, they weren’t going to get more than a couple of kilometers farther at best today; and that was going to be exhausting for the boy. The sensible course would be to turn around immediately. At this rate, if they were lucky, they might just get back to where they’d pitched the tent last night.

“The forest’s finishing, look,” Orion said.

Ozzie focused, alarmed by how easily he’d fallen into a daydreaming state. The crystal trees were small and naked now; central boles of amethyst armor standing proud, with their main branches flung out at right angles. Away at the tips of the regular twig segments, the purple encrustation gave way to smooth opal wedges that flared out from each tip, flat side up to absorb the crisp frigid sunlight. They had thinned out enough for him to see past the last clusters to the vast plain beyond. From his position it looked like a circular depression walled in by low curving hills. In the thin clear air, the far side was almost as sharply drawn as the ground around him. Distance was difficult to judge with so few reference points, but he guessed at thirty to thirty-five kilometers across. Bright sparks of reflected sunlight twinkled with vivid intensity to halo each hill, indicating the crystal tree forest had spread over every slope. The depression’s floor was empty apart from its scattering of dusty snow.

For all the harsh beauty of the exotic landscape, Ozzie wanted to curse it. There was no hope here. They were going to struggle just to reach the end of the forest, a few hundred meters ahead where the crystal trees were nothing more than spindly dendrites of clear crystal strands sticking out of the iron-hard ground. Any notion of traversing that vast bleak and empty land to the other side was unthinkable.

Perhaps this is why so many who sought the deep paths were never heard of again. Our perception of the Silfen as gentle and kind is our own stupid, convenient illusion. We wanted to believe in elves. And how many human bodies lie out there under the snow because of that?

“It’s a desert.” Orion said. “A desert of ice.”

“Yeah, ’fraid so.”

“I wonder if Mom and Dad got here?”

“Don’t worry. They’re not stupid, they will have turned back, just like us.”

“Is that what we’re doing?”

Ozzie saw a flash of near-blue light out across the plain. He pushed his sunglasses up, heedless of the sharp pain from the terrible air gusting against his exposed skin. The flash came again. Definitely emerald. The contrast was astounding on that vista made up entirely from shades of red. Green had to be artificial. A beacon!

He dropped his sunglasses down again. “Maybe not.” The distress flares were nestled in hoops on each pack for easy access. He pulled one of the slim cylinders out, twisted the safety cap off, and held it at arm’s length to pull the trigger. There was a loud crack, and the flare zoomed off into the sky. A dazzling star of scarlet light drifted over the edge of the crystal forest, lingering for a long time.

Orion was staring at the slow pulse of the green beacon. “Do you think that’s people?”

“It’s got to be someone. My handheld array still doesn’t work, so the Silfen are screwing with the electricity. That means this is definitely one of their worlds.” He waited a couple of minutes, then fired another flare. “Let’s try to walk to the edge of the trees. If we haven’t seen an answer by then, we’ll turn back.”

Ozzie hadn’t even fired the third flare when the beacon light started flashing faster. Laughing beneath his mask, he held up the cylinder and triggered it. As it sputtered out overhead, the beacon light became constant.

“It’s a beam,” Orion cried. “They’re pointing it at us.”

“I think you’re right.”

“How far away is it?”

“I’m not sure.” His retinal inserts zoomed in, compensating for the emerald glare. The resolution wasn’t great, but as far as he could make out, the light was coming from the top of some mound or small hillock. There were dark lines on it. Terraces? “Ten or twelve miles, maybe more; and there’s some kind of structure around it, I think.”

“What kind?”

“I don’t know. But we’re stopping here. If they’re used to people they’ll know we need help.”

“What if they don’t?”

“I’m going to put the tent up. We’ll use a heatbrick and get warm, we both need a proper rest. When the brick’s finished we’ll know what to do. If nobody’s arrived we turn back.” He started to tug at the big knot he’d tied in the strap that secured the tent onto the lontrus.

“Can’t we go there?” Orion asked plaintively.

“It’s too far. The state we’re in it’d take another couple of days. We can’t risk that.” He unrolled the tent, and let the inner lining suck in air, raising itself into a small elongated hemisphere. Orion crawled inside, and Ozzie handed him a heatbrick. “Rip the tag,” he told the boy. “I’ll join you in a minute.” He lifted his sunglasses again, and zoomed in on the mound below the beacon light. Then he fired another flare. In answer, the green light blinked off three times in slow succession before returning to a steady glare. In anybody’s language that said: We’ve got you. He still couldn’t make out what the mound was, except it actually had quite steep sides.

Three hours and four hot chocolates later, there was a great deal of noise outside the tent. Ozzie unzipped the front to peer out. Two big creatures were slogging their way up the last section of slope in front of the crystal forest. They were quadrupeds, about the size of terrestrial rhinos, and covered in a straggly string-thick fur similar to the lontrus. Steamy breath whistled out of a stubby snout on the bottom of a bulbous head that bristled with short prickly spines. He’d seen uglier animal heads, but it was the eyes that were strange, long strips of multifaceted black stone, as if they too had crystallized in this deadly climate. Both animals were harnessed to a covered sledge; a simple framework of what looked suspiciously like bone, with cured leather hides laced to it. As he watched, the side was pulled back, and a humanoid figure climbed down. Whoever it was wore a long fur coat with a hood, fur trousers, fur mittens, and a fur face mask with hemispherical goggle lenses bulging out of it like fish eyes. The figure strode toward them, raising a hand in greeting.

“I thought it would be humans,” a female voice called gruffly from behind the mask. “We’re the only people tasteless enough to use red light for emergency flares around here.”

“Sorry about that,” Ozzie shouted back. “They don’t stock a real big range of colors at the store.”

She stopped in front of the tent. “How are you coping? Any frostbite?” Her voice had a strong northern Mediterranean accent.

“No frostbite, but we’re not prepared for this kind of climate. Can you help?”

“That’s why I’m here.” She ducked down, and pulled her mask free to look inside the tent. Her face was leathery brown, engraved with hundreds of wrinkles. She must have been in her sixties, at least. “Hello there,” she said cheerfully to Orion. “Cold here, isn’t it?”

The boy just nodded dumbly at her. He was curled up in his sleeping bag again.

She sniffed the air. “God in his heaven, is that chocolate?”

“Yes.” Ozzie held up his thermos. “There’s some left if you want.”

“If we ever had elections around here, you’d be emperor.” She took a big swig from the thermos, sighing pleasurably. “Just like I remember. Welcome to the Citadel. I’m Sara Bush, kind of unofficial spokesperson for the humans here.”

“Ozzie Isaac.”

“Hey, I’ve heard of you. Didn’t you invent the gateways?”

“Uh, yeah.” Ozzie was a little distracted. A block of fur had appeared from behind the sledge. This time it definitely wasn’t a biped in a fur coat. More like a tall rectangle of the fluffiest fur he’d ever seen, with wide dark eyes visible near the top, about eight feet from the ground. There were ripples in the fur that suggested legs were moving somewhere within as it glided forward. It gave off a loud hooting that rose and fell, varying in pitch, almost like a chant.

“All right, all right,” Sara said irritably, waving a hand at the creature.

“What’s that?” Orion asked timidly.

“Oh, don’t worry about him,” Sara said. “That’s old Bill, he’s a Korrok-hi. More like a yeti if you ask me.” She broke off to warble a long verse back to her companion. “There, I’ve told him we’re coming. Now let’s get you packed up and on the sled. I think you two could do with a hot bath and a drink. Not long to cocktail hour now.”

“You’re shitting me,” Ozzie exclaimed.

....

Paula spent most of the night reviewing the old AquaState accounts. The verification she wanted was easy enough to find, you just had to know what you were looking for to make the facts fit. Like every good conspiracy theory, she told herself. And no doubt that would be the angle that the defense counsel took.

When she arrived in the office the next morning, she was surprised that Hoshe was already behind his desk and running through forty-year-old files from City Hall. Even staying awake for half the night, she wasn’t exactly late.

“I can’t believe how much construction work there was in the city forty years ago,” he complained as soon as she’d sat down at her desk. “It’s like half of Darklake wasn’t here. I don’t remember it being so much smaller, and I’ve lived here for sixty years myself.”

Paula glanced over to the big wall-mounted portal he’d activated. It showed a detailed map of Darklake City, with a lot of green lights pinpointing building activity forty years ago, both civic and private. “Don’t forget to include things like roadworks for at least a couple of months after the murder. I know that will increase the search area dramatically, but that uncertainty makes them a prime possibility.”

He didn’t say anything, but his expression soured further.

“I’ve finished my analysis,” she said. “I’ll help with your search. Divide the city into two, and I’ll take one-half.”

“Right.” Hoshe instructed his e-butler. “What did you find in the accounts?”

“It confirmed my theory. But it’s hardly evidence we can take to court, at least not alone.”

“You mean, we need the bodies?”

“They’ll certainly help. Once we’ve established it’s a murder, then the circumstantial evidence will be enough to convict him. I hope.”

Hoshe looked up at the map in the portal. “This is an awful lot of fieldwork for our forensics people. They’re good, but there’s only so many available. It could take months. Longer.”

“It’s taken forty years so far, they’re not going anywhere. And once we’ve locked down every site, I’ll call in some teams from the Directorate. That should help speed things along.”

Mel Rees knocked on the open door and came in. Paula gave him a surprised look, then frowned. The Deputy Director always handed out her assignments in person. For him to visit a field operation, it had to be something big. He looked nervous, too.

“How’s the case going?” he asked.

“As of yesterday, I have a suspect,” she said warily.

“I’m glad to hear it.” He shook hands with Hoshe. “I’ve had some good reports about you, Detective. Do you think you’ll be able to close this one by yourself now?”

Hoshe glanced at Paula. “I suppose so.”

“He will,” Paula said. “Why are you here?”

“I think you know.”

....

After the Second Chance launched from the assembly platform, it had taken the SI a further three minutes to crack the last fireshield in the gateway control center datanet. The CST security team had marched in twenty minutes after that, once Rob Tannie had agreed to an unconditional surrender. The only promise CST made was not to shoot him and his colleagues on the spot. As it happened, the other two chose to suicide before the team got through the door, wiping their memorycells as they did so.

A fresh group of wormhole operation technicians rushed in as Rob was unceremoniously hauled away in handcuffs, leg restraints, and neural override collar. They took two hours to run checks on the systems and reopen the gateway next to the starship in its new, highly elliptical orbit. By then, what remained of the complex was under the strict control of CST security forces. The surrounding area was isolated and swept clean by the Commonwealth Security Directorate. A squadron of FTY897 combat aerobots had taken up patrol of the perimeter; the smooth dark ellipsoids were ultra-modern and equipped with the kind of weaponry capable of taking out pitiful antiques like Alamo Avengers with a single shot.

The assembly platform survivors were brought back down to the planet. Fresh crews were taken up to assess the ship’s status and secure exposed equipment against further vacuum degradation. Procedures were drawn up to establish a new assembly platform around the ship.

Five hours after the first explosion signaled the start of the assault, Wilson Kime stepped out of the gateway to spontaneous applause and cheers from the complex’s staff, and a bear hug from Nigel Sheldon. The CST media office broadcast the captain’s triumphant return to an audience almost as big as the assault itself had attracted. After that, he gave half a dozen interviews, thanked everyone involved for their tremendous effort, cracked a few jokes, didn’t speculate too hard on who had launched the attack but said he was fairly sure it wasn’t the Dyson Alpha aliens themselves, promised that he’d come through the ordeal more determined than ever to complete the mission, and finished up saying he’d donate his hazard bonus to a local children’s medical charity. Anshun police gave his car an escort of eight outriders back to his flat in the city.

Wilson woke with a smile on his face. When he turned over, Anna’s dark hair tickled his nose. She was curled up on the jellmattress beside him, one arm around her head like a small child warding off bad dreams. A whole series of delightful memories—and a deliciously wicked one—drifted through Wilson’s head. He kissed her shoulder. “Good morning.”

She stretched with a cat’s lethargy, giving him a sleepy grin. “That’s a horribly smug smile you’re wearing there, mister.”

“Yeah? I wonder what could have put it there?”

She giggled as he slid his arms around her. One hand stroked down her spine until it came to rest on her rump. “Was it this?” His other hand squeezed a small beautifully shaped breast, mercilessly tweaking the nipple. “Or this?” He kissed her neck, moved around to her mouth to smother the giggling. “This?”

One of her hands wriggled down between them, gripping.

“Wa-how!”

“Might have been that,” she said with a laugh.

“Oh, yeah?” He started to tickle her ribs. She retaliated. It turned into a mild wrestling contest, which soon developed into a much more intimate body contact sport.

In the end she grinned down victoriously from her position straddling his hips. “Well, whadda ya know: it is true what danger does to a man.”

He could hardly deny it. Last night had been all about survival, his body celebrating with its most basic physical reaction. The amount of relief he’d experienced when the Second Chance had risen above the spaceplanes had actually produced the shakes (which thankfully only Anna had witnessed). The others on board—the youngsters—had been delighted, ecstatic even, with their dramatic escape; but the prospect of dying hadn’t been too much for them to stand.

Wilson had never quite realized before how scared he was of dying, especially now. It wasn’t something today’s society could understand, not with all the expectation of rejuvenation and re-life procedures instilled from birth. The post-2050 generation knew they could live a good chunk of forever, it was their right. He thought his fear might have come from growing up in a time when there was only one life and then you died. The idea that memories could be saved and downloaded to animate a genetically identical body was a reassuring crutch for everyone else. But he couldn’t quite convince himself that was a continuation of his current existence. There would be a discontinuity, a gap between what he was now, and what that future Kime would remember being. A difference; a copy that was flawless was still a copy, not the original. People got around the dilemma by saying that every morning when you woke the only link to your past was memory, therefore waking in a new body was just an extended version of that ordinary nightly loss of consciousness. It wasn’t enough for him. His body, this body, was his life. The longer he lived in it, the more that identifying link was hardened. Three hundred plus years had produced a rock-solid conviction that nothing could break.

“I don’t think I’d survive another dangerous night like that one,” he told her, still panting slightly.

She folded her arms across his chest, and bent forward until her chin was resting on her hands, putting their faces inches apart. “What’s ship regulations about the captain sleeping with the lower ranks?”

“The captain is very much in favor of it.”

A finger tapped on his sternum. “You do have a sense of humor.”

“Carefully hidden, but cherished nonetheless.”

“So what do we do tonight if there isn’t an attack?”

He pursed his lips in mock thought. “Practice just in case?”

“My diary’s free.”

“You don’t have anyone?”

“No. Not for ages, actually. Too damn busy with my new job. You?”

“Not really. I haven’t been married since my last rejuvenation. Some affairs, but nothing serious.”

“Good.” She straightened up. “I’d better get a shower. Do you really want to meet up again tonight? Last chance for a clean getaway.”

“I would like to meet up again tonight.”

“Me, too.” She gave him a quick kiss. “Life’s too uncertain not to try and keep hold of something good. Yesterday really made that clear to me like nothing else. Nobody’s ever tried to kill me before.”

“You did a magnificent job up there. Combat stress is hardly something you’re used to. I’m proud of you.”

“Have you been through something like that before?”

“Not exactly. But I’ve seen active military service. It was a long time ago, though. Not that you ever really forget, not even with rejuvenation editing.”

“Did you—” She hesitated. “Kill anyone?”

“Honestly? I’m not sure. I certainly shot at a lot of people. You don’t hang around to see the result. Slam on the afterburners, and head for home almost before the missile’s left the rail.”

“It’s hard to think how old you are. I just know you as a corporate chief. I had to run a search program to dig up the Ulysses story.”

“Ancient history. If you accessed it recently you probably know more about it than me.”

“But you did it, though. You traveled through space in a ship. It can be done.”

“I wouldn’t call that mission an unqualified success.”

“Oh, but, Wilson, it was! You reached Mars. Millions and millions of kilometers from Earth. It doesn’t matter that Sheldon and Isaac found another way. Don’t denigrate what you did. After all, look who needs you now.”

“Sheldon. Yeah, I suppose that’s poetic justice. You know what he said to me yesterday after we got back? He just fixed me with that smartass smile of his and said: You’re having a ball, aren’t you? He was right, too, the bastard. It felt so right flying the starship. We did it on a wing and a prayer. And we won! It’s like everything I’ve done since Ulysses was an interlude; I’ve been marking time for three centuries.”

“And now you’re doing what you were born to do.”

“Damn right.”

She looked down at her body, then his. Her expression became coy. “There’s a question a lot of us on the project have speculated about. You don’t have to answer.”

“What?”

“All those months on Ulysses. It was a mixed crew. You were all young and fit. The whole voyage was in freefall.”

“Oh. Sorry. That’s classified government information.”

“Classified, huh?”

“Yes. But let me just say this: the longer you spend continuously in freefall, the more immune you get to motion sickness. Even vigorous motion.”

“Really? A long time acclimatizing.”

He gave her an evil grin. “Worth every minute of the wait.”

“It better be,” she muttered. “I’ve really got to take that shower now. I’m supposed to be on duty in another ten minutes.”

“Take the day off. Tell them the boss said it was okay.”

Anna scrambled off the bed. “Uh?”

“That door.” He pointed. There hadn’t been much time to show her around the apartment last night. Clothes were coming off before the door shut.

“Thanks.” Another giggle, and she headed for the bathroom. “At least you don’t have to ask what my name is.”

“Certainly don’t: Mary.”

One of his slippers flew across the room and hit him on the leg. “Ow!” The door closed. As the sound of the shower began, Wilson put his hands behind his head and stared happily up at the ceiling. Given that yesterday he’d nearly been killed, this really wasn’t a bad way to start a brand-new morning.

Not even the sight of the badly damaged complex brought down his mood. As he approached along the heavily guarded highway, thin trails of dark smoke were still leaking up into the sky from the ruined power plant. The missing circular administration tower was still a shock. Debris was piled high where the big atrium used to be, and most of the windows on the remaining two towers were either cracked or missing. Firebots picked their way delicately over the fragments of glass and concrete that sprawled out from the base, occasionally spraying out a jet of white foam. Medical salvage crews were working alongside the firebots, sending smaller remote sensors down into the rubble. They were seeking out bodies to remove their memorycell inserts ready for re-life.

Emergency vehicles had taken over the parking lot, so Wilson parked on an unused piece of lawn and got out. Oscar was standing watching the work parties in a group of several office staff and a squad of uniformed CST security guards.

“Morning, Captain,” he said, and saluted. Everyone around him abruptly straightened up.

“Morning,” Wilson replied. He didn’t bother with returning the salute, outside genuine military circles there was little point. “Where do we stand?” Before he’d left last night, he’d discussed the immediate problems with Oscar and left his deputy to it.

“The starship is okay, all critical onboard equipment is stable and holding. There were enough backup and redundant systems lying around down here to reestablish most of the umbilical feeds overnight. We’re going to keep her like that until we can secure her inside an assembly platform again. The malmetal manufacturer hopes to deliver a viable globe to us in another four days. Once that’s in place, we can perform a more detailed examination.”

“Good.” Wilson nodded at the sagging ruin of the closest assessment hall. “And the complex?”

“That’s going to take a bit longer. Security wants to verify the place safe first, make sure the terrorists didn’t leave any nasty little booby traps behind. Once that’s done we can clear the site and start the rebuild. With the Second Chance so far along her schedule, we won’t need the full suite of facilities down here again, so a lot of the work will just be patch-up operations. CST’s civil engineering division is preparing a bunch of appropriate equipment as we speak; as soon as we give them the go-ahead, they’ll move straight in.”

“Sounds like you’ve done a good job, Oscar, thank you.”

“Least I could do. Wish I’d been here yesterday.”

“Believe me, you don’t. I suppose security is eager to implement a whole new set of procedures?”

“Oh, yeah. We’re going to have to make some decisions about that and review our new assembly program today. I put off the biggies until you got in.”

“Right. I’ll get on it. Do I have an office?”

“I took over chemical systems building three for senior staff. Oh, and there’s some security people who want to see you now.”

“They can wait.”

Oscar gave him an uncomfortable look. “It might be a good idea to get it done and over with. Mr. Sheldon suggested it.”

“Did he now?”

The last Alamo Avenger had been shot by an FTY897 as it was charging through assessment hall seven on its way to the gateway. An atom laser had pierced clean through its force field to strike the main body with devastating consequences. It had been severed in two as its primary power cells exploded. The blast flung the sections apart, smashing the forward part into racks of delicate fuselage panel stress test equipment, while the smaller rear portion had buried itself into the composite wall, which had promptly collapsed on it, leaving the overhead ceiling dangerously unsupported. One of the legs had been ripped off, embedding itself in the concrete floor.

A CST security tech force had spent the night debugging and powering down the wreckage. Small red tags fluttered from every element, confirming it was now inert and harmless. There were so many of them they made it seem like some abnormal Chinese parade monster. Paula walked slowly around the upturned front section, bending down to inspect one of the shattered sensor clumps on the head. The Director of the Serious Crimes Directorate, Rafael Columbia, was standing in the middle of the damaged assessment hall alongside Mel Rees, the pair of them watching her as she performed her little inspection of the dead armored monstrosity. Both looked unhappy. Water left behind by the fire sprinkler deluge dripped off the overhead beams; their expensive shoes were already soaked from walking through all the puddles.

Paula ran a finger over the battered polyalloy armor, feeling the thin carbon ablation blisters crumple like ancient paper below her nail. “Not bad for a hundred-and-fifty-year-old weapon,” she acknowledged. “They were lucky Captain Kime was in orbit to take charge.”

“Absolutely,” Mel Rees said.

“I would have preferred CST to be luckier somewhat earlier,” Rafael Columbia told the Deputy Director. “The current estimate is one hundred and seven people killed, and another eighteen so far unaccounted for. They’re still calculating the financial loss, but it won’t be less than two billion. And we had no prior warning. None. This is the single most destructive act of criminal terrorism we have known in the last century. The death toll in nationalist succession movements adds up over time, but this …” His arm swept around, a gesture taking in the smashed hall. “This is our failure. It is a challenge to the Directorate’s very credibility to perform its designated task. I will not tolerate this appalling violation of law and order.”

“We’ll get them,” Mel Rees said. “No question of that.”

“Your division has had decades on this case. I expected better.”

Paula turned from the Alamo Avenger. “I have spent decades on the Johansson case, not Deputy Director Rees. And I really hope you’re not implying we should have provided you with some kind of advance warning.”

“Paula—” Mel Rees began.

She shot him a look that silenced him immediately. “The reason Bradley Johansson and his associates have had the run of the Commonwealth for so long is twofold. The resources which are allocated to tracking him and his activities are wholly inadequate. That is a political decision, made by you and your predecessors, Mr. Columbia. He also receives help from someone extremely well placed in the Commonwealth establishment.”

“Rubbish,” Rafael Columbia snapped.

“Even with inadequate funds, there is absolutely no way he should have eluded me for over a hundred and thirty years. It simply isn’t possible. If he kept a low profile and lived a thoroughly simple life I should have caught him. But as the leader of a criminal organization constantly involved in smuggling weapons to Far Away he leaves himself continually exposed to our sources and monitor programs. To avoid them requires a considerable degree of assistance. He is not acting alone.”

“Do you realize what you’re saying? Do you know how many administrations there have been since he founded his ridiculous Guardians movement? There isn’t one which would give him any kind of support, covert or otherwise, let alone all of them.”

“Administrations change, power groupings do not.”

“I am not going to stand here and be told I’m part of some corrupt cover-up operation. I don’t care who you are, how dedicated you are, or what your case conviction record is. I am the chief of this Directorate, and you will show me some respect.”

“Respect is something which is earned, Mr. Columbia.”

“Okay!” Mel Rees put his hands up and walked forward to stand directly between them. “One thing Johansson would be doing right now is laughing his ass off at the pair of you. The only person you’re helping right now is him.”

“Thank you for that,” Columbia said. He gave Paula a glare that would normally ruin any of his staff. She didn’t even seem aware of it.

“First question,” Paula said. “Why do you think it’s him?”

Columbia gave an irritated wave to the Deputy Director.

“Method of operation,” Rees told Paula. “This has Adam Elvin’s signature all over it. We think he put the operation together.”

“That would be unusual,” Paula said. “Elvin himself hasn’t been directly involved in violent acts since Abadan. He just puts shipments together for Johansson.”

Rafael Columbia produced a small scornful laugh. “This is not an age where the measure of time depreciates anything. I thought you of all people should appreciate that, Chief Investigator.”

“All the recent Guardians propaganda has been denouncing the Second Chance as a project organized by the Starflyer,” Rees said. “They’re the only ones who have any kind of reason to do this.”

“A reason?” Paula said thoughtfully. “To launch an action like this inside the Commonwealth is a huge change of policy for Johansson.”

“Who knows how his deranged mind works,” Rafael Columbia said.

“He’s not deranged,” Paula said. “Deluded, certainly, but don’t make the mistake of believing he isn’t capable of rational thought.”

Rafael Columbia pointed at the crumpled blackened body of the Alamo Avenger. “You call this rational?”

“We’re only a couple of hundred meters from the gateway, and the other two got through. Then there was the kinetic assault on the assembly platform. They almost succeeded. I’d call that pretty smart. Whatever you think of him, and I think worse than most, he is not stupid. If he is behind this, then something new is happening. Is it possible the Marie Celeste came from the Dyson Pair?”

“Unlikely in the extreme,” came Wilson Kime’s voice. He nodded respectfully at Rafael Columbia as he walked across the wet floor of the assessment hall. “Paula Myo, a privilege. I’ve accessed a lot of your cases.”

“Captain.”

“We’ve discussed the possibility of a link between Dyson Alpha and the Marie Celeste with the Director of Far Away’s Research Institute,” Wilson said. “He says it doesn’t exist. I’m inclined to believe him.”

“An official denial is the certificate of endorsement for conspiracy theorists,” Paula said. “Especially one issued by the director of the Institute. We know Johansson believes there is a link.”

“That’s his problem.”

Paula gave him a grave smile. “He just made it yours, too.”

“I want him stopped,” Rafael Columbia said. “Deputy Director Rees has assured me you are the best, indeed only, person to take charge of this case. Do you agree with that assessment?”

“I certainly have the experience,” Paula said. “What I need to finally track him down is the Directorate’s full cooperation and resources behind me.”

“As of now, you’ve got them. Whatever it takes. You can build your own team, take whoever you want no matter what they’re working on. This has total priority.”

“Very well, I’ll start with my usual colleagues, and expand from there as our lines of inquiry open up. The first thing I’ll need from you, Mr. Columbia, is political coverage. CST security will want to make this their mission. Please talk to Mr. Sheldon and have them stand back.”

“I will point out the jurisdiction implications to CST,” Rafael Columbia said. He ignored the quiet laughter coming from Wilson’s direction.

“Thank you. Now how exactly do you smuggle three working Alamo Avengers to a planet?”

“They weren’t smuggled in,” Rees said. “According to the export files, they were neutralized relics on their way to a new museum here on Anshun. It was a lawful shipment.”

“A new museum?”

“You got it. The land exists, it was bought three months ago, and there’s a registered company to control it. But there’s no building yet, or even plans. The company has a few thousand Anshun dollars in its account, but that was transferred from a one-use account on Bidar. Untraceable, or at least very difficult.”

“Ah,” she said in satisfaction. “Yes, that does sound like Elvin’s signature.”

“Completely. The Alamo Avengers were bought legitimately from a dealer a week after the museum company was registered. Back then, they really were just wrecks. They’ve spent the intervening time being ‘refurbished’ to display standard on the Democratic Republic of New Germany. The company which did the work has been sealed up, and the DRNG police are going over their facilities and records for us.”

“What about the spaceplanes?” Wilson asked.

“Leased from a fully legitimate commercial operator here on Anshun. Again the company hiring them was a shell. Using them as kinetic missiles was a simple case of reprogramming their pilot arrays. It’s not difficult. We’re sending in some teams to the port they took off from. I’m not expecting much.”

“Are these Guardians likely to try again?” Wilson asked.

“Johansson has been launching attacks against the Institute on Far Away for a century and a half,” Paula said. “It would be reasonable to assume this was only the first attempt against the Second Chance.”

TWELVE

Over the High Desert the deep sapphire sky began to darken. Kazimir McFoster stood alone on one of the long wave-shaped dunes of gray sand and watched the stars emerge. It was a ritual for him now, staring up at those platinum sparks, waiting for the mighty constellation of Achilles to come shimmering out of the golden velvet twilight. When he’d found the shape of the ancient warrior and his gleaming red eye, he traced along the Milky Way swirl of his cloak. There in the sparse lower hem was a twinkle he could never be sure was real or imagined. Earth’s star.

She will be there, standing on cool, rich, green land, looking up into this same void. Six hundred years away. But I can see you still, my glorious angel. Grant me victory on this raid, even though you never believed in our cause.

In Kazimir’s mind, Justine’s beautiful face was shadowed by sadness as his task on this night became clear to her. “Choose your own path, my love,” she whispered in the darkness and thick warmth of their secluded tent in the forest. Fingers lighter than mist stroked him this way, then again like so. Her delighted laughter filled the tent as he twisted with helpless delirium beneath her sensual puppetry. “Be your own man, not the tool of others. Promise me that.” The pleasure she bestowed made him weep openly, swearing on generations of McFosters as yet unborn he would be true to himself and his own thoughts.

Yet for all her concern, Justine did not understand the reality of this planet. Like every offworlder before her, she regarded the Starflyer as a local myth, Far Away’s Loch Ness monster.

“Forgive me?” he asked of the stars. “I’m doing this for you, so you may enjoy your world and the wonderful life you have there.”

A tiny rivulet of sand shifted behind him, causing the faintest of sounds. Kazimir smiled softly, and continued to stare into the heavens. The desert heat lacked any hint of humidity. Surrounded on all sides by the Dessault Mountains, the air here never moved. Not even wisps of cirrus clouds sneaked past the rampart peaks. The static climate sucked the moisture from exposed skin and every breath. Few plants grew here, some native cacti that resembled stones, and were often harder; not even the Barsoomians could bring verdant life to a place without water. But for all its harsh nature, it was home, the place in the universe where Kazimir felt most secure.

“If I were the Starflyer, you would be mine now,” a voice whispered contentedly in his ear.

“If you were the Starflyer, Bruce, you would be dead now,” Kazimir said. He pushed the knife blade back a little farther so the tip touched the stomach of the other young man.

Bruce McFoster laughed with relief, and threw his arm around his friend. “You had me worried, Kaz, I thought you were going soft.”

“Worry for yourself.” Kazimir withdrew the knife and slid it back into the sheath on the side of his sporran. “You sounded like a herd of T-rexes coming up the slope. The entire Institute will hear you coming.”

“They’ll hear me from the afterlife. Tomorrow night we shall inflict a massive blow to them. Did you hear the attack on Anshun damaged the human starship?”

“Scott told me.”

“Scott! That old woman? Is he here? I can’t believe the elders will let him in on the raid.” Bruce dropped a shoulder and limped around Kazimir. “Mark my words,” he lisped. “This Starflyer will spill your blood and tear your body apart for its amusement. Never has there been a monster so evil in the universe. I know, I faced its slaves in single combat. Hundreds of them killed, a thousand, yet still they came on.”

“Don’t mock so,” Kazimir exclaimed. He and Bruce had grown up together, shared so much they were closer than any brothers. Yet his friend could still be incredibly offensive, not to mention tactless. Sometimes he wondered if Bruce had ever been awake at any time under Harvey’s years of tutelage. “Scott has suffered for our cause, more than I’d wish.”

Bruce straightened up. “I know, I know. But you have to admit, he’s too cautious.”

“He’s alive. I’ll be happy if I’m alive after serving the cause for that long.”

“Keep daydreaming about your offworld nympho, and your contribution to the cause is going to be over too quickly. You were thinking about her again, weren’t you? That’s what you’re up here for, presenting a fine skyline target for the enemy.”

It was difficult for Kazimir not to smile. “I was enjoying the quiet, that’s all. Listening to you for the whole day before the raid would drive anyone nuts. And stop calling her a nympho.”

“I knew it! You were thinking about her again.”

“So what? At least I do care about others.”

“Oh, hey, below the belt, or what. There have been a lot of girls I cared for in the last few years. More than you.”

“More, yes. But none of them for very long, eh, Bruce?”

“Doesn’t need to be long, just thorough. Now come on, Romeo, time we got ready.”

“Yes.” Kazimir took one last longing look at the thick swath of stars, then followed Bruce as he skidded his way down the dune. Directly ahead of them was StOmer, the great mountain that marked the most northeasterly point of the Dessault range.

“Did it help?” Bruce asked, serious for once. Or as serious as he could be. They’d reached the broad ridge of crumbling sandstone where there was a tunnel to the clan’s Rock Dee fort.

“Did what help?”

“Thinking about her?”

“Some. Yes. I know that what we’re defending is worthwhile.” Kazimir ducked his head to step under what looked like a deep overhang. The tunnel was underneath, hidden from the sky, barely wide enough for one person. He tucked his shoulders in, and scraped his way forward, the once-gritty sandstone on either side now smooth as marble from the passage of so many bodies over the decades. The tunnel bent twice, following a sharp S-curve. Thirty meters from the entrance it opened out into the first of the wide chambers that formed Rock Dee fort. The guard, standing proud in her lavender and tangerine McMixon kilt, studied his face, then allowed him to pass. If the Institute soldiers did ever find the tunnel, any guard would be able to hold them off just about single-handed as they wriggled their way out of the narrow slit one by one.

Polyphoto strips had been epoxied to the roof, with long strings of black electrical cable stretched out between them. Their relentless sol-spectrum light etched deep shadows across the rumpled sandstone as they led deeper into the fort.

“She must have been phenomenal in bed,” Bruce said with apparent sympathy. “I mean, the two of you only had, what, a couple of days together? And you’re still moping about her.”

“Sometimes, I almost wish you’d met her.”

“Almost?”

“If you’d seen her, got to know her, you would understand this isn’t some easy infatuation like the ones you have. And I would have wanted my two closest friends to meet.”

“Oh … well, thanks, Kaz.”

“But I thank all the heavens you didn’t, because you’re such an embarrassment I’m sure she wouldn’t want to have anything to do with anyone who knew you.”

Bruce made a lunge for him. A laughing Kazimir dodged ahead and started running. The pair of them burst out into the fort’s main chamber, still taunting and insulting each other loudly. Heads swung around to check out what was happening. Some frowned at the flippancy of the youths at such a time. Others—those of a similar age—smiled tolerantly. Most simply turned back to their work.

Kazimir and Bruce put on their sober faces, slowed down, and nodded courteously at their fellow clansmen. The rocky cavern had been carved in the rough shape of a football amphitheater by storm waters now long gone from this side of the mountains. Two fast channels had once merged here, swirling around and around as they clashed before rushing out toward the northeastern lowlands. The surging waters also had eroded a host of smaller passages and caves, tributaries that had splintered and shifted as geology took over from hydropressure.

Rock Dee was one of the largest Guardian communities, and a formidable safe refuge. There was still fresh water to be found in the lower caverns, filtering in from the mountains that guarded the desert above. Solid-state heat exchange cables had been sunk deep into the mantle below, providing power for lighting and cooking, along with the more important task of supplying the armory with electricity. All that had to be brought in was food, and that was supplied by the McKratz clan’s farms and grazing lands scattered throughout the Dessault range.

Kazimir felt a surge of pride at what he saw in the big chamber. If only he could have brought Justine to see this, then she would have believed in the Guardians’ purpose. Over eighty fighters were busy on the chamber floor, making up one of the largest raiding parties the Guardians of Selfhood had put together in years. But then, as everyone here knew, events were picking up with the construction of the human starship. The Starflyer’s long-laid plans were maturing rapidly, bringing disaster and death to the Commonwealth from the one direction no one in authority was looking.

All the clans had contributed to the raid. McFosters had provided a dozen young fighters, who were checking over their packs and equipment. Their emerald and copper kilts had been packed away; this evening they wore their navy-blue and ebony hunter tartan, helping them pass unseen through the night.

The McNowaks, also predominantly fighters, were in their gray and brown tartan. A group of them were engaged assessing the armor worn by one of their captains. The blue skeletal suit flooded the air around him with a nebulous orange haze, as if he were standing inside a ghostly amoeba. The radiance crackled and intensified each time a test penetrator cane was applied against him. With each application the force field emitter was gradually tuned until the emanation was nothing more than a faint aural outline, the kind any Old Testament saint might possess. Fine-tuning inverted the radiance, cloaking him in a skin of absorptive shadow.

The McOnnas were the third clan to focus on the soldier ethic. Their nomadic boys and girls were undergoing the same lessons, training, and tests that Kazimir himself had gone through. All of them he knew he could trust as much as Bruce. All were totally loyal to the cause, prepared to give their lives that humanity could be liberated. The squad they’d sent were wearing their nightguard blue and vermilion kilts, along with dark leather travel jackets; ion pistol holster and harmonic blade knife sheaths hung from their belts.

The McMixons, who were charged with the keeping of Rock Dee and other forts in the countryside surrounding the Institute, were tending to the Charlemagnes, the warhorses they would all ride to the raid. The gene-modified beasts were fully twenty-one hands, carried by legs like small tree trunks. They had no mane or tail; their thick leather hide was tougher than rhino skin, and a similar dull slate-gray in color. A short unicorn spike rose out of their heads, tipped with carbon-bonded titanium blades by the Rock Dee smithy. Any unprotected human caught by one would be ripped in half; and even force field armor had been known to give way from the inertia of a full charge. Fat iron bolts had been driven through the tough shield ridges of bone that protected the neck and underbelly, and straps of leather and silicon threaded through hoops in the bolts to hold the saddle in place. The Charlemagnes had been designed by the Barsoomians in their lands away to the east of the Oak Sea. Not for money—an emblem of the culture to which the radical ecogeneticists were fiercely aversive—but for the challenge of engendering an animal that in symbiosis with humans had only one purpose: carnage. The Barsoomians probably even delved into the forbidden field of psychoneural profiling, for no clan fighter had ever known a Charlemagne to shy away skittishly in the heat of battle like an ordinary horse would. With their tough skin, triple hearts, and multiple stress loading pathway skeleton, the great beasts were inordinately difficult to kill even with modern weapons.

The McPeierls, the widest-roaming clan of all, gathered intelligence on Institute activities from all over the planet. They also collected the advanced equipment that Johansson smuggled through the gateway along hundreds of innocuous routes. This evening, their members were distributing the final pieces of technology and weaponry required by the raiders.

The McKratzes farmed and raised cattle out across Far Away’s sweeping plains and tricky mountain pastures. They were the ones who bred the Charlemagne herds and lynxhound packs, and other domestic animals used by the clans. Throughout the year, they insured the more nomadic clans were fed and supplied.

And everywhere in the main cavern moved the McSobels, the armorer clan, responsible as well for general technology. Lugging their test equipment over the rock floor, they stopped beside each fighter and warhorse, running test programs through the arrays. Scarlet superconductor cables were pulled about behind them, supplying top-up charges to batteries and weapons magazines. Seven of them had been assigned to the raid, dressed in kilts that were matte-black with a plain grid pattern of thin dark gray lines and equally black coats. Five were bringing the missile launchers and medium-caliber plasma cannon, bulky titanium-cased units hanging from their Charlemagnes, which didn’t even seem to notice the extra weight. The remaining two operated electronic warfare systems intended to neutralize the Institute communications and throw in as much confusion and false data as possible.

Walking up to his own warhorse, Kraken, Kazimir felt the gooseflesh rising as the prospect of the coming raid grew more real. The Charlemagne snorted like a small thunderstorm, lifting and turning its head slightly so it could watch him walk around to its flank. Kazimir had absolutely no instinct to pat the creature reassuringly, this was nothing like the normal ponies and horses he’d learned to ride on. It was enough that the beast didn’t try to bite his head off on sight; the carnivore tusks curving over its rubbery lips were thicker than his fingers.

He began to check his pack once more.

“So are you two screwups ready?” a rasping voice asked.

Kazimir smiled around at Harvey McFoster, his old tutor. The man was a veteran of many clan raids against the Institute, and had the scars to prove it. Years ago, an ion beam fired by an Institute soldier had vaporized a superconductor battery beside him, and the superenergized molecules had penetrated his armor force field. After his injury, he spent his time teaching rather than fighting. He was lucky he survived the toxic shock. Clan medics spent six months repairing as much tissue as they could; even so the skin on a third of his body now had a melted appearance, and he could never raise his voice to shout. Not that he needed to, his presence alone inspired awe in his pupils. Kazimir considered himself privileged to have been one.

“Doing my best to be ready,” he said.

“Good enough,” Harvey said. “And you, Bruce, are you scared yet?”

“Ha.” Bruce gave the ion pistol on his belt a confident pat. “No, sir.”

Harvey’s cheek muscles moved his too-thick skin into a grimace, looking even more like some Halloween grotesque. “If you had a brain, lad, you would be.”

Bruce’s eternal cockiness vanished.

“Be nervous,” Harvey said. “Their soldiers are trying to kill you, or worse. Fright is your friend, it keeps you alert. That gives you a chance out there.”

“Only heroes are fearless,” Kazimir said. “And they die young.”

“I’m glad you heard something I said,” Harvey told him. “Even if it is just an old lyric.”

“We’ll make you proud,” Bruce insisted.

Harvey’s hand closed on his shoulder. “I know you will, lad, although I’d prefer it if you just stay alive. Remember, keep your eyes focused in front of you the whole time, not on your dick.” He gave a labored wink toward the McNowak group, then walked off.

Kazimir and Bruce smiled at each other in the same way as they had when they got caught playing truant. Bruce lifted his pack up and fastened it behind his saddle. “He’s right, you know.”

“I know. We mustn’t let our attention slip.”

“No, you idiot, about them.”

“Huh?” Kazimir followed the line his friend was surreptitiously indicating. Four of the McNowak fighters were young women. Kazimir had even chatted with a couple of them yesterday when they arrived in Rock Dee.

“That one with the dark hair, she hasn’t stopped looking at you since we came in.”

“Andria?”

“Oh, ho, you already know her name. Quick work, my friend. So who’s the one next to her? I wouldn’t mind a tumble with her after the raid.”

“That’s Bethany. I think she’s paired with one of the McOnnas. And anyway, what about Samantha? It’s only another month until she’s due, right?”

“So? This is why I love being a McFoster. We exist to kill the Starflyer and breed enough warriors to make the cause successful. That’s our duty. We fight. We fuck. When you think about it, what else is there worth doing? And believe me, that Bethany over there, she’ll be thinking along the same lines.”

“Dear dreaming heavens. Bruce, she’ll be thinking how to brain you with her pistol butt, that’s all. Can’t you ever get a grip on yourself?” Kazimir unfolded the lightweight shield coat, and threw it over Kraken’s back, bracing himself should the beast not want it and react with a fast kick. The dark fabric was embroidered with glittering black metal curls and spirals, long tassels hung from the lower edges, almost touching the ground. He started to smooth it over the warhorse’s thick skin, and used its straps to tie it to the bolt rings.

“I’m being honest,” Bruce protested with genuine hurt feelings. “You know that. This raid is going to make every female fighter incredibly horny afterward. It does me. What better way to celebrate our glorious victory?”

“How about in a civilized fashion?”

“Ha! I remember the West Irral raid. You were drunk for a week after. And you vanished off with that McSobel. What was her name?”

“Lina.” He didn’t mention it was because in the midst of his happy drunken haze Lina had looked more than a little like Justine.

“That’s the one. So don’t go all noble on me. You and I are the same.” Bruce’s arm went around his friend’s shoulder. He turned the reluctant Kazimir until they were both facing the young McNowak women, and gave them a cheery wave. Andria returned a sly smile, her gaze lingering on Kazimir before turning to her Charlemagne. Her three companions went into a huddle with her. The boys heard giggling.

“Now tell me that wasn’t an invitation,” Bruce insisted. “Look at her. What a figure. I bet she’ll be as lusty as hell in bed. And those breasts, dear heaven, they’re huge.”

“Will you shut up!” Kazimir tried to clamp his hand over Bruce’s mouth. “They’ll hear you.”

“You’re such a virgin. Ohooo, be quiet, or they’ll hear how much we like them. Wake up and smell the coffee, Kaz, you’re not going to live forever. And it’s such a beautiful life in the meantime, especially when it’s got breasts that size in it.”

“Stop it!” He started plucking at Bruce’s shirt, peering under the collar, checking the cuffs.

“What are you doing, Kaz?”

“Looking for the off switch. Please, heaven, let there be one.”

Bruce laughed, pushing his friend away. “No man can stop thinking about women, especially not at a time like this. Battle fires up all the primitive instincts.”

“That explains a lot; nobody gets more primitive than you.”

“Let’s get over there, we’re wasting time.” He took a step forward.

“No!” Kaz almost had to lunge to grab hold of Bruce’s shoulder and stop him. All four McNowak women were staring at their antics now. “I swear I’ll shoot you dead on the spot if you make a scene with them,” he growled at Bruce.

Bruce allowed himself to be halted in midstride. “Kaz! You do care about Andria.”

“I don’t want the whole raiding party to think we’re a pair of jerks, that’s all. Which is what they will do if we go over there and you spin them your usual bullshit lines. Now will you quit being such an ass in public?”

“Okay: I will be quiet if you promise you’ll bed her after the raid. Deal?”

“And that’s really a promise I can make.” Kazimir wished his traitor mouth wasn’t trying so hard to smile. It seemed as though from the moment he and Bruce became teenagers every second of their time together had been spent plotting strategies to meet and impress the opposite sex. Now when relationships were more adult, casual, and easier, he wasn’t interested. Though Andria was genuinely attractive, and it had been pleasant talking to her earlier. And it had been a very long time since Lina. I wonder if Justine has found a lover? She would never lack for young men pursuing her.

“If you don’t, I’ll take her.”

Kazimir grunted in utter contempt. “Oh, yes, and that’s even closer to reality. Everyone knows your reputation. And if she didn’t know about Samantha, I’d tell her. I’ll go over there, and …”

“You’ll do it then?” Bruce’s face was radiating delight.

“Anything to shut you up.”

Bruce hugged him heartily. “Thank the dreaming heavens. You have no idea how badly you need to get laid. Every second since your offworld nympho left has been torture for your friends.”

“Good! So now you know what my life is like having to listen to you the whole time.” Kazimir lifted up his saddle and slung it over Kraken’s back, settling it on top of the blanket. He was convinced that even the warhorse was laughing at him.

The raiding party left Rock Dee an hour after nightfall, fully eighty clan fighters filtering out of hidden clefts amid the desert-side foothills of StOmer. They led their warhorses at first, negotiating the tricky passes and steep dune banks. Before midnight, they had all reached the southern side of the mountain, and mounted up to start their descent into the lowlands. Small tufts of wiry dry grass the color of straw were appearing in the gritty sand. As the gentle folds in the land began to deepen into distinct valleys the grass turned greener, and began to spread out into patches that soon joined together into a single carpet. This far down, and facing due east, a cold wind blew at them. For the first time they felt a tinge of moisture against exposed skin.

The air warmed quickly as they moved steadily lower. Even though it was now deepest night, they were only a few degrees south of the equator. A thin belt of giant heather formed the upper border to the forest that covered the lower half of StOmer’s eastern slopes. By daybreak they were safely under cover of the lush trees, and moving in small groups along the myriad hidden tracks.

They had a long break at midday, taking time to sleep as best they could as the heavy warm rain pattered against the broad canopy of leaves overhead. A quick, cold meal at the start of the afternoon, and they were on their way again. As the light began to drain out of the sapphire sky they had reached the edge of the forest, where the land fell away in a steep shingle and grass ridge. The captains of every squad sent out scouts, who crept up to the edge of the ridge to check the ambush point. Several of them were McSobels, who pinpointed and neutralized the remote sensors that the Institute had installed along the road below.

Far Away only had one major road: Highway One, which ran southward from Armstrong City to cross the equator where it snaked along the western side of the Great Iril Steppes until finally driving into the valley where the Marie Celeste had crash-landed and the Institute had been built to study it. The road provided the sole supply route from the gateway in the city to the Institute, a twin lane strip of enzyme-bonded concrete extruded by the only pair of tracked roadbuilders ever to be exported to Far Away. They’d been brought in specifically for that one job, although once they’d finished the long north-south route they’d managed to keep going long enough to lay down a few smaller roads linking Armstrong City with the larger towns in the north. But after they finally broke down no spare parts were ever brought in to fix them.

From their position atop the ridge, the clan scouts could see the stone-gray ribbon of the road curving around the hill that marked the entrance to the alien arkship’s valley. It was late afternoon, and the thick cover of vegetation that lay across the lowland was still steaming gently. Carried on the air, echoing and drifting out of the valley that contained the Institute, was the faintest of mechanical sounds. For over a year now, scouts had been reporting increased activity around the massive metal hull. The news had been given an ominous reception by the clans, its synchronicity with the work on the human starship was too strong to be ignored.

But now, from the vantage point of the ridge, there was no sign of any activity. Nobody was using the road. The scouts settled down and waited; their information on the convoy was good, it was only a matter of time.

Every couple of weeks a supply convoy delivered food and equipment to the Institute. It took at least a week to drive the route down from the city, often longer depending on the road’s state of repair, and the level of sabotage by the Guardians. Each convoy was protected by soldiers who were hired by the Institute and licensed by the planetary governor.

The Guardians had been monitoring this convoy since it left Armstrong City. There were twenty big trucks hauling the cylindrical freight containers that had arrived through the gateway over the last fortnight. They were all FordSaaB VF44s; sixteen-wheel, twin axle, diesel-fueled, and manual drive—even the most sophisticated arrays would have trouble coping with Far Away’s poor surfaces and absence of satellite positioning systems. The Institute had chosen them for its transport fleet because they were designed for low maintenance and rough terrain.

Driving with them were eight matte-black Land Rover Cruisers, vehicles in common use among Commonwealth police and paramilitary forces operating in remote areas. On the road, they rode low on six independent suspension wheels, which could extend down and out to carry them over really rugged ground. The rest of the convoy was made up by a huge fuel tanker, and a couple of tow/repair trucks.

When they reached the last stretch of road before the start of the Institute valley, it was already twilight. The scouts saw the headlights blazing ahead of them, visible for kilometers across the rumpled countryside, advertizing their presense. A couple of the Cruisers were out in front, their drivers accelerating eagerly now they could see the sodium orange corona from the Institute’s little town crowning the hill ahead.

The dark sky was ripped apart by three blinding streaks of plasma as the McSobels opened fire from the top of the ridge. Two of the bolts struck the lead truck, blasting it apart. Inertia kept the disintegrating bulk tumbling forward as the freight containers spewed out great streamers of flame. After a couple of seconds the flaming wreckage flipped over and skidded to a stop, blocking the road. The third plasma bolt hit the fuel tanker. A tremendous explosion bloomed out, the fireball eruption swelling in seconds until it was over thirty meters wide, lighting up the whole convoy with garish menace. The trucks directly ahead and behind were completely engulfed, their own subsequent detonation adding to the devastation.

Every vehicle in the convoy emergency braked as the attack began, wheels locking and screeching as they scored huge scars of black rubber along the enzyme-bonded concrete. Several of them came dangerously close to fishtailing as their automatic systems fought to stabilize the braking sequence.

Another three plasma bolts flashed down. Two of them found their targets, smashing trucks apart in swarms of flaming debris. But the driver of the third truck had reflexes fast enough to activate his force field as he struggled to halt the bucking vehicle. A hemispherical shell of air solidified around the truck, sizzling electric blue as the bolt hit. Spikes of lightning lashed off in every direction. Long jagged lines of concrete ruptured into gravel and soot as the energy discharge pounded the road. Slim streamers of lava welled up in the gashes. There was nothing the force field could do to protect the truck from them as it slithered onward. Tires burst apart as they touched the molten rock, tipping the wheel hubs onto the ground. The front edge of the cab gouged out a huge scar as it shuddered to a violent stop.

By then every other surviving vehicle had a force field surrounding it. Drivers shouted into their radios for help and instructions, receiving nothing but thick static even on the encrypted security channels. The road was completely blocked; if they were going to get to the safety of the valley they would have to drive across open ground. Force fields made progress along a flat surface difficult; to travel over such rugged terrain the strength of the protective hemispheres would have to be reduced. Nobody wanted to do that. A further series of plasma bolts whipped down, hammering at the force fields like the spears of angry gods. None of them penetrated, but the pyrotechnic electron display was lighting up the countryside for kilometers around. Waiting in their cabs, engines running, praying for reinforcements, the drivers watched in horror as the strobing incandescence revealed a dark horde of horsemen rushing down the ridge toward the road.

Kazimir had fitted active lenses into his eyes long before the scouts reported the convoy was approaching. The view they presented him gave the world a pale emerald tint, but it stayed sharp and clear as the sun went down. Along with the rest of the Charlemagnes he hung back from the top of the ridge so the enemy had no hint of their presence. Then the McSobels fired the plasma cannon. His lenses simply refused to let that much light through into his eyes; he saw them as pink lines blinking on and off, like an afterimage of the noon sun traced across his retina. That was the signal to advance. With the sound of the exploding trucks reverberating around him, he urged Kraken forward to the crest of the ridge. A quick sideways glance showed Bruce at his side, laughing like a demon as the massive warhorses picked up speed. Then they were over the ridge, and the entire panorama glared brilliant jade below them as the diminishing tanker truck fireball ascended into the sky. He watched the trucks skidding about on the road, their force fields haloed by pieces of flaming wreckage that bounced and skittered across the invisible screens. The Cruisers had all turned off the road, and were driving straight toward the clan raiders as they charged down the slope.

As the distance quickly shrank, the raiders started to fire their ion pistols and the larger carbines. Force fields protecting the Cruisers flared chrome-yellow, but none of the shots got through. The thunder of hooves was now as loud as the howl of flames bursting out of the ruined tanker and the crackling energy weapons. Kinetic rapid-fire guns on the front of the Cruisers opened up. Tall gouts of earth sprayed up around Kraken. One of the projectiles struck Kazimir. His force field rang like a sepulchral church bell, completely deafening him. Vibrant slivers of energy rippled down the dark confining field, then surged through the curlicues embroidered in the warhorse’s shield blanket, turning the metal a glimmering white, before grounding out through the bottom of the tassels. Blue and purple sparks fizzed out around Kraken’s hooves as they charged onward. The air was filled with the sharp tang of burning metal. All around him, the clan raiders were trailing fabulous streamers of Saint Elmo’s fire as the projectiles hammered into them, human comets streaking across the gloom. Warhorses screamed as the gunfire tore their flesh open, falling to the earth as blood poured through huge tattered wounds.

A flight of missiles soared overhead. The Cruiser guns switched their aim upward, trying to lock on to the elusive barrage. Soldiers jumped out of the rear of the vehicles, sprinting for cover. They started firing ion rifles at the raiders. Their armor suit force fields became vivid coronal beacons as they were shot at in turn.

The front line of warhorses wavered as their casualties built up. They were almost level with the lumbering Cruisers now. Small groups peeled away. Kazimir urged Kraken toward the front end of the convoy. There was little thought involved, he simply remembered that was where he was supposed to go. Five times he’d been hit by kinetic bullets or ion rifle fire. So far his armor suit’s force field had held. Terror and exhilaration surged through his body, crushing almost all rational thought. Only some faint recollection of the plan kept him moving in the right direction. He loved the vivacity of the mad ride straight into the lethal muzzles of the Institute soldiers. Simultaneously, the constant fear of being cut to shreds any second made him scream wordless defiance at his foes, while shooting his ion pistol wildly. It was insanity, and utterly beautiful. Even Kraken seemed to share the recklessness, pounding on into the heart of the bedlam. Blood from two craterous wounds was running down the warhorse’s flanks, soaking the shield blanket.

Bruce was still level with him, still wearing the same rictus grin that had begun on the top of the ridge. He yelled something that Kazimir never heard above the clamor. Then he was gesturing urgently with the long barrel of his ion carbine. Kazimir glanced ahead. The road was only fifty meters away now, as brilliantly lit as any city, showing a zigzag jam of trucks. Bruce gestured again at the second truck, which had come to rest with its force field just nudging into the sputtering flames of the ruined lead truck. Kazimir’s heated zeal subsided enough for him to nod sharp agreement, and they both altered track for the trapped vehicle. Kraken galloped over the road in front of the flames, with Kazimir pulling on the reins to slow their unruly flight and curve back to the second truck.

It was at that moment he saw into the Institute valley for the first time in his life. He couldn’t see far down it, the angle was wrong for that. From his position all he could make out were a few nondescript low buildings clustered around the end of Highway One. Beyond them, however, the aft section of the alien arkship was just visible. Kazimir had always known its dimensions, and how only something that large could survive centuries of travel between the stars. But all the statistics Harvey had coached him in had never registered the way seeing it for real did. The diabolical thing was big. Its fuselage design followed a simple cylindrical geometry, with various protrusions and fins breaking the uniformity of its eight-hundred-meter length, and a complex wart-cluster of force field generators at the prow. At the rear it was a sheer circular cliff of metal two hundred fifty meters in diameter, with the eight stubby nozzles of its fusion drives sticking out. The Institute had set up a ring of powerful arc lights around the ship, centering it in a huge pool of bright monochrome light. Not that Kazimir could see many of the slate-gray metal hull plates. Vast arches of scaffolding had been erected around the Marie Celeste, supporting access walkways running the length of the fuselage. The shapes of humans and bots were discernible moving along the aluminum planking, tiny scavenger insects swarming over some fallen corpse. Cranes rose from the apex of the scaffolding, their long gantries hauling up big freight containers to the loading bays on every walkway level. Flashes of ruby laserlight were coming from the dark cavities of the fusion drive nozzles, evidence of a great deal of activity within.

A sudden chill washed across Kazimir’s skin, sobering his thoughts. Actually seeing the enemy that his clan was sworn to destroy was a humbling experience. The power and purpose reflected in the massive arkship was formidable, an extension of its master’s will. He felt pathetically small by comparison.

“Come on!” Bruce yelled as he galloped past. “For fuck’s sake, Kaz.”

Kazimir dropped his gaze from the ship and saw a fleet of black Land Rover Cruisers tearing out of the Institute town, accelerating toward them.

He grunted, “Oh, shit,” under his breath and urged Kraken around toward the intact truck. His hand fumbled with the equipment belt hanging from the side of his saddle, but he eventually found the dump-web unit and pulled it free. Ten meters ahead of him, Bruce was holding his own dump-web, leaning forward in his saddle as he rushed up to the force field surrounding the truck. His arm began to sway to and fro, calculating the weight and closing distance. Then as the warhorse was only a meter from the edge of the force field he swung the unit in a short arc and let go. The dump-web hit the ground and bobbled along until it reached the shield.

Kazimir had little chance to check his friend’s accuracy. He was doing the same thing with his own unit, letting it swing slightly, watching the force field as he hurtled toward it. Speed, distance, angle—he judged them all and dropped it at what he knew was the right moment, squeezing the activation trigger as it left his hand. The heavy gadget bounced a couple of times, then slapped into the force field. Internal sensors detected the coherent energy structure and immediately deployed the compressed nest of conductive filaments at the core of the unit. Fine dark strands expanded quickly, sliding their way along the curve of the shield like a stain spreading upward. The flimsy mesh began to leach energy out of the force field, channeling the flow down into the ground. Smoke began to rise up from the enzyme-bonded concrete where the lower half of the web was unfurling. On the back of the truck, behind the cab, the force field generator began a near-subliminal whining as it consumed more and more power, trying to reinforce the relentless drain that was gnawing into it in two places. The driver watched helplessly as more and more indicators on the cab dashboard turned from amber to red.

Thirty seconds after Kazimir let go of his dump-web, the huge quantity of energy that the generator had to pull from its superconductor battery to maintain the shield’s integrity exceeded its rated wattage. The force field collapsed as small turquoise flames jetted out of glowing cherry-red cooling fins on the generator casing. Several hundred meters overhead, loiter missiles launched by the McSobels detected the failure. Their sensors acquired the naked truck. Solid rocket boosters ignited, and they screamed down vertically at Mach four.

Kazimir was halfway back to the bottom of the ridge when the truck exploded behind him. He risked a quick look over his shoulder and whooped for joy at the sight of the billowing flames. There must have been some volatiles in one of the containers; flaming aquamarine globules were spinning out of the main explosion, soaring across the night sky like rampant fireworks.

Another convoy truck’s force field vanished, and long rocket plumes blazed high above as missiles locked on. Several clan raiders were circling the remaining trucks, ready to throw their dump-webs. Spread out between the road and the ridge, the firefight between Institute soldiers and the remaining mounted raiders was intense. The rapid-fire guns on the Cruisers were inflicting heavy casualties among the Charlemagnes. Retaliatory ion carbine shots were directed at the vehicles, turning their protective force fields into seething bubbles of light.

Kazimir tugged the reins slightly, steering Kraken away from the stationary Cruisers. According to the plan, all he had to do now was get back to the top of the ridge, and from there the rendezvous point. At that moment he hadn’t realized how close the Institute reinforcements had come until the rapid-fire guns on the first of the new Land Rovers opened fire. A patch of ground along the side of Kraken tore open, throwing up a ragged curtain of earth and vegetation. The big beast bellowed in shock, jerking sharply to one side. Kazimir clung on grimly.

Bruce was slightly ahead of him, staying low in the saddle. Ten meters beyond him, three Institute soldiers jumped up from nowhere and opened fire with their ion rifles. Bruce’s force field glared like a fragment of captured sunlight, the howl of its energy stresses louder than any thunderclap. Perilously thick tendrils of electricity writhed across his Charlemagne’s shield blanket, punching out of the tassels like a jet exhaust. Kazimir was already shooting back at the soldiers, forcing them to stop, when Bruce’s warhorse reared up as if to charge its attackers. Kinetic projectiles from a Cruiser rapid-fire gun plunged into its underbelly, shredding hide, organs, and bone in a cloud of crimson vapor. Time and gravity withdrew for a moment, allowing the mighty warhorse to hang poised on its hind legs. Then it slowly toppled over. Kazimir howled, “NO!” as he watched Bruce slide off the saddle, instinctively seeing the shape that the fall would take. Bruce hit the ground first, and ion rifle fire pummeled at him, straining his armor toward overload. The warhorse collapsed on top of him, its momentum rolling it over. Kazimir froze, staring in agony as more and more of his friend was engulfed by the massive carcass. Bruce actually managed to lift one arm, as if he were clawing his way free. Then the force field nimbus flickered and died. The warhorse completed its roll, crushing the human beneath an avalanche of dead steaming flesh.

More trucks exploded as missiles slammed down. The newly arrived Land Rovers rushed onward, driving straight for the retreating groups of warhorses. Clan raiders concentrated their fire on individual Institute soldiers, overwhelming their armor.

Kraken stood perfectly still as the battle raged around them. Kazimir hadn’t moved, his stare fixed on the bloody remains of Bruce’s warhorse, unaware of anything else. Waiting, waiting …

Another clan raider charged past, screaming something at Kazimir, half of it obscenities. Sound and light swooped back into Kazimir’s universe. The raid was over. They were supposed to be leaving. Already, most of the warhorses were galloping back up the slope. He spurred Kraken on, searching the ground ahead. A couple of the Institute soldiers were kneeling beside a clump of thick bushes not twenty meters away, shooting at the raiders on the slope above. Kazimir was never sure if it was him or Kraken who chose the direction, only that it was the right direction. They were suddenly moving toward the soldiers, picking up speed. The soldiers had a few seconds’ warning, both of them turning to gape in consternation at the terrible medieval vision of vengeance bearing down on them. One ran. One brought his rifle up. Kraken lowered its head, the titanium blade of its horn level with the soldier’s chest. Kazimir’s face was contorted into a vicious sneer of triumph as the tip rammed home into the soldier’s force field. There was a brief cascade of sparks, streaming out of his torso like some ephemeral flower. Then the carbon-bonded blade punctured the armor, slicing clean through the sternum and into the soft tissue of the organs inside the rib cage. That was when Kraken shoved its neck back, ripping the blade upward. The soldier’s body left the ground, dragged upward as the blade continued its scythe through his upper half before it pulled out with a last violent shake as Kraken twisted. The torn figure spun lazily through the air, squirting arterial blood as it went.

Kazimir knew he should have felt joy. The sweetness of revenge. But it was a hollow, meaningless victory. It mattered nothing to Bruce that the soldier was dead. He wouldn’t care, wouldn’t rejoice back in West Dee, wouldn’t down glass after glass of beer, would never get his chance with Bethany. Bruce was dead.

As if knowing Kazimir’s confusion, Kraken sped away back up the slope on its own accord, carrying its rider back to the safety of the forest.

The rendezvous spot was a patch of clear ground alongside a small stream, deep in the forest. There should have been twelve McFosters gathered there. Instead, there were only nine. A somber Scott McFoster began the roll call. Kazimir listened to the names with eyes closed and tears leaking down his cheeks.

The roll call was the formal end of every raid. Unless you were there and confirmed your name to the squad leader, there could be no readmission to the clan and its places, the villages, farms, and forts. Too many fighters had fallen in battle only to be caught and enslaved by the Starflyer. Many of them were sent back to infiltrate and kill the very clansmen and women they had grown up among. The roll call prevented such treachery from reoccurring.

“Bruce McFoster?”

The way Scott said it told everyone he already knew.

Kazimir opened his mouth. He was going to shout: Yes, I’m here. I made it back. But all he could see behind closed eyelids was that last sliver of radiance from Bruce’s force field going out. The half-second glimpse of fright rushing across Bruce’s face as he realized. Then there was just a mass of blood and gore descending, the sickening crunch of bone snapping.

“Bruce McFoster, your name will be written in honor on our clan’s memorial for those who have forever escaped the Starflyer’s reach. We pray that your final sleep will be filled with dreams of a better place.”

“Amen,” the others murmured.

“Kazimir McFoster?”

That faint second skin of light extinguished. How long would it have taken Bruce to die as his body was pulped? Who was going to tell Samantha?

“Kaz,” someone urged.

“Here,” he said brokenly. “I’m here.” Which was such a blatant lie. He wasn’t himself, not anymore, a part was missing. It was never coming back.

....

The Manby Memorial Clinic was in Little Sussex, one of the more pleasant residential districts of New Costa. Senior management had their big homes and sweeping gardens here, protectively moated by middle management developments. The shops were small and exclusive, the schools high class, and the facilities generally excellent. There wasn’t a factory within twenty-five kilometers.

The AEC police car swept up to the center’s main entrance and its door opened for Paula. She got out and greeted Elene Castle, the clinic’s deputy manager. As the woman chattered away in a slightly nervous manner, Paula underwent a touch of déjà vu; it wasn’t that long ago she’d visited the Clayden Clinic and Wyobie Cotal. But then, most of her cases involved a visit to medical facilities at some point or other.

Elene took her past the first two blocks, which contained the private recovery rooms, day lounges, and physical therapy spas. Paula was familiar with the setup, her own post-rejuvenation rehabilitations had been spent in almost identical buildings. The Manby had a slightly plusher decor, but the rituals would be the same. Elene Castle was delivering her to the third block, where the actual rejuvenation treatment was conducted. The long corridors were strangely empty. As Paula passed a lounge, she saw a number of recovering clients slumped in deep chairs watching the Augusta StLincoln Cup match. Nursing staff hung around unobtrusively, keeping an eye on the big portal as the two national teams duked it out on emerald grass.

“I’m afraid you will have to wait for another couple of hours,” the deputy manager said apologetically as a collective groan went up from the lounge as StLincoln’s striker missed a shot. “Professor Bose was withdrawn from the actual treatment chamber only forty minutes ago. It will take him a while to recover sufficiently to answer your questions.”

“I can wait that long,” Paula said. On any other world, it would have taken weeks just to get a court order allowing her to interrupt a rejuvenation. But CST was paying for Bose’s fast-tracked treatment, and Augusta was essentially controlled by the Sheldon family. It hadn’t been difficult to arrange.

Paula was shown into a reception room, where a man and a woman were standing waiting. “This is Mrs. Wendy Bose,” Elene said, “and …”

“Professor Truten,” the man said, offering his hand. He was in late middle age, dressed in the kind of suit that Paula guessed had gone out of fashion several centuries earlier. The fabric was a brown tweed, cut with very small lapels. Judging from the tightness across his shoulders the professor must have bought it quite some time ago. “I’ve wanted to meet you for some time, Chief Investigator,” he said. “It’s a shame it had to be under these circumstances.”

“What circumstances?” Paula asked.

“You exert a natural fascination on members of my profession. Unfortunately, I am here to represent Professor and Mrs. Bose.”

Paula gave Wendy Bose a sharp glance; in her opinion the woman’s jittery inability to return the contact spelled out a great deal of guilt. Unfortunately, Paula didn’t know what the crime could possibly be. The Directorate had run its usual search, and Wendy Bose had come up completely clean. “And what is your little profession, exactly?”

“Ah, yes. I teach law at Leonida City university.”

Paula kept staring at Wendy Bose, who was looking all around the small room. “I didn’t know the professor was guilty of anything.”

“He’s not. Everybody is innocent until proven guilty. Commonwealth Charter Clause 3a. As I’m sure you’re aware.”

“If he’s not guilty, what does he need a lawyer for?”

“I don’t know. What do you want to question him about?”

Elene cleared her throat. “I think I’ll leave at this point.”

“Thank you,” Paula said. “Please call me when Professor Bose has recovered.”

“Of course.”

“So does a professor of law on Gralmond know much about Augusta law?” Paula asked once the door had closed behind the deputy manager.

“There’s not much law here to know. Augusta is hardly an enviable democratic model.”

“Exactly. You don’t have any jurisdiction here. Whereas I have a lot. I can have you removed from the planet very easily.”

“Surely you believe in fairness, Chief Investigator?”

“Fairness I believe in more than you ever can. I also believe in justice. What I don’t tolerate is lawyers interfering with that justice.”

“Ah yes, we’re always the bad guys, aren’t we?”

“Wherever you find human misery, you find lawyers, either causing it or making a profit from it.”

“Please,” Wendy Bose implored. “I asked Professor Truten to come here. I don’t know any lawyers on Augusta, and we don’t have much money. Dudley isn’t receiving any salary while he’s in regeneration.”

“Dudley is a colleague,” Truten said. “Surely having a witness and advisor can’t harm your investigation. He’s bound to ask for a lawyer anyway.”

“I’m not investigating Dudley Bose,” Paula said. “As far as I know, he’s not guilty of anything.” She gave the lawyer a pointed look. “You obviously believe differently. Why is that?”

Wendy Bose gave Truten a questioning look.

“I don’t understand,” the lawyer said. “Dudley is only having two months of rejuvenation treatment. That’s all the time he can afford before the starship leaves, and that’ll barely get him into a reasonable physical condition. This investigation must be incredibly important for you to have him pulled out of that. You might have cost him his place on the crew.”

“Not a factor for me.”

“What do you think he’s done?” Wendy Bose asked.

There was desperation in her voice, but Paula knew that wasn’t all. Some of the worry was for herself.

“Very well, but this investigation is confidential. You are not at liberty to discuss it without my express permission.”

“I am aware of basic law …” Truten trailed off under Paula’s gaze.

“We believe that that attack on the Second Chance was made by a group called the Guardians of Selfhood. They are an obscure paramilitary political group based on Far Away who believe the Commonwealth is politically manipulated by an alien.”

“I’ve heard of them,” Truten said. “My e-butler has let their shotgun messages through its filters several times, unfortunately.”

“In order for them to see the Second Chance as a threat,” Paula said, “they would need to establish a link between its construction and their alleged enemy alien. What I’m trying to do is uncover that link, or at least their belief in a link. As the whole mission started because of Professor Bose’s discovery, he was the logical place to begin.”

“I hardly think this warrants yanking him out of the treatment.”

“It didn’t,” Paula said. “This kind of data analysis is a standard correlation for the Directorate RI. It came up with an unusual coincidence. I want to ask the professor about it. That’s all.”

“What was the coincidence?”

“The Cox Education charity account in the Denman Manhattan Bank was subject to an attempted data hack some while ago, prior to the attack. The charity is one of the sponsors of your husband’s astronomy department. Obviously, the Guardians believed the charity was channeling money into the Dyson Pair observation project on behalf of the alien. We assume they were trying to find their ‘evidence’ for this in the charity’s financial records. They weren’t successful in gaining access to the secure files, the bank’s smartware managed to lock them out. It wasn’t considered important at the time, the bank is subject to many such attacks, but the Trojan the hackers used to ride in on was based around Professor Bose’s codes.” She watched with interest as the color faded from Wendy Bose’s face. The woman reached out for Truten’s support. “Is there something you’d like to tell me?”

Truten nodded encouragingly. His grip on Wendy Bose’s arm tightened. There could have been a degree of affection in that grip, Paula decided.

“He said to tell you something,” Wendy Bose said. “I didn’t understand at the time.”

“Your husband?”

“No, the reporter. He said, ‘Tell her from me to stop concentrating on the details, it’s the big picture that counts.’ ”

“A reporter said that to you?”

“Yes. To tell Paula when I see her, that’s what he said. I don’t know anyone called Paula. And we were talking about the astronomy department’s sponsors. He was interviewing me.”

“When was this?”

“Months ago. I think it was when my husband was awarded his professorship. There was a party afterward, a lot of people. Most of the media wanted to talk to us.”

“This reporter mentioned me by name? Me?”

“Yes. Definitely.”

“What was his name?”

“I think it was Brad.”

Bradley, Paula mouthed. Surprise chilled her skin. For the first time ever, she knew how it must feel to come off worse during an interview. To have your confidence kicked out from under you.

“You know the gentleman?” Truten asked mildly.

Paula ignored his gentle mockery. “I’ll need a description of this Brad person. Were there any other reporters recording the party?”

“Probably. Yes. There’s something else.”

“What?”

“We left the party early. There’d been some kind of break-in at the house. Whoever did it copied all the memories in our household array.” She brightened. “That would hold Dudley’s information about the Cox Educational charity bank account, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” Paula said softly.

“So Dudley’s innocent, then, isn’t he? He can go on the starship.”

“I’m not going to stop him.” She didn’t comment on the way the loyal wife and the supportive colleague hugged each other.

....

Ozzie was rocked from side to side as the big awkward sled jostled along over the frozen surface of the depression. The murky interior of the covered sled was actually colder than the inside of the tent, despite an iron brazier filled with glowing, hissing charcoal. Even so, Ozzie felt a lot more comfortable now they were under way. Orion also perked up considerably as the ride progressed, sitting on the long bench, his sleeping bag wrapped around him like a quilt.

The sled framework was constructed mainly out of bone, great honey-brown ribs of it, cut and fitted together as if they were lengths of wood. Walls and ceiling, and the benches they were sitting on, were made from stiff black leather, which Ozzie could see had been poorly scraped. A strip of clear crystal in the front wall, which he presumed was a chunk from the local trees, provided the only window. It gave him a rough view out across the ice-locked ground, but mainly of the swaying rumps of the two big ybnan that were pulling them. Bill, the big Korrok-hi, was standing on an open platform at the rear, steering them with a long set of reins. He was keeping their speed low so that the lontrus could keep up.

“What is this Ice Citadel place?” Ozzie asked.

“I’m not sure what it was originally,” Sara said. Now they were inside, her face mask hung on straps at the side of her hood. The brazier’s somber light had turned her creased skin as dark as Ozzie’s. “Most of us think it was some kind of Silfen lodge. They still use it when they come to hunt the icewhales.” She patted her fur coat. “That’s where all this comes from. I’ll need a new one soon, I’ve had this seven years now. It wears well if you take care of it.”

Ozzie glanced around the sled again. “And the bone?”

“Smart lad. Yes. In that respect they’re like the whales on old Earth, a valuable resource. We can use them for a lot of things. Once the Silfen have killed them and taken their trophy tusks, they don’t mind us utilizing the rest of it. A hunt is quite a sight, the Silfen ride out like some royal medieval pageant, dressed up in all their winter finery. Then you get us lot hanging on behind, trying to keep up. After they kill an icewhale, we set up camp for a week to butcher and cook the damn thing. Most parts have a use here. Even the blood has a kind of alcohol in it to stop it freezing, not that you can drink it—and there’s been enough experimental stills over the years. Then there’s one gland in the male icewhale which some people dry and then grind up. They say the powder puts the peck in your pecker, if you know what I mean.”

“I think I get the idea.”

“Some of the organs have medicinal properties, so our doctor claims, not just for us but other species at the Ice Citadel. And of course the meat is edible. That’s our basic diet.” She puckered her lips in disapproval, deepening the mass of wrinkles on her cheeks and forehead. “You have no idea how truly boring icewhale meat can get. Were you two riding horses?”

“Up until like two days ago, yes.”

“Humm. Horse steak. Now there’s a gourmet dish. If folks hear there are some horse bodies lying around out there for the taking, they might just put themselves in gear and get an expedition together. Two days away, you say?”

“Roughly, yeah. Not that we walk very fast.” Ozzie had eaten horse before, so the thought didn’t make him too squeamish. But he could see the boy turn his nose up in disgust.

“That’s near the limit,” Sara said. “It would be a risk. But there’s some who’ll take it just for the chance of tasting something different.”

“What sort of risk? You seem well equipped for this planet.”

“It’s not equipment, lad, it’s location. The Silfen paths aren’t stable, you know. Once you start going deep into the forests, there’s no telling where you might wind up.”

“You mean like there’s no dependable way to get out of here?”

“There’s a million ways out by all accounts. And then again, there’s another million ways to stay. I’ve seem them sometimes, with my own eyes. Friends who can’t take the Ice Citadel anymore. They set off into the forest, looking for somewhere better. Years go by, and you think they must have made it, must be safe. Then an expedition will come across their bodies, all stiff and black.”

Orion pulled the sleeping bag tighter around him, fighting the way his chin was quivering.

Ozzie gave the woman a look, but she didn’t seem perturbed. “If there’s a way in, there’s a way out,” he said.

“Sure there is. What I’m telling you is, nobody here knows one. Anybody who does leave permanently doesn’t come back. At least, I’ve never seen one return.”

“How long have you been here?” Orion asked.

“I’m not sure. Some of the places I’ve visited might not have had the same kind of time as others. They were different. Don’t ask me how. You only realize once you’ve left. When you try and remember, every moment you spent there was like a dream. Then there’s the paths, time flows along them as well. You probably realized that the climates merge very gently, to do that they have to match seasons.”

“But how long?” Orion persisted.

The old woman smiled, showing copper-colored teeth. “Put it this way, I walked off Earth in 2009.”

Orion let out a gasp of surprise. “No way!”

“Oh, yes. I was on vacation in Tuscany. I still liked doing that, walking through the countryside, visiting the towns, sampling the food. There were enough areas of it that the developers never got around to ruining which made it worthwhile. One day I packed my backpack and hiked off into the forest. That was it. I’ve been out here ever since. I never really wanted to go back. I mean … what’s the point?”

“Interesting,” Ozzie said. It was fascinating to know the Silfen paths had led to Earth in those days, but somehow not surprising. “That would make you about four hundred years old. They didn’t have rejuvenation on Earth back then, not even in Europe.”

“I’ve never been rejuvenated. I told you, time runs differently along the paths.”

“But you just said you don’t walk the paths anymore.”

“I’m here, though, and I encounter the Silfen most years.” She shrugged. “This isn’t something you rationalize and order, Ozzie. Everything that is here simply happens. Don’t try to assign reason to what you experience.”

“Right.”

“Please?” Orion said. “Do you know if my mom and dad are here?”

“What are their names?”

“Maurice and Catanya.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Orion, there’s nobody here with those names. And I can’t recall a couple passing through, either.”

The boy hung his head.

“Not every path from Silvergalde leads here, you know,” she said. “They could be anywhere. Some nice tropical island, perhaps.”

“Yeah. Whatever.”

She looked at Ozzie, who gave her a don’t-ask-me shrug.

The Ice Citadel gradually grew larger in front of them. It was difficult for Ozzie to see clearly through the grubby, ice-crusted crystal window, but the basic pyramid shape soon became apparent. From base to tip it was about seventy yards high. Every surface had been covered in crystal, great lengths of the quartz trees arranged into hexagonal arrays. They were packed together in a perfect honeycomb, giving no clue as to what material was underneath. A smooth cylindrical pillar of crystal rose from the center of each hexagon, topped by a large multifaceted stone that swelled out almost organically. Ozzie frowned at the assembly, trying to understand its purpose. The long segments that made up the hexagons were angled in series against each other, forming tiers. Little prismatic sparkles of light danced off the sheer surfaces. They were like … “Mirrors,” he muttered to himself. Very crude concave mirrors focusing sunlight on the central stalk. Or maybe not so crude, he decided; it would take a real artisan to get the angles just right.

The top of the pyramid was a small rounded pinnacle. As he watched, the beam of green light shone out of it, sweeping around.

“You can see it right over the other side of the crater,” Sara said. “There’s been many a night it’s guided me home.”

“It works at night?” Ozzie said. “I assumed the mirror array gathered sunlight for it.”

“Worked that out, huh? Shouldn’t surprise me, a techie like you. The mirrors mostly scoop up light for the rooms inside. But, yeah, the top row is exclusively for the lighthouse system. They pour sunlight into some kind of light battery. Please don’t ask me how it works, it looks like a big ball of stone to me. There’s always some idiot science type wanting to take it apart. We don’t let them, of course.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll spare you that.”

“Good. We have been known to run some people out of town. And as far as we know, there isn’t another town on the whole damn planet.”

The sled came slowly to a halt at the base of the pyramid. Ozzie and Orion pulled their gloves on again, covered their faces, and stepped out carrying their packs. Another couple of the Korrok-hi warbled mournfully to Bill as they started to unharness the big ybnan that had pulled the sled. Some humans (or human-shaped) had come over, dressed in the same bulbous fur coats as Sara wore. There were other aliens as well, a small gnomish creature with five limbs and two things like snakes with legs, all wearing coats of icewhale fur. Ozzie stopped to study them; he’d never seen their kind before. He began to wonder just how far into the galaxy the Silfen paths ran.

“This way,” Sara beckoned. “Iusha will stable your lontrus for you.” There were a number of archways of various sizes along the base of the pyramid, from trapdoor height up to an opening wide enough to take two sleds at once. There was a lot of activity around them, with animals (again types he’d never seen) and aliens coming in and out. Several sleds resembling racing toboggans were being prepared.

She led them through one of the archways into an antechamber with plain black marble walls. At the far end was a big revolving door made from bone, with thin crystal windowpanes. “It’s like a heat-lock,” she said as she pushed one of the panels and set the doors moving.

Beyond that was a wide corridor walled with the same marble. Long panels of quartz were set into the ceiling, with pink sunlight pouring out of them. Ozzie stood underneath one and squinted into the glare, but there was nothing to see.

“They light the whole place,” she said. “It’s like a root network of big crystal ducts leading down from the mirrors on the pyramid. Same principle as our fiber-optic cable, but big, much bigger, the ducts are a meter wide.”

The corridor angled down slightly, then opened out into broad stairs that curved around out of sight. They started their descent. The curve was actually a wide spiral. Ozzie lost track of how many times they went around, and how deep they were. It was a long way down. Sara took her face mask off, then unbuttoned the front of her coat. She was wearing woolen trousers and a thick blue sweater underneath. Ozzie realized he was getting warmer, and unzipped his own coat.

“What heats this place?”

“Hot springs,” she told them. “It was built right above them. I wasn’t kidding about that bath.”

The stairs ended at an archway. Sara watched as they walked out onto the main floor of the Ice Citadel. Ozzie took a few steps in, and came to a halt. He’d entered an alien cathedral, a vaulting dome at least eighty yards high. Pillars curved up the wall like some arcane rib cage, supporting seven balcony rings. It had to be a religious monument. The alcove walls between the pillars were carved marble. Thousands of different creatures stared out at Ozzie, every third was a Silfen. Somehow, the artist had given each one a majesty surpassing the divine quality suggested for the human prophets. They’d all been captured at the same moment of revelation and veneration, seeing the wonder dwelling beyond the physical universe. The bas-relief landscapes around them ranged from arboreal scenes to stark landscapes with exotic moons in the sky, cities of grandiose buildings and even technological surroundings. Right at the apex, a mandala of crystal strips shone brighter than the sunlight outside. “Jesus wept,” he exclaimed. As proof that the Silfen did have a tangible culture it was a startling introduction.

In the center of the floor was a large pool, fed by a raised fountain, whose waters steamed gently as it splashed and gurgled. There was no altar or rows of seating, which Ozzie was half expecting. Long tables made of bone and leather had been set up on granite paving that was worn and badly cracked. On the other side, a large rectangular stone hearth had been built, with neat brick-walled ovens on top. Flames were visible flickering through grids set in the base. Judging by the background smell in the room, and the soot clogging the oven brickwork, it was some kind of fat-based oil fuel. Several humans and aliens fussed around on tables next to the hearth, preparing a meal.

The chamber obviously served as a main meeting place for the Ice Citadel residents. Even in the daytime it was busy. The number of species astounded Ozzie; he could make out at least twelve different types. Creatures with three legs, four legs, six legs, some that squirmed or wriggled across the floor, one that hopped, and something that was either a young Raiel or a close cousin. Big and small, they had skins in many shades, scales, fur, spines, and oil-rainbow membranes; clothes on those that bothered ranged from simple togas to practical utility harnesses.

Like the statues, every creature was now focused on Ozzie and Orion. They were stared at, smelled, echo-sounded, heat-scanned …

Orion edged behind Ozzie, who returned the attention levelly. “Where are they all from?” Ozzie asked. “Do we know their star systems?”

“It doesn’t matter where they come from,” Sara said dismissively. “Only that they are here now. Why do you want to classify them? That’s the first step toward segregation.”

“Nobody’s classifying,” Ozzie snapped back. “Man, this has got to be the most important gathering of cultures we know of. There are more species represented here than even the High Angel hosts. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“It means we have a broad fund of abilities to help us survive.”

“I’ve got to find out where they come from, if they know anything more about the Silfen.”

“Introductions later,” Sara said. “Your rooms are over here.” She led them around the edge of the chamber. There was a corridor leading off between every set of pillars on the ground level. The one they walked down opened into a cluster of three simple circular rooms. There was crude human-style furniture in one of them: a sleeping cot and a pair of sling chairs. The leg on one chair was broken, and the leather so old and cracked it looked like it would tear if anyone sat on it. A bathing pool took up half of the last room, filling the air with steam. Orion stuck his hand in the clear water, and smiled happily at how hot it was.

“Take your time to freshen up,” Sara said. “The evening meal is served in a couple of hours. It’s kind of tradition that the newest arrivals tell their stories and bring us all the news from whatever part of the galaxy they’ve come from.”

“I can manage that,” Ozzie said.

“Good.” Her expression was troubled. “You won’t try and rush off to find a path, will you? We lose a lot of people that way. At least take the time to learn the way things are around here.”

“Sure. I’m not stupid. But we will be leaving as soon as we can.”

“Good luck.”

....

There were a dozen grand dinners, balls, and galas on the night before departure. Only one counted, of course: the one thrown by Anshun’s First Speaker, which was attended by Vice President Elaine Doi, Nigel Sheldon with three current wives from his harem, Rafael Columbia, Senator Thompson Burnelli, Brewster Kumar, and a dozen other notables from the Commonwealth’s political ruling classes. And that, sadly, was the one which Captain Wilson Kime also had to attend. His car drove him through no less than three security checks, including a deep scan, on his way into the government’s Regency Palace, which served as the First Speaker’s official residence at the heart of Treloar. The sun was just setting as he and Anna drew up outside the massive stone portico. They were greeted by two human servants in long frock coats covered in gold brocade. The senior one bowed deeply. “Welcome, Captain. The First Speaker is receiving her guests in the Livingstone Room. Please go straight in.”

“Thank you,” Wilson replied. He took Anna’s hand, and they walked up the big steps. She was wearing a long formal ocean-blue gown with elaborate nonsymmetrical loops of gold and a pearl necklace that seemed to merge with her glittering OCtattoos. Her hair had been cut short ready for the voyage, but the stylist had managed to weave in some temporary extensions flecked with platinum and phosphorescent Titian strands. He’d never seen her so elegant before. At work she was mostly in overalls or an office suit, while at the apartment she wore very little. The effect, enhanced by a thick subtle perfume, made her extremely desirable. He wanted to rip the dress off her and have passionate sex right there on the cold tiles of the palace floor. Her pose was only slightly spoiled by the way she had to grip the front of her dress with her free hand, holding the hem off the steps as they ascended.

“Bloody classical architecture,” she muttered under her breath.

As they reached the top, a shiny black Ferrari Rion pulled up at the foot of the steps, emitting a hum of barely controlled power. A gull-wing door lifted up, and Oscar climbed out.

“Might have guessed,” Wilson said. He was mildly envious of the car; it was a limited edition. Of course, given his age and status, he was above such things now. But he couldn’t help wondering what the Ferrari would be like to drive on manual. From a purely engineering point of view, it was a superb machine.

Oscar waved cheerily, and dashed up the steps. He kissed Anna on the cheek. “You look gorgeous tonight, my love.”

“Thank you,” she said with a smile. “You, too.”

Oscar carried off a tuxedo with great panache, a stylish searing-white jacket with a trendy cut and an old-fashioned scarlet carnation in his lapel. In contrast, Wilson felt as though he’d been stuffed into his own tux, like a high school boy on a prom date.

“Shall we go in, boys and girls?” Oscar said.

They walked through the doors into the over-classical interior, dominated by gilt-framed portraits and the twisting bronze and jade shapes of first modernist sculpture. The First Speaker, Gilda Princess Marden, greeted Wilson with a politician’s firm, trustworthy handshake, and air-kissed Anna. Wilson said something sympathetic about the planet’s defeated national football team. The First Speaker thanked him profusely, going into detail about the sporting and personal failings of the main striker.

“Well done,” Anna murmured as they walked away. “Only another five hours of small talk to go.”

The Livingstone Room’s large garden doors had been folded back, allowing the guests onto the wide balcony outside. The palace courtyard’s formal garden had been lit by flaming torches and yellow and green starglobes hanging like fruit from the trees and larger bushes. Over a hundred guests dressed in smart colorful clothes suitable for the warm summer evening were milling around as the golden sunset drained out of the horizon. Local A-list socialites mingled with famous unisphere celebrities and wealthy grandees while official news and political reporters maintained a respectful distance. A band was playing on a small platform set up in front of the Henry Wu planet-sphere fountain.

All three of them grabbed drinks from a waiter. Wilson could see several other crew members, each at the center of a knot of people. Like him, they were the unlucky ones; more junior members had a free choice where to spend their last night. For himself Wilson would have preferred a less ceremonial event.

“I see our illustrious navigator is here,” Anna said quietly at his shoulder.

Wilson and Oscar saw Dudley Bose standing beneath a Japanese maple. He’d returned from his partial rejuvenation on Augusta having had about fifteen years taken off his age. Unfortunately, his frame hadn’t quite adjusted yet. Skin hung in folds from his neck; his hair was a mottled fuzz of gray and black, and a sagging belly hung over his tuxedo waistband. He was telling some story to his attentive audience of Anshun dignitaries, with his wife in close attendance, laughing as if she’d never heard the anecdote before.

“Remind me again why he’s coming with us,” Oscar said.

“Because he’s the greatest expert the Commonwealth has on the Dyson Pair,” Anna told him demurely.

“Ah. I knew there was a reason.”

Wilson did his best not to frown. Not for the first time he wished he hadn’t bowed to political expediency. Bose hadn’t undergone even half of the tests that the rest of the crew had struggled their way through, let alone taken part in any meaningful training. Having the astronomer on board was simply asking for trouble. But it had got the media off his back.

He saw Nigel Sheldon talking to the Vice President and other members of the ExoProtectorate Council, and made his way over to their small group. As he reached them he realized the young-looking woman standing next to Sheldon, who had his arm around her shoulder, was Tu Lee, their hyperspace officer. Her small delicate figure was clad in a little black dress; with her raven hair cut short she looked like a sexy imp.

“Captain!” Nigel grinned in welcome. “I know you’ve met Elaine.”

Wilson smiled politely at the Vice President. Farndale Engineering had chosen to donate to her rival’s campaign, and Elaine Doi knew that.

“Any last-minute problems?” Nigel asked.

“No. It’s all going remarkably smoothly.”

“We reached point two five light-years per hour on the last test flight,” Tu Lee said. “That’s our operational target, so we’re on the green for tomorrow.”

“Listen to you,” Nigel said. He grinned proudly at her.

“Stop it.” She gave him a sharp look.

“Tu Lee is my great-great-great-granddaughter,” Nigel said to Wilson. “Four natural-born generations; you don’t get a stronger family tie than that. Can you blame me for being proud of her?”

Wilson couldn’t remember that being in Tu Lee’s file.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Tu Lee said, her dark eyes gazing intently up at Wilson. “I never said anything, because I wanted to make the crew on merit.”

“You succeeded,” Wilson said. He suddenly wondered why none of his own family had ever made it through the qualifying stages.

“A Sheldon and a Kime finally flying together, eh,” Nigel said happily. “We’ve got it covered from every angle.”

“Looks that way.” Wilson was having trouble keeping his smile intact.

“I understand you’re taking a lot of weapons on your flight,” Thompson Burnelli said.

“The great debate,” Wilson said, not quite mocking. “Do we shock culturally superior species with our primitive warlike behavior, or do we go into the unknown with sensible protection that any smart alien will understand.”

“Given what we’re facing, a degree of self-defense is appropriate,” Nigel said.

“Huh,” Thompson snorted. “What do you believe, Captain? Is the barrier a defense against some psychopathic race armed with superweapons?”

“We’ll find out when we get there,” Wilson said mildly. “But I’m not taking a crew anywhere unless I stand a chance of bringing them back alive.”

“Come on, Thompson, this is supposed to be a party,” Nigel said. “Stop giving the man a hard time.”

“Just making a point. I’m still not convinced this is the best way to deal with the Dyson Pair. There’s a strong body of opinion saying we should leave them well alone for a few centuries.”

“Yes,” Anna said. “The Guardians of Selfhood for one.”

Thompson flashed her an angry look.

“Any news on them?” Wilson asked Rafael Columbia.

“We’ve made over two hundred arrests in connection with the raid. Mostly black-market arms merchants and other underworld military types. My Chief Investigator is confident they will provide us with enough information to finally track down the organizer.” He didn’t sound impressed.

“She seems to be doing a good job so far,” Oscar said. “There hasn’t been a hint of trouble since the raid.”

“Sure that doesn’t have anything to do with the level of CST security?” Elaine Doi asked demurely.

Oscar raised his glass to her, ignoring the dark expression on Columbia’s face. “That’s probably about ninety-nine percent of the reason, yeah,” he conceded.

She looked around at the four crew members. “So, are you nervous?”

“It would be stupid not to be,” Wilson said. “The fear factor is a significant part of our racial survival mechanism. Evolution doesn’t like arrogance.”

“A healthy attitude. For myself, I wish there was some way of communicating with you. To be cut off from information seems barbaric somehow.”

Wilson smiled a challenge at Nigel. “I guess our best hyperspace theorists aren’t quite up to that.”

Nigel raised a glass, but didn’t take the bait. “That’s the whole reason for me getting Wilson here to captain the mission. As they can’t refer every decision back here for review by your committees, I wanted someone who could make a decent judgment call. Unless you’d like to go yourself, Vice President.”

Elaine Doi glanced from Nigel to Wilson. “I’m satisfied that you’re in charge of the mission, Captain.”

“If we had more than one ship, communications wouldn’t be such an issue,” Oscar said.

“And who’s going to pay for another ship?” Thompson asked quickly. His gaze flicked to one of the big portals set up along the far side of the courtyard garden. They all showed various images of the Second Chance. The starship was docked to its assembly platform, though the outer shell of malmetal had peeled back to a thick toroid skirt around the gateway. Of all the construction gridwork, only a tripod of gantry arms remained, like an aluminum claw gripping the rear of the starship. Sunlight fell across the four-hundred-meter length of the central cylindrical section’s snow-white hull, casting small gray shadows from every hatch, nozzle, grid, antenna, and handrail that stood above the protective cloak of foam. The huge life-support ring was rotating slowly around it, almost devoid of windows, except for a few black rectangles along the front edge. Tiny colored navigation lights winked at various points on the superstructure, otherwise there was no visible activity.

The sight of the massive vessel brought a flush of comfort to Wilson. Something that large, that solid, gave an overwhelming impression of dependability.

“Any subsequent ships would be cheaper now we’ve finalized the design,” Nigel said. “CST is certainly considering the formation of a small exploration fleet.”

“What the hell for?” Thompson said. “This expedition is bad enough, and we know something strange is out there. We don’t need to go looking for trouble any farther out.”

“That’s hardly the attitude that pushed us this far out into the galaxy, Senator. We’re not a poor society, thanks to that outward urge; we should continue to push back the barriers.”

“Fine,” Thompson said bluntly. “You want them pushed back, you pay for them. You certainly won’t have my support for further government funding. Look what happened with Far Away—we poured billions into that venture, and it still costs the government hundreds of millions a year. What have we ever got back out of it?”

“Knowledge,” Wilson said, surprised to find himself defending Far Away.

“Precious little of it,” Thompson grunted.

“Tell that to the Halgarths, they dominate force field manufacture thanks to the technology they acquired from the Marie Celeste.”

“What if we don’t come back?” Anna asked. The way the Council members all looked at her in a mildly scandalized silence made her want to giggle. “You have to admit, it’s a possibility.”

“We won’t abandon you,” Elaine Doi said smoothly. “If it is necessary to build another ship, then it will be done.” She gave the North American Senator a sharp frown as he gathered himself to speak.

“The ExoProtectorate Council has drawn up contingency plans for every possible scenario,” Nigel Sheldon said. “And quite a few implausible ones as well. As the Vice President says, every effort will be made should we face a worst-case outcome.”

“Does that include military action?”

Now even Wilson was giving her a look.

“I don’t believe that’s relevant,” Rafael Columbia said.

“It just strikes me as odd that very little is being done to beef up the Commonwealth’s defenses. Especially as one of the most plausible theories about the Dyson barrier is that it’s protective.”

“We are doing something about it,” Rafael Columbia said. “We’re sending you to assess the situation.”

“And if it’s bad?”

“We will respond accordingly.”

“With what? We haven’t had any wars for three hundred years.”

“There are seventeen Isolated planets, and each one was withdrawn from the Commonwealth because of military action. The last of those was only twenty years ago. Sad to say, our Commonwealth is actually quite experienced in such matters.”

“Those were guerrilla actions mounted by nationalist and religious groups. Most of the Commonwealth’s citizens weren’t even aware of them.”

“What exactly is your point?” Elaine Doi asked, irritation creeping into her voice.

“All I’m saying is, a few Alamo Avengers aren’t going to be much use against anything that’s seriously hostile out there.”

“We know that. Your mission profile was drawn up with the possibility in mind, and I welcomed Captain Kime’s input in the planning. Frankly, his cautious approach is one I favor. And to be realistic, if you do find anything as powerful and hostile as what you’re talking about, then they’re going to know about the Commonwealth anyway.”

The band struck up a light waltz that Wilson felt he should know. But he was thankful for the distraction as everyone turned to look at the western sky. A particularly bright star was rising above the palace rooftop.

They’d left the Second Chance in her highly elliptical orbit around Anshun; after all, the exact position made no difference to the wormhole gateway. Now as she glided up high over the horizon, still exposed to the full radiance of Anshun’s sun, she was the brightest object in the heavens. Fireworks zoomed over the palace to greet the starship, exploding in huge bursts of emerald, gold, and carmine with a cacophony of thunder cracks. The courtyard was swiftly filled with the rapturous applause of the elite guests. A laser projector drenched Wilson in a bubble of white light. Everyone turned to look at him, the sound of their applause rising. He bowed graciously, gesturing Anna and Oscar into the lightfield as the senior members of the ExoProtectorate Council sank away along with Tu Lee. Somehow Dudley Bose managed to appear beside Oscar, clasping his hands victoriously above his head.

When the fireworks were over the band resumed a more traditional background piece. The buffet was opened and people surged across the garden. Elaine Doi stepped forward again. “Captain, I just wanted to say bon voyage.”

Even when it was over, Wilson regretted having to attend the official party for the personal time it stole from him on the eve of the departure. By the time the buffet started the affair had become immensely boring. Two hours in, he’d seen Oscar making a quiet exit with some handsome young lad, and wished he could do the same with Anna. But they’d be noticed; he’d forgotten the true price of fame.

There were compensations, however. At eight o’clock this morning he had arrived at the complex to walk through the gateway. Management staff, construction crew and technicians, designers, medical personnel, and a hundred others lined the last length of path before the wormhole, all applauding as Wilson led the senior officers through the gateway. Now he was sitting in the bridge, about to embark on the voyage that would put him on the same list as Columbus, Armstrong, Sheldon and Isaac. But not poor old Dylan Lewis.

To be honest, he did consider the bridge to be a bit disappointing. Even the old Ulysses command cabin had been more visually exciting, let alone the bustling chambers of a thousand unisphere fantasy drama ships. It was a simple compartment with consoles for ten people, although only seven were currently manned. A glass wall separated off the senior officer’s briefing room—basically, a big conference table with twenty chairs. At least there were a couple of large high-rez holographic portals in their traditional place on the forward wall, although (bad design, this) the consoles right in front of them blocked the lower portion from anyone farther back.

Not that he had much time for the standard images they were relaying from hull-mounted cameras. His virtual vision was on high intensity while his retinal inserts were filtering out most natural light. The result was an almost indistinct room flooded with ship-function icons. He rested his palms on the console i-spots, seeing phantom fingers materialize within the galaxy of graphics drifting through the air around him. When he tapped his customized chrome-yellow fingernail on the airlock icon, it expanded to show him the hull was now sealed. A simultaneous tap on the umbilicals told him all the tanks were full and on internal power. The only links to the platform were a high-band data cable and the mechanical latches.

“Crew status?” he asked Oscar.

“Everyone on board and ready.”

“Okay then; Pilot, please activate our force field and disengage us from the platform.”

“Aye, sir,” Jean Douvoir said. The pilot had spent decades working for several companies at the High Angel, flying engineering pods around the big freefall factories, shifting sections massing hundreds of tons with the casual precision of a bird of prey. Before that, he’d helped develop control routines for spaceplane RI pilots. Coupled with his enthusiasm for the project, it was a background that made him perfect for the job. Wilson counted himself lucky to have someone so competent on board.

A communications icon flashed in Wilson’s virtual vision, tagging the call as Nigel Sheldon. He tapped for admission.

“Captain,” Sheldon’s voice sounded across the bridge, “I’m accessing your telemetry. It all looks good from where we are.”

“And here.” There had been a great many of these pointless official talks on the Ulysses, too. All for posterity and media profile. One of his virtual vision digital readouts was showing the number of people accessing the moment through the unisphere: in excess of fifteen billion. “We’re ready to go.” His voice was somber and authoritative as the impact of the event finally hit home. One of the portals showed him a view of the three umbilical gantries swinging away from the starship’s rear section. Little silver-white fluid globules spilled out of the closed valves, sparkling in the sunlight as they wobbled off into space.

“Hopefully, we’ll see you again in a year’s time,” Nigel Sheldon said.

“I look forward to it.”

“Godspeed, Captain.”

Jean Douvoir fired the small thrusters around the rear of the central cylindrical section. Second Chance started to slide away from the gateway. Acceleration was so tiny Wilson couldn’t even feel it affect the low-gravity bridge. The dazzling turquoise flames of the thrusters shrank away and vanished.

“We’re now at five meters per second,” Douvoir reported. There was a lot of amusement in his voice.

“Thank you, Pilot,” Wilson said. “Hyperdrive, please bring the wormhole up to flight level.”

“Aye, sir.” Tu Lee couldn’t help the strong twang of excitement in her voice. She began to shunt instructions into the ship’s RI that would handle the enormously complex energy manipulation functions.

Nigel instructed his e-butler to shift down his virtual vision intensity, and took his hands off the console i-spots. One hologram portal showed the assembly platform slowly shrinking behind them. The second had a small circular turquoise nebular glowing in the center. It began to expand, growing more indistinct, although no stars were visible through it.

“Course laid in?” Wilson asked.

“Want to consult our expert navigator on that?” Anna muttered under her breath. She still hadn’t warmed up to Bose.

Wilson ignored her, wondering if the rest of the bridge crew had overheard.

“As agreed,” Oscar said. He had his hands pressed firmly on his console i-spot, his eyes flicking quickly between virtual icons. “First exit point, twenty-five light-years from Dyson Alpha.”

“Wormhole opening stable, Captain,” Tu Lee reported.

“Inject us,” Wilson told her.

The blue haze folded around Second Chance like petals closing for the night. Their datalink to the assembly platform and the unisphere ended. Both portals showed the starship bathing in the wormhole’s pale moonlight radiance of low-level radiation.

Oscar canceled the camera feeds. The bridge portals switched to displaying the gravitonic spectrum, sensors around the ship detecting faint echoes resonating within the wormhole. It was a crude version of radar that allowed them to locate stars and planets to a reasonable degree, but that was all. For truly accurate sensor work they needed to drop out into real space.

Wilson upped his virtual vision again, taking another sweep of the starship’s primary systems. Everything was humming along sweetly. He came out and checked around the bridge. The engineers were all still heavily integrated with the ship’s RI, monitoring the performance of their respective fields, but everyone else was already relaxing. Wilson glanced inquisitively at Oscar, who put on a contented expression as he sat back. There wasn’t much left for them to do. Not for another hundred thirty days.

THIRTEEN

Hoshe waited at the side of the street for her to arrive. It wasn’t midmorning yet, but already a small crowd of curious locals had gathered along the sidewalk. Two police cruisers had parked nearby, their constables directing the copbots as they set up temporary barriers around the thirty-story condo building. As he watched, yet another big police technical support van pulled up and slowly nosed its way down into the underground garage. His e-butler told him the precinct commander was on his way, and the city commissioner had asked for the Ice Department case files.

“Great,” Hoshe muttered. It was going to turn into one big jurisdictional free-for-all, he was sure of that. Now all the real work had been done, every other department in Darklake would be after a slice of the credit.

An unmarked police car drew up beside him. Paula stepped out. She was wearing a simple pale blue dress with a fawn jacket, her raven hair tied back neatly. Hoshe thought her skin was a shade darker than the last time he’d seen her, but then Treloar, Anshun’s capital, was in the tropics. She actually gave him a smile as he said hello.

“Good to see you again,” he said.

“And you, Hoshe. Sorry I left you carrying the ball on this one.”

“That’s okay,” he lied.

“But I appreciate the way you carried on, and for calling me today. That’s very professional.”

He gestured her toward the entrance to the garage. “You might yet regret coming, a lot of senior city police officers are on their way.”

“That I’m used to. You know, right now I’d actually welcome some of the old problems again.”

“Tough case?”

“You wouldn’t think so by the number of arrests we’ve made.” She shrugged. “But yes. My opponent is an elusive man.”

“Holmes and Moriarty, yes?”

“Hoshe, I had no idea you read the classics.”

“It was some time ago, but I used to really enjoy that kind of thing.”

“Holmes never knew how easy he had it,” she said as they reached the bottom of the ramp. “So what have you got for me?”

Two white forensics department vans were parked at the far end of the garage. Various sensor patches the size of paving slabs had been stuck to the floor around the walls and thick cables snaked around everywhere, winding back to the open access panels on both vans. Several GeneralPurposebots were moving the sensors around, clustering them in one corner while three forensics officers supervised.

“We found them first thing this morning,” Hoshe said as they climbed into the back of the squad leader’s van. The inside was cramped, a narrow corridor between two equipment benches, the air hot from all the humming electrical circuits. He was more than familiar with all the units. The additional forensics teams Myo had promised from the Serious Crime Directorate had never materialized. In view of what amounted to her withdrawal from the case, Hoshe’s commander had reluctantly agreed to allocate him two of the city’s forensics squads. Hoshe himself had undergone the appropriate skill memory implementation so he could operate the equipment and interpret the results, helping his pitifully small team throughout all the dreary months that had followed. They had worked through the list of sites where construction work had been going on forty years ago, a laborious and terribly tedious task. Sick days and short hours among the team members had been on a steady upward curve from the first week onward. There had been times, especially in the last few weeks, when only the GPbots had turned up at the start of the day’s shift.

Hoshe had been receiving an increasing amount of pressure from both the team and his commander to wrap things up. But he’d kept doggedly to the list, examining the sites one after the other while soothing and cajoling the team and pleading for just a little more time from the police department. Reflective deep scanning had revealed a great many interesting things buried beneath the city, but no bodies. Until this morning.

Paula peered closely at the small high-rez holographic portal with its 3D grid of gentle pink luminescence; right at the center were swirls of darker red, like knots in wood.

“Even allowing for decomposition you can see the shapes quite clearly,” Hoshe said, his finger tracing around denser swirls. “This is a head here, look, and these are arms and legs. Both bodies are inside some kind of box-shape container; there’s a distinct air cavity around each of them.”

“I’ll take your word for it. This looks like a Rorschach test to me.”

Hoshe avoided a smile. “One is slightly smaller than the other; which corresponds to a male/female pairing. But that’s the end of the good news. They’re deep; ten meters down below this level. The developer didn’t cut corners when this condo was built, unfortunately; all the foundations correspond to City Hall regulations.”

“Thank you, Hoshe.”

“We don’t know it’s them yet. We’ll get a slightly better resolution when the sensors have been realigned, but that’s not going to give us a positive ID. Only DNA will do that.”

“It’s them. You know it is.”

“Yeah, well. It’s going to be a bitch to get them out. We’ll have to excavate all the way around, probably need force fields to reinforce the foundation when we chop the block out. The residents will need to be moved out while we do that. Then we’ll need to break the concrete up very carefully.”

“Don’t worry, the Directorate has experienced extraction teams. I’ll have them here before lunch.”

“You said that about the forensics teams.”

She shifted around in the cramped space, and gave him an unnerving look of appraisal. “I know, and I apologize again. I’ve never quite let anybody down like that before. It won’t happen again.”

Hoshe knew he was blushing. Her apology was like some intimate confession. He tapped a knuckle on the portal to distract her. “Are you sure this will get a conviction? I’ll bet you a whole Earth dollar their memorycell inserts have been destroyed; there’ll be no memory of the killer we can ever access.”

“Trust me, Hoshe. We can nail him now. All I need is a judge to issue a warrant.”

It was a hell of a row that broke out in the living room. Loud enough for Morton to hear it from his bedroom, which made him stop what he was doing, which pissed him off no end. His e-butler told him who was invading his penthouse, so he was tying the belt on his dressing gown as he strode out.

Chief Inspector Myo was arguing with his human butler, while Detective Hoshe Finn interjected with angry threats. It was a credit to the butler’s training and character that he didn’t appear in any way flustered by the unwelcome guests and their authority. His loyalty lay solely with his employer; nothing was going to shift that.

“Let’s all take a breath and calm down,” Morton said. He combed his wild hair with his hand, trying to slick it back down. “What seems to be the problem here? Chief Investigator?”

“No problem.” She held out a small memory crystal disk. “I have a warrant for your arrest.”

“On what charge?”

“Two counts of bodykill and deliberate memory erasure.”

Morton couldn’t quite hang on to his peaceable demeanor with that allegation fired at him. “You’ve gotta be fucking joking!”

“No, sir, I am not joking,” Paula said. “As a registered Commonwealth citizen, you are hereby advised not to speak further in connection with the offense you have just been charged with until you are in consultation with your legal representative. Now, please get dressed, sir. You will be taken to the police precinct station for further questioning.”

“This is bullshit.” Morton stood his ground, folding his arms across his chest. Even though he knew, he asked, “Whose murder?”

“Tara Jennifer Shaheef, your wife at the time, and Wyobie Cotal.”

“Shit! I fucking told you they’d been bumped off.”

“You certainly did. Thank you for that, sir. Now please get dressed. If you don’t, we will take you as you are.”

A naked Mellanie rushed into the lounge. She threw her arms around Morton. “What’s happening, Morty? What are they saying?”

“Nothing, it’s a police fuckup, that’s all.” He almost shook her off, then thought better of it and returned her embrace. “Everything is fine.”

From inside the circle of his arms, she glared at the two officers.

Hoshe Finn was not looking at the naked teenager. Then he had to not look at the second girl who came to stand in the bedroom doorway, pulling on a white lace robe. Her long elegant face wore a bemused expression as she took in the tableaux, as if she was accessing some low-budget soap on the cybersphere. “What is happening out here?” she drawled in a husky voice. One hand patted languidly at her expensively styled hair. “Is this part of your kink, Morty, to be hauled off to a secret police dungeon where they manacle you to the wall?”

“No,” Morton and Paula Myo said in unison.

“Oh.” She sounded disappointed.

“Morty never killed anyone,” Mellanie asserted. She tossed her head, daring them to say different.

Paula gave her a cool glance. “You weren’t even alive when he did this. Take my advice, don’t cause a scene. Morton?”

“It’s all right.” Morton gave the clinging girl a tender squeeze. “My e-butler has already informed the legal department. I’ll be home for dinner tonight. We’ll be suing for wrongful arrest before the fish course arrives.”

Mellanie pushed her face up toward his, entreating. “Don’t go with them, please, Morty. Don’t.”

“This is not a multiple choice situation,” Paula told her.

“I’ll get dressed,” Morton said. He swung around and walked back toward the bedroom. “It’s a shame,” he said to Paula. “You and I could have been quite something together.”

Paula looked from Mellanie to the haughty girl in the lace robe, then to Morton. “I can’t think what.”

....

The daily storm that raced in from the Grand Triad had now passed, leaving the wide valley fresh and gleaming. There were few trees here on the northwestern edge of the Dessault Mountains. The valley was mainly grassland, with boggy meadows along the bottom where the fast river flowed out to the north. Sunlight grew steadily warmer as the last twisting clouds hurried away toward the Great Iril Steppes, and the ground steamed quietly.

As soon as the rains stopped, Kazimir stepped outside. The McFoster village on the western slopes was where he had spent his earliest childhood, a huddle of stone houses with living grass roofs that provided watertight shelter during the rains. They all had broad open windows so the air could circulate. Not that many daylight hours were spent indoors in such a warm climate. It was a farming village, one of the many sheltered refuges where clan children could grow up untroubled by the Institute and the Starflyer. Cattle grazed easily on the floor of the valley, and a few Charlemagnes were trained by fighters no longer able to answer the Guardians’ call to arms.

Scott and Harvey joined him as he walked out toward the memorial garden, more villagers joining in until there were over thirty marching silently along the little-worn path. It ended at a dark wooden gate set in a drystone wall that was overrun by colorful climbing nasturtiums. The wall circled a graveyard that followed the pattern adopted by most small human settlements across the Commonwealth. Saplings that had been planted around the perimeter were now large enough to offer some shade. Gravestones were carved on chunks of local rock. In the middle was an eight-sided memorial made of stone. The base plinth measured three meters across, holding a two-meter sphere of red marble polished to a gleam. Names had been etched into the lower half, forming neat lines that covered nearly a third of the surface.

Everyone gathered around and bowed their heads.

“We have come today to celebrate the life of Bruce McFoster,” Harvey said in a loud clear voice. “Although he has left our clan, he will not be forgotten by us and those who fight with us. When the time comes for this planet’s revenge upon its violator he will hear the song of joy that all peoples will sing, for it will be so loud as to rock the dreaming heavens themselves.”

Harvey placed a small engraver tool against the marble at the end of an unfinished line of names. The little unit buzzed as its tiny blades began cutting the programmed pattern. Fine gray dust started to trickle down.

“I remember your laughter, Bruce,” Harvey said.

Kazimir stepped forward. “I remember your friendship, Bruce, you are my brother and always will be.” It was difficult to get the words out as his voice cracked. Tears were leaking down his cheeks.

“I remember your stubbornness, Bruce,” Scott rasped. “Keep it with you always, lad.”

A woman stepped forward. Kazimir didn’t hear what she said. The infant boy that Samantha was cradling began to wail loudly as if he understood what was happening, that he would never see or know his father.

The tributes lasted for some time. Eventually, the last McFosters had their say and the infant found the comfort of his mother’s breast. The buzz of the engraver fell silent. Kazimir stared brokenly at the new name on the marble, then hung his head, unable to bear the sight any longer.

People drifted away, leaving him and Samantha alone.

“Thank you, Kaz,” she said quietly. “Sometimes I think you and I are the only people who really cared about him.”

“Everybody cared,” he said automatically. Samantha was a few years older than he was, which had always made him kind of awkward around her. Now with Bruce gone, and the baby born, he was even more uncertain.

She smiled, though it was clearly an effort. The infant was only three weeks old, and she looked very tired. “You’re so sweet. Everybody knew him, especially my sisters in all the clans. There’s a difference. But at least he made his mark on this world, I think.”

Kazimir put his arm around her shoulders and they walked out of the memorial garden together. “Have you decided on his name yet?”

“Not Bruce, that would be too much. I’ve chosen Lennox, that was Bruce’s grandfather, and I have an uncle called that as well.”

“Lennox. That’s good. I expect that’ll be shortened to Len.”

“Yes.” She stroked the infant’s head. Lennox had lolled back into sleep again. “You should find someone, Kaz.”

“Huh?”

“Someone for yourself. It’s not right for anyone to be so alone.”

“I’m fine, thanks. I get plenty of offers, don’t worry.” It was the kind of thing he used to say to Bruce. His mind went back to Andria McNowak, and his broken promise to Bruce. He never did try to bed her after that terrible raid. In fact, he’d never bothered with any girl since then. As always, he had the memory of Justine to comfort him through the long hours of every sleepless night.

Scott and Harvey were waiting on the path, along with another man Kazimir didn’t know. Harvey beckoned.

“I’ll see you before you go, won’t I?” Samantha asked.

“Of course you will. I want … If you need anything, help with the baby, or something, please tell me.”

“You’re not obligated, you know.”

“I want to see him, Samantha. I would have wanted that even if Bruce were still alive.”

“All right then.” She stood on her toes and gave him a light kiss. “Thank you again, Kaz, you’ll make a wonderful uncle.”

He watched her walk off back to the village, a whole range of emotions messing his head around.

“Nice girl,” Harvey said. “I remember training her for a while.”

“Yeah,” Kazimir said.

“This is Stig McSobel,” Scott rasped in his damaged voice.

Kazimir shook hands with the stranger, surprised by how strong the grip was. He could look the man level in the eye, so he was no taller, but his shoulders were wide enough to stretch the fabric of his simple lace-up shirt. The McSobel was in his early thirties, with skin lighter than Kazimir’s, and a broad face that regarded the world with considerable amusement.

“I’ve heard a lot about you, Kaz,” Stig said. “You’ve earned quite a reputation for yourself on your last few raids.”

Kazimir gave Scott and Harvey a sharp glance. “Is this another lecture?”

“About recklessness and personal vengeance?” Harvey asked. “Why should it be? Did you not pay attention last time?”

Kazimir started to push past. Stig put out a hand to stop him. Again, the man’s strength was very evident.

“If you can keep that temper of yours under control, I can use you,” Stig said. “Harvey here says you can. The ceremony should have been cathartic, and now you’ll start to accept his death. Is that right?”

“I saw Bruce’s death. I watched him die, and I could do nothing.”

“I know what that’s like. We all do; there’s nothing unique about you and your grief, Kazimir. You’re a McFoster, a fighter. One day you’ll die, and some other friend will watch it. Do you want their life to be blighted by that? We all have a right to live our lives as well, you know. There is more to us than the struggle against the Starflyer. This village shows that. Bruce’s baby should show you more than anything.”

“Well what the fuck else can I do?” Kazimir shouted. He was close to tears again, which would be an awful thing in front of the men he respected most. “I can fight, yes, and that’s how I help bring about this better time we’re all promised. If anger makes me fight harder, then good. Bruce would appreciate that.”

Scott laid a hand on Kazimir’s arm. “Just listen to what Stig has to say, lad. Where’s the harm in that, hey? We came to you with this because we’re worried about you. We don’t want to stop you fighting, but the way you are right now, you’re going to get yourself killed on one of these raids, and for no good reason. This way you can still carry on the fight without deliberately putting yourself in so much danger. Now how about you just stay quiet for a minute while Stig says his piece, huh?”

Kazimir gave a rough shrug, knowing he was being a hothead idiot. Not knowing how to stop. “Sure. Sorry. It’s just …” He waved at the memorial garden. “Today. You know.”

“I do,” Stig said. “If you felt nothing for him, you would not be a true clansman, you would be nothing better than a Starflyer slave. I respect what you’re going through.”

“What did you want?”

“You know the human starship has flown?”

“I heard, yeah.”

“Bradley Johansson believes its launch is the start of the Starflyer’s endgame. It will bring ruin to the human Commonwealth.”

“How?” Kazimir asked. He never had quite understood how the human starship could be involved in their fight against the Starflyer. It was just an exploratory flight.

“The barrier around the Dyson star was put up to contain a great evil. Johansson is worried that the humans will let it out. Some of the crew will be the Starflyer’s slaves.”

“What kind of evil?”

“We don’t know. But if the Commonwealth has to fight a war it will be badly weakened, economically and socially. Such an action would leave humanity vulnerable to the Starflyer as it gnaws at us from within.”

“But you said the starship has left. We can’t stop it now.”

“No. But, Kazimir, if the Starflyer is preparing to crush us, the time for the planet’s revenge will soon be here, possibly within a few years. That means the Starflyer will return to Far Away, and we must be ready.”

“I know that.”

“Good. Now this is where I can use you. There are a number of items which must be brought to Far Away so that the planet may have its revenge. Unfortunately, our supporters out there in the Commonwealth are being hunted down by the authorities that the Starflyer has corrupted. That means we have to set up alternative routes for the items we need. I’ve traveled around the Commonwealth, I know how it works. Now I have to go back and help our allies, but I’m going to take a small team of dedicated Guardians with me to help achieve our final goal. I’d like you to be one of them.”

“Me?” Kazimir asked in shock. Just the notion of leaving Far Away was awesome, let alone traveling around the planets whose names were closer to fable than fact. And she was out there … “Why me? I don’t know anything about the Commonwealth.”

“You can learn easily enough. Harvey says you are quick, which is good. Life there is very different, at least superficially. You must learn how to blend in easily. And you’re young; physically you can still adapt. You’ll have to train hard to build your muscles up to a point where your body can cope with standard gravity. There are drugs which can help, of course, and cellular reprofiling, but those techniques can’t do it all, you’ll need to commit yourself fully.”

“I can do that,” he said without even thinking.

“Was that a yes?”

“Yeah!”

“You will also have to obey orders. My orders. I cannot have you running around loose out there. This is the one operation that cannot be compromised, not ever. It is what the Guardians are, why we exist.”

“I understand that. I won’t let you down.”

“I’m sure you won’t, Kaz. But it will be Johansson who makes the final decision.”

Kazimir gave Scott and Harvey a confused glance. “What decision?”

“If you can help bring back what we need,” Harvey said. “The physical training is only half of your preparation. You really are going to have to learn how to behave like a Commonwealth citizen. I promised Stig you could do that, please don’t make me a liar.”

“Never, but … Johansson will decide?”

“Yes,” Stig said. “You’ll meet him before we begin the operation.”

Kazimir could barely believe what he was hearing. As far as he was concerned, Bradley Johansson was some remote icon that everyone quoted and deferred to, a historical giant. He wasn’t someone you got to meet in the flesh. “Fine,” Kazimir said faintly. “Where is he?”

“At the moment? I don’t know. But we’ll meet him on Earth.”

....

While she was being built, the Second Chance was the unisphere’s primary news story. Details of her design, stories about her construction, spun briefings on the politics behind the decision to build her, gossip on who would be picked for her crew, it all pumped up the ratings for any news media show. Then came the Alamo Avengers attack, and modest interest became outright fascination. It culminated with over seventeen billion people accessing her departure for Dyson Alpha in real-time. After that, as she traversed hyperspace for month after month, there was a distinct feeling of anticlimax, and even a little frustration. Commonwealth citizens simply weren’t used to anything that important being off-line; worse, it would be a year until they did hear what happened. Until then, everybody would just have to fall back on the old familiars of TSI soaps and dramas, squabbling politicians, badly behaved celebrities, and the Commonwealth Cup now moving into the quarter finals.

Then news of Morton’s arrest was released, along with the names of the arresting officers, and every train to Oaktier was suddenly full of reporters hungry for more information. The case was a studio editor’s dream: a Paula Myo investigation of an ice murder, a wealthy suspect with big political and business connections, a strong hint of financial scandal. And sex. What had once been idle Oaktier gossip about Morton seducing the beautiful young Mellanie and ruining her chances on the national diving team was pushed high up the coverage agenda, featuring heavily on every report and info-profile. His earlier conquests were soon tracked down and coaxed into telling their stories for respectable sums of money. Bribes were offered to Darklake City forensics officers to reveal exclusive insights into the evidence that the prosecution would present—which led to five subsequent contempt-of-court proceedings. Tara Jennifer Shaheef and Wyobie Cotal were forced to apply for nonharassment court injunctions against the swarms of reporters laying siege to their homes.

After a month’s buildup, expectations were running high. On the first morning of the trial, Darklake Superior Courthouse had to be cordoned off from the frenzy of media and public interest. Street barriers pushed the expectant crowd back half a city block. A long convoy of police cars and patrolbots escorted the prisoner van around to the secure reception area at the rear of the courthouse, its movements followed by cameras on a dozen helicopters. They never got a glimpse of Morton; the van vanished into a locked garage bay.

The trial venue was Court One, which the judicial authorities had hurriedly spent a large amount of their annual maintenance budget on sprucing up. With Oaktier about to spend at least a week in the focus of the entire Commonwealth, impressions were suddenly paramount. The rich golden brentwood paneling around the dock and judge’s bench was buffed. Both of the lawyers’ long heavy tables were resurfaced and waxed. The walls and ceiling were repainted, with the big justice symbol taken out for cleaning. Every polyphoto strip shone down brightly; the sound system was checked and balanced correctly.

The revamp worked; when the fifty selected pool reporters were finally allowed in on the first morning they all remarked to their audiences how solemn and dignified the chamber was. The kind of place you could put your trust in, knowing that here justice was both fair and thorough.

Presentation was also foremost in the defense strategy. The first time Morton was seen since his arrest was when he walked into the packed courtroom, dressed in a deep purple designer suit, his thick hair perfectly styled, and looking very confident—almost mystified as to why he was here. It was not the image of a guilty man awaiting the inevitable verdict that Paula Myo always got when she prosecuted. As he reached the dock he bowed politely to the curving panel of silver one-way glass that shielded the jury and protected their identities. Just before he sat down he glanced around the packed public gallery, found who he was looking for, and smiled warmly. Every reporter swiveled around, retinal inserts focusing on Mellanie, who was perched elegantly in the front row, wearing a stylish navy-blue jacket and plain white blouse. Dressed so, she managed to project herself as both the epitome of bewildered innocence, and tremendously sexy. Just an ordinary Girl-Next-Door standing by Her Man in the face of a terrible injustice.

Then Paula Myo walked in, wearing a smart gray business suit and black leather shoes. Formidably cool, she exuded her own special brand of confidence. In the studios of a hundred news shows, they once again ran the clip of an impassive sixteen-year-old Paula at her parents’ hugely emotional trial. As it showed across the Commonwealth she sat down between the city’s chief attorney, Ivor Chessel, and Hoshe Finn, whose best suit appeared ancient and derelict amid the high-fashion statements that the principals were wearing.

Judge Carmichael made his entrance, and everybody stood. Morton flashed a reassuring grin up to Mellanie, captured by fifty professional pairs of inserts.

Once the charges had been read out, the defense lawyer, Howard Madoc, immediately applied for a dismissal, citing contamination of evidence by the media. Ivor Chessel attested that the evidence itself was still sound and irrefutable, and only a small part of the prosecution case. Judge Carmichael rejected the appeal, and with the posturing over, the trial began in earnest.

Prosecution laid the case out simply. Morton was a man driven by his raging manic thirst for money and power. His marriage to Tara Jennifer Shaheef was a simple and ruthless first step to achieving that goal. Her family money was used to fund AquaState, giving that small company the financial muscle to go after and win large building development contracts. AquaState under Morton’s fiery management grew successfully until it was ready to go public.

The share flotation was all part of his original grand scheme. It made him rich and gave him the leverage he needed to gain a seat on Gansu’s board. After that, his rise was unstoppable.

But his plan had faced ruin as his then-wife Tara Jennifer Shaheef grew bored with their marriage. If she filed a divorce, AquaState would either be wound up or sold off and the proceeds split between them. Morton would still be rich, a lot richer than he was at the start of the marriage, but it wasn’t enough for his purpose. It was still too early for the flotation to take place; AquaState wasn’t quite big enough to attract investors. That required another two or three years of uninterrupted growth. “So you killed her,” Ivor Chessel said, standing in front of the dock. “You removed the one obstacle left to flotation, your own wife. And with her out of the way, supposedly living on Tampico, you were free to build up AquaState to the level you required.”

Morton gave Howard Madoc a helpless look—unable to believe anyone could make such an absurd accusation. The defense lawyer, a dignified man who kept his appearance firmly middle-aged with the first frost of silver in his hair, shook his head sadly at such blatant theatrics by the prosecution.

The first prosecution witness was the city’s head of forensics, Sharron Hoffbrand. She confirmed that the bodies dug out of the forty-year-old condo’s foundations were indeed Tara Jennifer Shaheef and Wyobie Cotal. They had both been shot at close range by a very high-powered nervejam weapon, and their memorycell inserts had been erased, probably by an em pulse. The exact time was slightly difficult to pin down after so long, but she could narrow it down to a three-day period in the middle of the week when Morton was away at the conference in Talansee.

Chessel then asked if they’d found any foreign DNA traces on either of the bodies.

“No,” Hoffbrand said. “Cotal was fully clothed. There were the normal particles and dirt you’d expect from moving through the city, but no extraneous DNA. Shaheef was naked, but we found traces of soap and perfume chemicals on her skin, indicating she had been in the bath.”

“Can you tell if she was shot in the bath?” Chessel asked.

“Not after so much time has elapsed, no.”

“But she was in the bath at least prior to the slaying?”

“Yes.”

“So she was at home then?”

“That’s likely, yes.”

“Thank you.” Ivor Chessel turned to the judge. “No more questions, Your Honor.”

Howard Madoc smiled as he got to his feet. “Home or a hotel? Can you really tell the difference?”

“No, it could have been either.”

“Or a friend’s house? Or a public washroom?”

“Somewhere with a bath is as specific as I can get.”

“Was it on Oaktier?”

“There’s no way of knowing.”

“I see. Thank you.”

Prosecution called Tara Jennifer Shaheef. She took the stand wearing a lavender suit with wide white trimming and a too-short skirt. Her hair and too-lavish makeup emphasized how nervous she looked.

“Do you recall having any enemies forty years ago?” Ivor Chessel asked.

“No. I didn’t lead that kind of life. I still don’t.”

“So you certainly weren’t aware of anyone wanting to kill you?”

“No.”

“Do you have any memory or knowledge of visiting the planet Tampico?”

“No, I’d never heard of it until I was re-lifed.”

“What about Broher Associates?”

“The lawyers? No. I heard about them at the same time I did Tampico, when the insurance investigators looked into my disappearance.”

Tara’s eyes watched Howard Madoc as he walked over to her. She hadn’t yet managed to glance in Morton’s direction.

“The prosecution is relying very heavily on the assumption that you were about to divorce my client,” he said. “Were you?”

“I don’t think so. There was no definite plan that I remember. We would have parted eventually. The marriage was moving close to its sell-by date.”

“Is that why you were having an affair?”

“One of the reasons, yes. Life was sweet. Wyobie made it sweeter.”

“Life was sweet,” Madoc repeated thoughtfully. “I see. Do you still see Morton?”

“Sometimes, yes. I don’t avoid him.” She gave a brittle laugh.

“So you’re good friends then?”

“As best as you can be with an ex. He was … supportive when I was re-lifed. It’s quite a shock waking up to find that’s happened to you. The therapists say some people take another lifetime to get over it.”

“So it would be fair to say there is no ill will between you and Morton?” Madoc asked.

“No. That is, I had no reason to suspect any until this blew up.”

“If you had gone and done what the prosecution claimed, and filed for divorce that very week you were killed, would you have insisted that AquaState be wound down or split in half as your marital agreement stated?”

“Objection,” Ivor Chessel said. “That requires speculation.”

“Hardly, Your Honor,” Madoc said smoothly. “I’m asking the prosecution witness what she would actually have done under very specific circumstances; while the entire prosecution case rests upon what might have happened if she did as they believe. Which of us is speculating?”

“I happen to agree with you in this instance,” the judge said. “How the witness believes she would have reacted is not speculation. Please answer the question.”

“I … I’m not sure,” Tara stammered. “Money wasn’t too big an issue for me, I still had access to family funds. I suppose I would have allowed AquaState to continue. Morton would probably have made a good case for getting it ready for flotation.”

“So you were never angry with him?”

“No. All marriages end, everybody knows that. That’s why we have contracts at the beginning.”

Howard Madoc was very careful not to smile at the prosecution team as he sat down.

The second day began with Hoshe Finn taking the stand. He was still in his one best suit with his hair slicked back into the silver clasp he always used; while Paula had chosen a black jacket and light tweed skirt, still every inch the unflappable professional. Morton had gone for expensively casual, with an open-necked white shirt under a gold-embossed waistcoat. His lawyer was wearing the same suit as the previous day, careful to project style without ostentation. Looking down on them, and smiling encouragement when required, Mellanie had selected a pale gray dress, cut tight enough to qualify as an overskin.

“Detective Finn,” Ivor Chessel began. “Is there any evidence Tara Jennifer Shaheef or Wyobie Cotal ever went to Tampico?”

“The tickets were bought, and the law firm hired, but there is no evidence either of them were ever there. We performed an extensive search, there was simply no data or physical trace of them ever being on that planet. We believe the whole Tampico scenario is an alibi for the killer.”

“An alibi?”

“If Morton killed his wife to guarantee the flotation of AquaState, he couldn’t afford to have anybody asking questions about where she was. As far as everyone else was concerned, she had run off with her lover to set up house on a new world. The legal firm of Broher Associates was hired to carry on the fiction by acting on her behalf.”

There was a lot more. Methods used during the search. Verification of police records. Results into inquiries conducted into Wyobie Cotal’s life to see if he had enemies prepared to kill. The official accounts for AquaState. All of them designed to show how the inquiry had carefully narrowed down options until it could be nobody else but Morton. It wasn’t until the afternoon that defense began its questions.

Howard Madoc got Hoshe to tell the court how the original investigation of Cotal’s re-life was winding down when Morton intervened to get the case assigned a higher priority.

“Very curious thing for him to do, if he is the killer, isn’t it?” Madoc asked.

“He wouldn’t know he murdered Shaheef and Cotal,” Hoshe said. “The first thing he would do is have the memory erased.”

“You know that, do you?”

“We examined his secure memory store. There is no memory of the event.”

“Was there a full memory of the week-long convention he was attending at the time of this terrible crime?”

“Essentially yes. However, he could have returned to Darklake City during what was logged in the secure store as a sleep period.”

“You examined my client’s secure memory store. Is there any memory of him ever having been to Tampico?”

“No. But if he killed …”

“Just answer the question you were asked, please, Detective. You have no evidence my client set up this alibi. Would I be right in saying that the person or persons who did actually kill Tara Shaheef would have needed this alibi to deflect any police or private inquiry about her whereabouts?”

“Yes.”

“In the course of your investigation, did you find anyone else with a motive to kill these two unfortunate people?”

“No. There was nothing, no other reason except Morton’s.”

“What about Tara and Wyobie unexpectedly walking in on some deeply illegal criminal gang activity? Was that considered?”

“Yes, we examined it as a possibility. There was no evidence to support the idea.”

“Well there wouldn’t be, would there? If the gang who killed them were smart enough to deliver an alibi that stood for forty years, they’re hardly going to leave evidence lying around. Their only piece of bad luck was my client spotting the re-life connection and asking questions in high places, doing his duty, being a good citizen. And this is his reward. While all we have here in court is your theory mangled to fit the facts, a notion which is based solely on your assumption that my client is a cold, ruthless man. Am I right in that?”

“Yes, that’s what the facts support.”

“But they don’t, Detective. That’s not evidence. That’s your theory. It is not evidence, not some bloodstained blunt instrument in a plastic bag which you can hold up here in court and point to. It is the most tenuous circumstantial theory. So I ask you again: Is there any evidence, physical or digital, that definitely rules out Wyobie Cotal and Tara Jennifer Shaheef walking in on a criminal activity and being killed to shut them up, and incidentally why their memorycell inserts were erased?”

Hoshe stared ahead for a long moment, then cleared his throat. “No, there is no physical or digital evidence which rules that out,” he said in a monotone.

As the court recessed for the day the talking heads in media studios across the Commonwealth were nearly unanimous that Howard Madoc had done a good demolition job on Hoshe Finn. A great deal of the prosecution case was subjecture. It should be enough for a good defense lawyer to swing the jury in his favor. Public sympathy was definitely moving toward Morton according to the constant interactive polls monitoring opinion on the case. It acted like a feedback loop, giving even more people the impression he was going to get off. Which implied an even bigger revelation was waiting to be accessed: Paula Myo was actually going to lose a case.

After such momentous events, day three brought an unsurprising increase in the unisphere audience, close to three billion people were on-line and waiting to see what would happen. They watched as Mellanie arrived early and took her usual seat. This morning she was wearing a long coat of some shiny ice-blue fabric with matching trousers. The vest underneath was a translucent mesh, though the coat lapels remained very close together, hinting at rather than revealing any flesh. With her hair given a sophisticated wave and combed back neatly she was radiating raw sex appeal.

After yesterday’s roasting, Hoshe Finn was wearing a lighter suit, for once allowing his oiled hair to fall loose over his shoulders. Next to him, Paula was in a somber dark green suit, her hair scraped back severely.

When the court officer brought Morton in, he’d put on a navy blue suit appropriate for any boardroom meeting, emphasizing his authority and integrity. His face was sober and intent, betraying no hint of contentment at what had happened yesterday. He was restrained as he shook hands with Howard Madoc, then they both stood as Judge Carmichael entered.

With the prosecution case over, defense called its first witness: Morton himself.

Howard Madoc faced the shielded jury as he asked his opening question. “For the record, do you believe yourself capable of committing such a dreadful act as this murder undoubtedly is?”

“I do not believe I could kill in cold blood. And I did not kill my wife and her lover.”

“Thank you.”

Madoc went through a long series of questions designed to show his client in the best possible light to the jury. How Morton was ambitious but not so ruthless as to use murder to his corporate advantage. How he had shown sympathy and support for his ex-wife after her re-life procedure. How he would have risen to the top no matter what trivial little financial problems beset him forty years ago.

“The prosecution has made much of how cold and ruthless you are,” Madoc finished. “Are you a cold man?”

Morton looked up to the public gallery where Mellanie was sitting, gazing down with a soft devoted smile on her beautiful young face. “You’d have to ask those who know me properly, but I don’t think so.”

Howard Madoc bowed slightly to the judge and sat down.

“Your witness,” Judge Carmichael told the prosecution table.

Everyone in the courtroom fell silent as Paula Myo slowly stood up. Then a round of excited whispering broke out as she bowed to the judge and walked over to the witness stand. If she was having to take charge herself, the prosecution must be desperate.

“Murder ain’t what it used to be,” she said to Morton in a pleasant conversational tone. “It’s no longer death. Not final. Today it’s bodyloss, memory erasure, lots of euphemisms that describe what is essentially a discontinuity in consciousness. Your body can be killed, but the clinics on every Commonwealth planet can bring you back to life with a simple cloning procedure. There’s a blank decade or two, but eventually you’re walking around again as if nothing ever happened. It’s a wonderful psychological crutch to have. A lot of psychiatrists argue that it helps make our society a lot more stable and calm than before. They bandy the word ‘mature’ around quite a lot.

“So you see, murdering somebody is nothing like as serious as it used to be. All you’re actually doing is removing them from the universe for a few years. You’re not really killing them. Especially when you know their insurance will cover a re-life procedure. It would probably be an acceptable risk to remove someone who was going to ruin your plans.”

“No,” Morton said. “It is completely unacceptable. It is not a done thing, something that can be performed for convenience. Murder is barbarism. I wouldn’t do it. Not now, not forty years ago.”

“But we are agreed that your wife and Wyobie Cotal were murdered?”

“Of course.” He frowned, puzzled by the question. “I told you, remember?”

“No, you originally said you were suspicious about her disappearance, especially when it coincided with that of her lover. Feelings of unease aren’t entirely memory-based, they can’t be erased by legal or black-market editing. They are derived from the subconscious. You knew something was wrong about their disappearance.”

Morton sat back and gave her a suspicious stare.

“The Tampico alibi was a good one, wasn’t it?” Paula said.

“Yes.”

“Yes. Assuming you no longer had the memory of murdering her, neither you nor her other friends ever questioned the story that she’d left you to go there.”

“I didn’t kill her. But you’re right, it was a watertight cover-up. I had no reason to question her disappearance, especially after Broher Associates contacted me and said they were acting as intermediaries.”

“Let’s examine this again. You came back from your conference in Talansee, and found your apartment had been stripped of all your wife’s things, her clothes and possessions, and there was a message telling you she had left for good.”

“That’s right.”

“And that was enough to convince you at the time that there was nothing unusual about her leaving.”

“It was unusual, and unexpected, and quite shocking. But it didn’t make me suspicious.”

“So you knew of her affairs?”

“Yes, there had been several by then. Our marriage allowed for them. I’d had a couple myself. I’m only human, not some cold machine.”

“Did you argue the terms of the divorce?”

“No. They were all set out in the marriage contract. I knew what I was getting into.”

“What about the items removed from your apartment, did you ask for any of them to be returned?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Morton gave Madoc a quick glance. “Tara only took her own stuff.”

“You knew what was hers, did you?”

“Sure.”

“Did anybody else?”

This time the glance Morton shot at his lawyer was a puzzled one. “Excuse me?”

“I read the transcripts of all your calls and messages to Broher Associates,” Paula said. “There was never any dispute over what was removed. So tell me this: In a home where two people have lived together for twelve years, where only those two people could possibly know whose item was whose, how is it that the killer removed only her property?”

Morton’s expression turned to one of stricken incomprehension. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but no words came out.

“No criminal gang would ever know what to take to set up the alibi,” Paula said. “It would take someone intimate with the house and its contents. There were only two of you with the exact knowledge. One of them is your ex-wife, and we know she didn’t do it.”

Morton slowly lowered his head into his hands, covering his grief and confusion. “Oh, holy shit,” he moaned. “I didn’t. Did I?”

“Yes.” Paula regarded him with the kind of sympathy normally extended to the bereaved. “You did.”

The jury took three hours to deliberate their verdict. Comment on the unisphere was that they took so long in order to enjoy a decent lunch at the taxpayers’ expense. When they filed back into the courtroom and delivered their verdict nobody was surprised that it was unanimous. The electronically disguised voice from behind the curving silver glass announced, “Guilty.”

The outbreak of chatter was swiftly silenced by the judge, who then told Morton to stand. There were, the judge said, very firm guidelines laid down for such appalling crimes: the minimum was usually twice the period of life loss.

“Given that you committed this crime purely for your own advancement, I have to agree with the prosecution’s assessment that you are a cold immoral individual who sees other people’s lives as an inconvenience to your own ambition and has no qualm in eradicating such problems. Due to your evil, Tara Jennifer Shaheef and Wyobie Cotal have suffered the loss of decades without a body, I therefore have no reluctance to imposing a punishment of one hundred and twenty years of life suspension. Sentence to begin immediately.” His gavel banged down loudly.

Tara Jennifer Shaheef leaped to her feet and screeched, “You bastard!” at her ex.

On the other side of the public gallery a hysterical Mellanie screamed incoherently, struggling against the court officials holding her back from jumping the railings to be with her guilty lover. Some members of the public around her were cheering merrily at the commotion. Morton shook his head in bewilderment as he was led out of the dock, a study in tragicomic defeat. The reporters turned en masse to the prosecution table. Hoshe Finn and Ivor Chessel were clearly delighted, smiling wildly as they shook hands. Paula Myo seemed oblivious to the commotion all around her; she was picking up loose sheets of hard copy and slotting them neatly into her briefcase. The table cleared, she walked out of the courtroom without looking around.

FOURTEEN

Wilson was now a hundred twenty-nine days into the mission, and counting. In the same way everyone else on board the Second Chance was counting. Days, hours, minutes: every little unit was being ticked off with a combination of irritation and relief. Their problem, strangely enough, was just how well the starship had worked since they departed Oaktier. He supposed it was inevitable, enough money had been poured into the design, making sure every component had multiple redundancy along with at least a two hundred percent tolerance rating. In his NASA days they’d called it goldplating. Everything on Ulysses had to work, and if some bizarre mishap did knock out a unit then three backup systems jumped up to replace it. And that was when you could still see Earth through the viewing port, while communications with Houston took a few minutes at the most. It provided a tenuous feeling of connection to the rest of the human race that had always given him a degree of security. If something had gone badly wrong, he’d always believed that NASA would ultimately do something to salvage the situation.

Today, though, the sense of isolation was stronger by orders of magnitude. Even he, with his previous experience, found their flight daunting. Should anything go wrong here in hyperspace, nobody was ever going to find them. It made him grateful for the way the starship had been constructed. This mission, he realized, had an altogether more mature feel to it than the Ulysses flight ever had.

It was a civilized voyage. First of all there was the gravity. It might only be an eighth of a gee around the rim of the life-support wheel, but it made sure everything flowed in the right direction. His body was so much more comfortable with that. Then there was the food. Instead of neat, efficient, rehydratable packets of precooked meals, the Second Chance canteen served dishes like pan-fried diver scallops with herb risotto, or loin of lamb with tarte Tatin of vegetables drizzled with a thyme and tomato sauce; and the dessert selection was dangerously broad. For recreation there were a number of gyms, which everyone dutifully attended. But most of the crew spent their spare time accessing TSI dramas. They had a huge library on board, with sexsoaps inevitably the most popular, though first-life first romances were equally fashionable, and there were numerous adaptations of classic fiction and biographies of historical characters. Wilson spent several days immersed in a sumptuous production of Mansfield Park. He’d read the novel in his first life, and was interested in the societal structure of the era that it conjured up (intriguing parallel with present-day Earth, he felt), though he was fairly sure there hadn’t been quite so many lesbian love scenes in the original book.

Between fitness sessions, meals, TSIs, and ship’s duty, he spent most of his hours with Anna. Even after all this time, he still preferred a one-woman-at-a-time lifestyle. The kind of arrangements many of the Commonwealth’s wealthy, and not-so-wealthy, favored had never really appealed to him, not like Nigel Sheldon with his thousand children and dozen-strong harem, or the Kandavu multi-families, or any other of the hundreds of variants on relationships. At heart, he knew he was as old-fashioned as the era he’d come from.

Anna, though, was good company; never demanding, happy to keep things comfortably casual. It was almost the same as before the launch, the difference this time being that everyone onboard knew about them. It didn’t cause any resentment or whispering; they were all grown-ups. Although it had never been a firm policy, one you could find written down or in a program, Wilson had rejected all applications from first-lifers.

He was convinced they didn’t have the temperament he wanted from his crew. The voyage so far had confirmed that in his own mind. There had been so little trouble, so few “personality clashes,” that he’d begun to regard the ship’s psychologist as superfluous. Even now, as he waited on the bridge for the hyperspace flight to end, there was no sign of any tension among those around him.

“No significant mass within a hundred AUs,” Oscar reported.

“Thank you,” Wilson said. He glanced around at the portals himself, seeing the gravitonic spectrum displays almost blank, like the eye of the storm. They’d obtained their last accurate navigational fix flying within three hundred AUs of a red dwarf, now ten light-years distant. That put them close to twenty-five light-years from Dyson Alpha, in clear interstellar space. “Okay, stand by to take us out of hyperspace. Anna, let’s have the main sensor suite on-line please.”

“Aye, sir,” She didn’t even grin at him. On the bridge, she took her duties very seriously indeed. Two seats away, OCtattoos on her hands and forearm began to shimmer like pulsing silver veins as her palms rested on the console i-spots, readying the equipment up at the bow of the starship.

“Astrophysics?” Wilson asked.

“Ready, sir.” Tunde Sutton was waiting at the rear of the bridge, along with two of the science officers, Bruno Seymore and Russell Sall. Their consoles all had double the number of portals and screens than the others, capable of displaying a vast amount of data. In addition, all three men had upgraded retinal inserts, giving them a high-quality virtual vision field. If there was any anomaly out there in real space, they’d have it located and analyzed almost instantaneously. They were also sharing the data with the astrophysics office, on the deck above, where the majority of specialists were waiting, including Dudley Bose.

“Oscar, bring the force fields on-line, please, and take tactical control.”

“Aye, sir.”

Part of Wilson’s virtual vision display showed him the power being routed into their force fields and atom lasers. Sensor data was also fed directly into the targeting control, with Oscar assuming executive authority for their missile arsenal. Wilson moved his virtual fingers to activate a general channel throughout the ship. “All right, ladies and gentlemen, let’s see what’s out there. Tu Lee, take us out of the wormhole. But keep the hyperdrive on-line. We may need a fast exit.”

Tu Lee grinned broadly. “Yes, sir.”

The blue mist filling the two big high-rez portals at the front of the bridge began to darken. A ripple of black broke out from the center, expanding rapidly. Clear pinpoints of light speckled the deep night outside the ship as the starfield appeared around them once more.

“Tunde?” Wilson demanded.

“Nothing obvious, sir. Electromagnetic spectrum clean. Gravitonic empty. Standard particle density. Immediate quantum state stable. Zero radar return. Neutrino flux normal. Cosmic radiation high but not excessive.”

“Sensors, show me Dyson Alpha,” Wilson said.

Anna centered the main telescope, feeding the image to the left-hand portal. Slim red brackets indicated the position of the shielded star. She bled in the infrared emission, and it appeared as a pale pink dot. Dyson Beta materialized slightly to one side. “Doesn’t look like there’s any change to either of the barriers,” she said. “They were both still intact twenty-five years ago.”

“Any activity in the surrounding area?”

“Not that I can locate. Do you want an hysradar sweep?”

“Not yet. Expand our baseline for the current sensors. I want a clearer picture of the area. Astrophysics, keep monitoring. Pilot, hold us stable here.”

“Aye, sir.” Anna began to manipulate virtual icons. “Prepping for sensor module launches.”

Wilson let out a quick breath of relief. His virtual finger was tapping icons almost unconsciously. On the console in front of him, one of the small screens flicked between camera images. Each one had a small portion of the starship superstructure: the forward sensor array, a slice of the life-support wheel, the plasma rockets. But no matter which camera he chose, there was never anything other than the ship and the very distant stars. Nothing. The emptiness was awesome. Frightening.

When he was a boy, Wilson had enjoyed swimming. His parents had a small pool in their yard, and he’d used it every day. That didn’t stop him from continually nagging his parents to take him to the larger pool at the county sports center. He’d been nine on the day of that visit, he and a whole group of friends ferried out there by some harassed mother. With his skill and confidence he’d not been intimidated by the size or depth of the big pool, and was soon leading the others through the water. When he was in the deep end he dived to the bottom, sure he could touch the tiles. He made it easily enough, his strong strokes hauling him down away from the surface, popping his ears against the pressure twice on the way down before slapping his fingertips on the smooth blue tiles. Sound from the rest of the pool was curiously muted so far below, the thrashing feet above, dull, like the filtered blue light. Pressure squeezed him gently. So he started to swim up. And only then did he realize his mistake. He’d taken enough breath to get him down, but now his lungs were burning. Muscles twitched as the need to suck down fresh air swelled desperately. He began to claw frantically at the water, which did nothing to increase his terrible slow speed. The need for air became overwhelming. And his chest began to expand, lungs working to pull in that sweet oxygen. Wilson felt the water sliding up his nostrils like some unstoppable burrowing creature. Right that second he knew if it got any farther he would drown. It was enough to send his body into a frenzy, kicking and struggling. At the same time he found the discipline to stop his lungs from trying to inhale. Somehow he managed to break the surface without the water spilling any farther inside him. Only then did he suck down a huge breath of beautiful clean air, almost sobbing as the shock of what’d happened struck him. For a long time he’d clung to the side of the pool as big shivers ran up and down his body. Finally, he regained enough control to swim back out to his friends.

Even during his air force combat flights he’d never felt so scared as that whimpering child striking out for the side of the pool. Nothing had ever come close to re-creating that feeling. Until now. Now that same clammy sickness was gripping him just like it had his nine-year-old self as the reality sank in of how far away from anything they were. He started his ancient deep-breathing exercise routine, trying to calm his body before the shakes started.

“Modules disengaging,” Anna announced.

“Right, thank you,” Wilson replied a little too abruptly. His virtual hand stopped flicking through the camera sequence, and he concentrated hard on the images of the sensor modules. Something to do, something to shift his mind off the nothingness of outside. He felt his heart rate slow as he forced his breathing to a regular rhythm, though there was nothing he could do about the cold perspiration on his forehead. A text-only message popped up into his virtual vision, it was from Anna and read: ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?

FINE, he sent back. He didn’t look in her direction. Everyone else on the bridge seemed to be absorbed by their work, unaffected by what lay outside. He was the only one interstellar space was intimidating. That piqued him somewhat—enough to make him focus properly on his job.

The screen on his console showed him the forward section of the Second Chance. Doors on eight cylindrical bays had opened up, spaced equidistantly just behind the bow’s large sensor cluster. Modules like big metallized insects sprouting golden antennae were drifting out, glittering in the lights around the rim of each bay. Ion thrusters flared blue on the base of each one, pushing them away from the starship.

They traveled in an expanding circle, linked by laser and microwave, taking hours to reach their stand-off station. When they were fifty thousand kilometers out, their ion thrusters burned again, bringing them to a halt. As one, their dark protective segments peeled open, exposing delicate sensor instruments to the interstellar medium. Disks, blocks, booms, and lenses uncoiled on the end of electromuscle tentacles and began scanning space around Dyson Alpha. The big arrays back on the Second Chance correlated the results, combining them into a single image with extraordinarily high resolution in every spectrum.

For everyone waiting eagerly on board, the result was a big disappointment. Virtually no new information about the barrier was revealed. Its diameter was confirmed at twenty-nine point seven AUs. There was a moment of prayerlike silence on the bridge as that fact was absorbed. The surface was emitting in a very low infrared wavelength. Local particle density was slightly lower than average, indicating that solar wind emission from Dyson A and B was blocked. Nothing else could be detected.

After five days of cautious observation for any sign of hostile events, or any other energy emission that might point to artificially generated activity, Wilson had to agree with his science team that there was no obvious danger at this distance. He ordered the sensor expansion modules back to the starship, and they flew fifteen light-years closer.

When they emerged into real space again, they repeated the examination. From five light-years, the images that the expanded baseline modules provided were even more exact. But nothing had changed. The interstellar particle winds blowing off nearby stars were detectable as they gusted around the barrier, creating giant swirls and eddies that sighed in the electromagnetic spectrum like faint whale song.

Wilson moved them forward in one-light-year increments. Each time the eight modules would fly out and peer ahead. Each time they would provide a more detailed survey of the local radiation and particle environment. Of the barrier itself, they revealed nothing.

“Take us to one light-month out,” Wilson told Tu Lee.

“Aye, sir.”

“Tunde, that’ll take us within high-definition range of the hysradar,” Wilson said. “Do we scan it?”

The astrophysicist gave an expansive shrug from behind his bridge console. “It’ll tell us a lot about the nature of the barrier, but then we’ll probably reveal ourselves. If there is an active force controlling it, I can’t imagine they won’t be able to detect it.”

Oscar looked at the forward portals that showed the blue walls of the wormhole closing over real space. “They have to know already. We’d be able to pick up the quantum signature of a wormhole from this distance.”

“The builders must have realized that people would come and investigate at some point,” Anna said. “You can’t do something like this and expect it to go unnoticed.”

“We’ll run passive scans first,” Wilson said. “If there’s no response, we can use the hysradar.”

Just under four hours later, the Second Chance emerged from hyperspace. Wilson didn’t have to order the expanded baseline modules out. The ship’s main telescope revealed the full expanse of the disk. In infrared it was like the baleful eye of some dreaming dragon.

“Very low neutrino density out here, and virtually nothing coming from Dyson Alpha’s direction,” Bruno Seymore said. “I’d say the barrier is impermeable to them. We should be picking up a whole deluge from the star at this distance.”

“What about particle density?” Wilson asked.

“Interstellar wash, that’s all. No particle wind from the star itself. The barrier must be converting all the energy hitting its internal surface to infrared. Output corresponds to that, assuming the star remains the same inside.”

“Thank you,” Wilson said. He was staring at the red circle, all sense of isolation long gone. “Is it solid?”

“No, sir,” Tunde Sutton said. “We’re picking up the star’s gravity field. It’s weak but detectable. If that thing was solid, it would mass at least the same as an average star. Probably a lot more.”

“So it blocks neutrinos, elementary particles, and most of the electromagnetic spectrum, but not gravity. Are any of our force fields like that?”

“Similar,” Tunde said. “I’m sure we can build a generator that duplicates those properties. It wouldn’t be easy.”

“And what would it take to power one this size?”

Tunde almost flinched. Bruno and Russell grinned at his discomfort.

“A good percentage of the star’s fusion energy.”

“Can you tell if that’s missing?”

“Not really. We’d need a much better measurement of the naked star to compare with. We’ve never had that.”

“Okay. If you can pick up the star’s gravity field, can you tell if there are any planets orbiting inside?”

“Not from out here, we need to get closer for that.”

“Anna, is there any sign of activity outside the barrier, anything at all?”

“No, sir, nothing. No microwave communications, no laser, no radar emission. No plasma trails, not even a chemical rocket plume as far as we can see, though we’re stretching resolution on that one. No wormhole signatures either. As far as our sensors are concerned, we’re alone out here.”

Wilson gave Oscar a glance.

“It’s beginning to look like a relic,” the exec said. He sounded disappointed.

“All right. Give it a hysradar sweep. And I want a very careful watch for any response. Hyperdrive, be ready to take us straight out of here.”

“Yes, sir.”

The bridge was silent for a couple of minutes as Anna and Tu Lee worked in tandem, sending out hyperaccelerated gravity waves from the wormhole generator.

“Unusual,” Tunde Sutton said eventually. “It simply reflected the pulses back at us, like a mirror. That indicates a very complex quantum structure. But then we knew it was never going to be anything simple.”

“Did we ring any bells?” Wilson asked.

Anne and the astrophysics team shook their heads. “Still no sign of activity. But we are limited with sensors from this range. Anything in the electromagnetic spectrum is going to take a month to show up.”

“I’m more concerned about hyperspace and quantum field activity.”

“Nothing so far.”

“Very well. Oscar?”

“We’ve come a long way,” Oscar said. “And so far we’ve seen nothing to make us turn back.”

“I agree. Prepare the ship for a hostile encounter scenario. Hyperspace, take us in to one million kilometers above the barrier’s equator.”

“Aye, sir.”

The wormhole projected into real space with a burst of Cherenkov radiation, its toroidal nimbus twinkling with azure scintillations. It dissipated as quickly as it had begun, leaving the Second Chance floating a million kilometers above the blank surface of the barrier. On such a scale there was no visible curvature to the shell around the star. It appeared as a simple flat plane extending to infinity in every direction, as if the starship had reached the bottom of the universe.

“We couldn’t have gone through,” Tu Lee reported as soon as they were established in real space.

“What do you mean?” Wilson asked.

“The barrier is a block to wormholes as well. There was a lot of exotic energy echo as we approached. Whatever the barrier is, it extends through the quantum fields. The wormhole wouldn’t be able to circumvent it.”

“So there really is no way in,” Wilson mused.

“Or out,” Oscar said.

Wilson turned to the astrophysicists. “So how can the star’s gravity field get through?”

“We’ll let you know,” Tunde said. He didn’t sound happy.

“Hysradar sweep gives a sheer surface,” Anne said. “Definitely no neutrino penetration. I’ve never seen the detectors registering this low before.”

“How thick is it?”

“That dimension really only applies to solid matter,” Tunde said. “This is an artificial rift in the quantum fields which manifests itself in spacetime; technically, it has no physical depth. It’s two-dimensional.”

“Fine.” Wilson couldn’t take his attention off the standard radar return. “Any sign of spacecraft activity?”

“Nothing,” Anna said; she sounded slightly peeved at having to churn out constant reassurance. “No rocket exhausts. No wormhole signatures. There’s nobody else here.”

“I’d qualify that,” Tunde said. “This goddamn thing is thirty AUs across. That’s almost impossible for the human mind to grasp. We’re not even seeing a fraction of a percent from here. There could be a battle fleet of ships the size of a moon gathered five AUs away and we’d never know.”

“Let’s not get carried away,” Wilson said. “This is what we’re here for, people, a full survey and analysis. So … Pilot, hold us steady at this stand-off distance. Defense, keep our shields up full until further notice. Hyperdrive, keep us ready for an immediate exit. Astrophysics, you’re on. I want a comprehensive sensor sweep from this distance, probe it with everything we’ve got. We are not getting any closer for now. If you can confirm there are no active components which threaten us, I’ll authorize a remote satellite examination of the barrier’s structure. Until then we play it safe.” He leaned back in the chair, and watched as the data started to build up on his screen and within his virtual vision. The stream of results was unending, and growing by the hour as new instruments were unsheathed and applied. Only a fraction of the information made any sense to him. It was slightly humbling. He’d always thought himself quite up-to-date on physics.

Tunde Sutton and the rest of the science crew tore into the raw data with unnerving enthusiasm. Their attitude was childlike in its wonder. Wilson was very careful not to intrude, or censure Tunde for the way he ran his department. But from what he could see they were acting more like first-life science geeks than the wise, considered professors they’d been when selected. They quarreled and laughed among themselves, completely uncaring for social restraint. Suddenly, after all these months, they were now the elite, aloof from the rest of the crew. It showed.

Wilson overstayed his duty period by two hours, then turned the bridge over to Oscar. An hour later, Anna found him in the forward observation gallery. It was a long dark compartment on the wheel’s middle deck, with subdued blue floor lighting. She paused for a long moment after she came through the door, letting her eyes acclimatize to the darkness. The gallery had three tall windows of optically perfect glass facing forward. The silhouettes of several people were just visible—the barrier was a popular vista. She walked over to Wilson. “Hi,” she whispered.

“Hi.” His hand found hers in the gloom, fingers fumbling. They stood together, content with their closeness. Anna could see the main cylinder above them, a somber gray bulk illuminated by the small nav lights dotting its surface. It was rotating slowly, turning various sensor clumps into view one after the other.

“I’m not sure if I can see it,” Wilson murmured quietly. “My inserts give me a perfect image in infrared. But when I cancel that, I think I can see it. If it’s there, it’s like a flat cloud of the darkest red ever. Maybe I’m just imagining it because I know that’s what it should look like. And it looks as if it’s just in front of my nose.”

“On this scale, it is,” she whispered back. “We’re not even a germ to a basketball.”

“Can you see it?”

“I don’t know.” Stupid though the action was, she leaned forward slightly, squinting. Her inserts were off now, and there might well have been some kind of ultradark vermilion haze out there in front of the nose, the kind of luminosity you got from a single candle lighting a cathedral. “It’s like a ghostlight.”

“Humm. I always thought I had quite good eyes. I’ll have to get them resequenced next time I go into rejuve.” He waved his hand in front of his face to see if that made any difference, if he could see the outline of his fingers against the obscure emission. There was too much secondary lighting in the observation gallery to be certain. “Whether I can see it or not, I can certainly feel it. The damn thing’s spooky, like something lurking just outside your thoughts.”

She curled her arm around his. “Come on, it’s been a long day. Time you got some rest.”

He grinned. His teeth were just visible in the gloaming. “I’m too tired and strung out to argue.” He allowed himself to be led toward the door.

“Strung out? You?”

“Yeah. We spent a year getting this ship built. I spent three hundred years waiting for something this important to happen to me again. I wanted something there when we came out of hyperdrive, something positive that I could see and understand. When we set down on Mars, there was all this alien geology surrounding me. It was strange, and even beautiful after a fashion, and nobody really knew anything about it. But you could break open a rock with a hammer, and see the minerals and strata inside. We had a knowledge base that could take that information and pin down what kind of rock it was, what event produced it. It was all in my head, information I could apply.”

They were alone in the corridor, so she stood on her toes and kissed him. “You poor old thing.”

Wilson smiled, sheepish now. “Yeah well, I guess I’m just intimidated, that’s all. The size of this fucker is mind-warping. I really shouldn’t let it get to me.”

“I know, whacking this with a hammer isn’t going to help.”

“No.” He kissed her back. “I bet it would make me feel a hell of a lot better, though.”

Five days later, Wilson allowed the Second Chance to move up to fifty thousand kilometers above the barrier. They used the plasma rockets, accelerating in at a fiftieth of a gee, then stopped and flipped over to decelerate. The physicists were very keen to see what would happen when the exhaust sprayed against the surface. The simple answer was nothing. Satellites hovering centimeters above the barrier observed the residue of gas and energized particles strike the surface and rebound. There was no heat or momentum transfer. No effect. Gigabytes flowed back up the microwave links between satellites and starship, expanding the already vast database on the barrier. A huge quantity of sensor log files were stored in the RI array, almost all of them containing negative information. Every member of the science crew could tell Wilson what it wasn’t; they could explain its properties at great length. What nobody could tell him was how it was generated, nor from where. And they certainly didn’t know why it existed.

But then, he told Anna charitably one night, they had only been there for five days. He shouldn’t expect miracles.

The starship hung above the stubborn barrier for another eight days, picking at it with various beams of radiation, like a small child with an intriguing scab, eager to see what lay beneath. Their wormhole generator distorted spacetime in many convoluted perturbations, the wave function of each one bouncing off the near-invisible surface without any significant resonance pattern. During that time, their only major discovery was the planets inside the barrier. Tunde confirmed that gravitational readings showed two gas giants and three small solid planets were orbiting the star, with indications of several large asteroids. It livened up the daily department heads meeting when he told them that one of the solid worlds was within the life band, the distance from the star that would allow carbon-based life to evolve should the planetary conditions be favorable, such as the availability of water and a decent atmospheric pressure.

Finally, for morale’s sake rather than practical science, Wilson allowed McClain Gilbert to fly out to the surface. After the long, boring flight, the crew was becoming restless. Like Wilson, they’d all expected something a little more substantial, some hint as to the origin of the barrier, the reason behind it. One of their own actually going out there and examining it in person should help alleviate some of the tension that was building up in the life-support wheel.

So the whole starship was watching as the small shuttle flew out of its hangar in the cylindrical superstructure. It was a simple spherical life-support capsule capable of transporting up to fifteen passengers, sitting on the top of a drum-shaped propulsion section containing the environmental equipment and two small plasma rockets. A short-range vehicle, with a ten-day flight margin, it was intended to ferry science officers between any “items of interest” to be found at the Dyson Pair. Although it didn’t have an atmospheric entry ability, it could set down on small airless moons, or more hopefully rendezvous with alien starships, alien space stations, or if they were really lucky, even a barrier generator. Nearly everybody on board had volunteered to accompany Mac, including a very vocal Dudley Bose, but Wilson had vetoed any passengers on this trip. Mac had a backup exploration team member, a pilot, and an engineer riding with him, but that was all.

The shuttle used its tiny chemical reaction control engines to hold station a hundred meters away from the barrier, and Mac wriggled his way carefully out of the craft’s cylindrical airlock. His space suit’s inner plyplastic layer gripped his skin, constantly adjusting to accommodate his every movement yet always fitting snugly. On top of that he wore a thermal regulator garment, woven out of heat duct fibers, which would carry away any excess body heat. Above that was a thicker suit, a pale gray in color, combining a radiation baffle cloth and an external impact armor layer, resistant to most micro meteor strikes. It had a built-in force field generator web, which was his real protection in space. If that failed, then procedure was to abandon the EVA and head for the nearest airlock. His helmet was a reinforced transparent bubble, also radiation proof and temperature resistant, which he could opaque depending on the light level, giving him all around visibility, which was boosted by various collar sensors he could access through his virtual vision. Batteries, the heat regulator, and the air regenerator system were all contained in a neat little pack built into the front of the outer suit, with a couple of circular radiator fins to discard surplus body heat. The whole thing was interfaced and controlled via his e-butler, with its system schematic icons sprinkled around his virtual vision.

As soon as he was clear of the airlock hatch rim he anchored himself to the fuselage grid. The cilia on his boot soles adhered to the lattice with a grip strong enough to hold him in place against the kind of torque his body might apply by mistake in the confusion of freefall. He bent over, his stomach muscles pulling hard in the absence of gravity, and unfastened the maneuvering pack from its storage rack. It was a simple unit, a slim backpack with fat plastic mushrooms on each corner sprouting cold gas nozzles that could jet him about freely over a range of several kilometers.

As he was strapping it on, a new set of icons appeared in his virtual vision. He made sure the diagnostic software ran a full check before his virtual hand began to manipulate the joystick. Now he was actually out here, with so many of his crewmates watching over his shoulder, it was tempting to twist the throttle and scoot over to the barrier right away. But he forced himself to get through the physical test routine, burping all the cold gas nozzles, confirming their thrust. Only when his little practice flight around the shuttle was complete did he say, “Ready for crossing.”

“You look good from here,” Oscar said. “Telemetry at one hundred percent. Clear to proceed.”

That familiar voice, with its perpetual tone of dry amusement, was one Mac found absurdly reassuring. In this awesomely bizarre situation it was a welcome touch of normality, the same voice that had led him out onto a dozen new worlds. Virtual fingers tilted the joystick forward, and the maneuvering pack nozzles snorted nitrogen, moving him out away from the shuttle. As far as he could see in the standard visual spectrum he was heading into total darkness; the barrier could be a couple of centimeters in front of him, or fifty light-years. His radar said ninety-three meters. He bumped the speed up to a couple of meters per second, then told his e-butler to switch on the craft’s spotlights. His space suit glowed a dusky pewter as the beams followed him. Up ahead he was sure he could see the triple circles where they were striking the barrier; they formed a royal-blue patch; the effect was almost as if someone was rendering a cartoon shimmer on the surface.

Mac activated the infrared function in his retinal inserts. Half of the universe turned a lambent carmine. Even though he could see the barrier, there was still no way to judge physical distance. The radar put him forty meters out. He began to reduce his closing speed, and the spotlights were showing up as circles with a slightly greenish tint. But he could finally see his own shadow projected onto the flat wall ahead.

He came to a halt a meter away, and just floated there for a moment. The biomonitor showed him his racing heartbeat, and he could hear the adrenaline buzz in his ears. He started to raise his arm, fingers extending to touch the enigmatic surface, then paused. He hadn’t received permission, but if he checked before doing anything the EVA would take all day. The reason he’d been chosen was because of his contact experience. Not in this situation, he told himself evilly, and managed a small grin. His heart rate had slowed a little now, so he completed the motion. His fingers touched the surface.

For one twisted-up moment he imagined the barrier vanishing like a soap bubble, punctured by his ignorant touch. But it didn’t, and he chuckled slightly at the notion. By now he was drifting away, propelled by the slight contact; so he moved the joystick forward, and put his hand out again. This time the maneuvering pack held him in place.

“Okay, I’m touching it. No apparent reaction. Seems like ordinary solid matter, there’s none of that slight surface instability you get on our force fields.”

“Understood, Mac,” Oscar said. “We were all waiting for some demonic claw to come through and drag you in.”

“Hey, thanks for that.”

“My pleasure. You feel like applying some sensors for us?”

“Will do.” He reached down to the equipment clipped on his belt. One by one, he stuck sensor pads against the barrier, taking measurements. He had to hold each one in place. The high-temperature epoxy was no use at all. When he squeezed it out of the tube, it simply rebounded off the barrier like water splashing off Teflon. “We didn’t think that would work,” Oscar said. “There aren’t any atoms there for it to adhere to. Worth a try, though.”

“Sure, but I’m using up gas at quite a rate keeping these sensors applied.”

“Copy that. Please apply the meson rate detector.”

“Okay.” He settled the fat little cylinder against the surface. Once again that notion of there being something on the other side was strong in his mind. He was scratching away on the barrier like some mouse behind the baseboard, and the house cat was listening intently, unseen, just the thickness of an electron away. Irrational, he kept telling himself. But surely something knows we’re here? He twisted his head to one side until he could see the starfield. For a moment he was upright, pressed against a wall, with the night sky behind him, the ground lost beneath his feet. The vertical horizon between red and black was perfectly straight and clear. When he looked down, that same horizon was below his boots. A human mind simply couldn’t grasp the size of the thing. Whoever established this incredible artifact must have had a phenomenally compelling reason.

Defense? Confinement? The sweepstake on board was running eighty/twenty. Both implied aggression somewhere; again on a scale beyond human comprehension.

“You all right there, Mac?” Oscar asked.

He realized his heart was thudding again, and took a couple of deep breaths. “Sure, no problem. What’s next?”

“Exotic waveform detector. Tunde wants to know exactly where the infrared emission originates. That should help define the barrier interface with spacetime. “

“Sure.”

After forty minutes he placed the last sensor back on his belt, and jetted back to the shuttle. The physicists were pleased with the results; they had moved another step toward understanding the nature of the barrier. But as to how it was generated, and the why of it, they hadn’t got a clue.

Two days after Mac’s EVA, the morning departmental heads meeting decided that information gathering had progressed about as far as it could from a static observation point. Wilson was concerned that they weren’t making enough progress in other directions.

“We were sent here to establish the reason why the barrier was erected,” he told them somewhat formally after they’d had the usual roundup of results from the previous day. “Tunde, I know your teams are doing a great job on the characteristics of the barrier, but we need more than that. Now you’re identifying its quantum structure, is there any way we can reformat the hyperdrive to get us past?”

“No,” Tunde said. “In fact, I don’t think there is a way through. We might not be able to generate a barrier like this for ourselves, but we do understand enough about its properties to just about rule out any kind of circumvention through hyperspace. A wormhole simply cannot be opened through it.”

“What about forcing our way in?” Oscar asked. “Can we break through in real space?”

“Again, no. Absolutely not. Even if you could generate collapsed-state energy levels and apply them directly against the barrier, it wouldn’t have any effect. It’s not physical. It can’t be damaged or stressed in the way solid matter can. One day we might be able to manipulate quantum fields in such a way to destabilize a section, but that won’t be for a long time. To use a very bad pun, we haven’t even scratched the surface.”

“Then we must look for clues elsewhere,” Wilson said. “Admittedly, given the size we’re dealing with here, that can only be the most perfunctory search, but it must be done. We’re back to our original two theories: offensive or defensive. If the barrier is defensive, there may be signs of the attacking force left somewhere outside.”

“Signs, or the whole armada?” Oscar asked lightly.

“If they were here, they’d be investigating us by now,” said Antonia Clarke, the engineering chief. “We’ve created enough disturbance since we’ve arrived. Even a few perfunctory warning satellites scattered around the barrier would have found us.”

“Maybe,” Tunde said. “But we certainly haven’t located any active observation equipment. And it is a long time since the barrier went up. The threat might not exist anymore.”

“It’s only long on a human scale,” Oscar said.

“All right.” Wilson held up his hands to prevent any full-scale argument erupting. “If the attacking force or entity is still here, we need to find it—preferably without it seeing us, which I admit is a long shot; however, we have to try. If they’ve gone, then they might have left something behind. And if the barrier was put up for the opposite reason—to confine the star and its inhabitants—then we have an even greater chance of finding the builders. Therefore, I have decided we’ll take the Second Chance on a complete circumnavigation of the equator. We’ll stand off an AU and use the hyperdrive at low speed. If we take a week, the hysradar will be able to complete a very accurate scan of the surrounding space. Following that, and taking the worst-case scenario that we find nothing, we’ll fly to both poles and examine them. If after that we still draw a blank we’ll review the situation then.”

“Captain,” Tunde said. “I’d like to raise the issue of communication.”

“With whom?”

“Both our scenarios imply that there is some kind of sentient life to be found inside the barrier. Now that we’re this close it may be possible to attract their attention, possibly even initiate a dialogue.”

“How? I thought you said the barrier was impervious.”

“It is to everything except gravity.” He indicated the chief engineer. “I’ve discussed this with Antonia. It shouldn’t be too difficult to modify the energy configuration of the hyperdrive to create simple gravity waves. If the civilization inside has a working gravity detector, they should be able to pick it up.”

The notion surprised Wilson; given the analysis he’d been getting from the science teams since they’d arrived, he’d dismissed the notion of any attempted contact a long time ago. “How difficult would the adaptations be? I will not authorize taking the hyperdrive off-line at any time.”

“It’s a matter of programming,” Antonia said. “That’s all. Standard gravity wave emission would be a simple modification of the hysradar function. The ship’s RI can give us a reformatted routine within a couple of hours.”

“Okay then, you can go ahead with the program. If the circumnavigation flight doesn’t produce any results, we’ll certainly try it. Good idea, both of you.”

It was the second day of their week-long flight around the equator when the hysradar finally found something of interest. The first scan returns came back just after midnight, ship’s time. Oscar was in command on the bridge; he ordered the Second Chance back into normal space, and put a call in to the captain’s cabin.

By the time Wilson arrived, pulling on his jacket and shaking his head to rid himself of sleep, the starship’s main sensors were fully deployed. A picture was building up on the bridge portals. He squinted at it, not quite believing what he was seeing. The radar graphic of neon-green grid lines was the most detailed, showing a perfect hemisphere rising out of the barrier. Its base was twenty-five thousand kilometers in diameter.

Tunde Sutton and Bruno Seymore arrived on the bridge. Both of them stood behind Wilson, staring in perplexity. “Wow,” Bruno muttered. “Talk about a fly in amber.”

“Okay,” Wilson went over and sat behind his console. “What am I looking at? Is that a planet?”

“No, sir,” Russell said, the screens on his console were shimmering with light as he ran the incoming data through analysis routines. “I’d say it’s some kind of extension of the barrier itself. Surface is uniformly smooth, just like the barrier, and it is a perfect hemisphere as well. It has an extremely strong magnetic field, at least an order of magnitude above a standard planetary field; and it’s fluctuating wildly, almost as if it’s spinning. There’s no gravity field, as such … sensors are picking up gravity wave emissions, though. They’re regular, pulses of some kind. Not synchronized with the magnetic shift, though. Very odd.”

At that, Wilson turned to face Tunde who was just sitting down behind his own console. The astrophysicist gave him a confused frown.

“A signal?” Wilson asked.

“I don’t know.”

“The pulse sequence hasn’t varied,” Russell said. “If it’s a signal it’s not saying much.”

“Can you see where they’re coming from?”

“They seem to be from within the hemisphere, although the actual origin point appears to be moving around in there.”

“Okay, anything else?”

“There’s no infrared emission.” He nodded at the large portal. It was showing the barrier’s blank surface in bright carmine. A large circle in the center of the image was black, as if a hole had been cut through. “Wait! There’s something at the top.” Russell’s voice rose in pitch as he interpreted the raw data. “The apex isn’t curved, it’s flat, or … maybe some kind of crater. An opening! There’s an opening there.”

“You’re right,” Bruno called out; there was a wild grin on his face. “Slight photon emission. There’s light shining out, wavelength just outside ultraviolet. It’s not infrared, not like the rest of the barrier. That could be the way in!”

Wilson and Oscar exchanged a shocked glance. “Calm down,” Wilson said. “I want realities not speculation at this point. Get me a decent image from the main telescope. Oscar, what’s our current stand-off distance?”

“A hundred thousand kilometers above the barrier; seventy thousand from the hemisphere.”

“Good enough.”

“Focusing now,” Bruno announced.

The bridge portal showed a fast expanding ring of red flashing outward. Then it was completely black. “Here it comes,” Bruno said triumphantly. A speck of luminescence getting bigger rapidly, jumping up to a crescent of lavender light that shivered in the middle of the portal.

“Size?” Wilson asked.

“The hole is seventeen kilometers across.”

“This wavelength doesn’t match Dyson Alpha’s known spectrum,” Tunde said. “That’s not the star shining out.”

Wilson couldn’t take his gaze off the sliver of light. “Any local activity that would indicate spacecraft or sensors?”

“No, sir.”

“I don’t suppose you know if that hole was open when we emerged from the wormhole?”

“We know the apex was flat, but the hysradar return doesn’t tell us if it was open.”

“Very well, recommendations?”

“Send a probe in,” Russell said immediately.

“Eventually, yes,” Tunde said. “But we’ll need to observe it for a while first.”

“While we’re doing that we could send a satellite on a flyby above the opening,” Oscar said. “Keep it at our current standoff distance, and take a look directly down inside. Our position gives us a lousy angle of view.”

Wilson was mildly surprised at the suggestion. He’d expected Oscar to be more cautious, although a satellite flyby was reasonable enough. If anything was in there, they must surely be aware of the Second Chance. “Go ahead.”

“I’ll start the prep sequence.” Oscar went over to the console Anna normally used, and called up the launch sequence.

“In the meantime,” Wilson said dryly, “does anyone have any ideas about what this thing is?”

Jean Douvoir chuckled softly. “Fortress of Darkness, where the evil lord hangs out.”

“Thanks. Anyone else?”

“I have a possibility,” Bruno said. He was close to blushing as the bridge crew all looked at him. “Well, it’s active, right? Something inside is generating gravity waves, and magnetic fields; and that’s just what we can detect. It’s also absolutely right on the equator; and as near as our sensors can tell, it’s perfectly aligned with the plane of the ecliptic. Though I’m not sure how relevant that is …” He glanced around, unnerved by the attention. “I just thought it might be a generator, that’s all, where the whole barrier is being produced from, or at least this area of it.”

Wilson looked at Tunde and raised an eyebrow in query.

“Gets my vote,” Tunde said. “Until something else comes along to disprove it.” He gave Bruno a thumbs-up. “Smart.”

Oscar launched the Moore-class satellite twenty minutes later. Its ion drive accelerated it away from the big starship, sending it curving over the apex of the dark hemisphere. Nearly every screen on board relayed the image from its visual spectrum cameras. The violet glow didn’t reveal much; certainly there was nothing lurking just inside. A very detailed analysis program picked up a slight but regular fluctuation to the output intensity. It didn’t match the oscillations of either the gravity waves or magnetic field.

Four hours after leaving Second Chance, the satellite was directly above the opening. Even on the highest magnification it could see nothing but the homogeneous dark blue glow, as if the hemisphere contained nothing but a fluorescent fog. Twenty minutes later, when half of the crew had lost interest, the light vanished, leaving the opening completely dark. Eighteen minutes later it reappeared.

Intensive slow-motion replays coupled with image enhancing programs showed that something had moved across the opening, cutting off the light.

“Your evil lord just blinked,” Oscar told Jean.

After three days of observation they knew the light was blocked on average every seven and a quarter hours, though this could vary by up to eight minutes. The eclipse duration was more constant, lasting a fraction over eighteen minutes, except once when it had gone on for nearly thirty-five.

As nothing had come out of the hole in all that time, Wilson finally authorized a close observation. A larger Galileo-class satellite left its launch bay on the Second Chance, equipped with a more expansive sensor suite than the Moore. Anna slowed its approach as it closed in on the hole, keeping it twenty kilometers above the hemisphere’s perfectly black surface. Telemetry showed her the little craft was taking a beating on the magnetic and electromagnetic wave fronts; even with circuitry hardened to withstand the kind of treacherous energy environment found around the most active gas giants she had to watch out for overloads and temporary glitches. Interference caused a lot of static within the datastream link back to the starship, resulting in poor imagery and broken instrument readings.

Everyone on board the starship watched as the hole slowly slipped into view, its gentle lavender radiance appearing like the dawn of a weak sun. It was an illusion that was broken soon enough as the satellite crept closer; the illuminated hole was small by any standards. Then the satellite passed over the rim, slowing to a relative halt. The magnetic flux in tandem with the gravity waves were strong enough to induce a detectable wobble, as if the satellite was floating on a sea. Anna did her best to counter the tiny vibrations, allowing the sensors to peer down carefully.

Four hundred kilometers below the hole, a curved lattice of immense dark strands were gliding slowly across the blue glow that came from deeper inside. As the satellite focused on the strands it became clear that the lattice was anything but a uniform hexagonal honeycomb. The interstices ranged from simple triangles up to twelve-sided grids with some of the strands curving them into near-ellipsoid geometries. The holes were the size of small countries, with strands up to a couple of hundred kilometers wide. One thing was obvious from the curvature and ponderous motion: the lattice was a sphere.

A thousand kilometers beneath it, a second lattice sphere was visible, also composed of dark strands, though this one had a more regular geography, mostly comprised of triangles and pentagons. It, too, was rotating, but in a completely different direction to the outer layer. And below that was a third lattice grid, with wider spacings. Its continent-long strands glowed a strong indigo, helping to create the pervasive glow. Its radiance was complemented to a large degree by streaks of amethyst light that came from underneath it, the indicators of a fourth lattice sphere spinning somewhere in the deeps. Exactly where was unclear; the third lattice appeared to be surrounded by some kind of lambent vapor.

“Son of a bitch,” Wilson whispered. Out of all the things he’d expected to see within the Dark Fortress, a kinetic sculpture bigger than planets was not high on the list. The scale of the barrier was already hammering at his beleaguered human senses. But that at least had been a projection, energy manipulated and folded on a stellar scale, while these lattice spheres looked resolutely solid. This was matter manipulated in quantities incomprehensible to Commonwealth technology. Yet the barrier creators had produced something that from a simple visual viewpoint was almost laughably mechanical, in the truest sense of the word. He wouldn’t be at all surprised now if they were to find gearboxes with cogwheels the size of moons driving the entire edifice. “Are those strands really solid?” he asked.

“I can’t tell,” Anna said. “The electromagnetic environment in there is playing hell with the satellite’s radar.”

“That much matter would coalesce under its own gravity,” Bruno said. “They have to be energy forms.”

“Not so,” Russell immediately claimed. “There’s nothing like a terrestrial planet mass in there. And their spin rates will keep them inflated.”

“Nonsense, they’d have to be metallic hydrogen to maintain their structural integrity under these conditions.”

“So? It’s metallic hydrogen. Apart from those glowing ones, I’d say they were exotic matter. There’s virtually no infrared emission coming from in there.”

“Is the outer shell complete?” Oscar asked. “I mean, is there a corresponding hemisphere on the inside of the barrier, or is this just some giant bearing groove for those lattice spheres?”

“Good question,” Tunde said. “Anna, can you focus the satellite telescope through those grids?”

“No, sir, no way,” she exclaimed. “That haze effect around the third sphere is like looking into a gas-giant cloudscape, and it gets thicker below it.”

“Like oil,” Oscar muttered. “It lubricates the gaps between the spheres.” He realized Tunde was looking at him and smiled an apology. “Just a thought.”

“Anna,” Wilson asked. “Will the satellite survive in there?”

She let out a long breath as she stared at the main image on the twin portals. “I don’t see why not, certainly as far down as the first lattice sphere, anyway. The sensor returns we’ve got show clear space that far in.”

“Okay then,” Wilson said slowly as a sense of real enthusiasm grew inside him. “Let’s do it.”

Anna launched a second Galileo-class satellite, flying it to the entrance hole at the top of what the crew now all called the Dark Fortress. Once it arrived, she sent the first satellite inside, using the second as a relay. As it descended toward the outermost lattice sphere, the energy surges around the satellite picked up noticeably. Eventually, Anna stopped trying to compensate. At that rate she would run out of fuel in a matter of hours. So she let the little craft wobble its way forward, blurring the visual sensor pictures. Every eighty kilometers or so she would stabilize it again, and run a quick check before allowing the vibrations to build up. There was nothing to see en route, the gap between the outer shell and the first grid sphere was empty, with the satellite sensors recording it as a hard vacuum.

When it was halfway there, one of the sphere’s massive struts slid underneath the hole, eclipsing the light pouring up from the inner lattice spheres. By now the crew were successfully recording the geography of the first lattice, and were making good progress charting the second. There seemed to be no logic behind the pattern. But predicting the times of the eclipses was now straightforward.

As the satellite grew nearer to the first lattice sphere, the radar return began to improve. “That’s odd,” Anna remarked as she stabilized the satellite once again.

“Problem?” Tunde asked.

“I’m using parallax to confirm the distance to the strut we’re heading for, but there’s a discrepancy between that and the radar return. Radar places it three klicks closer.”

“Maybe that optical haze effect is throwing the parallax reading?”

She shook her head. “Clear view. There is no haze around these struts.”

The discrepancy began to rise as the satellite closed in. Then they examined the magnetic flux around the strut, seeing the force lines warp like cyclone clouds around the surface.

After a long and heated conference with the rest of the physics team, Tunde said, “Whatever else it is, the outer lattice sphere has electro-repulsive properties. The radar pulses aren’t actually reaching the surface itself.”

“Can we take the satellite in and attempt a landing?” Wilson asked.

“I wouldn’t recommend it. That repulsion force would play havoc with the electronics. We’ll have to study it from a distance.”

The Galileo satellite spent two days hovering thirty kilometers above the first lattice sphere as it rotated slowly underneath. All of its sensors’ booms were fully extended, gathering up as much information as possible. Back on the starship, the physics team worked with the engineers to try to design a simple probe that they could drop onto one of the struts. Its circuitry was all optronic, using a laser for communication; sensors were extremely limited. But even studying its flight path as it neared a strut would tell them something.

Wilson, keen to expand the exploration of the Dark Fortress, authorized its deployment. A further two Galileo-class satellites were launched. Anna and Jean Douvoir had assembled a small team of controllers drawn from the pilot-qualified on board to help remote-fly the probes. Together, they steered the twin satellites through the entrance hole, and took them down toward the first lattice sphere. Anna maneuvered the lead one into the center of a pentagonal-shaped grid, and while Jean held the original satellite fifty kilometers above as a communications booster, she fired its ion thrusters, flying it straight in toward the second lattice sphere. As it passed through the level of the struts, electronic systems suffered repeated crashes. Thankfully the multiple redundancy architecture managed to keep the primary components on-line the whole time, constantly rebooting the failed units. It released the probe and carried on.

Once it fell below the outermost lattice sphere the Galileo returned to full functionality. Heartened by that, Anna got another of her team to send the second satellite through. With both of them clear and operational, she took them in deeper still.

The probe, meanwhile, drifted steadily toward its target strut. Information zipped back along the laser link, revealing the swirling energy environment around the vast mass. Contact was lost a couple of minutes before impact. The physics team wrote that down to the repulsion force affecting the probe’s battery.

Anna’s team piloted the two Galileo satellites in toward the second lattice sphere. As they receded from the first, so the magnetic and electromagnetic squalls shrank away. It began to look as though the second lattice sphere was inert. With one satellite holding back, poised halfway between the two, Anna lowered hers in toward the edge of a strut making up a large pentagon shape. Radar return was precise, there was no magnetic field, no electromagnetic emission, the infrared signature was minute.

“Something’s slowing it,” Anna reported. The satellite’s velocity was dropping at an increasing rate, as though it were encountering some kind of atmosphere. Molecular sensors stubbornly continued to report a vacuum outside.

Anna managed to get it to within seventy kilometers of a strut surface before it came to a complete halt. She had to fire the main thrusters at full strength simply to keep it there. Without that, the satellite would have reversed its trajectory. “Something’s pushing it away,” she told the physics team.

After three days of attempted approaches at varying velocities, another Galileo satellite arrived to assist, equipped with a simple rail launcher to shoot inert slugs of different elements. It began firing. Every slug, no matter what its component atoms, slowed to a halt before reaching the strut, then began to return, picking up speed. After making both passive and active sensor sweeps of the second lattice sphere, the physics team came to their excited conclusion: “Negative mass matter,” Tunde announced at the next departmental heads meeting. “Its gravitational force is the opposite of our own, therefore anything made out of ordinary matter will always be repelled.”

The satellites were able to push through the center of each hole in the negative mass lattice where the inverted gravity was at its weakest. Anna moved one down to the next level, dipping it into the shoal of tiny pale scintillations that swirled across the gulf between the second and third lattice spheres. Its sensors had trouble tracking the dense will-o’-the-wisps, but eventually the physicists determined it was a tenuous cold plasma, aggravated by the emissions of the exotic matter below, and confined to the gulf by the negative mass above.

Analyzing the exotic matter proved even more difficult than with the previous two lattice spheres. They had to launch a whole squadron of large Armstrong-class satellites with their powerful and comprehensive sensor suites. It took a further two weeks before they’d charted the energy currents seething like photonic tempests in the plasma between the two exotic matter spheres. After that, they were able to pilot a satellite through the fourth lattice sphere.

When the first Armstrong satellite passed through it found no further spheres. Instead, the space in the middle, measuring sixteen thousand kilometers in diameter, housed a series of concentric rings, all of them aligned with the plane of the barrier outside. The outermost, thirteen thousand kilometers across, the crew immediately named the daisy chain. It was a sequence of lenticular disks linked together by a black cable. Next in was a simple ring of green matter, so smooth and uniform it was impossible to tell if it was rotating. Then a braided ring whose thick silver strands moved sinuously around each other like oiled serpents. One of pure scarlet light. More solid loops. Globes, hundreds of thousands of them, strung together in a dense necklace that the bridge officers likened to a strand of alien DNA, twisting around each other as they rotated around the center. Sparks: a wide band of emerald and amber lightpoints trailing cometry tails as they orbited in both directions, though never colliding. There was one of water, or some clear liquid, with a surface beset by waves. Right in the center was emptiness, a little patch of darkness into which light fell.

It was God’s own orrery.

Talk in the starship’s canteen was that the lattice spheres powered the rings, or vice versa. Either way, they were all convinced now that the Dark Fortress was the barrier generator.

One by one, the satellites were ordered down toward the rings. One by one they lost contact with the Second Chance. The center of the Dark Fortress was an energistic maelstrom. Human technology could not survive within it. Watching the displays that showed tides of quantum distortions raging chaotically around the wounded satellites, some of the physics team claimed the rings didn’t—couldn’t—even exist in normal spacetime.

What everybody on board wanted to know was if there was a corresponding opening on the other side of the Dark Fortress.

“There’s no way we can get anything across the center and past the rings,” Tunde said. “If we’re going to try this, we’ll have to program a satellite to fly around in the gulf between the outer shell and the first lattice sphere. It’ll have to operate in autonomous mode, we don’t have enough satellites to act as a relay chain over that distance.”

“It’s a waste of time,” Oscar said. “I don’t believe there’s a hole there. There’d be no damn point to the whole barrier if there was.”

“I don’t think there is either,” Wilson said. “But you know we have to look. Anna, program a Galileo for the assignment.”

The flight took three days. When the Galileo reemerged into communications range, its sensor logs showed the shell opposite the hole was continuous. It had searched over twenty thousand square kilometers. Wilson ordered it to be refueled, and sent it out again. After seven flights, it had scanned the entire hemisphere on the other side of the barrier. There was no hole, no passage through to the imprisoned star.

Three months after they discovered the Dark Fortress, Wilson called Oscar and Tunde to his cabin for a mission conference. “I need to know if we’re going to learn anything more from the Dark Fortress,” he said to Tunde.

“Are you joking?” the surprised physicist asked. “There is more exotic physics in there than the human race has discovered since an apple fell on Newton’s head.”

“I’m sure there is. But now we have the major components identified, how much can you and your team realistically add to that? I mean, we don’t even know if this really does generate the barrier.”

“It’s a logical conclusion.”

“Admittedly, yes. But can you prove it? More importantly, can you prove it with the sensors and instruments we have available on board?”

Tunde looked defiant for a moment, but eventually nodded reluctantly. “No. Not a chance, really. As you say, we can map what’s there. But determining function and interconnectivity … On this scale, it’s the kind of project which would absorb every living theorist for the next two centuries. We need a bigger ship; in fact, we need to establish an outpost the size of the High Angel, and with its manufacturing capacity. The Commonwealth will have to open a chain of wormholes out here, that’s the only way we can apply the kind of resources we need to crack this.”

“It’s not going to happen,” Oscar said. “Oh, I agree, it should. But from a political point of view, all you’ve got here is the mother of all esoteric physics problems. That doesn’t gain you the kind of funding you’re talking about.”

“Nigel Sheldon will understand,” Tunde said.

“Yes, he will,” Wilson said. “More than anybody, he made this flight possible. But even he can’t carry the entire Commonwealth Senate, not for that kind of financial commitment. If we’d found anything out here, anything that indicated why the barrier was established, any hint of a current threat to the Commonwealth, then we might earn ourselves a couple of return missions at the very least. But it’s an enigma. And we’ve lived with enigmas for a long time now. We’re shocked and excited by them at first, then we just learn to live with them. Eventually, we don’t even question them anymore. Look at the Silfen. Why don’t electronics work on their worlds? How the hell do they really travel between star systems? Our popular myth has it there are forest paths between worlds. That’s what the more whimsical members of our race believe. More practical people believe they spread themselves across the galaxy with arkships millennia ago. It doesn’t matter, because we live with it, it doesn’t affect us. Now as far as we can determine, the barrier, for all its grandeur, isn’t going to affect us either. There are no alien battle fleets waiting out here to blow Earth to pieces and steal our gold and our women. This is just one more incomprehensible relic that will take us five hundred years to understand. One day, after that, you and I will be standing here and laughing at how puzzled we once were.”

“You’re taking us home, aren’t you?” Tunde realized.

“Not immediately. But we’ve certainly devoted enough time to the Dark Fortress. Unless either of you have a viable alternative, I’m going to continue with our flight around the barrier. After that, if there’s nothing else to be found, we’ll examine the poles as originally planned. We might follow up with a fast examination of Dyson Beta. I’d like to confirm that it is the same before we head for home.”

“I’ll concur with that,” Oscar said. “Team leaders are getting asked how much longer the investigation is going to last. Nobody has actually complained yet, but I’d say it’s time to move on.”

They both looked at Tunde.

“All right,” he said. “We do have enough data to keep the universities busy for a decade. But I hope to God you’re wrong about the next stage of the project. Understanding the technology in the Dark Fortress would elevate our species to unbelievable heights. We could become transgalactic, for heaven’s sake; there really would be no limits to what we could achieve.”

Anna and her little team of controllers recalled the satellites, carefully threading them back through the moving maze that was the four lattice spheres. Out of the thirty-seven they’d deployed inside the Dark Fortress, nine had been lost, either in the center or due to communications failure. When the remainder were back in their hangar cradles, Tu Lee sent the Second Chance back into hyperspace at a speed that would complete the circuit of the barrier in another five days.

The alarm brought Wilson struggling out of a deep comfortable sleep. He floundered around on the cot for a second, trying to shield his eyes from the cabin lights that had switched on automatically. Anna groaned, squinting and blinking.

“What the fuck—” she grunted.

“The bridge has declared an emergency,” Wilson’s e-butler told him.

“Son of a bitch!” He rolled off the cot and headed straight for the door. His virtual vision was flashing up dozens of icons. It was difficult to focus on them and the corridor he was half running down. Fortunately, the starship’s designers had stuck with maritime tradition and kept the captain’s quarters close to the bridge.

The status icons didn’t indicate any physical damage to the superstructure, and the hyperdrive was functioning normally. Defense was equally reassuring. No immediate danger, then. Wilson forced himself to relax as the bridge door slid open for him. That was when he started to review the sensor icons. The hysradar was breaking through the barrier.

“Shit!”

The bridge’s small night shift crew glanced around at his exclamation.

“It started a couple of minutes ago,” Oscar said as he rose from the command console chair. “I ordered a halt to our flight.”

Wilson glanced at the forward portals as he sat down in the command chair. “Are we still in the wormhole?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay, Tu Lee, plot a course directly out of here. Implement it the second I tell you.”

“Aye, sir.”

Both portals were showing the hysradar scan of the barrier surface. It seemed to be fluctuating, bowing inward as if it was being bombarded by projectiles. Then Wilson acknowledged the scale; if objects were hitting it, they’d be the size of gas giants. The hostile force! The reason the barrier was established. “Astrophysics, do we know what’s causing that?”

“No, sir,” Bruno said cheerfully. “Not a clue.”

“Is there anything else out here? A ship? Some weapons system which could be causing that?”

“Nothing,” Sandy Lanier reported from the sensor console. “The hysradar scan is clean for a thousand AUs this side of the barrier.”

Wilson frowned at the bridge portals. The fluctuations were growing larger. And they weren’t going to find out why sitting out here peering over the parapet. Decision time.

“Hyperdrive, take us in to one million kilometers of the barrier,” Wilson ordered. “Defense, force fields on. Let’s see what’s happening.”

The rest of the bridge day shift arrived, sitting at the consoles that had been left unmanned, or standing behind the night shift. The atmosphere of nerves and genuine excitement was the same as Wilson remembered from the Eagle II’s cabin as they came in to land. He rubbed his hand slightly self-consciously over his creased white T-shirt before brushing his hair off his brow; the chair’s leather was already sticking to his bare legs below his sleep shorts. For a moment he considered hurrying off to change. It was hardly the most dignified image for history (and the onboard sensors were definitely recording), but then half the bridge crew was dressed the same. Ah, what the hell …

“One million kilometers, sir,” Sandy Lanier reported.

“Take us out of hyperspace.”

One of the portals switched to an image of pure aquamarine-blue. Dark streaks blossomed from the center, and peeled open. This time they didn’t have to switch the sensors to infrared to see the barrier.

“My God,” Tunde said hoarsely. “It’s becoming transparent.”

Dyson Alpha was wavering in and out of visibility thirty AUs ahead of them, only marginally brighter than the rest of the stars behind. The fluctuations indicated by the hysradar scan were inaccurate; the barrier wasn’t moving in any physical dimension, it was losing cohesion.

“Sensors, Defense, is there anything shooting at it?” Wilson asked desperately.

“No, sir. No energy of any kind. Local quantum state is also stable as far as we can tell. The barrier is … oh, wow! It’s gone! Hysradar scans are clear. The fucker’s vanished.”

Wilson stared at the two portals. The one with the gravitonic scan was empty. A second later, when the light reached them, Dyson Alpha burned steadily at the center of a colossal blank circle.

We’re still seeing the other side of the barrier, he realized, it’s going to take the light from the stars beyond over four hours to travel thirty AUs.

“Full passive sensor sweep,” Wilson ordered. “Show me what’s in there.”

“This can’t be coincidence,” Oscar said; he sounded shocked, even a little frightened. “It’s been there for over a thousand years, and then it vanishes just as we come along? No way. No goddamn way. Something knows we’re here.”

The bridge crew were looking around anxiously, seeking reassurance from one another. Wilson had been thinking along similar lines himself; quite a loud voice in his head was urging him to run. And don’t look back. The starfield was beginning to reappear around the edges of the barrier as light swept in toward the Second Chance. It gave the rather unfortunate impression of a giant mantrap opening its jaws.

Wilson turned to Tunde. “What’s the Dark Fortress doing?”

The physics section went into a fevered huddle over their consoles, running analysis routines over the hysradar scans. Wilson watched the results coming through on one of his desk screens, not that he could understand the details, but the overall impression was easy enough.

“There’s still something there,” Tunde said. “Hysradar scan shows it’s smaller than before. We’re probably picking up the outer lattice sphere. Wait—yes, it’s rotating. The shell has gone. And there’s a very strange quantum fluctuation signature inside it. That wasn’t there before.”

“A wormhole?” Wilson asked.

“No. I don’t recognize it at all.”

“Threat assessment?”

Tunde gave him a slightly irked look. “Nothing obvious. I’ll get back to you on that one.”

A picture of Dyson Alpha’s planetary system was building up on one of the bridge portals. The two gas giants were both smaller than Jupiter, orbiting at four and a half AUs and seventeen AUs from their star. The largest of the three solid planets had a diameter of fourteen thousand kilometers and orbited one point two AUs out from the sun. The remaining two were both smaller, and in mildly ecliptic orbits a lot farther out. They called the innermost planet Alpha Major and focused the starship’s main sensor suite on it.

“My God,” Sandy Lanier said. “Will you look at those readings.”

Alpha Major’s visual spectrum showed water on a scale that indicated oceans, and an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. It was also a strong source of neutrinos. “A very heavy level of fusion activity,” Russell commented. “I’d say total power generation exceeds our Big15 worlds combined.”

“What the hell uses that much power?” Oscar muttered.

A measurable percentage of it, they discovered, was pumped into communications; throughout the electromagnetic spectrum the planet was shining like a small nova. The starship’s RI began recording the multitude of overlapping signals, but without a key none of its decryption algorithms were of any use.

The greatest fusion usage was the most obvious to see. Space above Alpha Major was thick with activity. Slender brilliant threads of fusion drives created their own ring nebula, extending from the upper atmosphere out to a million kilometers. Fleets of ships were accelerating at three or four gees away from the planet, slashing long scars of plasma across the void before finally cutting their engines to coast to destinations across the star system. Hundreds more were on their approach, firing their engines to decelerate into the perpetual swarm circling the planet.

Over fifty moonlets were in orbit two hundred thousand kilometers out, with knots of small fusion flames wrapped around them as ships came and went. They must have been captured asteroids, their orbit and spacing was too regular to occur naturally. Each one was surrounded by massive industrial stations.

“Don’t they care about their environment?” Antonia asked. “It can’t be safe having fusion ships flying that close to a habitable planet.”

“Those are big ships,” Anna said. “At least the same size as the Second Chance, some are a lot bigger. And their exhaust is helium, they’re probably using boron fusion.”

“Expensive,” Antonia muttered.

“Depends on your technology level,” Oscar said. “This is not a primitive civilization.”

“Where are the ships going?” Wilson asked.

The Second Chance began to expand its observation. They found an astonishing level of technological activity on and around every planet. The two outer solid planets, though cold and airless, were dotted by vast force field domes, artificial habitats whose vegetation matched the spectrum to be found on the landmasses of Alpha Major. Fusion globe suns illuminated each one. Spacecraft were almost as numerous as above Alpha Major, wrapping the worlds in a perpetual flexing toroid of blazing light. They also had dozens of industrialized moonlets.

Out among the gas giants, the pattern was repeated. Every large moon was home to the habitat force field domes, and surrounded by ships and industrialized moonlets. The thin rings orbiting the gas giants played host to thousands of stations that latched on to the rocky particles, slowly digesting them. As for the dozens of outermost moons—rocks that were essentially large asteroids—force field habitats had engulfed them completely. Tightly whorled contortions in the magnetosphere revealed colossal structures in low equatorial orbit. When the Second Chance’s sensors tracked them, they found they were trailing cables or pipes down into the upper cloud bands.

As the details appeared on the bridge portal they made Wilson nostalgic for the future he’d thought he was pioneering back in 2050, the never-happened golden era of humanity’s High Frontier. This was the kind of intersystem society any technological civilization would eventually build if it was somehow cut off from the stars.

Why would it be cut off, though?

Three hours after the barrier had vanished, Sandy turned the sensor console over to Anna, though she hung around for a couple of hours to see what developed.

One of the secondary telescopes was watching the turmoil that was space around Alpha Major. “Looks like some ships are heading outsystem,” Anna said. Eleven streaks of fusion plasma were visible beyond the distance when most of the ships had powered down to coast-flight mode. “Accelerating at five gees, and have been for three hours now. That’s one hell of a velocity they’re hitting. I hope they’ve got force field protection. A small molecule can seriously ruin your day at that speed.”

“I’m tracking several similar flights from both gas giants,” Jean Douvoir said.

“Any coming our way?” Wilson asked.

“Not really, sir. Four are on an interception course for the Dark Fortress. One of the others will pass within eight AUs.”

“Safe enough, but keep tracking it. If it alters course in our direction I want to know about it.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Tunde, do you think they’re capable of detecting our hysradar scans?”

“I’d say they have the technology to detect quantum wave fluctuations, which might give them an indirect clue we were here. But we haven’t detected any hysradar emissions from inside the star system, so they probably haven’t got a direct detector. Why would you build a hysradar if you’re confined inside a barrier thirty AUs across?”

“Do they have the technology to build the barrier?” Wilson asked sharply.

Tunde grimaced, reluctant to give an opinion. “I’d say not. Judging from what we’ve seen, I’d put them on a par with us, except that they don’t have wormholes. The Dark Fortress is orders of magnitude above anything we’re capable of.”

“That implies the barrier was put up by an outside agency.”

“It’s looking that way, yes.”

“They were confined inside, then. Someone thought they were a threat.” Wilson turned his attention back to the magnificent astroengineering accomplishments which the sensors were revealing. Given his background, it was hard not to be envious of Dyson Alpha’s civilization. “Why?”

“I’m more concerned about why it was switched off,” Oscar said. “Somebody observed us here.”

“That doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Wilson said. “If you were attempting to close off this civilization, why remove the barrier the first time a ship investigates it?”

“They didn’t ‘attempt’ to cut them off,” Tu Lee said. “They succeeded.”

“Which makes switching the barrier off all the more nonsensical.”

“I don’t know what you’re worrying about it for,” Anna said. “There’s a simple way of finding out now.”

The bridge crew all looked at her. She grinned back, small spiral OCtattoos on her cheeks shimmering a soft silver.

“Ask them,” she said, and pointed at the portal.

On the third day after the barrier fell, they used the hysradar to scan the system. Wilson had heard every argument for and against making contact. Most people, himself included, were being cautious, despite what they’d seen of the Dyson aliens. Dudley Bose was eager to start hailing them, while Oscar wanted to turn the Second Chance around and head straight back to the Commonwealth; he was still badly worried by the timing of the barrier coming down.

It was the first time Wilson really wished they had instantaneous communications back to the Commonwealth. He would have been relieved to pass the buck on this question. Anna was right, they could learn a lot from initiating contact. But now that it looked certain the Dyson aliens had been confined, shipboard speculation was heavily focused on the reason. Their civilization was impressive, but not that threatening.

There were now eighty-three ships heading out from the star system. After three days of continual flight at five gees acceleration the first wave had now traveled over ten AUs, and still more were being launched. The first ships from the outermost gas giant had almost reached the boundary where the barrier had been.

Nobody on board the Second Chance could work out what they intended to do once they were outside the thirty-AU limit, as the ships weren’t designed for interstellar travel. But the crew had spent their time gathering more data on the Dyson Alpha system. It wasn’t just the planets that had been colonized. There were two asteroid belts, one on either side of Alpha Major’s orbit, which were extensively settled. And each of the gas giant Trojan points, with their broad cluster of medium-sized planetoids, accommodated thriving spaceborne societies. More intriguing—certainly to the physicists—was the swarm of rings, five hundred kilometers in diameter and protected by force fields, which were orbiting three million kilometers above the star’s corona. They seemed to be absorbing the solar wind, siphoning in massive currents of elementary particles that jetted out of the flares and sunspots below them.

Wilson finally authorized the use of the hysradar to obtain a more detailed chart of the star system and its inhabitants. Nobody was really surprised when it showed tens of thousands of the big ships coasting between planets, moons, asteroid habitats, and the industrial stations. The total was slightly unnerving given how alone the Second Chance was. Also unforeseen were the number of stray asteroids they detected out beyond the second gas giant that showed signs of colonization and industrial activity. Three of them were only a couple of AUs away. Wilson gave Sandy Lanier, the duty sensor officer, a very hard time for not picking up their neutrino emissions earlier. He paid for it that night, when Anna gave him a lecture on how small the fusion generators were, and how big space in general was. “They must be just starting to build on those asteroids,” she claimed heatedly. “If there’s anything big and dangerous close to this ship, our department will spot it for you.”

He managed to grumble a mild apology, and said they should take a really good look at the nearby asteroids. Having examples of the Dyson civilization so close was an excellent chance to learn what they could without being observed themselves.

She accepted the apology, and let him kiss and make up. They were getting good at finding innovative ways to use the low gee of the crew ring.

With a more complete picture of Dyson Alpha’s system established, the starship’s hysradar was focused on Dyson Beta. The range was extreme, but even so the return showed that the barrier around the second star remained intact. It strengthened Oscar’s argument that the removal of Dyson Alpha’s barrier had been triggered by their arrival. Not that anyone could come up with a convincing reason why, and the scenario certainly wasn’t one of the contingency plans so carefully prepared before they left Anshun. All of which left Wilson even more aware of how critical his decisions were now. He ordered the sensor department to resume collecting information on the Dyson Alpha system.

It was while they were scanning the nearby asteroids for high-resolution images that the first firefight broke out a third of the way around the star system. The electromagnetic sensors spotted it first, several large em pulses erupting halfway between the orbits of the two gas giants. They were quickly confirmed as nuclear explosions. The second barrage broke out as exhaust plumes suddenly streaked out all around the trio of explosions, exposing two squadrons of over thirty ships converging on each other. The fighting had started when they were a million kilometers apart. Now they were all accelerating toward each other at over seven gees. Missiles and gamma lasers turned the shrinking gap into a lethal hurricane of energy. Exploding ships added their fury to the radiation deluge.

Hysradar swiftly scanned the area in real-time, finding a large, expanding cloud of debris and vapor with several ruined ships tumbling through it. Thirty-two million kilometers away, five colonized asteroids were surrounded by a shoal of ships whose active sensors were probing the battle zone.

“Glad we weren’t there,” Oscar exclaimed.

Wilson stared at the display with its crumbling flecks of irradiated matter hurtling apart. It reminded him of the ridiculous slow-motion explosions in the blockbuster films of his youth, where steroidal Hollywood action stars outran the blast wave. “Defense,” he asked slowly. “Could our force fields have stood up to that kind of assault?”

“The initial blasts, sir, possibly. But it got pretty hellish in there toward the end.”

“Thank you.”

He glanced at Oscar, and inclined his head. The two of them went into the senior officer’s briefing room, and opaqued the glass wall. Screens around the long central table glowed blue and crimson from the sensor graphics they were showing.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Wilson said as he sat on a corner of the table.

“It’s not difficult. I’ve been saying it ever since the barrier came down. We should leave. These developments have pushed us way outside our original mission scenario. We were supposed to be a scouting flight. This is something else entirely.”

“I know, I know.” Wilson ran his hand back through his hair; it was getting longer than he liked. “But we still don’t know why they were confined, and we certainly don’t know who or what put the barrier up. We were sent here to find out. That means we haven’t completed our mission, not to my satisfaction.”

“That fight was a damn good indicator why they were penned up in here. It doesn’t come any clearer than that to me.”

“Maybe, but we can’t go home with just an assumption. I need to be certain.”

“It’s not just the Dyson civilization you have to consider, Wilson. Why was that barrier taken down for us? Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Of course it does. But the people who can tell us about the barrier are right here.”

“We can’t ask them, it’s too risky. In our whole history, the human race has only ever let off five nuclear warheads in anger. And they were under the most extraordinary, exceptional circumstances. That fight of theirs just saw eight hundred and seventy-two fusion bombs detonating inside of thirty minutes, and half of them had diverted energy output functions. They are dangerous, Wilson. Very, very dangerous.”

“The kind of weapons involved in any conflict are determined by the nature of the battleground and the technology available. If we are attacked out here, I’m quite prepared to use our nukes. It would be an appropriate response. Does my willingness to do my duty make the human race a bunch of dangerous killers?”

“You’re twisting this. I’m on record here: I don’t like this situation. It is my opinion we should leave.”

“We can’t. For all it’s an unexpected outcome, this is why we’re here. Discovery and opportunity, Oscar. We can’t turn our back on it. That would be less than human. I’m going to authorize a remote investigatory contact.”

Oscar closed his eyes and let out a long dispirited breath. “Okay. It is your choice, and I will support it. But can we at least be cautious about it?”

Wilson smiled at him. “Believe me, we are going to be so cautious you’ll think I’ve turned dangerously paranoid.”

They set out the rules of contact at the next daily departmental heads meeting, drawing on the Commonwealth protocols for alien contact, and adapting them to their own unique situation.

“It is my intention to discover what we can about the Dyson aliens without ourselves being observed,” Wilson said. “Now we’ve seen how volatile they are, I am not prepared to take the Second Chance into orbit around any planet or moon. God alone knows what weapons systems they have in orbit around their large population centers.”

“The initial investigation will be a contact team deployment to a deserted artifact, something big, an abandoned habitat or wrecked spaceship,” Oscar said. “Anything that will show us how they live, give us an indication of their physical shape, their culture. If we get lucky there might be some electronic memory units we can access. Whatever we choose, it will be a minimum of five million kilometers from any settlement or ship. We can manage a five-gee acceleration in an emergency combat situation, which is significantly lower than most of the ships we’ve seen flying around out there; so our primary tactical advantage is our FTL drive. I’d like to avoid any sort of chase altogether, therefore the whole procedure will be conducted on a minimum emission basis.”

“Before we begin this investigation, I’d like some idea of their response if we’re exposed to them,” Wilson said. He glanced around the table until he found Emmanuelle Verbeke, their alien culture officer. “Can you give us any insight on their society, yet?”

“Very little other than the obvious,” she said. “What we’ve seen matches our standard simulations for a non-FTL technological species. They’ve followed a logical progressive route of development across their star system. Given the extent and obvious success of their colonization I am slightly puzzled by the fight we saw. I would have expected more social stability. But as we really know nothing about their culture it would be inappropriate to speculate too much on the conflict at this point.”

“We’ve made no progress on decrypting any of their signals,” Anna said. “That’s worrying. I don’t expect the RI algorithms to begin immediate translations, but there were some areas I expected progress with.”

“Such as?” Oscar asked.

“Video or holographic signals for a start. There are basic formatting rules which data of that nature has to follow. Even if they see in ultraviolet or air-sonar, there will be display template patterns that can be determined. So far we haven’t found any. Their transmissions seem to be almost completely random, and they’re all analogue signals, which is even stranger. Of course it doesn’t help that we’re receiving so many of them. Overlap and interference is considerable. I would at least have hoped to play you an example of their language by now, but I can’t even do that.”

“It is unusual that we don’t even know what they look like,” Emmanuelle said. “If the situation were reversed, and the Dyson aliens were lurking close to a Commonwealth world, they would soon be able to gain an understanding of us from what we broadcast.

“We are recording it all,” Anna said. “If we eventually make contact, and the Dyson aliens want to talk to us, then we’ll have a full understanding of whatever communicative pathways they employ. After that we can start translating the signals we’re recording now. It’ll be helpful in case they start restricting their output when they find out we’re here; what we’re receiving at the moment could be quite valuable later on.”

“You mean we’re catching them off guard?” Wilson asked.

“Essentially, yes.”

“Okay, I don’t have any problem with that.”

“If they find us creeping around out here, are they likely to attack?” Oscar asked.

“If it was me, I’d be curious,” Emmanuelle said. “But that’s a personal thing. It’s also a human thing. Given our current knowledge base, there really is no way of knowing.”

“Then we will conduct the investigation on a worst-case basis,” Wilson said. “The contact team will be armed and have fire authority if threatened. The Second Chance will operate on combat alert as soon as we cross the old barrier threshold.”

For the first time since the barrier fell, Oscar actually looked happy.

“Anna, did you find anything suitable for us to start with?” Wilson asked.

“Yes, actually. There are a lot of spaceship wrecks floating around out there.” She gave Oscar an uncomfortable look. “It would appear the Dyson aliens do fight a lot among themselves. I think we do genuinely need to be cautious.”

“We will be,” Wilson said, giving her a warning stare. “Have you got a suitable starting point for us?”

“I think so, yes.”

Nobody actually said anything, but the bridge crew was very conscious of passing inside the line where the barrier had been. Was it going to spring back into existence, trapping them?

The hysradar scanned behind them, scouring space and hyperspace. There was no change to the quantum signature of spacetime. Nothing altered in or around the Dark Fortress.

They waited just inside the barrier line for over an hour before Wilson finally said, “Okay, Tu Lee, take us over to the rock.”

“Aye, sir.”

McClain Gilbert waited in the contact team’s operational office, not too far away from the bridge. By contrast, this compartment had only a couple of consoles, but a lot more display screens. Three long tables were seating most of his forty-strong team members, who were regarding the blank screens with a controlled patience. The absence of any current sensor data couldn’t damp the sense of excitement vibrating around the room. It was present in the short terse comments shot between friends, the way shift rotas had been forgotten so everyone could cram in, drink packets on the tables, lack of the usual horseplay. The contact team was finally coming into its own.

So far, they had been the most underused department on board, simply looking over everyone else’s shoulder as vast quantities of physics data flowed back into the starship. Now, that tolerance and waiting was being rewarded.

Oscar came in just as the Second Chance emerged from its wormhole. Mac waved him into the vacant chair next to his own, and together they watched the wormhole’s blue light fade off the screens allowing the cameras to focus on the chunk of rock they were rendezvoused with. Anna, who found it and therefore had the right, had named it the Watchtower. It was a long slice of rock, with a station of some kind at one end. Given its towerlike shape, and its position—one and a half AUs beyond the outer gas-giant orbit—she felt it analogous to some ancient imperial outpost, a long-forgotten garrison fort, watching across the desolate barbarian territories for anything that could threaten civilization.

“Looks like we were right about it being inactive,” Oscar said. “Thankfully.”

Long-range passive scans had shown no infrared emission. There was no neutrino activity, or electromagnetic broadcasts. As the rock had a fast rotation, once every twenty-six minutes, they had concluded it was now abandoned, most probably a victim of some ancient battle.

As he watched the images appear, backed up by the slow trickle of data, Mac was convinced they were right. The rock was fashioned like a sharp blade, over a kilometer and a half long, but never more than a couple of hundred meters wide. Every side was sheer, with razor edges: obviously a splinter that had snapped off cleanly from whatever asteroid had been nuked into oblivion.

“That must have been one brute of an explosion,” Mac said idly. “We’ve never seen them build anything on a small asteroid.”

The station was rooted in the surface at the wider end of the fragment. Cubes and pyramids and mushrooms of polytitanium composite made up the bulk of it, their once-strong hulls now brittle from centuries of vacuum exposure. Crumbling fissures exposed reinforcement ribs below, while the color had been mottled down to a grubby lead-gray by uncountable micrometeorite punctures and constant molecular ablation. Spiky fungal structures molded from toughened plastics and metaloceramics lurked between the larger sections. They, too, were fraying around the edges, leaving long delicate strands poking out from ragged cavities.

“At least you won’t have any trouble gaining access,” Oscar told him. “There are more holes than walls.”

“Yeah, on the upper sections. Those lower portions look more intact. Ah, here we go, the deep scan’s coming in.”

They leaned forward in unison, peering at the small hologram portal that was now showing a three-dimensional map of the station’s internal layout.

“That looks like a surrealist’s maze,” Oscar said. “It’s got to be some kind of industrial refinery, those are all pipes, aren’t they?”

“Or corridors, or warren tunnels. Remember the jarrofly nests we found on Tandil? We thought they were just beautiful coral outcrops until the swarm came out.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Oscar gave his friend a wide smile. “Only one way to be sure.”

“Right. Send us in to do the dirty work. Never fails.”

“Damn right. I’ll just lounge around in here, maybe have me one of those gourmet meals from the canteen, then access a hot TSI drama. But you be sure to enjoy yourself in those ball-squeezer suits of yours while you’re over there.”

“Once I set foot on that lump of rock, make first contact with the Dysons, it’ll be my name that our race remembers, not yours.”

“Tut tut: vanity, the most tragic sin of all. Hey, Mr. Legend, what are your first words going to be when you set that photogenic foot down?”

Mac struck a sincerely thoughtful pose. “I thought something like: Fuck me, now I remember why you shouldn’t eat curry before you put on a space suit.”

“Cool. Historic, even. I like that.”

Mac grinned, then stood up. “Okay, everybody, eyes and ears to the front, please. Our captain is going to hold the Second Chance a hundred kilometers off the Watchtower as a safety precaution. That means we’ll be using the shuttles to get ourselves over there. Preliminary scouting party will be myself and team C. The main objective on the first flight is to ascertain occupancy levels. If that is confirmed as zero, we’ll conduct an initial survey. Following that, I want to operate a rotating three-team shift pattern to map out the Watchtower’s contents. As you can see, there’s a lot of pipes and tunnels and shit to get through. We’re going archaeological on this one, which I know is a little different from the kind of exploration most of you are used to. What we need is clues as to what these critters look like, what they eat, what they drink, who they voted for, if their team won the cup, all that crap. So what you have to track down are artifacts that will open any sort of window into their culture for us. Teams B and F, I want you to concentrate on their electronics, or optronics, or difference engines, or whatever they hell they used. If there are any data fragments left in any system over there, I want them downloaded and copied. Got all that?”

A rumble of happy agreement went around the room.

“Fine, team C with me now, we’re suiting up. Shuttle departs in thirty minutes. Now while we’re scratching around over there, Oscar here is assuming his usual job of exploration supervisor, which means he’ll be watching our asses from his nice comfortable office chair. I’m sure you remember the drill, all major decisions are his—I don’t want any rogue calls on this one, no just going around the next corner because it looks interesting. If there’s any doubt about something, clear it with Oscar first. Team A, you’re our direct observation monitors on the first flight. B, D, E, if we okay the site, you’re on next. I suggest you get some rest accordingly.”

He turned to leave. Oscar caught his arm.

“I know everyone thinks I’m obsessing over the barrier coming down,” Oscar said. “But take care over there.”

“Don’t worry. Coward is my middle name.”

It wasn’t until a full twenty-four hours after Mac had landed on the Watchtower that Dudley Bose finally got his chance to regain some of the limelight. He’d thought that as a member of contact team A he would be among the first humans to meet the Dysons. That hadn’t happened, of course, not with McClain Gilbert preempting him.

Dudley had considered his predeparture appointment to the starship’s contact team as a smooth move. After all, Wilson and his senior officers couldn’t deny he was the Commonwealth’s expert on the Dyson Pair, from an astrophysics angle at any rate. And with his first-life engineering degree expanding his knowledge base on a practical level, he was an obvious choice for the contact team as well as the science staff.

So far on the voyage his knowledge had been left sadly unapplied. He understood very little about the quantum state of the barrier—managing the university’s astronomy department single-handed had left very little time for him to keep up-to-date on the theoretical front of physics. And although the insides of the Dark Fortress remained visually spectacular, he was unable to offer any insight on the nature of that gargantuan mechanism.

While the Second Chance was examining the Dark Fortress, he had spent most of his time alone in his cabin, recording commentaries. His contract with Gralmond WebNews called for informed opinions and interpretation of the information that the starship gathered: to be a pop science pundit, basically. So he would watch the day’s results come in, and provide an explanation that was dumbed down to the lowest level possible. His time as a lecturer, reducing complex facts to a series of easily digestible chunks, followed by his meteoric exposure to the media and their demands for simplified sound bite presentations, made him perfectly qualified for the job.

But the Watchtower had finally presented him with the opportunity to enhance his profile. Physically placing him on the ultimate human frontier would make it his flight. He, Dudley Bose, was due to become the human interface with the mystery of the Dyson Pair.

Then McClain Gilbert announced the team schedule, and Dudley had to wait for yet another day. Until it became his turn he was once again reduced to a secondary role, watching through the shuttle’s camera as Gilbert jetted himself over to the large alien structures on the Watchtower, and spouting banalities like: “This is it. Any moment now. Yes! Contact. How much this differs from our usual first encounter with an alien environment. CSI contact personnel normally walk through a wormhole and step firmly on the ground. Here, you can see my friend Mac actually having to cling onto the edge of a hole with his hand. Now, wait, he’s shining his lights through into the structure. You’re seeing the first glimpse of a whole new alien universe.”

In truth, Mac’s careful drift through the structure was tedium itself. It was quite obvious the station had been deserted for a long time. The polytanium hull was still mildly radioactive, its decay rate allowing an accurate dating on the explosion of two hundred eleven years. “So there can be nothing left alive in there. Or if there is, it’s a life-form very different from anything we know.”

The compartments weren’t particularly strange. Engineering principles were reasonably universal. The hull material was made up from sandwiched layers; the pressure wall, thermal insulation, structural reinforcement, cable ducts. First indications were that the cube Mac entered was a habitation section. Several internal walls had rectangular hatchways. “They are two meters across, larger than human ones, which indicate the Dysons might be bigger than us.” In case you couldn’t work that out for yourselves. There were times Dudley hated himself for what he had to do.

Almost every compartment had an opening into the broad tunnellike corridors that curved and twisted through the interior. Mac’s suit lights found octagonal mounting blocks in the compartments, jutting out of the walls at the apex of structural ribs. At one time they’d held large units of machinery. Now, there were just empty brackets and load pins. “It’s been stripped clean. Whoever won the battle must have taken their booty with them.”

Mac’s whole EVA was a record of empty chambers and long dark tunnels. The Watchtower had a sense of rejection about it rather than abandonment. Cold, dark, feebly radioactive, it was simply of no consequence anymore; both purpose and meaning had ceased when the lethal radiation pierced every corner.

It was an impression that was now strengthening in Dudley’s mind as he watched the horn of rock expanding across the starfield. Everything out here was gray, leaving very little difference between the rock and the alien station perched on it. He could just make out the other shuttle hovering above the cube, a silver and gold speck with green and scarlet navigation strobes flashing incessantly. Their light shimmered across the scuff marks on the perspex of the little port he was pressed against.

“Helmet.”

“Huh?” Dudley turned around to see Emmanuelle Verbeke on the other side of the aisle. She was putting her own helmet on.

“Time to put your helmet on,” she said.

“Right. Sure.” He gave her a thank-you smile, and retrieved his helmet from the fuseto patch on the side of the chair. He had gotten on quite well with Emmanuelle since leaving Anshun. Thankfully, since they were partnered up together in team A. Not that he got to socialize with her much outside duty shifts and training sessions. He was still somewhat conscious about his physical shape. Everyone else on board had been through a full rejuvenation, at most ten years ago. He was the starship’s official geriatric. Any early hope that would give him an air of distinction had quickly faded.

The shuttle’s small thrusters were firing almost continually as it maneuvered in for rendezvous, sounding as if someone with a hammer was knocking on the fuselage. Dudley accommodated the slight swaying motion it set up as he lowered the tough transparent bubble over his head. The liplike seals gripped tight, and he fastened the secondary mechanical seal. His e-butler immediately ran final integration checks, confirming the suit was fully functional.

He activated his suit’s force field as he went into the airlock. Team C and three of team A were already waiting on the fuselage grid that skirted the outer lock. Dudley took care to anchor himself before pulling his maneuvering pack out of its storage bin. It was McClain Gilbert himself who held the pack steady while Dudley pushed his arms through the straps. The unit stuck itself to his space suit, plyplastic straps contracting around him.

“You all right?” Mac asked. His helmet was very close to Dudley’s, allowing him to peer through the faint silvering.

“Sure.” However blasé he tried to sound, the reality of being out in open space within an alien star system was making his heart judder. The telemetry would be available to Mac. Dudley looked around to find the reassuring bright star that was Second Chance. Seeing it shining against the starfield made his breathing a little easier. He searched farther, trying to find familiar star patterns amid the strange constellations.

Team C began jetting over to the Watchtower a hundred meters away. Dudley held Emmanuelle’s maneuvering pack as she shrugged her way into it, receiving a thumbs-up in gratitude. He enjoyed that, it made him feel like a fully paid-up member of the team.

“Right, that’s everybody out,” said Francis Rawlins, the leader of team C. “Make sure you’ve secured your equipment bag before you leave the shuttle. You can freeflight in your own time. Head for the beacon they’ve put up on the alien station. We’ll regroup there, and move on in.”

Dudley made sure the cylindrical bag was fastened to his belt. The others were slowly lifting off the fuselage grid. Tiny squirts of white gas puffed out of their maneuvering pack nozzles, just visible in the dusky light of the distant star. His virtual hand gripped the pack’s joystick, and he tilted it forward. The gas produced a dull rushing sound, vibrating against his back. But his boots left the grid, and he was floating away from the shuttle. Once again his heart went yammering as adrenaline cut loose into his bloodstream. He couldn’t believe he was actually doing this. There was a holiday he’d taken in his first life when he’d signed up to go paragliding; trusting himself to a sheet of fabric and praying the straps held as he and the instructor jumped off the top of a mountain. The rush of tension and exhilaration that hit him simultaneously when he saw treetops below his feet was like nothing he’d ever known. Now here it was again, far more intense than the first time.

As before, he forced himself to relax into the inevitable. It just took a while to convince his body there was actually nothing wrong, that the suit and the maneuvering pack were working fine and taking care of him. Inside the helmet he was grinning like a madman. His free virtual hand tapped a microphone icon, then keyed in a privacy code.

“I’m approaching the strange alien station we’ve called the Watchtower. All of us agree now that it was misnamed. This is no guard outpost, simply the sad remnants of an industrial facility that was damaged during a conflict that went nuclear. I can’t help but feel regret that all the effort and cost which went into establishing such an enterprise should fall victim to this primitive lack of emotional control. Although the Dyson aliens have accomplished so much, and I concede some of their technological accomplishments exceed ours, I hope they can still learn from the way our society resolves conflicts and disagreements.” That would go down well back home. Always make the audience feel slightly superior.

The course graphic inside his virtual vision showed him heading off to one side of the beacon. He corrected. Overcorrected. Then had to tip the joystick firmly the other way. This was exactly what his skill training memory instinctively warned him against. He just couldn’t integrate that knowledge at an autonomic reflex level. So he wobbled his way forward, gas burping from every nozzle of his maneuvering pack in a seemingly random pattern, and keeping a cautious eye on his relative velocity.

Francis Rawlins was easing her way in through the gap beside the beacon as he finally came to rest just above her. The other members of team C followed. Dudley looked around eagerly once he was inside, but the compartment was something of an anticlimax: a simple box of blue-gray metal, flooded with vibrant pools of light by the suit beams. Nothing to hint at alien-ness.

“Now we’re inside I can’t emphasize enough to use caution,” Francis said. “The Ops office is watching out for us individually, but they can’t compensate for every mistake. The only solution is, don’t make any. We’re not in a race, we’ll keep searching around until we’ve acquired the data which the captain needs, so don’t rush anything. Now, teams B, D, and E have already explored down to level five, and radially they went as far as sections A3 and A8 on your charts. They’ve placed comrelays to cover that area, but when you go beyond them you need to set up your own, these walls are an effective block to our signals. Do not allow any communications dead zones, especially in the connecting tunnels. We stay in contact the whole time, understood? Okay, you’ve got your assignments. Move out.”

Dudley studied the topography of the 3D chart in his virtual vision, matching it to the big tunnel entrance on the compartment’s wall. An orange line snaked through it, detailing his route. He brought the inertial guidance on-line, aligning it with the beacon.

“You ready?” Emmanuelle asked.

“I think so.” He was staring at the black gulf that was the entrance to the tunnel they were going to have to use to get down to level five. It was nearly three meters in diameter. Thus indicating the Dyson aliens may be bigger than us—idiot. Not so small as to trigger claustrophobia. At least, not straightaway.

On the other side of the compartment, Francis was already hauling herself into a tunnel that snaked its way over to section A8. Dudley drifted over to the tunnel his chart indicated, and gripped the side of the entrance to steady himself. His suit lights cut straight through the gloom, revealing a tube whose carbon composite walls were mottled with hairline fractures and coarse blisters. It started to curve downward about five meters ahead, with a gentle twist to the left. He pushed his feet lightly off the compartment floor, allowing his legs and torso to slide up until he was level to the entrance, then pulled himself forward into the tunnel. “And into the unknown.”

“Sir, we’re being signaled,” Anna called out. “Sensors are showing both laser and microwave transmissions directed straight at us. Originating from Alpha Major orbit—the moonlets.”

“Son of a bitch,” Wilson grunted. “Are you sure? Could they just be aligned on something beyond us?”

“I don’t think so. There is nothing behind us. All three beams intersect here, and they’re holding constant. We’re definitely the target point.”

Wilson quickly called the signals up on his console screens. Even after the RI’s best filtering they came up as a jumble of sine waves and fractal patterns. “Is this the same stuff they transmit to each other?”

“Yes, sir. It looks like it.”

“So they might not realize we are aliens?”

“They must have a good idea we are not native to this star system,” Tunde said. “After all, now the barrier has come down, they’ll be expecting some kind of communication or contact from the species which put it up. They would be watching.”

One of the visual sensors was trained on a laser beam coming from a worldlet around Alpha Major. That single ruby dazzle-point obscured much of the planet’s delicate wrapping of fusion flame. Wilson stared at it with a growing concern that he might just have been underestimating the Dysons. “They’ve been looking for us, or at least an alien ship, since the barrier went down?”

“That would be the logical thing for them to do, yes.”

“So if they haven’t got hysradar, how the hell did they find us?”

“Our hyperdrive wormhole creates a great deal of gravitonic shock, and it also has a strong quantum signature. On top of that there will be neutrino emissions from our fusion reactors.”

“Small ones,” Antonia said immediately. “I’m keeping the fusion systems a couple of percent above breakeven. The niling d-sinks are our primary power source, but they’re very well shielded.”

“Captain, this entire planetary system is overflowing with advanced technology,” Tunde said. “And if they really are as conflict-driven as we suspect, they will have a great many sensor systems. I’m really not surprised they have detected us.”

Wilson was drawn back to the main portals, both of them showing an unaugmented visual image of the Watchtower. His initial concern was now turning to real worry. “Anna, give me a hysradar sweep. Is there anything out there?”

After a few initial scans of the Watchtower they’d switched off all of their active sensors, keeping all emissions to a minimum in a bid to achieve silent running. It was his choice again to remain inconspicuous; quietly gathering data until they were ready to make contact. A strategy that would allow them the upper hand.

“Oh, shit,” Anna exclaimed. “I make that eight ships heading straight at us.”

Dudley had followed the tunnel all the way down to level seven. He’d passed a lot of junctions where subsidiary tunnels branched off. The whole network was like some kind of root system twisted into a knotted corkscrew configuration. Winding his way down, he began to appreciate just how extensive the tunnels were in a way the virtual vision 3D chart never quite conveyed. As he progressed he became convinced they were pipes rather than corridors. There were simply too many of them to be used as passageways by the Dyson aliens. Not that he could visualize what kind of pipes they were. They had no valves or pumps, nor mounting pins where such units could have been. His best guess was that they used to be lined by a cellular sleeve, or a variant on electromuscle, which had subsequently been stripped out along with everything else. The contact teams had so far been singularly unsuccessful in recovering an artifact of any value.

He glided out from the tunnel into a level-seven compartment shaped like a slice of cake. It didn’t have any hatchways, only more tunnel entrances. He touched his boots down on the rumpled floor, allowing the sole cilia to grip the flaking surface. The open space was a welcome relief from the confines of the tunnel. Emmanuelle came out behind him, flipping her fingers against the edge as she passed, to turn a lazy circle before placing her boots firmly on the floor. Dudley was already sticking a comrelay to an empty mounting block.

“This has been cleaned out,” Emmanuelle reported. “No direct connection to other compartments.”

“Okay,” Oscar said. “Tunnel entrance three leads down into the rock itself. We don’t have an accurate plan of it after twenty meters or so; the deep scan can’t penetrate any farther. You guys want to check it out for me?”

“We can manage that,” Dudley said confidently. At last, some real uncharted territory.

“All right, proceed with care. Don’t forget the comrelays.”

Dudley wanted to say something like: Of course we won’t, but it lacked professionalism. In fact, Oscar’s calm voice in his ears was reassuring. You can always depend on Oscar. It was a pleasant psychological safety net.

He ordered his boots to release the floor, and pushed himself toward entrance three. With his suit lights shining down into the slate-gray interior it didn’t look any different from the dozen others he’d already passed, it was curving away counterclockwise. “Start recording the route,” he told his e-butler, and pulled himself in.

After fifteen meters the surface changed from the usual tough carbon composite to a thin aluminum skin, dull with age, and cracked to reveal rock directly underneath. The curvature tightened, becoming regular. Dudley stuck a comrelay to the wall. Twenty-five meters later, he had to use another.

“According to my inertial guidance, this is a spiral,” Emmanuelle said. “We’re descending almost along the rock’s axis.”

“Oscar, is there a hole anywhere on the rock surface?” Dudley asked. “Anything that could be the other end?”

“Difficult to say. There are a few fissures that could be openings. This is why we need you guys.”

“Thanks.”

After a couple more twists, they came to the first junction. It was a straight tube seven meters long. Dudley shone his suit lights down it.

“It just leads to the other side of the spiral, like a shortcut.”

“I don’t think so,” Emmanuelle said. “The angle is wrong. Hey, you know what? I bet this whole shaft is laid out like DNA. Two spirals running parallel, with cross links between the two.”

“You could be right. Oscar, I’d like to try something. If we put a comrelay at the other end of this link, then we might be able to pick it up if there’s another cross link below us.”

“Go ahead, Dudley, it’s worth a try.”

Dudley zipped through the short length of tunnel, happy at how easy he was at moving himself about in these conditions. The skill training memory was finally settling in—along with his natural aptitude, of course. He stuck the comrelay inside the second spiral, and hurried back.

Wilson stared at the small triangles inching their way across the big portal’s tactical display. Digits flickered around each one, delivering yet more bad news. The lead ship was eighty-two million kilometers distant, and accelerating hard at eight gees. It was going to reach them in just over three hours. That was bad enough, but what he really didn’t like was that it hadn’t flipped over to decelerate.

All eight ships had launched from the moons or inhabited asteroids of the outermost gas giant, three AUs distant, the closest center of any alien activity. If that lead ship didn’t decelerate at all, it was going to have a relative velocity of over seven and a half thousand kilometers per second when it reached them. No human machine had ever reached a fraction of that speed in real space. Even now, he could see it on the visual display as the Second Chance’s main telescope tracked it. The fusion drive was a streamer of near-invisible violet fury stretching for hundreds of kilometers behind a scintillating golden sphere. Every stray gas molecule and charged particle impacting on the force field was dying in a burst of radioactive splendor, contributing to the coronal hue around the ship. If it hit the Second Chance or the Watchtower at that velocity, the explosion would briefly rival a solar flare.

“Only ships five and seven have flipped,” Anna said. “They’re decelerating to rendezvous. Falling a long way behind the others. And three more have left the gas giant on an interception course for us. I think we’ve also got about fifteen on their way from Dyson Major; it’s a little early to be sure but their vectors are matching up.”

Wilson nodded silently as he absorbed the tactical situation. Given their vectors and positions, all eight ships in the first flotilla must have launched from various bases over a period of several hours. They were well spread out. There was no doubt about their destination, even if it was only a flyby. As for their intent …

“Thank you,” he said. “Oscar, pull the contact teams out of the Watchtower right now. I want them back on board Second Chance in half an hour.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tunde, I’m trying to think of any possible peaceful or scientific value from a flyby at the kind of speed the lead ship will have.”

“There isn’t any, sir, there can’t be.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say. This is territorial. They might even think we’re from the species which put up the barrier, in which case we have to assume the worst. If they do not slow down, we will withdraw from this system. I’m not going to risk our lives and this mission in an attempt to make contact under a combat situation. Hyperspace, I want an immediate flight path for our return to the Commonwealth, ready to initiate on my command.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Anna, we’re going to attempt data contact with the first flotilla. If we can’t understand them, maybe we can get them to understand us. Start transmitting our standard preliminary contact package. Use every frequency they’re squirting at us. If nothing else we have to tell them we’re not the ones who put up the barrier.”

“Captain,” Oscar called.

Wilson missed having Oscar on the bridge, although he grudgingly acknowledged the executive officer was by far the best person to be running the exploration of the Watchtower. But he knew immediately from Oscar’s tone something had gone wrong. “Yes?”

“We’ve got problems. Two members of contact team A have dropped out of communication.”

“This one is at a different angle again,” Emmanuelle said.

They had both stopped beside the fifth cross link, shining their suit lights into it. Once again, it was a straight tunnel opening to a spiral shaft. They suspected there were more than two spirals, possibly four or five.

“I think we should stick to this shaft,” Dudley said. “Let’s find out where it goes before we start plotting the rest.” According to his inertial guidance display, they were already a hundred fifteen meters below level seven of the alien station. They hadn’t managed to get a signal from any of the additional comrelays he’d placed at the cross links above, so they didn’t really know for sure what the topography was. “Oscar, can we carry on?”

“Yeah, keep going. It’s the most interesting aspect of the station we’ve come across.”

Dudley pushed off again. There were enough bumps and irregularities in the aluminum sheath for him to grip and use like a ladder, pulling himself along. He was keen to see where it led now. He had a gut feeling that this was important. It was different from the rest of the station. The aliens must have used it to feed something in, or out. This had a purpose. Once they knew what it was connected to, they would have the first key, a way in to decrypting the alien culture. And I found it.

He moved forward eagerly, his suit lights sliding over the ancient corrupted metal. Seeking understanding.

“I can’t get them back,” Oscar said. “The comrelays must have glitched. We’re not even getting a carrier wave from either of them.”

“Goddamnit!” Wilson started calling up the contact team status displays onto his console screens. “When did you lose contact?”

“Just as you told us to get them back. I don’t believe this. Those comrelay units can’t fail; they’re nothing but safety circuits.”

A 3D chart of the Watchtower station sprang up, with other team members’ positions illustrated by small green lights. All of them were converging on the beacon.

“Who’s missing?” Wilson asked.

“Verbeke and Bose.”

For one instant, Wilson felt a flash of anger. It just had to be him, didn’t it. Anger was equally quickly replaced by guilt. He’s one of my crew, and he’s suffered equipment failure. “Don’t they have to make their way back if they lose contact?”

“That’s what the manual says. Emmanuelle knows it well enough, even if Dudley is a little shaky on theory. They should be on their way back.”

“How far away are they from a working relay?”

“I don’t know. They set up eighteen units behind them, I’m still getting telemetry from sixteen of them. That puts them about twenty meters away from a working one.”

“Right,” Wilson said tersely. He could imagine it, the two of them annoyed their progress had been halted, maybe a quick squabble about going back right away or taking a fast look a few meters ahead.

“Should be back on-line any minute now,” Oscar said.

“Anna, Sandy, is there any response from those ships yet?”

“Sorry, sir, not yet,” Sandy Lanier reported. “They’re still on course. No signal, not directed at us.”

“Son of a bitch. Right, we need to start shouting. Bump up the power level in the transmission antenna. Make damn sure we get their attention.”

“Aye, sir.”

McClain Gilbert shot out of the carbon composite tunnel into the beacon compartment. In front of him, contact team members were freeflying out of the gap in the wall. Pale gas from their maneuvering packs swirled in rapid eddies through the beams of the remaining suit lights.

“Have we got them yet?” he asked Oscar.

“No. Nothing.”

“They should be back in range. For fuck’s sake, Emmanuelle knows what she’s doing. How long now?”

“Fourteen minutes.”

“No way. No way is that a comrelay failure. They’re in trouble.”

“We don’t know that.”

“I do.” He twisted himself around and pushed off the wall, heading for the tunnel that would take him directly down to level five.

“What are you doing?” Oscar shouted.

“Helping them.”

“Get back to the shuttle!”

“I’m with you, Mac,” Francis Rawlins said.

Mac was already in the tunnel. Light shone on him from behind. “I’ll take care of them,” he told Francis.

“They’re my team, damnit.”

“Okay.”

“Mac, for Christ’s sake,” Oscar said. “Get back to the shuttle, both of you.”

“Two minutes, Oscar. Come on, man, that ain’t going to make any difference.”

“Jesus.”

“The wall is changing again, look,” Dudley said. He stopped himself, and shone his suit lights on the patch just in front of his helmet. Emmanuelle drifted up beside him.

The tattered aluminum now formed a series of small corrugations. Spaced between them was a yellow ceramic. It had small red markings on it. “That’s interesting.”

“Hey, is that writing?” Emmanuelle asked.

“Could be. What do you think, Oscar?”

“We’re not sure. Make sure you get a clean video of it.”

“Copy that.” Dudley waited a moment. “Geddit? Copy. That.”

“Just video the bloody thing,” Emmanuelle moaned.

“OhmyGod.” Sandy pushed herself back from her console as if it had just given her an electric shock. “Sir, missile launch. The lead ship has fired. Eight. Nine. Twelve. That’s confirmed as twelve missiles.”

“At us?” Wilson asked. He was pleased by how calm he sounded.

“Four of them, yes. The rest are on courses for ships two, three, and six.”

Wilson’s virtual finger stabbed at a communications icon. “Mac, Francis, get out of there now. I’m recalling the shuttle in three minutes.”

“We’re almost at level seven.”

“The aliens are firing at us. Get out of there. I am not going to repeat this order.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The other ships are responding to one’s missile launch,” Anna called out. “Salvos launching from ships three, two, five, six, four. Oh, now eight has launched. Lead ship has fired again. Over one hundred missiles in flight. Sir, twenty-four of them are heading for us. God, they’re hitting fifteen gees.”

“Son of a bitch,” Wilson spat. “Pilot, take us over to the Watchtower. We’ve got to get that shuttle on board. Tu Lee, is the hyperdrive ready?”

“Aye, sir,” Tu Lee said. “We can go FTL at any time.”

Mac’s virtual hand twisted the throttle as far as the graphic would let him. He shot out of the station compartment into free space. His suit sensors locked on to the shuttle, and a bright red trajectory plot streaked across his virtual vision. He steered himself along it, ignoring the amber velocity warnings winking urgently. Francis was beside him, matching his flight.

A searing white light appeared from behind the Watchtower. Mac flinched inside his suit. Then logic kicked in. It was the Second Chance’s plasma drive, bringing the ship in close. Cutting down the time it would take for the shuttle to get inside its force field.

A time that shouldn’t have existed. I couldn’t leave them without making some effort to help. I just couldn’t. Who knew this would happen?

He started to decelerate a few meters short of the shuttle, using his legs to absorb most of the impact. Even so, he hit hard. The cilia on his soles gripped the fuselage grid, preventing any rebound. Francis came down beside him. “Bugger me,” she grunted. Her legs were bent sharply, torso twisting.

“Go,” Mac told the shuttle pilot.

“You’re not inside yet.”

“Just go. We’re secure.”

Space around him flared yellow as the chemical rockets ignited.

Oscar had hurried back into the bridge compartment. Wilson acknowledged him with a quick wave as he claimed his console. He was waiting for the shuttle, willing it across the gap. Both Jean Douvoir and the shuttle pilot did a superb job, rendezvousing thirty kilometers from the Watchtower. A small screen showed the little craft settle onto its cradle, which sank back into the hangar.

Wilson kept clenching his fist, which was disrupting his contact with the console interface pad. “Any contact?” he asked for the tenth time.

“No,” Oscar said. “I think Mac was right, they’re in trouble.”

“What the hell kind of trouble? It was dead over there. Cold and dead.”

“I don’t know.”

“Missile detonation,” Anna said. “Ho boy, here we go. Multiple blasts. High megatonnage. They’re using diverted energy pulsers, very heavy e-band emission, gamma and X-ray activity. Plenty of electronic warfare.”

“Where were they?”

“Ship three. Attacking and defending barrage. The ship’s still intact. Changing trajectory slightly.”

Wilson glanced at the forward portal that was tracking the twenty-four missiles powering toward them. Their velocity alone was terrifying.

“We should go,” Oscar said quietly.

“Right.” The second shuttle was on its cradle, a volunteer pilot ready to launch the second there was any signal from Verbeke or Bose.

“More missile launches,” Anna announced. “And we’re about to get another round of explosions. There’s an attack cluster almost in range of ship five.”

“Any reply to our signal?” Wilson asked.

Sandy shook her head.

“Detonations,” Anna sang out. “Shit, it’s like the warm-up for Armageddon out there.”

“Wilson,” Oscar urged. “It’s time.”

Captain Wilson Kime took a final look at the tracking display. The missiles were close now, and their true offensive capability remained unknown. He was coming perilously close to endangering his ship and crew. The bridge crew were all watching him, their expressions of defeat and regret, and yes, even guilt, were the same as his own.

“Hyperspace,” Wilson ordered. “Take us home.”

FIFTEEN

The lift doors opened smoothly, and police captain Hoshe Finn stepped into the familiar vestibule. For once he didn’t have to call ahead, the double doors into Morton’s penthouse were wide open. Several large flatbed trolleys had rolled through into the big split-level living room, delivering large plastic packing crates that were stacked against the walls. The process of loading the plush furniture into them had already begun, along with smaller household items all wrapped in sheets of foam. But after only three crates had been filled, the clearing-up process had come to a complete halt. All the GPbots that had been doing the work were motionless; some were still holding the objects they’d been carrying at the time of the reported incident with the harmonic-blade carving knife. Two junior managers from the Darklake National Bank, the court-appointed debt-receiver, were waiting somewhat nervously by the remaining settee in the conversation area. The supervisor from the removal company was sitting on the stone hearth in front of the fireplace, drinking tea from his thermos cup and smiling slyly.

“Where is she?” Hoshe asked. It said something for the power of unisphere publicity that he didn’t have to use his new police captain’s identity certificate. They all knew who he was.

“In there.” One of the bank suits pointed to the kitchen. “I want the bitch arrested.”

Hoshe raised an eyebrow while managing to look bored at the same time—something he’d seen Paula Myo do to great effect on several occasions.

Rather pleasingly, the suit flinched. “She threatened us,” he blustered. “And she’s damaged one of the GPbots. We’ll be requiring compensation for that.”

“Badly damaged?” Hoshe asked.

The supervisor glanced up from his tea. “Dunno. I’m not going in there. Psychos aren’t part of my job.” He sounded amused, though his face was carefully sober in front of the suits.

“Don’t blame you,” Hoshe said. The door into the kitchen was partly open. “Mellanie? It’s Hoshe Finn. Do you remember me? I need to talk to you.”

“Go away!” the girl yelled. “All of you, just piss off.”

“Come on, Mellanie, you know I can’t do that. We have to talk. It’s just going to be you and me. No constables, or anything, you have my word.”

“No. I won’t. There’s nothing to talk about.”

Her voice had almost cracked. Hoshe sighed, and moved right up to the kitchen door. “You could at least offer me a drink. I always used to be offered something when we came here. Where’s the butler?”

There was a long silence followed by what sounded like a sniffle. “Gone,” she said quietly. “They all left, all of them.”

“Okay, I’ll make my own drink. I’m coming in now.” Hoshe edged around the door, still cautious, not that he thought there was any real danger.

Like the rest of the penthouse, the kitchen was huge and elaborate. Every worktop had been carved out of pink and gray marble, with the cupboard doors below them made from burnished brentwood. The cabinets above the worktop all had transparent doors, showing off the expensive sets of crockery and glasses. He had to walk around the pool-table-sized central workbench to find Mellanie. She was sitting on the floor in a corner, hunched up tight as if she were trying to push herself through the wall. A harmonic-blade carving knife lay on the terracotta floor tiles just in front of her.

Hoshe wanted to squat down beside her, illustrating support and friendship just like the training scenarios emphasized, but he hadn’t quite lost enough weight to do that comfortably. Instead he lounged back, resting his buttocks on the marble worktop. “You should be careful of those harmonic blades,” he said casually. “They can be quite dangerous in the wrong hands. Lots of junior debt-receivers can get bits chopped off if your aim’s good enough.”

Mellanie looked up. Her auburn hair was in complete disarray. She’d been crying badly; sticky trails down her cheeks. Even so, she remained gorgeous. Perhaps even more so in this state: a classic damsel in distress. “What?”

He grinned ruefully. “Never mind. You do know why those people are here, don’t you?”

She nodded, and lowered her head again.

“The penthouse belongs to the bank now, Mellanie. You have to find somewhere else to stay.”

“This is my home,” she wailed.

“I’m really sorry. Would you like me to drive you back to your parents’ house?”

“I was going to wait for him here. Then when he comes back, everything will be just the same again.”

That shocked Hoshe more than anything else in the whole case. “Mellanie, the judge gave him a hundred and twenty years.”

“I don’t care. I’ll wait. I love him.”

“He doesn’t deserve you,” Hoshe said sincerely.

She looked up again, her face troubled as if she didn’t know who she was talking to.

“If you want to wait, that’s your decision, and I respect that,” he said. “Though I’d love to try and talk you out of it. But you really can’t do it here. I know it must be horrible for you seeing the bank walk in and take everything like this. But busting up a bot isn’t going to help get rid of them. In any case, the idiots outside are just doing their job. Annoying them just means people like me have to turn up and do their dirty work for them.”

“You’re a very strange policeman. You care. Not like that—” Her lips tightened.

“Paula Myo’s gone. She left after the trial. You won’t ever see her again.”

“Good!” Mellanie looked at the carving knife, and extended a leg, pushing it away with her toes. “Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “But everything nice I ever had happen in my life happened here, and they just barged in and started … They were really nasty.”

“Small people always are. You going to be okay, now?”

She sniffed loudly. “Yes. I think so. I’m sorry they bothered you.”

“Not a problem, believe me; any excuse to get out of the office is welcome. So, why don’t I help you pack a couple of suitcases, then I’ll take you home? Humm, how about that?”

“I can’t.” She stared straight ahead. “I will not go back to my parents. I can’t do that. Please.”

“All right, that’s okay. How about a hotel?”

“I don’t have any money,” she whispered. “I’ve been eating the packets in the freezer since the trial. They’re almost gone. That’s why all the staff left. I couldn’t pay them. Morty’s company won’t help. None of the directors will even see me now. God! Those bastards. They loved me before, you know. I stayed at their houses, played with their children. And the parties we had. Have you ever been rich, Detective?”

“That’s Hoshe, and no, I’ve never been rich.”

“They really don’t live by the same rules as anyone else. Whatever they want to do, they just do it. I found that exciting. It was so wonderful being a part of that, not having limits, living so free. Now look at me. I’m nothing.”

“Don’t be silly. Someone like you can achieve whatever they want to. You’re just young, that’s all. Changes this big are frightening at your age. You’ll pull through. We all do in the end, somehow.”

“You’re very sweet, Hoshe. I don’t deserve that.” She wiped some of the moisture from her cheeks. “Are you going to arrest me?”

“No. But we do need to find you somewhere to stay for tonight. How about a friend?”

“Ha.” Her smile was bitter. “I don’t have any. Before the trial I had hundreds. Now, there isn’t one of them who’ll talk to me. I saw Jilly Yen the other week. She actually left the shop so she didn’t have to say hello.”

“Okay, look, I know the manageress of a B&B not far from here. Have a couple of nights there on me while you get yourself sorted out. You could maybe get a job waitressing or something, there are enough bars in this town. And the colleges will start enrolling in another three weeks. You must have had some thoughts on a career before all this happened.”

“Oh no, no. I can’t take money off you.” Mellanie pushed herself to her feet, combing at her snarled hair in embarrassment. “I don’t want charity.”

“It’s not charity. I’m doing all right now as it happens, I got a decent raise as part of my promotion.”

“You got promoted?” Her brief smile died as she realized why. “Oh.”

“You have to go somewhere. And, believe me, this B&B is cheap.”

Mellanie bowed her head. “One night. That’s all. Just one.”

“Sure. Let’s go and pack a bag.”

She peered at the door. “They said I couldn’t take anything that was mine. They said Morty paid for it all, so it belonged to the bank now. That’s why I … Well, you know.”

“Sure. I’ll sort it out.” He guided Mellanie out into the living room. “The young lady is packing a bag of clothes and leaving,” he told the suits.

“We cannot allow any bank property—”

“I’ve just told you what’s happening,” Hoshe said. “You want to make an issue of it? You want to call me a liar?”

They looked at each other. “No, Officer.”

“Thank you.”

Hoshe had to laugh when they went into the master bedroom. Not at the cliché playboy decor of circular bed and black sheets, complete with mirror portal behind the pillows. It was the poor GPbot, lying on the floor with a sharp dint in its bodywork where someone had kicked it; two of its electromuscle limbs were severed clean at the base, and the remaining three knotted together around its legs. It took a lot of strength to do that to electromuscle.

Mellanie took a modest shoulder bag from one of the walk-in closets.

“I can’t really let you take any jewelry,” Hoshe said. “And I suppose some of the dresses cost a lot.” He was looking past her shoulder at the rack that had every slot taken by some garment; it was moving slowly, rotating the rest of the selection from a hidden storage space behind the closet. There must have been hundreds of clothes there altogether. When he checked, the other closet had as many suits and jackets, and nearly the same number of shoes and boots.

“Don’t worry,” Mellanie said. “One thing I did learn was that expensive doesn’t equal practical.” She was folding a pair of jeans into the bag. The pile on the bed was mostly T-shirts.

“I was thinking,” he said. “It’s kind of a last resort as far as earning money goes, but your life has been interesting to say the least, although it’s for all the wrong reasons. There are media companies who would pay for that story.”

“I know. There’s hundreds of them stored in my e-butler’s hold file. I stopped accessing them, then my cybersphere account was closed.”

“Why is your account closed?”

“I told you. I don’t have any money. I wasn’t joking.” She held up a trim, dark handheld array, giving him a questioning look.

“Sure.” He’d never heard of an account being closed before, everyone had access to the cybersphere.

The array was put in the bag’s side pocket. She sat on the side of the bed, and started lacing up some sports shoes.

“I’ll have the account reactivated,” he said. “Just data and messages for a month. Not an entertainment feed. It’ll only cost me a couple of dollars.”

Mellanie gave him a curious look. “Do you want to sleep with me, Hoshe?”

“No! Er, I mean, no, that’s not … I don’t … That’s not what this is about.”

“People always want to sleep with me. I know that. I’m beautiful and first-life young. And I adore sex. Morty was a very experienced teacher; he encouraged me to experiment. What I can do with my body isn’t shameful, Hoshe. Pleasure is never a sin. And I wouldn’t mind you enjoying me.”

Hoshe just knew his face was turning hot red. Having her talk about it so clinically was like enduring his father’s one attempt to explain the birds and bees. “I’m married. Thank you.” Which was about as lame as you could get.

“I don’t understand. If it’s not to have sex with me, why are you doing this?”

“He killed two people, ruined two lives,” Hoshe said quietly. “I don’t want him to claim a third victim. Not now.”

She picked up a brush from the dressing table and began working it through her hair. “Morty didn’t kill anybody. You and Paula Myo were wrong about that.”

“I don’t think so.”

“The criminal gang could have gone through her memories and found out what was hers, that or tortured it out of her. It wasn’t Morty.”

There were no signs of torture in the pathologist’s report, she was in the bath, and her memorycell was ruined. But all he said was: “We’ll just have to agree to disagree on that.”

“You’re far too nice to be a police officer, do you know that?”

Hoshe waited until she’d cleaned herself up, then took her to the B&B. He paid for a week in advance, and drove off, managing to avoid her attempt to kiss him good-bye. He wasn’t sure he was strong enough to resist actual physical contact.

Five days later, a taxi dropped Mellanie outside a big warehouselike building in Darklake’s Thurnby district, a shabby and badly run-down old industrial precinct. Every plot was protected by high fencing, although half of the factories and retail depots were abandoned. Rubbish had blown up along the wire-mesh fences, forming little dunes of paper and plastic; standing high above them were realtor signs proclaiming various sites available for redevelopment. The single track railway that ran alongside the main road had tall weeds growing from the shingle between the sleepers and its rails were rusting over.

Mellanie glanced around nervously. Not that there was anywhere for muggers to hide. A purple plaque on the door in front of her read: Wayside Productions. She took a breath and walked through.

True to his word, Hoshe Finn had got her cybersphere account activated again. The number of noncommercial messages in her e-butler’s hold file was over seventy thousand. She’d wiped them all and changed her personal interface code. Then she called Rishon, a reporter she’d known from her time with Morton. He’d been very pleased to hear from her, and immediately arranged a meeting. Her story was enormously valuable, he assured her, and people would access the drama from all over the Commonwealth. That was when she hit him with her real big idea, that she should play herself. To her surprise, he’d been delighted by the suggestion, claiming it would bring in even more money.

She sat with him for two days, pouring her heart out, telling him everything about those golden days, from the moment they met at a sponsorship gala dinner, what it had been like, the wonder and thrill of the love affair, her parents’ hostility, the parties, the luxurious hedonistic life, the members of Oaktier’s high society with whom she mingled freely, then the terrible trial with its tragic wrong verdict. Rishon recorded it all, and transformed it into a spectacular script for an eight-part drama that would play for days. He’d sold it within twenty-four hours.

There was a tiny reception area on the other side of Wayside Productions’s front door, composite panel walls and roofing boxing in a couple of ancient couches with flaking chrome tube arms and legs. A girl was sitting on one of them, her jaw working hard on gum as she studied a paperscreen. She had a very short leather skirt, and a white blouse with a low cut front showing off a huge cleavage. Her makeup was dreadful: mascara like panda circles and lips that were glossy lavender. Too-stiff white-blond hair that was mostly bad extensions curled down below her shoulders like overstretched springs. She looked up and smiled broadly at Mellanie. “Oh, hi there, you’re Mellanie; I recognize you from the court case.” Her voice was high and squeaky. Somehow, Mellanie couldn’t imagine it being anything else.

“That’s me.”

“I’m Tiger Pansy. Jaycee told me to look out for you. He said to bring you right on over to the set.” She got up from the couch, standing a couple of centimeters taller than Mellanie. Fifteen-centimeter silver glitter heels made that possible.

“Tiger Pansy?” Mellanie worked hard at keeping herself from spluttering.

“Yeah, honey, you like that? I just started using it. My agent wanted Slippy Trixie, but I nixed that.”

“Tiger Pansy is fine. Sure.”

“Why thanks. You’re gorgeous, you know that? Real young; all sweet and everything. They’re going to love you out there in access land.”

“Er, thanks.” Mellanie hurried after Tiger Pansy.

It was an old warehouse. Wayside Productions had simply partitioned it off into squares to keep the sets separate. Corridors ran between them, with high composite panel walls and no ceiling. High overhead, the building’s metal rafters supported an aging solar collector roof that rattled faintly at every light gust of wind. People were moving along the corridors. She had to flatten herself against a wall as a couple of stagehands came past carrying big hologram portals. They gave Mellanie lingering looks, smiling suggestively. She ignored them as she followed Tiger Pansy. Her body itched just about everywhere from her new OCtattoos. They’d taken three days to etch on they were so extensive, and it was hell trying not to scratch them, but if she did she knew her skin would be red and blotchy all over. That would never do for an actress, especially not at the start of recording that involved sensorium output. Today she knew the other actors would be skeptical about her ability; she was going to have to work hard to impress everyone.

They went past one set door where a whole troupe of actresses were filing in, dressed in schoolgirl uniforms. Even with cellular reprofiling some of them still looked well into their thirties. Mellanie gave them a long look. Surely they weren’t …

“Here we are,” Tiger Pansy said with a hint of pride. “They spent a lot of money on this set. You’re a real big deal around here.” She pointed to the polyphoto notice beside the door. Its glowing letters spelt out: Murderous Seduction. “Cute name, huh?”

“Right.”

Tiger Pansy opened the door and went through. The set was Morton’s penthouse. Almost. It had been split in two, with the living room on one side. Its actual floor space was mainly the conversation area, with settees similar to the real ones. The fireplace was in the right place behind it, but incorporating some very strange animal sculptures made out of fiberglass and sprayed to resemble stone. The walls surrounding the conversation area were simple holograms, showing the rest of the penthouse. A holocamera ring, three meters in diameter, had been lowered from the rafters until it hung a meter above the settees. Three technicians were standing around an open panel in its side, muttering among themselves while a bot like an arm-size centipede slowly wormed its way through the exposed electronics.

The remaining half of the set was given over to the bedroom. That at least was full-scale, though again the walls were just holograms, and the black sheets were cotton rather than silk. Two men were sitting on the mattress. One of them was Morton. Mellanie gasped in surprise. Then she noticed a few inconsistencies, and realized it was cellular reprofiling. A good operation, though, she acknowledged, the resemblance would fool most people. The man beside the mock-Morton was Jaycee, chief executive of Wayside Productions. He was dressed all in black, which looked good on most people. On Jaycee, Mellanie thought it made him look a lot more worn down than his actual fifty-one years, like some embarrassingly oddball bachelor uncle. His head was shaved, though a ghostly shimmer of gray stubble betrayed a monk’s halo. She tried not to stare as he came over, but what kind of executive, especially in a media company, couldn’t pull off baldness with any style.

“Mellanie, lovely to finally meet you in the flesh.” He squeezed her hand rather too firmly as he spent a long time looking her up and down. “And fucking great flesh it is, too. You look delectable.” His plastic friendship smile tightened slightly. “I thought you’d be younger.”

“Oh?” Mellanie was starting to get very bad vibes about Wayside Productions.

“Not a criticism, sweetheart. I’ve got a shithot cosmetics man, we can work you back a few years. See what he did to Joseph, here.”

The man with Morton’s face grinned aggressively. “Hi, babe, looking forward to gigging with you.” He put one hand on his groin, and squeezed happily. Mellanie could see his erection through the trouser fabric. “Don’t worry, you won’t be disappointed, not with this equipment.”

“You’re such an asshole, Joseph,” Tiger Pansy sneered. “Mellanie, don’t let him give you anal, honey, no matter what Jaycee says is in the script. He’s gotten himself an enlargement that’s so big it’s fucking stupid. You’ll hurt into the middle of next week.”

“Hey!” Joseph gave Tiger Pansy the finger. “You couldn’t even fit this between your sagging titties they’ve spread so wide you ancient fucking slut.”

“Fuck you.”

“What the hell is this?” Mellanie demanded. “We’re shooting my story, the things that happened to me and Morton, not some porno.”

“Of course we are, sweetheart,” Jaycee said. “You two,” he growled at Joseph and Tiger Pansy, “fuck off. I want to talk to Mellanie.”

“What are you trying to do?” Mellanie asked when the others had shuffled off the bedroom set.

“Okay, I apologize for Joseph, he’s an asshole. But he’s one of my best dols.”

“A doll?”

“D. O. L. Dick on legs. Even with all today’s drugs, some guys have a shitload of trouble keeping it up for the recording. It’s a psychological thing, or some crap like that. But Joseph, he can perform every fucking time, man. He’s fucking incredible. And don’t you fucking listen to that screwed-up old whore, Tiger. Joseph knows what he’s doing with girls. You’ll have a lot of fun riding that monster dick of his.”

“No I won’t. This has all been some giant mix-up. I’m not here to make a porno. Good-bye.” She turned around, ready to walk out.

“Wait, just fucking wait, okay,” Jaycee stepped in front of her, arms held up. “This is not a fucking porno. We’re shooting a real fucking true life drama here, man.”

She gave the set a derisive glance. Even the fireplace statues made sense now. “Yeah, right.”

“Fucking listen will you. I read the story Rishon came up with. You were some fucking swimmer when that Morton got inside your pants, and that fucked your chances on the team. It’s a fucking classic; you’re young and he’s rich. Only it turns out he killed a bunch of people as well; he betrayed you, sweetheart. Accessors love shit like that. We’ve even put in a chase scene around the apartment when you find out what he’s done. He comes at you with a knife. It’s fucking exciting.”

“That is bullshit,” she snapped. “None of this is what I told Rishon. Morton never killed anyone. You’re not interested in telling our story.”

“Of course I am, sweetheart. Man, I want the whole fucking story, too. Look, we’ll just be shooting the sex scenes first, get them fuckers out of the way. Then we can concentrate on all the other stuff, we’ll do it big style on location, where it actually happened. Okay?”

“What utter crap!”

“You don’t like Joseph? Fine. No fucking problem. I’ll get reprofiled to look like your boyfriend, and pump you myself.”

“Oh, Jesus wept!” She went for the door.

Jaycee’s hand came down on her shoulder and spun her around. His face was flushed and angry, hot blotches showing where too much cheap cellular reprofiling had been done to him down the decades. “Stop being such a fucking bitch-kitty princess. You signed that fucking contract, and you fucking knew what was in it. You’re even wetwired specially for this gig, for fuck’s sake. If you’ve started shitting it because this is your first time, then boo fucking hoo. I can slip you a dose of coolant that can take care of that for you, no fucking problem. You’ll be chill for the whole gig. But don’t fucking come marching in here and fucking tell me this isn’t what you wanted.”

“It’s not what I was told was going to happen. I had those OCtattoos because all actresses know we have to do that. Making love is an integral part of life. So love scenes contribute to the drama’s narrative structure. But they’re only a part of it. You just want to do that and nothing else.”

“Actress? Fuck me. If that’s what you want to fucking call yourself, then go right ahead. But I paid for those OCtattoos because you’re a fantasy fuck, princess hardass. You’re the real fucking deal; you’re the kind of trim that those sad little fucks out there in access land can only ever envy all the rich bastards for having. Your kind doesn’t ever fucking put out for a guy unless he’s got a hundred mil in his bank. Now I get to give them what you really taste like. And they’re going to love us for it.”

“No. I’m not doing it.”

“Did you see any multiple fucking choice boxes to check off when you came in here, you stupid bitch? I fucking paid for you and I’m gonna fucking collect. Our contract says you spread your legs when I tell you to and let us record every fucking feeling in your tight-ass body when my dol goes to work inside you. And stop giving me all this shit about it, else I’ll see to it that you wind up in the suspension chamber next to your killer boyfriend. We’ve got a legal contract.”

Jaycee was staring triumphantly right into her eyes, eager to catch the first signs of submission.

Mellanie was fast. Years of that relentless, tedious training with the squad had given her the kind of strength and reflexes that modern athletes normally had to have wetwired and retrosequenced into their bodies. Her knee came up, with powerful leg muscles trying to lift it all the way to Jaycee’s chin. His scrotum was the first thing to get in the way.

She watched his mouth drop open soundlessly. His eyes widened, flooding with tears. He slid to one side, making a quiet, agonized choking sound, and crumpled to the floor.

“I’m going to call my agent now,” she told him dispassionately. “But when you’re out of the hospital, we really must do lunch.”

The taxi dropped Mellanie off by the lakeside in the Glyfada district. She sat on a long wooden bench just above the water, watching the sailing yachts making their way out of the marina in Shilling Harbor to catch the first of the morning winds. The bars and restaurants behind her were just starting to open for the day, with delivery trucks parked outside several of them, cargobots unloading fresh food. They weren’t actually serving yet. It was too early for that. Her brand-new media career had lasted all of forty-five minutes.

The shakes began as she finally allowed herself to think about Jaycee, and what she’d done actually hit home. An incredulous half laugh burst from her lips, more relief than anything else. No one at Wayside Productions had tried to stop her as she left. They all just stared at her as she walked past the sets, as if she were some mad serial killer—except for Tiger Pansy who’d winked.

I can’t believe I did that.

Which triggered a terrible thought. If that ability was to be found in the core of every human mind, then could Morton actually have …

She stopped that line of reasoning straightaway.

But it felt good. I actually stood up for myself.

In the heat of the moment. And no doubt Jaycee would file charges as soon as he could walk and talk again. And she’d signed the contract. It had seemed so wonderful at the time, the perfect solution to her situation. Dear old Hoshe’s suggestion of waitressing or college were nonstarters. He didn’t understand, she simply couldn’t do things like that. Not after the life she’d been shown. That cut her options down considerably.

A young man so obviously on his way to crew a yacht, dressed in a rugby shirt and shorts, was sauntering along the waterfront, trying not to be too obvious as he glanced at her. She pushed her hair back lightly, and gave him a sunburst smile. The answering smile he gave was so full of puppy-dog hope and longing it was all she could do not to laugh outright. God, men are so easy. Not that it had to be men, especially given her current mood. A girl would be so much kinder in bed, more attentive, more receptive.

It would be nice to be taken care of, to be pampered and adored. But weak. I’m not going to be weak anymore. The tears threatened to burst out again. There had been so much of that since the trial. She made fists of her hands, forcing her nails into her palms until she winced at the pain. I will not cry again.

There was only one option left now. She hadn’t wanted to try it before because it was such a long shot. A fantasy, really. The psychological safety net you never want to use.

She pulled out the little array she’d brought with her from the penthouse. The one with the ridiculously expensive black foxory casing—not that dear Hoshe had recognized that. “I want a link to the SI,” she told her e-butler. Her new OCtattoos were all for sensory reception; Jaycee hadn’t paid for virtual interface functions.

“For what reason?” the e-butler asked. The SI was notoriously reluctant to accept calls from human individuals. Apart from its comprehensive banking service, official government requests and emergencies were about the only contact it had with the Commonwealth.

She brought the little array up close to her face. “Just tell it who’s calling,” she whispered. “And ask it if … if Grandpa remembers me.”

The little screen on the front of the handheld array immediately came on, showing tangerine and turquoise sine-waves retreating back to their joint vanishing point. “Hello, baby Mel.”

“Grandpa?” The word was very hard to get out through her tightened-up throat. Once again, the wretched tears threatened to burst loose. She really had not expected this to work.

“He is with us, yes.”

Mellanie remembered that last achingly long day in the hospice, waiting by his bed for him to die. She was only nine at the time, and never did understand why he didn’t rejuvenate like everybody else. Her parents hadn’t wanted her there, but she’d insisted—stubborn even back then. Grandpa (actually, her great-great-grandfather) was always the nicest relative she had, always found time for his baby Mel despite his status as one of the planet’s most distinguished residents. All the history files at school mentioned him as one of the programmers who had helped Sheldon and Isaac write the governing software for their original wormhole. “Are you still you, Grandpa?”

“That’s a difficult question to answer, Mellanie. We are the memories of your grandfather, but at the same time we are more, a universe more, which makes us less than the individual you want.”

“You always listened to me, Grandpa. You always said you’d help me if you could. And I really, really, need your help now.”

“We are not physical, Mellanie, we can only help with words.”

“That’s what I need: advice. I need to know what to do, Grandpa. I’ve made a bit of a mess of my life.”

“You are only twenty, Mellanie. You are a child. You haven’t begun your life yet.”

“Then why do I feel like it’s almost over?”

“Because you are young, of course. Everything that happens to you is epic at your age.”

“I guess. So you will help me, then, Grandpa?”

“What would you like to know?”

“I don’t have any money right now.”

“So we see. The Darklake National Bank is being its usual efficient self, and quantifying your ex-lover’s assets for redistribution. The funds will be split between Tara Jennifer Shaheef and Wyobie Cotal, once various exorbitant fees have been claimed by officials, lawyers, and institutions. We do not believe you would be successful if you applied for a percentage of them. Legally, you have very little standing.”

“I don’t want any,” she said forcefully. “I’ve decided I’m not going to be dependent on anyone again. I’m going to make my life my own from now on.”

“That is the baby Mel we remember. We were always proud of you.”

“I tried to sell the story of what happened with me and Morton, but it hasn’t worked out very well. I was naive and stupid, I guess. I trusted a reporter. It didn’t work out too good. I might get arrested. There was this terrible man, a pornographer. I kind of assaulted him.”

“Fancy trusting a reporter. That was stupid. But the situation can probably be resolved. And pornographers are not notorious for running to the police.”

“I wanted to give myself a profile, Grandpa. I had this idea that I could become like a celebrity, a media personality. I’ve got the looks, and I’m sure I have the determination to make it. I just need some guidance, that’s all. My story was just going to be the start. Once it’s released, people will know my name. That can be used. If I can keep myself on the unisphere then who knows, one day I could be as big as Alessandra Baron.”

“You could indeed. You have the potential. Where exactly do you see us fitting into this scheme?”

“I want you to be my agent, Grandpa. I need to get my story back from Rishon and sell it again, to a respectable producer this time. I’ll need to pay off Wayside Productions for my OCtattoos, as well. You can strike the best deal for me; you’re honest, you won’t rip me off. And you’re a bank, too. My money will be safe with you.”

“We see. Very well, we will do that for you. There is, however, the question of our fee.”

“I know. It’s ten percent isn’t it? Or do you charge more?”

“We were not thinking in terms of a financial percentage.”

“Oh.” She frowned at the little array’s screen with its random pattern. “What do you want?”

“If you are serious in your intention of a media career, then no matter what form it takes you will need a broadcast quality sensorium interface.”

“A pro neural feed, yes, I know. What I’ve got already is a reasonable start. I was hoping my advance would pay for enhancements, and there’s some inserts I’d like as well. I want to go virtual.”

“We will pay for the enhancements. But there will be occasions when we will want to ride along on them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Many people believe our presence within the Commonwealth is total, delivered to us through the unisphere. However, even we have limits. There are many places we cannot reach. Some are deliberately blocked, while others are simply lacking any electronic infrastructure. You could provide us access to these areas on special occasions.”

“You mean you watch us? I always thought that was just a silly conspiracy theory.”

“We do not watch everyone. However, our interests are combined with yours, and you are a part of us through innumerable memory downloads. To use an old phrase: our fates are entwined. The only way to unentwine them would be to remove ourselves from the sphere of all human activity. We choose not to do so.”

“Why not? I bet your life would be simpler.”

“And you believe that to be a good thing? No entity can enrich itself in isolation.”

“So you do watch us. Do you manipulate us as well?”

“By acting as your agent we control the flow of your life. Is that manipulation? We are data. It is our nature to acquire more, to continually add to our knowledge, and to use it. It is both our language and our currency. Human current events form a very small part of the information we absorb.”

“It’s more like you’re studying us, then?”

“Not as individuals. It is your society and the way in which its currents flow which is obviously of interest to us. What affects you affects us.”

“And you don’t want any surprises.”

“Do you?”

“I guess not.”

“Then we understand each other. So do you still wish us to act as your representative and advisor, baby Mel?”

“I’d be like your secret agent, wouldn’t I?”

“The role has parallels. But there are no dangers involved, you are simply our eyes and ears in secluded places. Don’t expect to be issued with exotic gadgets and cars that fly.”

She laughed—for the first time in a long while. Shame about the flying cars, though, that would be fun. “Let’s do it.” Because if Grandpa was serious, the SI would have to make sure she was a success.

....

The last sections of copper tubing in the espresso machine clipped back neatly into place, and Mark Vernon used a set of electromuscle pliers to tighten the seals. He screwed the chrome cover back on and flicked the power switch. Three green lights came on.

“There you go. All working again.”

Mandy clapped her hands together in jubilation. “Oh, thanks, Mark. I kept telling Dil it was buggered, but he didn’t do anything about it, just left us stewing in poo. You’re my hero.”

He smiled at the young waitress who was beaming up at him. She’d been setting fresh breakfast paninis out under the glass counter ready for the early-morning customers; huge halves of the crusty Italian bread clamped around entire meals such as fried egg, sausages, kyias, and tomatoes, or ham, cheese, and pineapple, or vegetarian omelettes. Her shift partner, Julie, was rattling pans and crockery around in the kitchen at the rear. The smell of honey-cured bacon being grilled was drifting in through the hatch.

“Pretty simple, really,” he said modestly. The small area behind the serving counter meant Mandy was standing slightly too close, and slightly too admiringly as well. “I’ll, er, get on then.” He was slotting his tools back into the small case he always carried with him. His other hand held it between them like a defensive shield.

“No you won’t. You sit yourself down there and I’ll get you a decent breakfast. It’s the least you deserve. And make sure you put a huge call-out fee on your bill for Dil. Bloody skinflint.”

“Right-o.” Mark nodded in defeat. Actually he was hungry. It was a fifteen-minute drive in to Randtown from Ulon Valley where the Vernons had their vineyard homestead. Mandy’s frantic early-morning call hadn’t given him time for a bite before he left. Hadn’t even used his toothgel yet.

He sat at a big marble-top table in one of the café Two For Tea’s big curving windows. A couple had already claimed the window table on the other side of the door. They were dressed in skiing clothes, and talking happily with their heads tilted lovingly together, oblivious to the rest of the world.

Bright sunlight was creeping over the Dau’sing Mountains that surrounded Randtown to the north. Mark put his sunglasses on against the light streaming in through the window as he unrolled a paperscreen—he never had liked reading directly out of his virtual vision, the print superimposed over his field of view always gave him a headache. A dozen headlines scrolled down the left-hand side, with local items opposite them, loaded into the cybersphere by The Randtown Chronicle, the only media company on this half of the continent. With all the goodwill and loyalty in the world, Mark really couldn’t haul up enough enthusiasm to read about the new loop road around the town’s western precincts, or the proposed foresting project along the Oyster Valley. So he told his e-butler to access yesterday’s pan-Commonwealth news, and followed the start of the presidential campaign. Reading between the lines on Doi’s funding efforts, she hadn’t gotten the Sheldons, the Halgarths, nor the Singhs to back her yet.

“Here you go,” Mandy said brightly as she put a plate down in front of him. It was piled high with pancakes and bacon oozing maple syrup out of every layer; the strawberries and lolabeans on top were arranged in a smiley face. A tall glass of apple and mango in crushed ice was placed next to it. “I’ll bring your toast and coffee when it’s ready.” She winked saucily and skipped off to take the ski couple’s order. Behind the serving counter the espresso machine had started to gurgle and steam comfortingly.

The smell of food was obviously spreading down the street. People started coming into the café as Mark was eating. Some of them were tourist types, seeking a good meal before the day’s hectic activities, looking around in appreciation at the mock Roman decor before finding a free table. Locals stood at the counter to collect their microwaved paninis and hot drinks to go. Mandy barely had time to bring him his four thick slices of toast and butter with the vanilla rhubarb jam he was especially fond of. A pains au chocolat was perched on the edge of his plate, just in case.

He eventually managed to leave Tea For Two at half past eight. Outside, it was exactly the sort of morning he had traveled three hundred light-years to immerse himself in every day. He breathed down air that had that distinct crisp chill that was only ever found at the foot of snowcapped mountains. The taller peaks and plateaus of the Dau’sings were still heavily snow-covered, including both ski fields. Mark looked up at them, his sunglasses darkening against the light from Elan’s brilliant G-9 star flooding down out of the cloudless sky. They dominated the land behind the town, forming an impressive barrier of rumpled cones and peaks. Now that Elan’s southern hemisphere was coming into springtime, meltwater was starting to run down out of the snowline, filling every crevice with gushing white rivulets. Pine variants from across the Commonwealth had colonized the lower slopes, bringing a much-needed cascade of verdure foliage. Above them, the native boltgrass still flourished, a characterless yellow-green plant with ratty strands. Away from the little oasis of foreign vegetation that humans had brought to the area, it was boltgrass that carpeted every mountain in the range, covering almost a quarter of the continent.

Small elongated triangles of golden fabric were already drifting idly across the sky as the first of the days fliers flapped their way upward in search of the thermals. They normally launched themselves off the ridges on Blackwater Crag, which rose up from the back of the town’s eastern quarter. A cable car run sliced through the forest that covered the crag, leading from its ground base behind the high school’s playing fields up to the semicircular Orbit building that protruded from the top of the broad cliff six hundred meters above the town, looking as if a flying saucer were sticking out over the edge. The restaurant it housed was an overpriced tourist trap, although the view it provided across the town and lake was unbeatable.

Every day the little chrome-blue cable cars carried tourists and flight professionals and extreme sports addicts up to the Orbit. From there they’d make their way through the forest paths to a ridge that had the wind blowing in the right direction, seal themselves into a Vinci suit, and take flight. The real professionals would spend all day soaring and spiraling in the thermals, coming back down only as darkness fell. A Vinci suit was easy enough to use: it was basically a tapered slimline sleeping bag with bird wings that had a span up to eight meters. You stood up inside it on the crest of the ridge, arms outstretched in a cruciform position, and dived forward into the chasm below. Electromuscle bands in the wings mimicked and amplified your arm and wrist motions, allowing the wings to flap and bank and roll. It was the closest humans had ever got to pure bird flight.

Mark had been up a couple of times, sharing an instructor suit with a friend who lived in town. The sensation was truly amazing, but he wasn’t about to switch jobs to do it full-time.

He walked down the sloping Main Mall toward the waterfront. The stores on either side of the walkway were a collection of Commonwealth-wide retail franchises like the Bean Here and the inevitable Bab’s Kebabs fast food, interspaced with local craft shops and the bars and cafés to provide an eclectic shopping mix.

Doors all the way along the Main Mall were being opened for business. Mark said hello to a lot of the staff, waving to even more. They were all young people, and strangely uniform in appearance; if it wasn’t for their varied skin colors they could all have been cousins. The boys had stiff hair cut short, maybe a few days’ stubble, bodies that were genuinely fit, not simply overaerobicized in a gym; they wore baggy sweaters or even baggier waterproof coats, with knee-length shorts, and trainer sandals. The girls were easy to look at in their short skirts or tight trousers, with T-shirts all showing off firm midriffs no matter how cold the day was. All of them were just filling in with these jobs: serving in the stores, waitressing, working bar, portering at the hotels, stewarding on the dive boats, hostessing the scenic tours, doing childcare for the permanent residents. They did it for one thing, to raise enough money for the next extreme experience. Randtown’s biggest industry was tourism, and what set it apart from countless other holiday destinations in the Commonwealth were the sports that were practiced in the rugged countryside surrounding it. They attracted the first-lifers, the ones moderately disaffected with the mainstream of Commonwealth life; not rebels, just thrill-junkies hell-bent on finding a quicker way down a mountain, or a rougher way to raft over rapids, or turn tighter corners on jetskis, or go ever higher for heliski drops. Older, more conservative multi-life types visited as well, staying in the fancy hotels and getting bused out to their scheduled activity each day in air-conditioned coaches. They were the ones who generated the service economy that provided hundreds of low-paying jobs for the likes of Mandy and Julie.

Mark crossed the single-lane road at the end of Main Mall, and walked along the waterfront promenade. Randtown was built around a horseshoe-shaped inlet on the northern shore of Lake Trine’ba. At a hundred eighty kilometers long, it was the biggest stretch of inland freshwater on Elan. Complementing the height of the mountains that corraled it at their center, it was over a kilometer deep in places. Lurking below the astonishingly blue surface was a unique marine ecology that had evolved in isolation for tens of millions of years. Stunningly beautiful coral reefs dominated the shallows, while conical atolls rose from the central deeps like miniature volcanoes. They were home to thousands of fish species, ranging from the bizarre to the sublime; though like their saltwater cousins of this planet they used lethal-looking spines and spindles rather than fins to propel themselves along.

After the winter skiing and snowboarding, diving was Randtown’s second largest tourist draw. The waterfront provided dozens of jetties, where the commercial diving boats were berthed. Even today, with the Trine’ba only just above freezing, ten of the operators were running trips out over the waters. Mark watched a big Celestial Tours catamaran slide past, its impellers kicking up a thick spume behind each hull. A couple of the crew waved to him from the prow, calling out something that was lost in the noise of the engines.

He carried on along the side of the stone wall, with its single line of poetry that stretched the entire length. One day he was going to read it from start to finish. The Ables Motors garage, which was his franchise, was situated a couple of streets away from the eastern end of the promenade. He got to it well before quarter to nine. Randtown, for all it was the only real town for eight hundred kilometers, wasn’t particularly large. Without the tourists and youthful transients, the population was only just over five thousand people. You could walk from one end to the other in less than a quarter of an hour.

There were an equal number of people living out in the valleys and lowlands to the north and west where the farms and vineyards were spreading. To travel about on the district’s dirt-track roads they needed decent four-wheel drive transport. That was what Ables Motors specialized in; it was a division of Farndale that produced vehicles for harsh terrain. It had seemed like the perfect solution to Mark when they were searching for a new home and career. He was good with machines, so he could do most of the light repairs himself; and trading both new and second-hand models would add considerably to that income. Unfortunately, Ables Motors was a relatively new venture for Farndale, an unproven brand, while the old familiar Mercedes, Ford, Range Rover, and Telmar products took the lion’s share of the market. Nor did it help that the Ables garage was only a couple of years old. He perhaps should have realized that when he took it on along with the outstanding mortgage. Sales were slow, and given the tiny number of Ables vehicles in the area, maintenance work was equally sparse.

It had taken Mark less than a fortnight to realize that the four-wheel drive business wasn’t going to bring in anything like a decent income for the family. When he started looking around for extra work, he swiftly found that people in town and on the farms had a lot of broken-down hardware that could be fixed by anyone with rudimentary mechanical aptitude. Mark had damn good mechanical, and electrical, aptitude; on top of which he had a fully equipped workshop. At the start of the third week he brought a few items back to the shop: a couple of janitorbots, an air conditioner, the sonar out of a dive operator’s catamaran, cookers, solar heat exchangers.

Randtown was a tight-knit community, people got to hear about anyone with that kind of talent. Pretty soon he was deluged with appliances and equipment that needed to be patched up. Most of it was done for cash. They’d been paying off the mortgage on the vineyard faster than they’d originally planned.

That morning had three autopickers waiting for him in the workshop. Each unit was the size of a car, with enough electromuscle appendages to fit a Raiel with prosthetics. They belonged to Yuri Conant, who owned three vineyards in Ulon Valley, and was now a good friend and neighbor. One of Yuri’s kids was the same age as Barry.

Mark pulled on his overalls, and started running diagnostics on the first machine. Its magnetic drive bearings were shot to hell. He was still underneath examining the superconductor linkages when his garage sales assistant, Olivia, came in.

“Have you heard?” she asked excitedly.

Mark propelled his flat trolley out from under the mud-caked autopicker and gave her a wounded look. “Wolfram finally asked if he could come in for a coffee last night?” It was a saga of frustrated romance that had been playing out for two weeks now; Mark usually got the latest installment each morning.

“No! The Second Chance is back. They came out of hyperspace above Anshun about forty minutes ago.”

“Goddamn! Really?” Mark couldn’t possibly pretend lack of interest in that. If he hadn’t been married with family responsibilities he would have applied to go on the voyage himself. It was all part of the more interesting universe that existed away from Augusta. As it was he’d hunted down a lot of information on the project until he was able to bore plenty of people with all the statistics and trivial factoids. His e-butler was supposed to alert him on all new developments connected with the flight, but while he was driving into town that morning he’d put a blocker on his e-butler’s access to the cybersphere to avoid any more emergency calls like that from Tea For Two. Family could get through, but no one else. He’d forgotten to take it off when he reached the garage. “What did they find?” he asked as he hurriedly removed the blocker.

“It’s gone, or something.”

“What has?” The data began to line up inside his virtual vision.

“The barrier. It vanished when they started to examine it.”

“Holy cow.” His virtual hands started to flash over icons, bringing up information. In the end there was so much coming on-line they went into the little office at the back of the salesroom to watch the images on a holographic portal. CST was releasing video segments of the exploration as the starship downloaded its data. The media companies were gleefully swooping on it, putting together their own analysis and commentary teams in the studio.

Olivia had been right, the barrier was no more. Its disappearance was shocking, affecting him like the news of a sudden death in the family; that was one thing he absolutely hadn’t been expecting. Nor had any of the studio experts, judging by the way they struggled to make sense of it.

There was little traffic on the road outside the Ables garage. The Russian chocolate house opposite had the same images playing in their portals above the counter. Customers sat at the tables, drinks ignored as they stared at the incomprehensively massive barrier. He called Liz to see if she was accessing. She said yes, she was sitting with the rest of the staff at the Dunbavand vine nursery where she worked, looking at the scenes on one of the office screens.

Mark watched, awestruck, as the spheres and rings of the Dark Fortress revolved within the portal on his desk. The scale was so hard to appreciate. Then there was the system-wide Dyson civilization. The safe thrill of watching the nuclear firefight between ships made him feel as if he were doing something illicit. None of the commentators Alessandra Baron brought into her studio liked the implications of the battle. She turned to a cultural anthropologist to try to explain why a space-faring species would fight in such a fashion. He clearly didn’t have a clue.

Hours passed without Mark really being aware of them. It was only when Olivia said, “Time for my lunch break,” that he finally glanced around at her, frowning as he tried to work out what she was saying.

“Right. Sure,” he replied. “I don’t suppose anyone’s going to buy a vehicle off us today.” He decided he ought to take a break himself, and shut the garage doors behind him. The promenade was unusually quiet for midday. He pulled up his jacket hood against the bitter wind blowing off the lake. Those who did stroll past had the glazed otherwhere expression symptomatic of someone absorbed by their virtual vision. Everybody was hooked on the starship’s return. It was as momentous as the Cup final, when all through the first half Brazil had actually looked like they were going to lose. Instinctively he glanced up at the Black House where Simon Rand lived, wondering if he, too, was having life put into perspective on this day. The building was a huge Georgian mansion perched on the slope above the eastern wing of the lake’s inlet, set in ten acres of its own immaculately maintained grounds. There were dozens of big houses arrayed on the slopes around it, the most expensive and exclusive in the town, though they didn’t match its grandeur. A lot of them belonged to the first arrivals, the men and women who’d joined Simon’s quixotic crusade and helped lay the highway through the mountains.

It was fifty-five years ago now when Simon Rand arrived at Elan’s planetary station with a whole train loaded with JCB roadbuilders, a fleet of various bots, and trucks jammed full of civil construction systems. He was moderately rich even back then, a first-life son of a minor Earth Grand Family who had cashed in his trust fund to buy a dream. Inspired by legends of the Oregon Trail he was determined to set out for somewhere fresh and new, and protect it from modern desecration. Elan, opened to settlers for only a couple of decades back then, was a good starting point. Developers and investors were cut a lot of slack by the planetary government if they helped establish new neighborhoods and facilities. The idea was such entrepreneurial folk would import entire factories and build housing around them. But Simon’s very different vision of a clean green community was harmless enough, so the bureaucrats granted him his land licenses while privately believing the venture was doomed. After all, the Confederation worlds were littered with the follies of eccentric romanticists and their lost fortunes.

Simon immediately set off for the almost uninhabited southern continent of Ryceel. Once there he began the ultimate foolishness of building his road through the imposing Dau’sing range—as if there wasn’t plenty of open land available north of the mountains. Several news shows ran derisive reports on their bulletins, which attracted other idealists and supporters to his cause, willing to get their hands dirty for the payday of living in a quiet, off-mainstream community when they were finished. And Simon, for all his quirky attitude, had at least prepared for his venture with a pragmatic thoroughness.

Three years and seven hundred eighty kilometers later his last surviving JCB monster roadbuilder chewed its way around the base of Blackwater Crag amid the death-screeches of disintegrating rock and churning clouds of filthy steam like some earthbound dragon. Behind it was a dual carriageway of enzyme-bonded concrete that bridged seventeen rivers and tunneled through eleven mountains. Walking along the newly-laid surface that crackled and gave off reeking urealike fumes was Simon, leading a chaotic caravan of mobile homes, trucks, and even a few horses and mules pulling carts. The three other roadbuilders that had begun the trip were now abandoned behind them; cannibalized, rusting hulks slumped beside the road as monuments to its conception.

Like Moses so long before him Simon gazed out across Lake Trine’ba and said, “This is where we belong.” He could see that it was the cool blue water that had parted the continent-spanning mountains, leaving their massed ranks pressed together along its shores. The massive ramparts stretched on and on into the distance, reflected perfectly by the unsullied mirror surface. On both sides, hundreds of waterfalls fed by the meltwater poured out over jagged cliffs, from tiny silver trickles barely wetting the rock to great foaming cascades throwing out spray thicker than rain. Tiny, delicate scarlet and lavender coral cones were poking out from the center of the lake. And filling the huge gulf of air above the water was a silence so deep it absorbed his very thoughts.

In fifty-two years, the majestic view hadn’t changed. Simon was very determined about that. Buildings, forests, fields, drainage ditches, and roads now spread out over the virgin land in the valleys behind Randtown, but there was no industry, none of the factories and business units that normally barnacled the outskirts of human settlements. The inhabitants could import what they liked down the long toll highway that was still their only physical link to the rest of the human race—it wasn’t economical to build a railroad beside it, and there was nowhere for an airport. Simon wasn’t out to change the majority Commonwealth culture, he just wanted to keep the worst aspects out of his little part. So the farms were organic, the town’s principal income came from tourism, its energy was geothermal and solar; combustion engines were illegal; recycling was a minor religion, and sewage was treated in secure bioreactors to prevent the slightest chance that any foreign human-derived chemical could ever pollute the precious pure water of Lake Trine’ba.

As environments went, Mark had gone from one extreme to the other.

Virtual vision showed him a ghostly image of the Second Chance slowly maneuvering itself into its assembly platform dock high above Anshun. He was struck by its condition, how unworn it was. After such a voyage there should surely be some signs of stress, a few meteor impacts, scorch marks—just something to prove how far it had been and what it had seen. But it looked as new and clean as the day it departed.

He stopped at one of the stalls behind the promenade and bought a tuna, shrimp, talarot, sweetcorn, and mayo salad sandwich for lunch, along with some vegetarian sushi and a small something for dessert. It was Sasmi who sold it to him; she’d arrived in town a few months ago for the start of the snowboarding season. Judging from her raven hair and flattish face, Mark had thought her heritage was Oriental, until she told him her ancestors were actually Finnish. A sweet girl who had dived headfirst into everything Randtown offered: the friends, parties, sports. Who always found the time to talk to Mark, not that he was singled out, she just had an irrepressibly sunny nature.

Today even she was caught up in the drama of the starship’s return. They swapped: “Have you heard?” and “Did you see the bit where …” as he watched her assembling his bap. He walked away back down the promenade, her parting smile lingering in his mind. There had never been so much temptation in his life before. It was an undisputed quality of Randtown; everybody here was so busy cramming their life full of events that mostly seemed to be parties and meeting other people, yet with all that they were never hurried. He had taken months to learn how to slow down and chill out after Augusta’s lean, focused routine of work and family, where enjoyment was centered solely around entertainment. His only fear about living here now was that he would give in one day, some of the girls were just divine.

Olivia was still on her break when Mark got back to the garage. He’d only just sat down and started on his triple chip chocolate and quorknut muffin when CST released the real bombshell. Two people had been left behind. The news was only just breaking because the company had been informing and counseling the families. Mark had enough trouble coping with that, never mind that one of them was actually Dudley Bose. For a while he was furious with the rest of Second Chance’s crew for abandoning them out there, such a thing was surely the ultimate betrayal. Just thinking about that much distance made him shiver. Then Captain Wilson Kime made a real-time statement. He was dressed in his full dark uniform, hair clipped neat and short, staring unflinchingly into the camera, knowing how many people would be staring back. All of them with one question on their lips. Why did you do it? Why didn’t you wait for them?

“It is with the most profound regret that I find myself ending our historic voyage with this saddest possible news,” Wilson said. His deep solemn voice was so sincere Mark immediately switched to feeling sorry for him and the terrible weight of command. “I was forced to make the decision which every captain fears the most, to risk the lives of every person on board, or to leave our friends and colleagues behind. This mission was launched with the express commitment of bringing back vital information on Dyson Alpha, and the remarkable barrier surrounding this star. While the safety of my crew is paramount to me personally as well as enshrined in my duty, I could not overlook our ultimate objective. We found ourselves in a situation that placed the entire ship in grave danger. Faced with these circumstances, I had no choice other than to leave. It is a choice that I will have to face down every day for the rest of my life, always asking myself if we’d just stayed that fraction longer would they have got back in contact? But those few extra moments could equally have brought us calamity. Then we might never have brought back the information we have. The Commonwealth might not have been warned that the barrier is down, and the aliens it contained do not appear to be friendly. It is that information which I considered more important than the lives of our comrades. I know that if the tragic situation had been reversed, and I was out there lost in the alien station, that I would have wanted my shipmates to carry the essential knowledge home no matter what the personal cost. All of us undertook this voyage knowing there would be danger involved. None of us hoped it would be so profound. Thank you for your time.”

Mark slumped back in his seat, and pushed out a long breath. Given those circumstances, he supposed he would have done exactly the same thing. It was still a pretty frightening decision, though. And the captain thought the aliens were dangerous. That wasn’t good, not good at all.

The news company started playing images of the Watchtower. Mark followed the astronauts as they slid through the dark tunnels of the station. There seemed to be miles of the eerie passageways knotted together. The harsh breathing of the contact team members reverberated around the showroom office; Mark felt himself being there as gloved hands stretched out at the edges of the image, grabbing frayed sections of the tunnel wall to haul himself along. Then he was slow-motion somersaulting into an empty chamber. Conduits on the wall had split open, allowing optical fibers to drift out like some kind of slender aquatic plant. He followed them along to a box containing circuit cubes, resembling fogged glass. Excited voices called out. The gauntlets tried to tease one of the cubes out, but it started crumbling at the touch. Another, calmer voice instructed them to cut the whole box free of its mountings.

Mark shook himself. He wanted to go through the Watchtower inch by inch, examining its dark mysteries for himself. One night this week he’d take the time and lie on his bed, running a TSI of the exploration.

The news company switched to Senator Thompson Burnelli who was standing in front of Washington’s imposing Senate Hall. A broad semicircle of reporters was gathered around him, while he was flanked by two aides.

“Obviously I am disappointed by certain aspects of the flight,” Burnelli said. “Although I would like to take this moment to express my sympathy to the families of both Dudley Bose and Emmanuelle Verbeke for the shock they received today. In relation to that, I do think there are some very serious questions raised by the way the Second Chance left the area so abruptly. I believe a lot more effort should have been made to ascertain the nature of the Dyson aliens. As to the supposed threat: nothing actually fired on our ship, a few robot devices were getting close, that’s all. We don’t know they were missiles. Kime could have taken a second, a third, even a fourth look; kept on trying until we got some real information. The Second Chance was equipped with FTL, they could leap out clean and free from any genuine danger.”

“What’s going to happen now?” a reporter asked.

“The full Commonwealth ExoProtectorate Council will be convening as soon as possible to review the results. Once we have done so we will make our recommendation to the President and the Commonwealth Senate.”

“What will your recommendation be, Senator?”

Thompson tipped his head thoughtfully to one side, frowning intently at his questioner. “I think that is obvious. Due to the lack of any real data, we’ll have to send another ship. This time commanded by a captain who has some nerve, one who can find out for us what’s really going on out there.”

Mark was nodding in agreement. Maybe Kime was hasty. The Second Chance had good shielding, I remember that from the specs. Protection was a prime design driver.

Olivia returned, and they spent most of the afternoon watching the portal. CST released the recordings Dudley Bose had made, explaining and commenting on the data that the ship gathered. His descriptions fascinated Mark, they were pitched at a level he could understand, a clear confident voice turning the dry facts to vivid life. No wonder he was such a respected, successful astronomer.

Mark went out to the workshop a few times that afternoon, trying to do some work on the autopickers. Each time his mind drifted from the job and he went back to check the portal again. A lot of the time was spent wondering what it must have been like for Bose and Verbeke at that moment when they finally realized the starship had gone for good. How would anybody handle knowledge like that? Christ, how would I take it?

He shut the Ables garage up early, and drove home in his pickup truck. The first part of the journey was along the great highway that Simon Rand had built, taking him around the back of Blackwater Crag and into the steep narrow valley there. Terrestrial grass had been planted at the side of the highway, a vigorous variety that had evicted the boltgrass, converting the slopes above the fast-flowing stream to a rich healthy emerald. Fat sheep still in their winter coats ambled around dozily, munching away, while their new lambs jumped about excitedly. High above them, where there was less grass and more boulders, mountain goats scurried about, venturing in and out from the edges of the pine forest.

After a few miles the valley widened out, the hills on his right sinking away where a much broader valley branched off. He took the junction, and started driving along the long straight track of hard-packed stone chips. This was the Highmarsh Valley, the first in the district to be farmed, and long since drained by an extensive network of ditches, leaving the rich peat exposed for the tractorbots and cattle. Long driveways branched off from either side of the main track, leading to big bungalow ranches and clusters of barns. The only trees here were tall, slender liipoplars planted in perfectly straight rows to mark the boundaries.

After five minutes the track forked again. Mark took the route down into Ulon Valley. It was almost as wide as the Highmarsh, though the mountain walls were higher. Boulders and stone were littered about, with a new crop brought down by the snows every winter. Although the soil was reasonable, the Ulon wasn’t really suitable for cereal crops. Instead, and at Simon Rand’s suggestion, the first homesteaders planted vines of grencham berries, an Elan-native plant that was already earning a reputation among Commonwealth oenophiles, though it had only ever been cultivated on the northern continents. The first few years saw passable vintages produced along the Ulon; then new varieties were introduced, and the yards got organized, forming a cooperative for blending and bottling, and incorporating their brand name.

By the time the Vernons arrived, the whole operation had become slick and commercial. Two-thirds of the valley was under cultivation, with the remaining plots being snapped up. Any purchaser got their ten or fifteen acres to be planted with vines, and a house site at one end. The vines would be managed and harvested by the co-op, guaranteeing a modest income each year from the Ulon Valley label.

Mark turned onto the track that led up a short slope to his home, slowing as the suspension bounced him around in the puddles and potholes. Once again, as he did every morning and evening, he reminded himself to get some decent gravel delivered. The vine trellises were stretched out on both sides of the track; lines of wires and poles, like flimsy fences, set a couple of meters apart, extending as far as the eye could see. Small gnarled brown strands of the vines themselves were carefully wound along the wires, each one trimmed identically, no more than five buds along each frond. It was too early in the year for any growth, leaving the whole plot looking pretty bleak with only the narrow strips of straggly grass providing any color between the trellises, though they seemed to be more mud and stone than living tufts. Up at the top of the ridge, where the house sat on an acre of flat land, the lawn was a vigorous emerald carpet. At the moment it surrounded two houses. The one they’d brought with them on the back of a big flatbed truck as a pile of square weather-resistant composite panels that could be clipped together in any design. Liz and Mark had settled on a simple L-shape, with a long rectangular living room at one end attached to three square bedrooms, a bathroom, kids-room, kitchen, and spare room—which was still crammed with crates of stuff they’d brought from Augusta and hadn’t yet opened. Its roof was made up from curved solar collector sections that slotted on top. The whole thing was cheap, easy to assemble, and the kind of place that you wouldn’t want to live in for more than a few months, especially not in winter. They’d been on Elan for almost two years now.

Behind the temporary prefab, their true house was still growing. In keeping with Randtown’s green ethos, they’d both decided it was going to be drycoral—which was strangely rare for an eco-obsessed district. Normally the plant was grown over an existing structure, but Liz had tracked down a company on Halifax that offered a much cheaper method. She’d started with what was essentially a cluster of hemispherical balloons, a simple made-to-order any-size-you-want membrane that she spread out over the ground and inflated. Then she just planted the kernels all around the outside, and waited for them to grow. As the strands slithered their way upward, she twined them together and pruned judiciously, ensuring the walls were smooth and water-tight. Because of Ulon Valley’s harsh winters, she selected a drycoral variety thicker than most, to provide a decent insulation. When they were done, a simple domestic solar-pumped heatstore cube would keep them warm and snug all winter. But it was that necessary additional thickness that made them realize why few Randtown district homes were made from drycoral: it took a long time to grow upward. Every day when he got out of the pickup truck Mark would take another look at the tops of the pearl and cornflower-blue strands to see how far they’d gotten. On four or five of the smaller outlying dome rooms they were already up to the crest, where Liz was knotting them together in a minaret finishing twist; but on the three largest domes they still had a couple of meters to go. “They’ll be ready by midsummer,” Liz kept saying. Mark prayed she was right.

Barry burst out of the house and ran over to Mark, flinging his arms around his father. It used to be his father’s legs, now they were above his hips.

“What did you do today?” They both said it together as ritual demanded, and smiled at each other.

“You first,” Mark said as they walked back to the temporary house.

“I was reading, and spelling this morning, then we had Mr. Carroll for math and programming. I did general history with Ms. Mavers, and Jodie took us for practical mechanics to finish off with. I liked that. It was the only thing that made sense.”

“Really, why’s that?”

They walked into the kitchen, where Liz was sitting at the big cluttered table, trying to coax Sandy into having some soup. Mark’s daughter looked the picture of misery with her cheeks and nose all red, eyes damp, and wrapped in a big warm blanket. It was a flu variant that had been going the rounds of all the local kids. Barry had managed to avoid it so far.

“Daddy,” Sandy said weakly, and held her arms out.

Mark knelt down and gave her a big cuddle. “So how are you feeling today, my angel, any better?”

She nodded miserably. “Little bit.”

“Oh, that’s good. Well done, darling.” He sat in the chair next to her, and got a very fast and perfunctory kiss from Liz. “How about eating some of this soup then?” he asked his daughter. “We’ll eat it together.”

What might have been a smile passed across Sandy’s lips. “Yes,” she said bravely.

Liz rolled her eyes for Mark and got up. “I’ll leave you two to it, then. Come on, Barry, what do you want for tea?”

“Pizza?” he said immediately, followed by a hopeful, “and chips.”

“It’s not going to be pizza,” Liz told him sternly. “You know you’ve cleared all of them out of the freezer. It’s going to have to be fish.”

“Oww, Mum!”

“We can probably find some chips to go with them,” Liz said, knowing it was the only way to get him to eat the fish.

“All right,” the boy said glumly. “Well, is it fried fish, then?”

“I’ve no idea.”

Barry sat in his chair at the table, a picture of tragedy. Liz told the maidbot to fetch some fish from the freezer, adding an order silently through her e-butler to make it a grill-only packet.

“So why didn’t anything make sense?” Mark asked again.

“Well, it did sort of,” Barry said. “It’s just that I don’t see the point.”

“Of what?”

“School.”

“Ah, why not?”

“I don’t need it,” the boy said sincerely. He gestured to the broad kitchen window with its view back down the Ulon Valley. “I’m going to be a jetboat captain, and do the river.”

“Oh, right.” Last week it had been a gyroball instructor. Kids in the Randtown district tended to be influenced by the more sporting and physical aspects of life. They were all going to be raft masters, or jetboat captains, or ski instructors, or pro fliers, or gill divers. “Well, you still need a basic education, I’m afraid, even to qualify for that. So you’ll have to keep going, at least for a few years more.”

“Okay,” Barry said mournfully. “I might be a starship pilot, as well. I was watching that on the cybersphere today. The whole school was there when the Second Chance docked with its platform. That was so cool.”

Mark kept looking at Sandy as he was spooning her the soup. “Yeah, it was.”

“You saw it, too?”

“Certainly did.”

The maidbot arrived back with a packet of fish. Liz grabbed it from the little machine. “Come on, help me cook this.”

“Where are the chips?” Barry asked plaintively.

“There are some potatoes in the basket. We’ll cut them up. It won’t take long.”

“No no, Mum, real chips. From the freezer!”

Mark took Sandy through into the living room while Barry and Liz prepared the fish. He cleared some of the toys off the sofa and sat down. Sandy curled up in his lap, sniffling as she clung to her friend-doll, a pro-response polar bear that was sensing her illness, and held on to her arm affectionately.

He flicked through a few cybersphere reports on the big portal before reluctantly settling on Alessandra Baron, who had secured an exclusive with Nigel Sheldon himself. He was sitting behind some big desk in his corporate office, talking clearly and confidently, as if the whole starship return drama had been just a scheduled stop for one of his trains. “While I deeply regret that Captain Kime had to leave Emmanuelle and Dudley behind, I don’t believe he had any choice in the matter. I was not there, nor were any of the somewhat distasteful armchair critics I’ve heard today. As such we are completely unable to offer anything approaching a valid opinion concerning what was done, and what other courses of action were supposedly available. Only a fool would try to second-guess an event like that. I appointed Wilson as captain because I believed he was the right man for the job. His exemplary actions throughout the mission have completely vindicated that appointment.

“Of course, CSI has already authorized re-life procedures for both of our lost crew. Thanks to the safety procedures which we take so seriously, their onboard secure memory stores were updated just before they went over to the Watchtower.”

“But what about the information the Second Chance brought back?” Alessandra asked. “Surely you have to concede it’s disappointing?”

Nigel Sheldon smiled as if he pitied her. “We have more data than the entire Commonwealth physics community can absorb. I’d hardly call that a dearth.”

“I was referring to the lack of knowledge about the Dyson aliens. After so much money was spent, so much time devoted, and with the added cost of human life, don’t you think we should know more? We don’t even know what they look like.”

“We know that they shoot at us on sight. The one thing I am in agreement with my good friend Senator Burnelli over is that there must be a return mission. This is the nature of exploration, Alessandra, I’m sorry it’s not fast enough for your personal timetable. But sensible, rational humans venture somewhere new and see what the conditions are like so that we can prepare ourselves to go farther next time. The Second Chance did this, it brought back a wealth of details on Dyson Alpha and what kind of ship we need to go back there with.”

“So you’re in favor of going back, then?”

“Definitely. We’ve only just begun our encounter with the Dyson stars.”

“And what kind of ship should we use, based on what we learned from the first mission?”

“One that is very fast, and very strong. In fact, just to be safe, we should probably send more than one.”

Mark and Liz got the kids to bed and settled by eight o’clock. After that, they sat in the kitchen, eating their own supper of chicken Kiev: out of a packet and microwaved, of course. “Old Tony Matvig has some chickens,” Mark said. “I talked to him the other day, he’ll give us some eggs if we want our own.” His fork prodded at the meat on his plate, squeezing out some more of the garlic butter. “It would be nice to have something we know isn’t full of hormones and weird gene splices to feed the kids with.”

Liz gave him her “weighing up” look. “No, Mark. You know we’ve been through all this. I like living here, and I’ll like it a whole lot more once the house has finished growing, but I’m not buying in that deeply. We don’t need to keep chickens, we earn more than enough to eat well, and I don’t order factory food from the Big15. Everything in that freezer has the clean-feed label, if you ever bothered to look. And who did you see plucking and gutting these chickens, exactly? Were you going to do it?”

“I could do.”

“You won’t. The smell is revolting. It made me throw up.”

“When did you ever gut a chicken?”

“About fifty years ago. Back when I was young and idealistic.”

“And foolish. Yeah, I know.”

She leaned over and rubbed his cheek with her fingers. “Am I a real pain?”

“No.” He tried to catch one of her fingers in his teeth—missing.

“In any case,” she said, “chickens will ruin the lawn. Have you ever taken a good look at their claws? They’re evil.”

Mark grinned. “Killer chickens.”

“They kill lawns, and rip the rest of the garden apart as well.”

“Okay. No chickens.”

“But I’m all in favor of the vegetable garden.”

“Yeah. Because I’m going to rig up an irrigation system, and a gardeningbot can look after the rest of it.”

Liz blew him a kiss. “I said I’d tend the herb bed myself.”

“Wow. All of it?”

“Any regrets yet?”

“Not one.”

“I can think of one.”

“What?” he asked indignantly.

“I need a big strong man to go out and look at the precipitator leaves again.”

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding! I fixed them last week.”

“I know, darling. But they barely filled the tank last night.”

“Goddamn semiorganic crap. We should have dug a decent well.”

“Well, we can get a constructionbot to lay a pipe down to the river when the real house is finished.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

The maidbot took their plates and cutlery away to stack in the dishwasher. Mark carried a dish of sticky toffee pudding through into the living room, along with two spoons. They snuggled up together on the sofa, and started scooping at the gooey mass from opposite ends. Over on the portal, Wendy Bose was stammering and weeping her way through a statement. Professor Truten, labeled by the subtitles as a “close family friend,” had his arm supportively around her shoulder.

“Poor woman,” Liz said.

“Yeah.”

“She needs to go into rejuve. I wonder if CST will pay for that?”

“Why does she need rejuve?” Mark peered at her image inside the portal. “She doesn’t look like she’s that old.”

Liz took advantage of his distraction to spoon up two lots of pudding. “Compared to whom? Dudley Bose’s replacement clone is going to be an eighteen-year-old. She’ll have a physical equivalence of late fifties. Trust me, that’s not a marriage you want to try.”

“Suppose not. I just can’t stop thinking about Bose and Verbeke. Talk about being abandoned a long way from home. Do you think they suicided when they realized?”

“Depends on the Dyson aliens. Maybe they built them an environment chamber, and right now they’ve cracked the translation hurdle and are chatting away happily.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?”

Liz chewed thoughtfully for a moment. Professor Truten was helping Wendy Bose back into her house. “Nope. They’re bodydead.”

“I figured that, too.” His gaze wandered up to the cheap composite ceiling. “You know Elan’s almost the closest Commonwealth planet to the Dyson Pair.”

“There are seven closer than us, including Anshun. But you’re right, we’re close.” She giggled. “Only seven hundred and fifty-four light-years away. Scary, huh?”

He reached around with his free hand, and poked her just below the ribs, where he knew she was sensitive.

“Ow!” Liz screwed her face up, and retaliated by scooping up a giant piece of pudding.

“Hey!” he protested. “I’ve barely had a mouthful yet.”

“Life’s a bitch, then you rejuvenate and do it all over again.”

SIXTEEN

It was midday on America’s eastern seaboard. The sun had reached its zenith, allowing it to shine directly onto the streets lurking at the bottom of Manhattan’s concrete canyons. Looking down on Fifth Avenue from the two hundred twenty-fifth floor of the Commonwealth Exploration and Development Office, Nigel Sheldon could see the city’s perpetual traffic battle in action. All along that massive historical thoroughfare, yellow cabs and matte-black limousines were jammed together, two entirely separate and antagonistic species contesting dominance of the available lanes. Urban myth told it that the city’s cabs had illicit aggressor software installed in their drive arrays. It wouldn’t surprise Nigel given the times his limo had to brake to make way for a cab veering out in front of him. And they were the ones who benefited most from this brief visitation of light, hundreds of them gleaming splendidly amid their somber opponents, right now they looked victorious.

Closer to the base of the skyscraper he could see a thick semicircle of reporters around the main entrance. There was an idle thought, if he spat out of the window, how long would it take before one of them was hit, looking upward with revulsion and annoyance. It was good to have childish thoughts like that still, he felt—put a perspective on life. His fellow Council members could certainly do with lightening up.

They were already filling the room behind him. Thompson Burnelli and Crispin Goldreich sitting together at the table, heads together as they horse-traded and maneuvered, playing out the game in which all the Grand Families participated. Elaine Doi, looking more drawn than usual, but then she really didn’t need complications in the year that would see her placing her name into the ring for the pre-primaries of the presidential election. She was exchanging greetings with Rafael Columbia and Gabrielle Else. There were fewer aides this time around, reflecting the increased security and importance resting on the ExoProtectorate Council. Wilson Kime was standing talking with Daniel Alster, looking remarkably unflustered given the certain degree of animosity directed toward him by Council members, led by Senator Burnelli.

Nigel could take the politicking in his stride. Unlike Wilson, he’d never given himself the luxury of a sabbatical life away from the heart of the Commonwealth government. Thinking ahead was what he lived for; and he was pretty sure that none of the aides and think-tanks that the other Council members drew on for their briefs had prepared as many scenarios as the CST strategists had. Some of the worst-case outcomes were going to require counteractions that he would have to undertake by himself, through private and discreet ventures—including the ultimate fallback of evacuating his entire family from Commonwealth space altogether. Implementing such schemes didn’t particularly bother him—in fact they were quite a challenge. The only cause for concern today was the one thing that had been troubling him for several months now, the lack of any communication from Ozzie. Nigel was used to his friend vanishing for months, or even years at a time while he went worldwalking, or even homesteading and raising a new family. But he always answered his messages eventually.

“If you’re ready,” Elaine Doi said, somewhat impatiently.

Nigel turned from the window, nodding reluctantly. He’d been putting off the meeting in the small hope that Ozzie would appear at the last second, unapologetic as always and happy to have caused a nuisance. It wasn’t to be. The doors were closed, and the room secured.

Everyone settled around the table. The Vice President asked for the SI to be brought on-line, and its tangerine and turquoise lines began to shiver across the screen at the end of the room. “I believe we should start by congratulating Captain Wilson and his crew on performing an exceptionally difficult mission with true professionalism,” Elaine Doi said. “I know you had some hard choices to make out there, Captain, and I don’t envy you that, but I believe they were the right ones. Bringing back information was your first priority.”

“What information was that, exactly?” Thompson Burnelli asked. “I consider myself less than enlightened by your trip. Certainly given the cost of the damn thing.”

“That there is a very large, technologically advanced, and apparently aggressive alien species seven hundred and fifty light-years from the Commonwealth,” Wilson said impassively. “They were confined within the barrier, but someone let them out so they could see us. A third party. In itself an action we should consider to be unfriendly at the very least, if not positively hostile.”

“You seriously believe that?” Thompson asked. “We’re facing two sets of aliens, both of them hostile?”

“The barrier removal was not coincidence,” Nigel said. “We didn’t do it. The Dyson aliens didn’t do it. QED, there is another factor at work here.”

“It had to be the aliens which put it up in the first place,” Brewster Kumar said. “Only the people with the knowledge of construction could do that.”

“That makes very little sense to me,” Elaine Doi said. “If you’re going to switch it off when the first ship arrives to investigate, why put it up in the first place?”

“I’d like to address that,” Wilson said. “We have two options, either the barrier was taken down by the same aliens who put it up, in which case the motivation remains beyond us given our current level of knowledge about them. Or it was switched off by someone else, again for an unknown reason; and that is the more worrying conclusion.”

“Why?” Crispin Goldreich asked.

“It was put up to confine what appears to be an aggressive species. Somebody was worried enough about them to build that thing. Now I was there, I saw that barrier; you just don’t build something like that without a very, very good reason. I don’t care how advanced the builders were, the resources and effort they needed to devote to that task were fantastic. They were worried to the point of paranoia about the Dyson aliens. Think about that: a species which can build a barrier around a star were worried. Anything that can worry them scares the shit out of me. And now the Dyson aliens are free.”

“Do you agree with that assessment?” Elaine Doi asked the SI.

“It is logical. We do not believe it was coincidence that the barrier was switched off at the same time as the Second Chance arrived. That it was done by the Dyson aliens seems unlikely. By simple elimination it had to be the creators of the barrier, or yet another alien.”

“Neither of which has any valid motive,” Brewster Kumar said.

“No apparent motive,” the SI said. “But as we do not yet know the actual reason behind the establishment of the barrier, guessing at the basis for its removal is an irrelevant exercise.”

“Don’t you think it was put up because the Dyson aliens are aggressive?” Wilson asked.

“It is a plausible theory, yes,” the SI said. “But why was it deemed necessary to enclose Dyson Beta in a similar barrier?”

“Good point,” Rafael Columbia acknowledged.

“I don’t know,” Wilson said wearily. “But what we have established is how dangerous the aliens at Dyson Alpha are.”

“Apparently dangerous,” Thompson Burnelli said. “Let’s face it, if an alien species had observed Earth in the twentieth century, especially during the Second World War, they would conclude we were irredeemably violent. I’m surprised they didn’t put a barrier around us while they had the chance, if that is the reason these things are built.”

“We’ve grown out of that phase,” Elaine Doi said. “Rejuvenation and interstellar expansion have completely altered our psychology and culture.”

“Don’t start that argument again,” Brewster Kumar said. “We got lucky, that was all.”

“We make our own luck,” Elaine said. “As a race we have great potential within us. Have some faith.”

“We’re not discussing us,” Nigel said. “We’re here to decide what to do about a bunch of aliens with an awful lot of nuclear weapons and a propensity to use them.”

“They have nukes and no doubt a great many other sophisticated weapons,” Rafael Columbia said. “But they do not have any form of FTL, which gives us a safety margin of seven hundred and fifty light-years. That’s a very big safety margin.”

“They didn’t have FTL, because there was no need for it inside the barrier, and FTL was blocked by the barrier,” Wilson said. “But given their demonstrated technological capability, I wouldn’t count on any kind of distance keeping them away from us.”

“How long would it take them to build FTL starships?”

Everyone looked at Nigel. He shrugged. “Like Wilson said, they have a high technology industrial base. Once you’ve worked out the basic theory, you could have a prototype hyperdrive up and running in a matter of months if you devote enough resources to the project. The key question is, if you can put that math together in the first place.”

“We have to assume they can.” Elaine Doi said. “They saw the Second Chance in operation.” She grimaced. “And they might well have Bose and Verbeke.”

“They’ll suicide before that happens, surely,” Rafael Columbia said. “They know what’s at stake.”

Wilson cleared his throat uncomfortably. Everybody around the table turned to look at him. They’d all been in the game long enough to recognize bad news from any distance.

“All crew members, myself included, were equipped with an insert which will perform that function,” Wilson said. “However, we can reasonably assume Bose and Verbeke will assess the situation first. If they were to make an initial nonviolent contact with the Dyson aliens, I would expect them to make some attempt to communicate and build up a rapport. Only if it looked hopeless would they resort to a complete datawipe of their memory inserts and suicide.”

“So they’ll do it then?” Elaine Doi said; she seemed to be urging him to say yes. “I mean, they know they’ll be re-lifed within the Commonwealth. They’ll only lose a day at the most, surely? And it could be a very unpleasant day, at that.”

“I am reasonably convinced Emmanuelle Verbeke will do the right thing,” Wilson said. “But—and I hope to Christ I’m wrong—we may have a problem with Bose.”

“What do you mean, a problem?” Thompson Burnelli demanded.

Wilson stared at the Senator. “His training and assessment weren’t as thorough as everyone else on board. After selection, he spent some time in a rejuve tank reducing his body age. The remaining time was limited before we launched.”

“Then why the fuck did you let him on board?”

“Political expediency,” Nigel interjected smoothly. “Same reason your man Tunde Sutton was on board.”

Thompson leveled a rigid forefinger at Nigel. “Tunde passed every test you threw at him.”

“He certainly did. And if he’d been rejected at the final selection process, along with everyone else who had connections to Earth’s Grand Families, you would have been the first to cause a stink.”

“Maybe. But at least Tunde was properly trained, not like this Bose character. What kind of half-assed operation are you running here?”

“The only one in town.”

“Jesus H. Christ.” Thompson sat back, and gave both Nigel and Wilson a disgusted look.

“Very well,” Elaine Doi said. “In the worst-possible case, the Dyson aliens know a lot about us, they can build an FTL starship, and they know where we are. What do we do about that?”

“Same as the last time,” Wilson said. “Send a mission to find out what’s going on.”

“One that has a greater success than last time, one sincerely hopes,” Crispin Goldreich said.

“It will be,” Nigel said. “The Second Chance was a shot completely into the unknown. We had to build something that could tackle just about any contingency, a true exploratory vessel. This time the mission will be very tightly defined. These ships will be smaller, and possibly even a little cheaper.”

“Why do you need more than one?” Elaine Doi asked.

“So the others can monitor what happens to the one that attempts to make contact, and report back if it’s lost,” Wilson said. “By now the Dyson aliens know who we are, and possibly that we didn’t put up the barrier. They certainly know we are no threat to them. How they react to us this time around will be crucial.”

“I wouldn’t like that job,” Rafael Columbia muttered.

“I’m not looking forward to it myself,” Wilson said. “But it has to be done, and done properly.”

“You got something to prove?” Thompson Burnelli asked quietly.

Wilson didn’t rise to it.

“I take it these ships are on the drawing board?” Elaine Doi asked.

“Oh, yes,” Nigel said. “As soon as we completed the Second Chance design, I authorized preliminary assessment on a possible smaller exploration starship. Adapting that to a fast scout vehicle is relatively simple. From what we learned about building the hyperdrive for Second Chance we can modify future versions for a much greater speed. That whole life-support wheel structure has been dumped, the crew can slum it in freefall. We’ve also minimized the reaction drive along with its ancillary garbage; there was no need for it apart from short-range maneuvering. But we have bumped up the armament quotient. They’ll be able to fight as well as run.”

“And what will their mission be, exactly?” Brewster Kumar asked.

“They must discover more about the nature of the Dyson aliens. If they are truly warlike. If they are developing FTL starships or opening wormholes to nearby star systems. FTL in particular would be hard to hide, given a wormhole signature is so readily detectable. Of course, if they have any knowledge in that field, that will mean they can probably spot us coming as well.”

“Very well,” Elaine Doi said. “I don’t think any of us disagree that this new mission must be undertaken, and with some urgency. What I’d like from this Council is a formal proposal to the Commonwealth Executive Office to form a new agency which will oversee the whole Dyson exploration and contact operation from planning to execution, put it all under government jurisdiction.”

“And financing,” Thompson Burnelli said gruffly.

“Are you saying you want the government to establish a civil starflight agency?” Rafael Columbia asked.

“Exactly that, yes. This is a possible threat to the entire Commonwealth. It cannot be the preserve of an ad hoc response with uncertain multisource funding. The problem needs to be addressed with stability and clear policy management.”

“Ah.” Rafael glanced at Nigel. “And how do you feel about that, Nigel? These are mostly your personnel we are talking about.”

“I think it doesn’t go far enough.” He almost smiled at how quiet the room became, even Wilson was staring at him in surprise. “You want policy for this, then it has to be long-term and coherent. If our new scouts come back with bad news, then what? Another meeting like this? No, Elaine is quite right, we need clear policy and an agency capable of implementation. We need to be preparing for the worst case before the scoutships even leave. There are other Commonwealth agencies and councils like this one that deal in security. They will have to be incorporated into this new agency as well.”

“You’re talking about the formation of a navy,” Crispin Goldreich said; he seemed taken aback by the idea. “A committed military force.”

“If you know of something else which can defend us, I’d like to hear about it.”

“I cannot believe you are proposing this. You! What does Mr. Issac say about it?”

“I expect he’ll be upset by the very notion,” Nigel said. “But as he can’t even be bothered to turn up to this meeting, he doesn’t get to have that say, does he?”

The surprise around the table was even greater than before.

“What?” an irritated Nigel asked. “We had a glorious dream when we were young. We gave humanity the stars. And now, as Elaine said, we’ve grown up because of that. If everything we’ve achieved as a race, this whole glorious civilization we’ve built, is under threat, then damn right I want to protect it. A navy will do that.”

“Yes it will,” Thompson Burnelli said carefully. “But if we go ahead and announce we’re going to create a navy, it will create a huge amount of panic and worry. Christ knows what the stock market will do, and the knock-on effect that’ll have on the economy doesn’t make pleasant speculation. You might even get inward migration from the outermost phase two planets—which is the last thing we need. The damn thing will be cyclic, it’ll feed on itself. If it’s our brief to protect the Commonwealth from any alien impact, then we have to consider that as well. This isn’t just external, Nigel.”

“I know,” Nigel said. “What we should do is copy the way Hitler prepared the ground for his Luftwaffe. After the Versailles Treaty Germany was forbidden from pursuing any form of military aviation, so he trained pilots in private clubs, and sponsored commercial aircraft which could easily be modified. Then when he wanted an air force he simply brought the two together. All the pieces were available, but no one recognized them for what they were. And today, with our industrial base spread over six hundred worlds, we can run a far more sophisticated covert manufacturing operation than the Nazis ever could. The rest of it is just another bureaucratic reshuffle, bringing together the requisite departments.”

“I can think of several people in the Senate who won’t take kindly to the Hitler comparison,” Thompson Burnelli said with dry amusement.

“Don’t use that analogy, then,” Nigel said. “The point is we can begin preparations for the physical defense of the Commonwealth without being alarmist. Getting the paperwork done is always half the battle.”

“I’m interested in your opinion of this,” Rafael Columbia told the SI. “Do you think we should have a navy?”

“While never condoning weapons development, we consider the formation of such a defense organization to be a sensible precaution given the circumstances.”

Wilson gave the screen a sharp look. “Would you assist us with weapons development?”

“We have every confidence in your own ability in that field. You have demonstrated your competence many times throughout your history.”

“Although I support a further mission to Dyson Alpha,” Brewster Kumar said. “We shouldn’t ignore the other species that appear to be out there. Will this navy or starflight agency be sending missions to try and locate the creators of the barrier?”

“We need to have a starflight agency first,” Nigel chided the science advisor gently. “But, yes, that should not be overlooked. Nor should a separate mission to Dyson Beta; I’m most interested to see if that barrier is still there. There is a lot more to this than Dyson Alpha’s species alone.”

“Very well,” Elaine Doi said. “I believe we should leave specific mission planning out of the discussion for now. We have a proposal that will eliminate it anyway. I expect this Council and its function would be absorbed into the new agency?” She gave Nigel a questioning glance.

“A starflight agency would need a steering panel,” Nigel said. “This is the obvious choice.”

“Then we’ll take a vote,” she said. “Those in favor?”

Every hand went up.

....

This time the message had the author certificate of Chiles Liddle Halgarth, but the spokesman was the same Formit 3004 politician sculpture, still sitting behind his desk in San Matio. This time the city was in springtime, with the powerful sun just rising above the whitewashed walls of the old quarter, turning the buildings a beautiful silken gold. Dark green trees planted along every street were uncurling their leaves to greet the dawn.

“My fellow citizens, I wish I could welcome you with a sense of satisfaction,” he said. “For once again we who have fought the subterranean battle to prevent the Starflyer’s agents gnawing away at the heart of our wonderful Commonwealth have been proved right. But of course I feel no joy at the situation we face this day. We failed to destroy the Second Chance, and now the starship has begun a chain reaction of events which will plunge us into war. The Dyson aliens have been let out of their prison in accordance with the Starflyer’s wishes. We have all seen the recordings of their aggression, a brutality which we all know will be turned toward us as soon as they build their own starships.

“Even if we survive the coming assault, we will be weakened terribly. Our wealth and our talent will be poured into our very survival, where it will be consumed by nuclear fire. That is when the Starflyer will strike against us, unseen, from our very midst.

“This monster will ruin us unless we guard against it. The Guardians of Selfhood will always be ready to thwart its machinations, right to the very end. We will root it out and eliminate its agents. But we need your help. Be vigilant. Be vocal. Stand for elections on a platform opposing the meager efforts which this corrupt government is proposing to protect us. We do not need three scoutships; we need an armada of battleships. We do not need further investigation; we need weapons that can blow the invaders out of space. We must be ready to defend ourselves from the Dyson aliens right now. They will appear in our skies soon enough. Don’t let us fall to their onslaught. Challenge those who claim to be working on your behalf. They are not; they serve only themselves and their evil master. Help us. Be strong. Guard yourselves.”

He bowed his head. “I thank you for your time.”

....

The red light was everywhere, oozing pervasively throughout the Ice Citadel to contaminate every room, passageway, and cranny. Ozzie detested it. The Silfen builders of old had done their job well; the big optical ducts and the light battery, whatever that was, delivered rosy sunlight throughout the frozen planet’s entire twenty-one-hour day. There was only one place that offered true sanctuary, the outside at night. But that was when it got seriously cold.

Inside, most of the private sleeping rooms had thick rugs rigged up over the radiant crystal to act as curtains. For those species that did sleep, or at least rest up at night, they were a godsend. Recently, Ozzie and Orion had taken to lighting a kerosene lamp in their room for a couple of hours before they went to bed. Their original supply of kerosene had quickly been exhausted, but one of the icewhale oils was a reasonable substitute. The yellow light also attracted quite a few fellow humans, who would come in and spend some time, either relaxing or bitching about their day. Ozzie’s room in the evening began to resemble a small bar, admittedly one without any alcohol. Inevitably, given that people had arrived at the Ice Citadel from many planets and over many centuries, the conversation ranged across a lot of different perspectives and opinions.

The gatherings also helped Ozzie gain a good understanding of the Ice Citadel and their general situation. One thing was perfectly clear, they shouldn’t try for another path until the Silfen came to hunt.

“That’s when you’ve got the best opportunity to get clear,” Sara said one day a couple of weeks after they’d arrived. She’d become a regular in Ozzie’s little evening club. Most humans at the Ice Citadel tended to look to her for guidance, a position she’d earned by the sheer quantity of time stacked up in her favor. It was a role she was content to see slide over onto Ozzie, who was equally keen to resist.

“Why?” Orion asked. “You don’t need them to get here.”

“Because it increases the odds,” she said tolerantly. “If you can follow them or, even better, stay with them, you’ll be on the path they take to get out. It’s definitely there, then. For the rest of the time, you’re just striking out into the unknown, hoping you’ll find a path that’s open. From what we know, there don’t seem to be many. And on this planet, that spells trouble. You have to carry a whole load of supplies and be quick as well.”

Ozzie had soon worked out it was a bad equation. You could use a sled to reach the forest of crystal trees surrounding the Ice Citadel crater easily enough, but then the sled would have a lot of trouble traveling through the forest itself. If you went forward on foot you needed a tent that could protect you from the deadly nighttime temperature. The air-insulated one he’d brought could conceivably do that, but then he had to carry enough food as well. The more weight you had, the slower you’d be. And so on. An ideal solution would be a pack animal, but those that could survive in these conditions, like the lontrus, were slow-moving. Which meant adding more food to the weight they carried. Sara was right, their best option was a fast dash behind the Silfen.

They had to be patient.

The usual early-morning sounds woke Ozzie, pans and bowls and platters clattering about as the breakfast shift began their preparations out in the main chamber. Human voices combined with alien hoots and whistles accompanied them, echoing down the short passageway to Ozzie’s set of rooms. He lay there on the cot for a while with his eyes shut, his mind ticking off the sequence. Low rushing sound of the bellows and oil burners. Water coming to the boil and rattling the big kettles. Knives being sharpened on the grinder. Familiar and tiresome.

This was the seventeenth week now. Or at least he thought it was. He was having strange dreams, events and Commonwealth worlds rushing past him like some fast-motion drama. There were stories from his fellow travelers about time being not-quite-right as you walked along the paths, of them missing or gaining weeks, months, years while they traveled through the Silfen worlds. The notion kept feeding his feeling of impatience.

Orion stirred, groaned—as he always did—and sat up in his sleeping bag.

“Morning.” Ozzie opened his eyes. The rug was still pulled over the crystal tract set in the ceiling, but enough light spilled around the sides, and through the curtained-off doorway, that he could see the room’s outlines without having to use his retinal inserts on infrared.

Orion grunted a response, and unzipped his sleeping bag. Ozzie started to get dressed as the boy went into the bathroom. When they arrived, he’d thought the Ice Citadel to be like a hothouse inside. After a while he knew that was just a reaction from being so cold when Sara brought them in. Despite the hot springs and all the body heat soaking through the Ice Citadel, it remained several degrees below genuinely comfortable. He fastened one of his thick checked shirts over his T-shirt, buttoned up his leather trousers, and pulled on a second pair of socks. Only then did he stand up and tug the rug off the overhead tract. Orion let out a sullen moan of complaint at the burst of red light. The boy was having a bad time of it in the Ice Citadel. The way it confined them physically, the monotony of the routine, the bland diet—it all chafed against his natural teenage boisterousness. Although the worst part was the lack of anyone else remotely near his own age.

“There aren’t any girls here,” the boy had moaned on the second day. “I couldn’t see any, so I checked with Sara. She says there were some twenty-somethings here a couple of years back, but they followed the Silfen out.”

“Yeah? Well, you’re not missing anything,” Ozzie had told him. He was slightly put out that the friendliness he’d shown toward Sara hadn’t been reciprocated.

“How can you say that! You’ve had hundreds of wives.”

“True,” Ozzie said modestly.

“I’ve never had any girl,” Orion said miserably.

“Not even back at Lyddington?”

“There were a few I hung out with. I liked one. Irina. We kissed and stuff, but …”

“You left and came walking down the paths with me.”

“Actually, she went off with Leonard. He’s slept with half the girls in town.”

“Oh. Right. Well … women, huh, who understands them?”

“You must, Ozzie.” Orion had produced one of those desperate mournful looks that always made Ozzie uneasy. “How do I talk to girls? I never know what to say. Tell me, please.”

“Simple really. It doesn’t matter what you say, you’ve just got to have confidence in yourself.”

“Yes?”

“Yeah.” Ozzie was worried the boy was going to start taking notes. “When you’re at a party, find a chick you can dig, break the ice, then let them do half the work. It’s supposed to be an equal relationship, right?”

“I suppose.”

“So let them do their fair share of the work. And if there’s nothing there, no spark—then no worries, man, just move on to the next babe. Remember, they had no spark either, they’re missing out on a great dude: you. Their loss.”

Orion considered that for a long moment. “I get it. You’re right.”

“Hey, it’s what I’m here for.”

“So what do I say?”

“Huh?”

“To break the ice? What’s a good opening line?”

“Oh.” Ozzie thought back to the few horrendous memories he’d kept from his high school days. “Well, er, just asking them to dance is always a great classic. Course, you have to be able to dance, chicks really dig that in a guy.”

“Can you teach me how to dance, Ozzie?”

“Ah, been a while there, man; best ask someone like Sara for some shapely footwork, okay?”

“Right. So, an opening line?”

“Er. Right. Yeah. Sure. Um. Hey! Okay, I remember this one from a party in the Hamptons way back when. Go up to a girl, and look at her collar, then when she asks what you’re doing you say: I was checking the label, and I was right, you are Made in Heaven.”

Orion was still for a second, then burst out laughing. “That is so lame, Ozzie.”

Which wasn’t quite the respectful response Ozzie had expected. Damn kids today. “It worked for me.”

“What was her name?” Orion asked quickly.

“I forget, man, it was a century ago.”

“Yeah, right. I think I’ll ask Sara, she’s probably better at this kind of thing.”

“Hey, I know how to chat up babes, okay. You are talking to the Commonwealth’s number one expert on this subject.”

Orion shook his head and walked off into the pool cave, chuckling. “Made in heaven!”

Ozzie rolled up his sleeping bag. Along with Orion’s, it went straight into the carbon wire security mesh that contained their packs. The mesh, looking like a black spiderweb, had wrapped itself around all the bags and bundles. A mechanical padlock fastened the mesh’s throat cable; he’d managed to loop it around a jag of rock on the wall, making sure no one could make off with the whole lot. After centuries spent moving around the Commonwealth, Ozzie knew just how much truth there was in the old saying that every conservative is another liberal who got mugged. He didn’t trust his fellow travelers an inch, especially those good causes less fortunate than himself. Right now, that was just about everyone in the Ice Citadel. The packaged food, first aid kits, and modern lightweight equipment in those packs were their best chance of making it off this planet.

For the first week or so, every time they’d come back to their rooms, there were new scuffs and scratches on the rock where someone had tried to work the security mesh loose or smash the padlock.

They took their plates and cutlery out to the main chamber and joined the short queue for breakfast. The food was the same as every day, the small pile of boiled and mashed crystal tree fruit looking like mangled beetroot, along with a couple of fried icewhale rashers that were alarmingly gray and fatty. There was also a cupful of the local tea, made from dried shredded fronds of lichenweed.

When they finished the meal they went back to their rooms to dress in thick icewhale fur jackets and over trousers. Orion went up to the stables, where he would spend several hours mucking out the animals, and bringing in new bales of rifungi for them to eat. Only the tetrajacks, which looked like blue horse-sized reindeer, received a different diet. They got to eat the swill left over from the kitchens below.

Ozzie walked up to the ground-level workshop. The big circular room had probably been intended as another stable—it had a rotating door large enough for an elephant to pass through comfortably—but the Ice Citadel’s new ragtag inhabitants were using it to garage the big covered sleds that were pulled by the stupid hulking ybnan. It was also the carpentry shop, not for wood, but icewhale bone, which had remarkably similar properties. Leather was also cured there; fat was rendered down into various oils; repairs were carried out on the Ice Citadel’s few precious communal metal artifacts, like the cooking range or cauldrons. Tools were mostly stone or crystal blades for shaping and cutting bone; those who arrived with their own little knives or pliers or multipurpose implements held on to them and treated them like the high value currency they were. Nobody was a real artisan, they didn’t have to be, all that was needed was a basic grasp of mechanics; the Ice Citadel kept ticking over on a level virtually equal to medieval.

The job that had been taking up everyone’s efforts for three days was repairing and refitting the runners on two of the big covered sleds. They’d finished one, and the second was resting a couple of meters off the ground on thick stumps of crystal, waiting for its newly carved runners. It was barely above freezing in the workshop, hot spring water ran along curved channels under the stone floor, keeping the air moderately warm. Like the rest of the Ice Citadel, the heating arrangement was worn down. The thick flagstones covering the water channels had cracked and shifted down the centuries. Tenuous puffs of mist leaked up in a dozen places, turning the air damp and cloying. Condensation slicked the walls and the workbenches, and rusted any metal that was left out for too long. Around the rotating door, it was a permanent prickly frost.

Ozzie made sure he kept his woolen gloves on at all times. It made the tools harder to use. He had to move slowly, and consider what he was doing. But without them, his fingers became too cold, losing feeling. That was when real accidents occurred.

He joined in with the repair team, three humans and a Korrok-hi lifting the first heavy runner up into place on the end of the legs—sliding it back under George Parkin’s directions. George had been at the Ice Citadel long enough to qualify as the unofficial workshop foreman; he was certainly the most competent carpenter. The new runner fitted neatly, the dovetail joins slipping into their grooves with the help of a little oil lubrication. Two of the team members set about securing the joins with locking pins hammered in sideways and glued.

Ozzie had now been out six times on the sleds as part of a harvesting party, twenty-five humans and aliens armed with ladders and baskets. On each occasion, they’d set out just as dawn rose, heading for the crystal tree forest surrounding the huge desolate depression. The opal-colored wedges that bloomed from the end of every twig on the mature trees were actually an eatable fruit, a little knot of near-tasteless carbohydrates in a tough shell. Without them, the inhabitants of the Ice Citadel would never survive. It took a couple of years for one to grow to the size of an apple, so they had to harvest in strict rotation, painstakingly recording each trip on crude hide maps that marked out radial sections of the nearby forest. When they got there, it was hard physical work retrieving the crop, ten hours with only one small break, climbing the ladders in thick layers of clothing and a fur coat to knock the fruit down with a length of bone. Ozzie was fascinated by the fruit. It convinced him that the crystal trees must be some kind of GM biology, or whatever Silfen science was equivalent.

Several members of the harvesting party roamed along the treacherous rocky gullies that crisscrossed the forest, where patches of litchenweed that took decades to grow coated the steep sides in shaggy blue-gray carpets. They stripped them off like vandals on a wrecking spree. Fungi were another prize, with the tetrajacks sniffing them out among the narrow clefts in the icy ground so they could be scooped out by picks and shovels. Between them, their haul was enough to feed the Ice Citadel for another couple of weeks.

The harvest, and the subsequent cooking and processing of the fruit and fungi, were a communal effort. Everyone contributed to the general upkeep in whatever way they could. Sara told him it was a civilized place most of the time. She could only remember it getting unpleasant once, when the Silfen hunt didn’t visit for over a year, and the icewhale meat had run out.

The workshop team lifted the second runner into place before lunch. Ozzie stood back with George Parkin to watch the locking pins being hammered into place.

“Two days,” George said happily; he had some kind of thick English regional accent that Ozzie couldn’t place. “The glue’ll set, then we’ll be able to take her out again.” He put his bone pipe into his mouth, and lit the dried fronds of litchenweed. It smelled foul.

“How many big sleds have we got?” Ozzie asked, waving the smoke away.

“Five. I’m planning on building another after the next hunt when we’ve got a decent stock of new bone in. I’ve a few ideas for improvements, and these old ones have been rebuilt so many times they’re losing their strength.”

“Five large sleds, and what, like seven small ones?”

“Nine if you count the singletons.”

“That’s not quite enough to carry everyone, is it?”

“No. Those five big sleds carry about twenty of us when we go chasing off after the hunt; it could be a lot more but we have to haul our tents along with us as well. Nights out there are just plain evil; we need those triple-layer fur tents. And we’ve also got to leave enough room on board the sleds to bring back the icewhale. Big brutes they are, you’ll see.”

“But there’s enough bone inside the Ice Citadel to build more sleds.”

George gave him a funny look, sucking hard on his pipe. “Not spare there ain’t, no.”

“Chairs, cots, rug frames. There’s a ton of it.”

“People are using it.” He sounded quite indignant.

“They might want to use it for something else.”

“What are you getting at, lad?”

Ozzie wiped the back of his glove across his nose. As always in the workshop, it was cold and runny. “I’m talking about taking everyone out of here. All of us at once.”

“Chuffing heck, lad; how do you figure that?”

“People get out by following the hunt, right? But they’re on foot, or sometimes skis. They have to be fast to keep up.”

“Aye.”

“So we follow the hunt on sleds. Pile everyone in, humans and aliens, take all the animals, the tetrajacks and the lontrus and the ybnan; use them in relays to pull us, cut the exhausted ones loose if we have to. But that way we can keep up with the Silfen, man, we can do it!”

George took the pipe out of his mouth and examined it solemnly. “It’s a grand idea, lad. But these big sleds won’t be able to get through the forest on the other side of the hunting ground.”

“Okay. Then we cannibalize them and build a fleet of smaller ones. They’ll be lighter, easier to pull, faster. It’ll increase our chances.”

“Aye, lad, it probably would at that. But how does that resolve why we’re here?”

“What do you mean, why we’re here? We’re here because we walked down the wrong path.”

“Did we? You’re still thinking everything in life takes place on a physical level, what about your spirituality?”

“My spirituality is fine and looking to get the hell out of here.”

“Then I’m happy for you, lad. But I’m not ready to leave. I believe we’re here for a reason, each and every one of us. The Ice Citadel is teaching us about ourselves, things we need to know as well as things we don’t necessarily want to know. I believe we’re here for a reason. We all know you’re rich back in the Commonwealth; a lot of folk wandering the paths are. I was. Proper little idle sod I was back in those days. Usual crap, born into a family with more wealth than sense. I’m a Yorkshireman, me, born and bred, and right traditional. Our family made a fortune out of scrap, raking it in and selling it on, making brass out o’ muck. We were doing it centuries ago, recycling stuff before anyone even heard of the word. Then Europe went bloody daft on the idea; if it were toxic you couldn’t use it, and that which you were allowed to use had to be reused. We ended up with fridge mountains because you couldn’t let the chemicals out of the coolant system, then computer mountains, then car mountains. We ’ad bloody Alps of consumer goods waiting to be broken down and refined cleanly. That was our family’s second fortune. Then you and your pal came along with wormholes, and all everyone wanted to do was dump all the poisons and pollution out away in space. We got rid of all the fancy recycling plants, but we kept on collecting rubbish off people, and ran it through your open enders. Our third fortune.”

“The Mo-oM corporation,” Ozzie said. “They’re Europe’s biggest trash disposers. Is that your company?”

George nodded, quite pleased that Ozzie knew the name. “Aye, that it is. Know what Mo-oM stands for? Molehills out of Mountains.”

“I figured something like that.”

“That’s what I was born into. Never did a day’s graft in my life; I was a total wastrel back then, useless, pointless, and out o’ me head half the time. Everything taken care of by money: parties, women, travel, drugs, rejuve—I ’ad the finest of them all. And you know what, after the third time around, it’s as boring as shit. So I followed the paths to find the fairy folk, because that’s the one thing money can’t buy.”

“And they brought you here.”

“Aye, they did that. This is where I’m learning what I am, Mr. Isaacs; I’m learning what it’s like to live as a real person. I’m important here; people ask me what to do about icewhale bone, how to fix it, how to shape it, how to glue it, how to saw it. I’m respected now. That might not seem much to you, you’re someone who really achieved something in his life; but this respect I’ve got now was earned, and earned the hard way. That’s why I’m in this place. I’ll leave eventually, we all do one way or another, either by walking out or dying in the forest. But until that day, I’ll do what I can to help the rest of me friends through the bad times.”

“Does everybody get this speech from you?”

“Those that need it, aye. But I can see you don’t, not with all your wisdom. So let me put it this way. What if we all set off like you suggest, and we still get left behind? What if the paths reject us? We’d all be stuck out there in the forest, too far away to get back here: well and truly up the creek wi’out a paddle. Not that you would get everybody. There’s the likes o’ me, and then there’s the Korrok-hi, they’re not about to leave. This place is just right for them. And what about those who arrive next? What do you think would have happened to you if our Sara hadn’t come for you and took you in?”

“Good point.”

“That it is. This is a place that has a purpose. Just because you don’t want to be here, don’t mean it’s a wrong-un.”

“Right. I guess I’d better go and work on plan B, huh?”

George shook his pipe at him. “You do that. But make sure you’re back here after lunch. We need a hand to get the sled down off them blocks.”

“Sure.” Ozzie took a couple of paces, then looked back. “George, you don’t happen to know any good chat-up lines, do you?”

George took a moment to examine his pipe. “If I did, I wouldn’t waste them on the likes of you.”

Ozzie left the workshop and headed back down to his rooms. George had made him remember the worst days of high school, the times when he wound up outside the principal’s office. The talking to that was always worse than any possible detention.

He could never tell George, or Sara come to that, but the reason he’d been considering the mass escape was Orion. The simple fact was, he couldn’t be sure about getting out if he took the boy with him. On his own it wouldn’t be a problem. He could ski, he’d even started carving himself a pair out of bone. No Silfen was going to get away from a human on skis no matter how fleet of foot they were. And he had his packaged food, and energy drinks, and lightweight equipment; all of which he could carry. But Orion … the boy hadn’t even seen snow before they got here, let alone knew how to move through it.

And all the while, when he was putting plans together, there was that one thought coiled up at the back of his mind: how much simpler it would be to leave Orion behind. There might even come a day when he didn’t have a choice. It wasn’t like he’d come searching for enlightenment or fulfillment like George and most of the others. He was on the paths for a reason. And God only knew what was happening back in the Commonwealth right now.

Ozzie walked across the main chamber and into the passageway that led to his cluster of rooms. The tochee was there, just coming out of the cavern they used to sleep in. It was the alien Ozzie had mistaken for a young Raiel the day he’d arrived at the Ice Citadel. At first sight it was a reasonable error. The tochee had a similar blunt body, like a squashed egg about three and a half yards long, and coming up to the middle of Ozzie’s chest. Its hide was a kind of bristly fur, a dark caramel in color, which looked as if it was about two sizes too big, the whole body was covered in wrinkles and creases, like a bulldog’s face. Strange little wizened black fronds grew out of the folds, as if it were sprouting seaweed.

The eye, or what people believed was its seeing organ, was a curved pyramid a yard or so behind its mouth, made up from three oval sections of translucent black flesh, with the one at the front twice as long as the other pair, curving down so it could follow the body-profile.

But it was the way the alien moved that was most interesting. Two fat ridges of rubbery tissue ran along its underbelly, for all the world like sled skis, except these rippled like snakes to push it along. The surface of the ridges was mottled, gray and bruise-brown, with some cracks oozing rheumy body fluid. Sara had said the tochee was in bad shape when they found it out on the edge of the crystal tree forest. Although the ridges were a sophisticated biological method of locomotion, their nature meant it couldn’t wear protective cladding. Its ridges were badly frostbitten from moving over the icy ground, where they suffered constant contact with the sub-zero soil. That was over two years ago, and the flesh still hadn’t grown back properly.

A second pair of ridges protruded from its back. They were shorter, extending only a little farther than its eye, and they were more bulbous. Ozzie had seen them swell out to grip cups and plates, or help lift objects too heavy for human arms, like giant amoebas shaping themselves into chubby tendrils or jaws. As tool users went, it was a high evolutionary concept.

In fact, it was only its manipulator flesh, along with a few high-technology artifacts it was carrying on a utility belt, that convinced the other Ice Citadel residents that it was sentient at all. In the whole two years it had been here, nobody had managed to communicate with it at all. It didn’t make any sound with its mouth, let alone speak. As far as they could tell, it was deaf. They’d tried chalking pictures on a slab, but it didn’t seem to understand them. All they had left were simple arm gestures: come, stay, go, lift, put down. It cooperated most of the time, as if it were a well-trained sheepdog.

They didn’t even know its true name, the Korrok-hi had named it the tochee, which in their language of hoots and whistles meant big fat worm.

“So what were you looking for in there?” Ozzie mused out loud as he stood in front of it.

The tochee’s snout waved slightly from side to side, putting Ozzie in mind of some animal awaiting castigation. To his eye it had the attitude of a whipped dog, but then, he supposed, if all he did every day was carry buckets of water from the fountain to the kitchen, on frostbitten toes, unable to talk to anyone, or know what was going on outside, he’d be seriously depressed, too.

“Okay, let’s go see.” He walked around the flank of the tochee and pushed the door curtain aside. He wasn’t sure, but he thought the security mesh had been moved around slightly, as if something had gently prodded it. “Come on then.” He beckoned the tochee with an exaggerated gesture. The big creature turned smoothly in the passageway, and slithered into the sleeping room. Once again, Ozzie was impressed by how agile the alien was; for something that size it could move quickly and precisely.

He sat on the cot, staring at the tochee, and gestured around expansively. “Go ahead.” The alien didn’t move. It kept its great front eye perfectly aligned on the human.

“All right then.” Ozzie went over to the security mesh and clicked the padlock’s combination code, covering the motion with his body. He still wasn’t that trusting. With the mesh open, he pulled out various articles, food, clothes, a kerosene lamp, his sewing kit, a handheld array, and set them down on the floor in front of the alien. The tochee’s locomotion ridges flattened slightly, lowering it down; then its manipulator flesh on the left side flowed out into a slim tentacle that picked up the array. The tip pressed each of the five buttons on top. But the unit remained dead.

“Ah-ha,” Ozzie said. Only someone familiar with technology would understand a button. “So you understand technology, but we can’t communicate. Why not?” He sat back on the cot and looked at the tochee again. It might be a human interpretation, but the alien seemed to slump in disappointment at the array’s failure. It slowly replaced it on the floor, little black fronds rustling like autumn leaves in a breeze.

“You don’t use sound, so what does that leave us with? Telepathy? Doubtful. Magnetic fields? Bees and trokken marshrats can sense them, but the Silfen are probably damping them here. Possible, then. Electromagnetic? Ditto for radio waves, the array is dead. Shapes? You’re visually perceptive, so that’s another possible. I can’t match that shapeshifting arm trick, though, and Sara said you didn’t understand pictures.” He cocked his head to one side. “Make that human pictures. I wouldn’t understand yours. That’s if you draw them. Now there’s a culture difference. Do you have art?” Ozzie stopped. He was feeling mildly foolish talking out loud to an alien that couldn’t hear. The tochee was still facing him, the front eye perfectly aligned. Ozzie shuffled a few inches along the cot. The tochee’s front body moved slightly, tracking him. “Why are you doing that? What can you be trying to say.” No, not what. How? Ozzie stared at that elongated oval of shiny black flesh that was pointing right at him. Not sound, but an emission of … “Shit.” He switched his retinal inserts to infrared, and the tochee’s body crawled with strange thermal signatures, hinting at the location of blood vessels and organs hidden below the flesh. He slowly worked up through the visual spectrum, until he reached ultraviolet. “Fuck!” Ozzie jumped backward in reflex shock, and fell off the cot.

The tochee’s forward eye was alive with complex dancing patterns of deep purple light shining straight at him.

When Orion returned to their rooms a couple of hours after lunch he found the tochee almost blocking the doorway. Ozzie was sitting on his cot, sketching furiously with a pencil on one of his notebooks. The rock floor was littered with scraps of paper, all with the weirdest patterns on them, like flowers drawn by a five-year-old, where every petal was represented by a jagged bolt of lightning.

“George Parkin’s been looking for you,” Orion began. “Why is that in here?”

Ozzie gave him a manic grin, his crazy hair fluffing out from his head as if he’d been hit by a big static charge. “Oh, me and Tochee here are just having a little chat.” He just couldn’t keep the smugness from his tone.

“Uh?” was all Orion managed.

Ozzie picked up one of the pieces of paper torn out of the notebook. The pattern was like a rosette of fractured glass, but there was a word scribbled on the top corner. Ozzie’s other hand held up a leather shoe. Half of the contents from their packs were scattered around. “This is its symbol for shoe,” he said jubilantly. “Yes, look, it’s repeating it. Course, it might just be the symbol for violated dead animal skin, but who the hell cares. We’re getting there. We’re building a vocabulary.”

Orion looked from Ozzie to the tochee. “Repeating what?”

“The symbol. There are other components to it, but they move the whole time. I can see them but I can’t draw them. So I’m just sticking to basics. I think the moving parts might be grammar codes, or context information.”

“Ozzie, what symbol?”

“Sit down, I’ll tell you.”

“It talks in pictures?” Orion asked ten minutes later.

“That’s the simple explanation, yes.”

“What’s the complicated one?”

“The pattern it projects is the visual language of the picture, sort of the same as we give names to objects. I imagine when two of them communicate together it’s extremely fast. There’s a lot of information in a pattern like that. I’m sure I’m only getting the fundamentals of it. In fact, I’m going to try and teach it the human alphabet. But I’m not surprised it didn’t understand the pictures Sara tried to draw for it, like the difference between drawing a stick man, and seeing a fully fledged color hologram of a man. Tochee will have to learn how to think down to our level, I’m afraid.”

“That’s good.”

“So why do you sound like it’s the world’s biggest bummer?”

“Well, it’s nice for Tochee, and everything, but writing notes isn’t going to get us off this stinking world, is it?”

“You think?” Ozzie grinned. “Know what the first thing tochee asked me? Can you get me out of here? That means we can team up. We’ll make a great team, the three of us.”

“How come?”

“Tochee is strong, and fast. And that’s what we need to keep up with the Silfen.”

“It can’t go outside, Ozzie. It freezes!”

“I’ve got some ideas about that. I’ll talk to George about them tomorrow.”

Orion gave the big alien a curious look. “You really think you can do that, get it to come along?”

“Hope so, man. We’ve just been fooling around so far, letting each other know we can talk. Now we’ve got to build a real communications bridge. I’ve got some programs in my inserts that are still working, kind of; they’re translation and interpretation routines, the type CST use when they encounter a new species for the first time. They’ll take you all the way from ‘the cat sat on the mat’ up to discussing metaphysics. Damn, this would be so much easier if my array was working.”

“Lucky your inserts are.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Ozzie, look!”

Tochee extended a thin tendril from its manipulator flesh, and picked a piece of paper off the floor. The pattern was close to a spiral of snowflakes, in the corner Ozzie had written array, or electronics in general?

“Why that one?” Ozzie muttered. He stared at Tochee’s forward eye that was flaring with fast-moving lavender patterns. “Ah, could be ‘communications device.’ I think Tochee wants me to get on with it.”

“Can I watch?” Orion asked excitedly. “It’s got to be better than the stables.”

“Yeah, you can watch. It might take a while, though.”

SEVENTEEN

It had taken days to cajole her father into supporting the weekend. Not that Justine Burnelli actually wanted him there, not as he was right now, barely six months out of rejuve. He was impossible at the best of times, but add his natural brute stubbornness to youthful vitality, and it made him damn near inhuman. However, she had to concede, his presence made the weekend a valid event; without him, the necessary players would never have turned up.

They’d chosen to have it at Sorbonne Wood, the family’s West Coast retreat, a big estate outside Seattle, with fast-flowing rivers and extensive woodland hemmed in by mountains. She would have preferred a weekend at the Tulip Mansion, the family’s primary home over on the East Coast. It was so much more civilized than this rustic sanctuary. But the informal gathering that the Burnellis were hosting was to be discreet above all else.

People started arriving midafternoon on the Friday. Justine had been there a day already, overseeing the personal preparations, something she never quite entrusted to her staff for get-togethers at this level. Sorbonne Wood consisted of a large main house, originally of stone and concrete, which was now thoroughly covered by drycoral, one of the oldest examples on Earth. It had been planted over two centuries ago. The two native colors of lavender and beige that grew up the walls and across the roof seemed insipid compared to the modern varieties that GM had made available. Their braided fronds also suffered from poor texture, with older sections susceptible to crumbling; so the groundstaff encouraged constant growth. By now the fronds were a foot thicker than the house’s original walls, which made the big picture windows appear organic they were so sunken. The UFN’s Environment Commissioners would doubtless impose a removal order and a hefty fine on anyone else who was impudent enough to cultivate the alien plant to such an extent, but no mere EC official was ever going to get through Sorbonne Wood’s security perimeter.

The interior of the main house was made up of various reception rooms, relaxation facilities, and the dining rooms. Family members and guests stayed in any of the dozen lodges arranged in a semicircle around the rear gardens, and linked to the main house by rose-covered pergola walks. On the outside at least these satellite buildings made an attempt to conform with local heritage. They had log walls and bark-slate roofs, although the interiors were strictly twenty-fourth century in terms of furnishings and convenience.

Gore Burnelli was the first to arrive, driving up under the wide gull-wing porch canopy in a huge black Zil limousine. Even though it was electric, Justine thought the six-wheeled monster must surely violate some kind of environmental laws, it was so heavy, and twice the size of her own current Jaguar coupe. Three other big sedans pulled in behind it, carrying members of her father’s retinue; and her e-butler told her another two had gone straight to the estate’s little staff village.

Justine stepped forward to greet the old tyrant-king as the Zil’s rear door opened and its ground steps slid out. Two assistants doubling as bodyguards emerged first, looking like traditional mobsters in their sleek black suits and silver-band glasses. Justine showed no emotion at their appearance. They weren’t needed here, and her father knew that, in fact he was probably wetwired to be a lot more lethal than they could ever be. His last rejuvenation at the family’s biogenic center had taken longer than usual.

Gore Burnelli appeared in the Zil’s doorway, sniffing the air. “Goddamn Seattle; goddamn raining again,” he grunted. A light drizzle misted the sky, making the edges of the gull-wing canopy drip constantly over the conifers planted around it. “Don’t know why we don’t just move this fucking place over to England. Same weather, better beer.”

Justine gave him a gentle hug. “Stop it, Dad. This weekend is going to be tough enough for me as it is, without having to keep you in order.”

He made an attempt to grin back at her. It wasn’t an easy gesture for him, not with that face. She could still see his native human features; as a normal twenty-year-old he would have been strikingly handsome. His thick fair hair was already starting to curl mischievously as it sprouted vigorously from the short crew cut he’d come out of the tank with. But the sheer number and complexity of his OCtattoos meant that they had merged together and now completely covered his face, giving him 24 karat golden skin like the sarcophagus mask of an ancient Egyptian king. “Like I’d dare complain with you riding my ass.”

“How’s Mom?”

Gore rolled his eyes; they at least appeared normal. “How the fuck should I know. You tell me who she was, I erased the memory centuries ago.”

“Liar.” Justine saw the bodyguards stiffen slightly; they probably weren’t used to anyone talking to their boss like this. But then Justine was Gore’s firstborn, conceived and born entirely naturally, unlike the fifty-odd children that had followed her and her brother. Back then Gore had been a mere billionaire, inheriting the wealth of two distinguished old-money American families as his parents joined in dynastic union. With some astute judgments and predictions, and not a little political influence, his original extensive portfolios had grown in tandem with the human expansion into phase one space. The Burnellis, like all of Earth’s Grand Families, were living proof that money breeds money. Dawson Knight, the legal, accountancy, and management firm that was the core of the family financial empire, was staffed almost entirely by family members. Its raison d’être was accumulating more wealth, and protecting that which already existed. The Burnellis had holdings on every planet in the Commonwealth, from acres of strategic real estate around the outskirts of phase three space capital cities to entire blocks of manufacturing capacity on each of the Big15, from transport and retail companies to banks, utilities, and cutting-edge start-up enterprises. Anything that did or would one day turn a profit, they took a slice early in the game.

Justine had played a huge part in building the family fortune over the centuries, performing nearly every role from troubleshooter in the early decades, to chief acquisition negotiator, and more lately a subtle political broker. Not that she ever favored the more public political role her brother took. But despite all that, all the dealing, the maneuvering, the manipulation that she’d carried out over the long centuries, it was Gore who remained the sacrosanct heart of the ever-increasing Burnelli family.

“Well, I saw Mom a month ago,” Justine said. “She sends her love.”

“She’s not coming here, is she?” Gore suddenly shifted his focus. As always, his virtual vision surrounded him with financial displays, news précis, and market reports from Dawson Knight, looking to buy options, futures, land, currency. If there was an opportunity to advantage the family, he’d take it.

“No. You’re safe here,” Justine said.

“Good. I’m going to my lodge. But I want to see you and your brother before any of the horse trading starts this evening.”

“I’ll tell Thompson when he gets here.”

Gore and his retinue of bodyguards, assistants, and aides walked into the main house. A couple of beautiful Oriental girls brought up the rear of the procession, wearing tight white microdresses. They were twins, or reprofiled to look identical. Both of them bowed respectfully as they passed Justine, who just managed not to scowl back at them. In some respects, her father could be terribly predictable. The girls would be slotted into his schedule the same way as a finance conference or a meal. Every minute of his day was worked into his personal agenda weeks in advance. She knew a lot of people speculated that he’d received illegal psychoneural profiling to turn him into an obsessive compulsive about work and the family. But she still possessed the memories of her early childhood, when he was rarely home from Wall Street before ten or eleven in the evening, spending every weekend in his study with computer screens as his only companions. He’d always been single-minded, keeping human requirements to the minimum. As technology advanced, so he acquired more and more interface and processing functions to keep him attuned to the great pan-Commonwealth financial markets.

Half an hour after Gore arrived, Campbell Sheldon drove up to Sorbonne Wood. Justine greeted him with a genuine enough smile. He was one of Nigel’s great-great-grandchildren, the youngest of three brothers from a direct lineage granddaughter. That gave him a lot of seniority within the Sheldon family, and as he’d chosen a CST career he’d achieved a high-ranking position as the Director for Advanced Civil and Commercial Projects. Though Nigel was quite adamant that being family only ever got your foot on the bottom of the ladder, from there you had to move up on merit.

Campbell had a couple of aides with him, but that was all. Justine remembered enjoying that no-fuss attitude the previous time they’d met. Today, Campbell was halfway between rejuvenations, giving him an apparent age in his forties. A trim mouse-brown beard covered cheeks that were slightly chubby; he definitely had inherited some of Nigel’s characteristics: the deep eyes, small nose, darkening blond hair. A few discreet platinum OCtattoos spiraled behind and below his ears.

He kissed her lightly on both cheeks and said, “You’re looking fabulous.”

“Thank you. I think I was just about due for rejuve the last time we met.”

“The party on the Muang Senator’s yacht, if I remember rightly. The Braby bridge opening ceremony. They had airfish floating over the yacht like yellow balloons.”

“Oh, Lord, you are terribly well briefed. I can see I’m going to have to spend all night updating myself.”

“I hope not all night. That would be a waste of an evening.”

“Ah. I remember this part of you very well.” Her gesture invited him into the hall.

“What can I say? I’m a Sheldon. I have a reputation to keep up.”

“Weren’t you with that rock singer that time on the yacht?”

“Ah, the dear Calisto. We parted company not long after, I’m afraid. She left me for a drummer.”

“She named herself after a moon?”

He shrugged. “It was fashionable back then.”

“So what is now? Asteroids? Comets?”

Campbell laughed, then paused to look at the house. “Is that really drycoral? On Earth?”

“Yes. Please don’t report us to the Feds. It’s older than most of our family members.”

“I’m easily bribed. A quiet late-night drink. Bathing together in romantic candlelight. Making love in a four-poster bed.”

Justine smiled back. “I’ll certainly consider a plunge in a mountain stream with you. We have several in the grounds.”

“My God, you’re a sadist. In Washington state in springtime? Do you have any idea what water that cold will do to a man?”

“I’m game to find out if you are.”

“Okay. But I certainly expect that drink later on. What’s the form for the weekend?”

“Strictly informal. The main decision on the starflight agency has already be taken by the ExoProtectorate Council. All that’s left are a few policy shakedowns to get things working smoothly before the Senate confirmation. If I might suggest … This gives you an excellent opportunity to explore options with Patricia Kantil.”

“Huh,” Campbell grunted. “She’s coming, is she?”

“Oh, yes.”

Patricia Kantil was actually the next to arrive. Stepping out of a mid-price-range Ford Occlat, wearing a neat office suit, also off-the-shelf, and classic black pumps. She kept an apparent age in her mid-fifties, mature enough to be trustworthy, not so old as to be losing any intellectual capacity. A web of silver OCtattoos radiated out from her eyes, so thin they were invisible most of the time. Her hairstyle and makeup carefully emphasized her Latin ethnicity. Justine could tell she spent a lot of money on that salon styling, but voters wouldn’t be able to tell that as she stood one pace behind her boss, Elaine Doi.

The fact that Doi’s chief political advisor was spending a weekend in Seattle barely ten days after the Vice President had announced her candidacy was a telling point to Justine. For Patricia these two days would be a major lobbying exercise. She’d brought her secretary with her, a studious young man, dressed in the kind of designer casuals an urban type always wore in the great outdoors. He stood attentively behind his chief, only ever speaking when spoken to.

Justine was busy welcoming them when a third person emerged from the Occlat. A young girl with long blond hair, actually taller and slimmer than Justine. Her clothes were unashamedly expensive, a short skirt and shiny gold V-necked top that highlighted her figure. She glanced around the grounds with the unique bubbly exuberance that spelled first-lifer, smiling broad approval at what she saw.

“And this is Isabella,” Patricia said. “My companion.”

“Hi there. You have a lovely place here,” Isabella gushed. She stuck her hand out eagerly, wanting to make friends.

“Thank you,” Justine said. “It took a while, but we’ve gotten it how we like it.” It would be so easy to shower Isabella with sarcasm and irony, the girl would never notice. But that would make her a bitch, and this weekend didn’t need any ructions. “Get me a full file on her,” Justine told her e-butler. Something about her features was familiar enough to make Justine cautious. Isabella was obviously from a Grand Family or an Intersolar Dynasty, but which …

“Isabella Helena Halgarth,” Justine’s e-butler reported. “Aged nineteen. Second daughter of Victor and Bernadette Halgarth.” A small file printed down inside her virtual vision, detailing Isabella’s schools, academic achievements, sports, interests, charitable causes. The usual PR crap the family released on its own.

Damnit!

As soon as she’d shown Patricia to her lodge, Justine put a call through to Estella Fenton. “I need some information.”

“Darling, I’m humbled and honored,” Estella said teasingly. “What on earth do I know that your family doesn’t?”

“It’s about this girl.” Justine’s virtual finger touched an icon, sending Estella the small file on Isabella. “You’re the queen of gossip, I need to know what her true standing is in the Halgarths.”

“If it was anyone else asking, I’d resent that,” Estella said.

“Please! I know the status of nearly every Grand Family member, but the Halgarths are an Intersolar Dynasty.”

“I know, darling, nouveau riche offworlders, the worst kind. I’ve got my own profile of her here, what exactly do you want to know?”

“Is she considered important?”

“Not really. Fifteenth generation, and Victor was only eleventh. Both father and daughter were invitrogestated children, so they’re not direct lineage, just filling the family quota. She’s got a minimal trust fund, it pays enough so she doesn’t have to work, but she can’t quite afford to live a society high-life. She finished school last year, and hasn’t yet chosen a university. In fact, word has it that when she’s rejuved she might go for a little brain resequencing. Her IQ isn’t exactly lighting the top of the Christmas tree. Had a few boyfriends, all of equally minor status, and currently sleeping with … ah: Patricia Kantil. Is this why you’re calling?”

“Yes. I’ve got some senior Halgarths coming this weekend. I don’t know if Patricia’s secured their vote. It might be a problem if they interpret the relationship incorrectly.”

“Rest easy, darling. You didn’t hear this from me, but EdenBurg is already lining up behind Doi. That makes six of the Big15. I don’t think Patricia and Isabella will be a factor for you.”

“The Halgarths are backing Doi after all? Congratulations, you are better connected than me. Thanks, I really don’t need last-minute scares like this. I owe you.”

“You certainly do. Next time I need an A-list Grandee for dinner …”

“I’ll be there.”

Gerhard Utreth was next, a fourth-generation member of the Braunt family that had founded the Democratic Republic of New Germany. As an attorney he’d opted out of the family’s management and financial side to work in the planetary legal office. Decades ago he’d been the DRNG’s Commonwealth senator. He’d even been married to a Burnelli at one time, resulting in two invitrogestated children. Not that Justine expected that to count for much during the weekend, but it made him a good potential ally.

She had also invited Larry Frederick Halgarth, who was in the third generation of his dynasty. He arrived with Rafael Columbia, who was an inevitable addition to the weekend. But when the invitation was issued, Larry had also insisted on bringing Natasha Kersley, who shared the limo with the other two. When Justine ran her name through the Burnelli database she drew a blank. Natasha wasn’t a member of any major family. Nor had Justine ever heard of the Commonwealth Special Science Supervisory Directorate, of which Natasha was the chief executive. All Larry would say was: “It conducts theoretical studies of weapons. Exotic weapons.”

There were two more senators to complete the weekend gathering. Crispin Goldreich, whose position on the Commonwealth Budget Commission gave him a great deal of influence over the start-up arrangements of the whole starflight agency project. Justine’s briefing had him down as a mild skeptic; but as she knew there was really no such political animal. He was fishing for something.

Finally there was Ramon DB, the senator for Buta, although remarkably he didn’t belong to the Mandela family that had established that Big15 world. Instead, he was the leader of the general African caucus in the Senate, which gave him a respectable power base. He had also been Justine’s husband for twelve years. But that was eight decades ago.

“Remember me?” she asked coyly as he got out of his car.

He just wrapped his arms around her, hugging tightly. “Damn, you look hot when you’re this age,” he rumbled softly. He held her at arm’s length, looking her up and down. A wistful expression crossed his face. “Can we get married again?”

It was her turn to look at him. His traditional robe had a wonderful rainbow hem of semiorganic fiber that kept swirling as if he were in a breeze. Not even that movement could entirely disguise the way it fell over his stomach. His apparent age was approaching sixty, with white hairs infiltrating his temple. Midnight-black OCtattoos ran across his cheeks, flickering in and out of visibility.

“How much weight are you carrying under there?” she asked.

He put his hands together in prayer, and appealed to the sky. “Once a wife, always a wife. I keep in shape.”

“What shape? A beach ball? Rammy, you know you have trouble with your heart when you put on this much weight.”

“It is the fate of senators to attend huge meals every day of the week. I expect you’ll be sitting us down for an eight-course dinner tonight.”

“You are definitely not having eight courses; and I’m going to talk to the chef about your diet for the rest of the weekend. I don’t want to have to visit you in a re-life procedure ward, Rammy.”

“Yes, yes, woman. I am due to rejuve soon. It will all be sorted out then. Stop worrying.”

“Have they got a specific retrosequence for your condition yet?”

He gave an impatient swish of his fly whisk. “I have rare genes. It is difficult for doctors to isolate the problem and correct it.”

“Then have them vector in a sequence for a new heart. It’s simple enough.”

“I am what I am. You know that. I don’t want somebody else’s heart.”

She gathered a breath, ready to sigh at him. Before she had a chance his thick forefinger came up under her chin. “Don’t scold me, Justine. It is so good to see you again. Being a senator isn’t nearly as wonderful as everyone claims. I was hoping we could spend a little time together, you and I, this weekend.”

“We will.” She patted his arm. “I want to talk to you about Abby, anyway.”

“What’s up with our great-grandchild now?”

“Later.” She read the clock in her virtual vision. “I have to check in with Dad and Thompson before the evening begins for real.”

“Your father is here?” Ramon was suddenly reluctant to get closer to the house.

“Yes. Is that a problem?”

“You know he never liked me.”

“That’s your insecurity and imagination. He always accepted you.”

“Like a lion accepts a wildebeest.”

Justine burst out laughing. “You’re a senator of the Commonwealth, and he still intimidates you?”

He took her arm, and walked into the entrance hall. “I will smile at him and make polite conversation for exactly three minutes. If you don’t rescue me by then, I’ll …”

“Yes?”

“Put you over my knee.”

“Ah, hark the heavenly angels as they sing glad tidings: the good old days are back in town.”

Gore Burnelli had decompressed his parallel personality into Sorbonne Wood’s large array, settling himself into the house as other humans would return to a comfortable old armchair. Unlike most humans who underwent frequent rejuvenation, he didn’t dump his memories into a secure store for nostalgia’s sake. He carried them around with him in high-density inserts, loading them into local arrays wherever he went. They were essential to him; to make the deals that gave his family a smooth ride into the future he had to have the knowledge of past deals, and the reasoning behind them, if they’d worked, what the problems were. Others, like his daughter, relied on briefings and extensive database access through an e-butler; while he had the real events immediately available thanks to the homogenized access programs that his early memories were rooted to.

Business and positioning the family in the market were his constant now. Technology made it possible for him to be involved for most of the day. Some of the routines he’d developed for managing the process were almost autonomous, allowing him to parallel multitask. Even now, as he watched his son and daughter enter Sorbonne Wood’s big classical library, he was reviewing the deluge of data that fell between them like red digital rain. Figures and headlines briefly flared green as his virtual fingers flashed among them, rearranging them into new configurations, shunting money and information to form the new deals and purchases.

“Everybody’s here,” Justine told him.

He made no comment. That information had long since flowed past him; the house was now updating him on the location of the guests and their aides and staff and spouses and lovers: who was using the showers and baths, who was using heavy (and heavily encrypted) bandwidth to the unisphere, who was walking along the pergola paths to the main house ready for predinner drinks in the Magnolia lounge. Secondary information like that was now presented to his brain in the form of scent; the multitude of OCtattoos allowing him to smell where the guests were and what they were up to.

“I think these guests provide us with a critical mass,” Thompson said. “As long as there aren’t any unforeseen problems it should go smoothly.”

“That’s self-evident, boy,” Gore snapped. “But there are always problems. I’m relying on you two to anticipate them and massage them out of those grossly bloated egos gathering out there.”

“The only possible glitch so far was Isabella,” Justine said. “But she won’t register on the Halgarth radar. Just another trustbabe having herself some first-life fun. I don’t think Patricia had an ulterior motive for sleeping with her.”

Thompson dropped down in one of the winged leather armchairs in front of the big fireplace. “Not like Patricia to take any sort of risk. The girls she normally fucks are completely sanitized as far as political connections are concerned.”

“Maybe it’s true love?” Justine said in amusement.

“That’d be a first,” Thompson said. “Why the hell Patricia doesn’t simply get a body reassignment when she’s in rejuve I’ll never know.”

“She can’t,” Gore said. “Most of Doi’s team are female; it’s an image she’s worked hard at for twenty-five years. Nobody’s going to screw that up now by growing a dick in the tank.”

“Speaking of which, we haven’t officially declared for her yet,” Thompson said.

“That can happen this weekend,” Gore said. “If the timing is right. For that I’ll require confirmation of Doi’s policy on the starflight agency start-up. Assuming she’s going to back it, and she’d be a stupid bitch if she didn’t, I want us to pay particular attention to the structure which is going to emerge. This weekend will give the family a big advantage on positioning when the agency is announced. Those details will matter.”

“The agency is temporary,” Thompson said. “It’s the navy we need to concentrate on.”

“I know. That’s where we come in.”

“What if we don’t need a navy?” Justine asked.

“We will,” Gore said firmly. “I happen to agree with Sheldon and Kime on this one. The Dyson aliens shoot first and ask questions later. That tells me all I need to know about them. Even if it’s just for deterrence value, the Commonwealth is going to need warships. Government will be spending money on procurement, a lot of money. We have to ensure the family gets a slice of that.”

“Easy enough,” Thompson said.

“Godfuck.” Gore closed a golden hand into a fist. “Don’t you ever fucking learn? All the other Grands are maneuvering right now. Justine was right to put this weekend together for us, if we can influence the shape our placing will be unmatched.”

“What sort of shape do you want?”

“The main one has got to be location. Get Sheldon to let go of that hillbilly backwood Anshun. I want the agency centered at the High Angel, where it damn well should have been all along. The family has a lot of interest in the astroengineering companies based there; a real shipbuilding program will see their stock go through the roof.”

“We can probably make that sound logical,” Justine said.

“It is logical. What we need is a way to make it serve their interests.”

“I’ll work on it,” she promised.

Gore turned back to Thompson. “The other side to the navy is going to be the planetary defenses. Don’t allow that to be overlooked this weekend. People are going to want damn great force fields guarding their cities and making them feel safe. I can see that ultimately chewing up even more cash than the starships.”

“Okay, I’ll keep that one on the agenda,” Thompson said.

Dinner was the kind of formal event that Justine could sleepwalk through in her official role as hostess. They held it in the main dining room, with broad churchlike arched windows looking out across gardens illuminated by thousands of twinkling white fairy stars. She made sure Campbell was at one end of the long oak table with her father, while she chatted away to Patricia at the other end. Isabella didn’t join them for dinner.

“She finds these things a little dull, I’m afraid,” Patricia said as the band started playing some background jazz.

“She’s young,” Justine said sympathetically. “You did well getting her to come along at all.”

“It was the names, she’s a bit of a fame junkie,” Patricia admitted as she bit into her starter of cannelloni of smoked salmon. “Right now she’s accessing Murderous Seduction, it’s the penultimate episode.”

“Isn’t that a biogdrama of the last Myo case?”

“Yes. A bit melodramatic for me, but the lead character is sort of her age, and it’s a good production.”

“I wish I had time to keep up on pop culture. I’m surprised you do, especially right now.”

“Part of the job is coaxing various celebrity endorsements, among others.” Her smile was polite, but one hundred percent professional.

“Our family is very supportive of the starship agency proposal. Hence this weekend.”

“I know, and Elaine is very appreciative of that.”

“Will she be making it part of her platform?” Justine looked down the length of the table, straight at her father’s expressionless gold face.

“It’s a bit radical, but then the Dyson mission has injected a few new factors into today’s politics. The agency needs to go ahead, Elaine knows that, she’s prepared to go out on a limb if that’s what it takes.”

Gore Burnelli gave a tiny nod. “Our family will certainly do whatever we can to support her position this weekend,” Justine said.

“I’m very grateful for that help.” Patricia couldn’t quite conceal her predatory smile as she took another mouthful of the rolled salmon.

Justine studiously avoided any more verbal fencing with Patricia for the rest of the evening. The meal wasn’t the time for the serious negotiations to start in earnest; instead the three Burnellis made sure they talked to everyone separately at some point, preparing them for tomorrow.

It began in earnest at breakfast. The staff had set up an extensive buffet in the conservatory on the side of the main house, and Justine came over early to join Patricia and Crispin Goldreich at a table. Crispin’s two wives, Lady Mary and Countess Sophia, were still in their lodge taking breakfast in bed, though one of his aides sat beside him, pouring tea and fetching food from the buffet. Patricia’s immaculate young man was doing the same thing for her.

One of the house staff brought a pot of Jamaican coffee for Justine. She sat next to Crispin as he ate his eggs Benedict. It was the less confrontational position, she wanted to know the same things as Patricia, and Crispin was hugely influential. In addition to his leadership of the Budget Commission, he held a lot of authority among the bloc of European affiliate planets.

“Thompson told me you were one of the more moderate voices on the Council meeting,” Justine said.

“Cautious would be the more accurate word, my dear. I’ve been in this game long enough to spot an open-ended commitment. If this agency is approved by the Senate, there is no knowing how long taxpayers will be required to fund the endeavor. It won’t end with the Dyson flights, you know. If they turn out to be benign, there will be a precedent in place for government to fund exploration of other questionable unknowns.”

“Which is surely better than having it done by a private company?” Patricia said. “We’ve all heard the rumors of closed planets, worlds which have something so valuable the Sheldons have kept it for themselves.”

“And you believe that?” Crispin asked.

“Not personally, no. But I do believe that the government should be more involved with the investigation of potentially hazardous scenarios, such as the Dyson Pair. For that we need the starflight agency. After all, the Dyson Pair is the very first time we’ve found anything remotely threatening. And it’s a big galaxy. So far we’ve been lucky. We have to start being more cautious.”

“Which brings us to this dratted navy proposal,” Crispin said.

“You can’t deny that would be essential if the Dyson scouting mission proves them hostile.”

“No, I don’t. But the expenditure for that will be orders of magnitude above a starflight agency.”

“So how would you like to see this managed?” Patricia asked.

Crispin took a moment to finish the last of his eggs Benedict. “With a greater degree of responsibility,” he said eventually. “At the moment we’re simply throwing money at the problem. The first thing I’d like to see is some proper channeling of resources.”

“You mean some kind of oversight committee?” Justine asked. In her virtual vision, a calendar was displaying the date two years hence when Crispin’s senatorial seat was up for reelection. He’d get it again if he wanted it, that wasn’t a problem. But of course if he’s to carry on as chair of the Budget Commission he would need to be nominated by the executive.

“Oversight, management, steering: call it what you like. We have to insure the resources are spent properly.”

“Your Budget Commission has it within its purview to set up such an oversight body,” Patricia said.

“Technically, yes, unless the executive starts throwing up obstacles. I’m sure the President’s office would want to maintain a tight control over the agency, and certainly the navy.”

“Of course. But Elaine would be in favor of legitimate financial scrutiny. She absolutely does not want taxpayers’ money wasted, and I know she has a lot of confidence in the way you run the Budget Commission.”

“I’m delighted to hear that,” Crispin said. He poured himself some tea. “In which case, providing the Budget Commission can get those financial safeguards in place, Elaine Doi would have my support for the agency. If she gets elected.”

“If she gets elected,” Patricia parroted, keeping a composed face.

“Crispin is on board,” Justine told her father.

“Good work. What did it cost?”

“Patricia gave him the Budget Commission leadership after Doi’s elected.”

“There could be worse people in charge. Crispin is an old hack, but at least he understands the rules of the game. Well done. What’s next?”

“Utreth. Thompson’s with him after breakfast.”

It stopped raining after breakfast, leaving the grounds glistening from the overnight soaking. Thompson led his guest past the formal gardens, and into the woods beyond. They were a mixture of pine and beech and silver birch, not as densely planted as they had been during the logging centuries when they’d been all pine. As Washington state was now edging into springtime, a multitude of bulbs were pushing through the sandy soil, their verdure leaves contrasting with the mat of brownish winter grass that was still pressed against the ground from the weight of snow that had lain on it for months.

Gerhard Utreth seemed to be enjoying the mock-wild environment. He’d even brought his own walking boots.

“Every time I visit the West Coast I always promise myself I’ll take a day and go to look at the sequoias,” the Democratic Republic of New Germany Senator said.

“And have you?” Thompson asked.

“No. Not once in a hundred and fifty years.”

“You should. I went about fifty years ago. They’re quite a sight.”

“Ah, well, maybe next time.”

They reached one of the streams that had cut a deep narrow cleft through the soil, its perfectly clear water now running over a bed of white and gray stones. Thompson started to follow it up the shallow slope, avoiding the big tufts of dark green reed grass sprouting from the sodden banks.

“I congratulate your family on getting a Sheldon as important as Campbell under the same roof as Doi’s chief political advisor. The weight which your father’s name still carries is remarkable.”

“It’s not in anyone’s interest to have warring factions at the heart of government. We do what we can.”

“Of course. I have to admit, I don’t remember a Vice President launching a campaign without the support of at least seven of the Big15 dynasties.”

“Doi’s own caution works against her at this level. You really can’t please all of the people all of the time. She’s been trying to do that for too long. It’s not that she’s gained enemies, she simply hasn’t gathered much in the way of admiration.”

“And if I may ask, how does the Burnelli family view her?”

“No differently to any other presidential candidate, there are many flaws and some strengths. However, our principal interest lies in the events which will play out during her presidential term. We heartily endorse the formation of a starflight agency. Doi did have the foresight to make the initial proposal in the ExoProtectorate Council.”

“Is that the view of the Grand Families as well?”

“The majority, yes, we will be campaigning on her behalf.”

“I see.”

Thompson stopped where the stream opened out into a wider pool. The far end was fed by a small waterfall gushing over an antagonistic cluster of sharp stones, making a loud sloshing sound as the flow was tossed around. “I’d appreciate knowing what it would take to bring you in.”

Gerhard nodded slowly, appreciative they were using straight talk for once. It didn’t happen often between senators. “Everyone is concentrating on the agency and constructing scoutships right now, which is understandable. However, it is the view of the Democratic Republic that the formation of a navy is almost inevitable.”

“We concur with that.”

“If a navy is formed, flying scouting and even attack missions will only be a part of its duty, it must defend the Commonwealth as well. Sheldon has a monopoly on the ships and their FTL technology which we would not dream of challenging; but planets and cities will need heavy fortifications, that is where we envisage our role to lie.”

“You would be happy backing the agency formation on that understanding?”

“Yes, we would.”

“That would mean lining up with Doi.”

“Like you, we acknowledge she has weaknesses, though like her strengths, none of them are particularly remarkable. I suspect history will regard her tenure as simply adequate. The age of great statesmen and women is long behind us, nowadays we just compromise our way through life. The Democratic Republic can live with that.”

“Good call by Gerhard,” Gore acknowledged. The data flow engulfing him began to flash like a thunderstorm as his virtual hands rearranged packages and icons for long-term positioning in the Democratic Republic of New Germany.

“He’s a professional,” Thompson said. “The DRNG realizes the agency will go ahead, they just want a way in. A late opening is better than none at all.”

“I wonder what the Sheldons will make of that.”

“They’ll accommodate it. They know damn well they can’t expect the entire agency budget for Augusta. That’s why they sent Campbell, he’s fourth generation, he probably won’t even have to refer back to Nigel for anything that comes up this weekend.”

“We’ll find out soon enough. It’s the crux meeting next.”

Patricia was invited to the study first. Gore’s retinue had done what they could to make the room more welcoming. A real log fire was burning away in the grate, helping to banish the afternoon’s chilly breeze. The ancient brown leather chesterfield sofas had been arranged in front of the hearth. A table standing in the middle held pots of tea and coffee, as well as plates of muffins and cookies, filling the air with a pleasant aroma.

She accepted a bone china cup of tea and sat opposite Gore. She wasn’t particularly unnerved by him, she’d spent enough time with the superrich to know what they wanted above all else was a show of respect. His gold face, however, was disturbing; most of her life was spent judging and responding to expressions. Gore offered her little clue about his emotions. That’s if he has any, she thought.

“It looks like the Democratic Republic will be backing Elaine,” Gore said.

Patricia kept herself as immobile as she could, though it was difficult. The relief she felt at hearing of Gerhard’s support was enormous. When she thought of all the time spent lobbying him, the team of researchers analyzing what they could do to bring him on board. Now just half a day spent with the Burnellis and another Big15 was supporting Elaine. For over a year, Patricia had been frantic with worry about how few of the Intersolar Dynasties they’d managed to gather in their favor. “That’s excellent news, sir.”

“You haven’t heard their price, yet.” Gore went on to explain what assurances she’d have to give the DRNG senator before the end of the weekend. “But the real key is Sheldon,” he said. “This agency and everything it will lead to is your first way in. I know you’ve been courting that dynasty for over three years now.”

“They have proved somewhat reluctant,” she acknowledged.

“Ha!” Gore’s shiny gold lips parted in a recognizable sneer. “Nigel hates careerist politicians, comes from his right-on youth I expect. That’s why he’s kept you dangling. But he’s learned to be a pragmatist over the centuries. And now you can offer him something. It is possible for him to maneuver his own candidate into the presidency, even at this late date. However, that would cost a lot of time and effort, and create antagonisms. Now with you, that wouldn’t even register, but the Intersolar Dynasties and Grand Families would be pissed with him. That, he does care about. So be what he wants, and you’ll have no opposition. Are you prepared to do that?”

“We can take Augusta’s requirements into account during the campaign.”

Gore stared at her for a moment. “There is only one requirement right now: money. You’ll be embarking on a campaign that will ultimately raise taxes. That’s never going to be popular.”

“I understand.” Patricia hesitated. “Won’t you be hit by taxes?”

“If we paid any serious ones, we probably would be.”

One of Gore’s overlarge, dark-suited bodyguards led Campbell into the study. He smiled pleasantly at Patricia as he sat beside her.

“You two kids play nice now,” Gore said.

The study fire had burned down low when Justine and Thompson came in. Two of the house staff were clearing away the paraphernalia of afternoon tea under the cautious gaze of the bodyguards. Gore took a couple of pine logs from the wicker basket at the side of the hearth and dropped them into the cast-iron grate, which kicked up a small cloud of sparks from the bright pink embers.

“It’s going to work,” he told his two children. “Sheldon will back Doi’s candidacy.”

“What did that cost her?” Justine asked.

“Billions,” Gore said. “In taxpayer money. Even I was surprised by what she offered for the starflight agency’s first budget.”

“She’ll look for a jumper to introduce the bill, someone who’s leaving the Senate,” Thompson said. “If Patricia’s got any sense she’ll try and get the President to introduce the agency formation bill into the Senate himself. That way, Doi won’t get the blame when the budget is announced.”

“She’ll get blamed when the navy starts up,” Justine said.

“If we need a navy, no one is going to question the cost.”

“Christ, she might even make a second term.”

“Did you tell Campbell we want to shift the agency base to High Angel?” Thompson asked.

“No. Someone else can do our dirty work.” Gore looked at Justine. “I thought your ex would fit the bill.”

She groaned and flopped down into the chesterfield. “Why him?”

“That way we can offer Buta the new High Angel shipyard assembly contracts. It fits perfectly. Sheldon will know he’s got to accommodate everyone else.”

Justine glanced at her clock display. “All right. We’ve got an hour before predinner cocktails. I’ll sound him out.”

“I thought you’d talked to him already today?” Thompson asked.

“Yes, but that was about Abby. She’s being a problem.”

“Is she all right?” Gore asked. “I haven’t received any information.”

The immediate interest amused Justine, he really was protective of the family, especially the direct lineage. “This wouldn’t reach you. We were just talking about which university she’s going to. I wanted Yale, she and her mother would like Oxford, and Rammy favors Johannesburg.”

“It’ll be Oxford,” Gore said. “You always cave in to your offspring.”

Cocktails were served in the music room. It was a large split-level room on the ground floor, with a central dais of teak for the ancient Steinway piano. The woman they’d hired to play the beautiful antique for the evening was from the San Francisco Civic Orchestra; she had an admirable repertoire and a mellow voice. After hearing her start with an Elton John classic Thompson was almost reluctant to take Ramon, Patricia, and Crispin down to the other end of the room where they stood in front of a Harkins water flow sculpture that took up most of the wall. Crispin wasn’t part of the deal to be made, but as he was now on Doi’s team he would be useful in providing assurances to Ramon. The more players were tied together, the harder it was for them to renege.

“You have to admit,” Thompson said to his ex-brother-in-law, “having Chairwoman Gall on your side would be a big help within the African caucus. A great many of your members respect her. It wouldn’t be just you trying to swing the proposition, you could share the load.”

“That woman is a total ballbreaker,” Ramon said dismissively. “I think you’re making a mistake including her in this without any prior consultation. And she’s only a very loose member of the Senate’s African caucus. When it suits her is the usual membership criteria.”

“She’s got to want the agency to be based at High Angel,” Crispin said. “I know she was most unhappy when the Second Chance was built at Anshun. I haven’t heard that kind of language in a committee room since the Kharkov Independency crisis.”

“All the more reason she’ll tell everyone to go to hell,” Ramon grumbled. He directed a wistful look at one of the waiters carrying around silver trays full of canapés, then checked around guiltily for Justine. “She’ll want her pound of flesh for that slight.”

“Chairwoman Gall is a fellow professional,” Thompson said. “The economic benefits to her fiefdom cannot be overlooked in these circumstances. She’ll sign on the dotted line.”

“She might,” Ramon said. “But in any case, don’t be so sure the High Angel will permit you to establish the agency there.”

“From what I understand, the High Angel is equally interested in the Dyson Pair,” Patricia said. “Besides, we don’t actually need its permission to site the new agency facilities there. It’s a convenient dormitory, nothing more.”

“Any lack of cooperation on its part would be a problem,” Ramon said.

“One we could surmount,” Thompson said. “The primary reason for siting the agency there is simply moving it away from Anshun.”

As one, they turned to look at Campbell Sheldon, who was talking with Isabella. The girl was dressed in little more than a white cotton cobweb, whose active semiorganic fibers shifted every time she moved so that her body’s true sexuality remained provocatively veiled. She was laughing with easy enthusiasm at whatever story Campbell was recounting, while he seemed equally enthusiastic at the attention she was shining on him.

“The Sheldons can be reasonable,” Crispin said. “When it’s in their interest.”

“This whole agency project is in their favor,” Thompson said. “Crispin, much as I hate to interrupt a fellow guest when he’s clearly having such a good time, but do you think you could broach the subject of the High Angel base to Campbell? It would sound better coming from someone with your authority.”

“Oh, bloody hell,” Crispin grumbled. He downed his sparkling gin. “Why do I come to these weekends?”

Thompson, Patricia, and Ramon watched him walk across the room to the corner beyond the piano where Campbell and Isabella were having their very public tête-à-tête. He stopped a waiter and grabbed a glass of black velvet before breaking in. Isabel welcomed the Senator with a fast flutter of her eyelashes.

“A lovely girl,” Ramon said. “You’re very lucky.”

“I know,” Patricia said. “But I’m old and boring, so I don’t suppose I’ll have her for long. Once the novelty of being so close to the future President wears off, she’ll move on. I did when I was that age.”

“I don’t even remember being that age anymore,” Thompson said. “And not from erasing the memories, either. They just fade after so much time.”

“To forgotten youth,” Patricia said, and raised her glass. “May we always be reminded by envying those who have it.”

“Amen.” Ramon touched his glass to hers, then with Thompson. They all drank the toast.

“If you are right about Chairwoman Gall being reluctant,” Thompson said to Ramon, “may we presume upon you to broach the subject with her?”

“I’d sooner put my cock in a food processor and switch it to puree.”

“You were married to my sister. How difficult can this be?”

Ramon put his head back and laughed. “Ah, I’d forgotten what this family was like.” He clicked his fingers at a waiter, who hurried over with some canapés. “All right, I might stop by at High Angel after this weekend. But I’m still not convinced that this agency is in the full interests of the African caucus.”

Thompson’s good humor never faltered. “Then I’m sure we’ll manage to find something that will convince you before you leave.”

They went through to the main dining room for the evening meal. Justine had arranged the seating as best she could given the state of play so far. Not that she expected much maneuvering during the meal, but the options were open. This time she wound up next to Campbell, though she frowned when she saw Isabel seating herself beside Ramon, who appeared more than happy with the arrangement. Isabel had taken Gerhard’s seat, leaving the DRNG Senator to sit next to Patricia, who Justine had wanted to place with Rafael. The Halgarths had done remarkably little in the way of negotiations so far. She knew Larry had talked to her father that morning, offering provisional support for the agency, but that was all. No doubt their cards would be on the table by tomorrow.

Text rolled down her virtual vision. YOUR EX IS BEING A PAIN, Thompson sent.

DON’T MAKE IT SO PERSONAL, she shot back. WHAT DOES HE WANT?

I’VE NO IDEA. I THOUGHT WE’D GOT HIM WITH THE HIGH ANGEL ASSEMBLY PLATFORM CONTRACTS. NOW HE’S SEEN HOW EVERYONE IS LINING UP BEHIND THE AGENCY, HE’S ANGLING FOR MORE.

I ALWAYS KNEW HE’D MAKE A GOOD POLITICIAN ONE DAY, YOU AND GORE NEVER BELIEVED ME. WE’RE PLAYING OUR HAND TOO OPENLY. IT LEAVES US VULNERABLE TO THOSE WE NEED TO ALLY.

YOU’LL HAVE TO BRING HIM BACK IN.

I’LL DO WHAT I CAN, BUT I’M MORE CONCERNED ABOUT THE HALGARTHS.

THEY’RE SOLID.

CARE TO BET ON THAT?

When the meal was over and the party had broken up, Gore went back to the study. With his latest retrosequenced modifications he needed at most three hours out of every twenty-four to sleep, and often managed on a lot less. As he prowled along the ceiling-high bookshelves he smelled the others as they went back to the lodges in the garden. Isabella, with her residual scents of the many men who for one reason or another had brushed up close against her that evening, herself redolent with the delicate smell of lily and orchid from the daubs of perfume on her neck. Her aroma stretched thin as she hurried across the grass, avoiding the paths, moving away from Patricia’s metallic tang. Ramon DB’s mélange of cologne and alcohol-laced perspiration awaited her, the two merging together as his lodge door closed behind her. Their combined odor built up heavily within the tight confines of the master bedroom, saliva pheromones and the sugar acid whiff of champagne mingled with it.

Behind Gore’s impassive gold face there was a stirring of amusement as the hot stench of sex began to gush out from their bodies. While in Patricia’s bedroom there was only the overpowering smell of pine soap as she drew her bath. No alcohol, no bitter salts of disappointment prickling her skin. She was content.

So Isabella was the go-between, the one who would bind Ramon back into the deal, making him the promises her mistress had preauthorized to secure his vote. And of course, she had a passing resemblance to Justine. A seduction of both mind and body. Poor, lucky Ramon.

Gore found the book he was looking for, seeing the leather spine behind the continual stream of sparkling scarlet information that enveloped his world. He reached out a hand swathed in glowing bands of silver and platinum, sliding The Art of Financial Warfare by James Barclay off the shelf. Not that he needed to read it, all the wisdom it contained now flowed freely among his thoughts and management routines. But the physical touch was a strange comfort. This book had been his Bible during his first life, and was still regarded as a classic text for anyone going into finance. He could probably do a good job updating it himself.

For some reason he always found himself searching it out when he was performing difficult placements; and this was one of the most complex. The starflight agency had so many variables, many more than the usual political-economic ventures he was accustomed to. By rights, it ought not to work, or at best be another cash-starved government institution that limped along on poor performances and missed quotas. This was too grand for today’s drab careerist politicians to make work. And yet … the people who would normally be tearing each other apart were actually cooperating and accommodating each other to facilitate its inception.

What am I missing?

Every formidable instinct he possessed was singing through his brain that something was wrong. He would have loved to believe that the human race was worthy and mature enough to behave so splendidly. To see a problem and address it with logic and resolution. There had been progress along the social evolutionary scale, he was the first to admit. Thanks to rejuve, people did take the long-term view very seriously indeed nowadays. The starflight agency was a perfect example of that.

So maybe I am the anachronism.

Untrustworthy, suspicious, always looking for the worst in people. The barbarian who had no need to invade the city, for he had watched it grow up around him. He still wouldn’t believe the agency could be birthed so easily.

Unless the manipulators themselves are being manipulated.

That notion was even harder to accept. He had been on this right from the start, watching with his usual Olympian detachment as Justine caught the implications from her own contacts and convened this weekend. As the most cursory reading of Barclay showed, to manipulate this situation earlier than he had, you would have to know the outcome of the Dyson mission before it was launched. Nobody possessed that kind of knowledge.

With a dismissive sigh he replaced the book, and went to sit in front of the small pile of embers that the fire had reduced to. If Isabella’s sweet body and wicked promises didn’t do the trick, he would need to outflank Ramon DB by midmorning tomorrow. Names flared within his private data casement, contacts within the African caucus who would not take kindly to their leading Senator turning down the subcontracts that re-siting the agency at High Angel would bring to their worlds. He sniffed the air, infusing the bouquet of Justine and Campbell and clean cotton sheets in mellow combination. Now that would be an advantageous union given what was expected to unfold over the next few years. Virtual hands reached out, purchasing shares in companies around the peripheries of where the larger starflight agency contracts would fall amid the African caucus planets. Preparing the family. Strengthening the family.

“I have to tell you,” Campbell said, “Nigel isn’t happy about moving the starship assembly platforms to High Angel.”

Justine stroked his nose in reply, moving her finger down to his lips so he could kiss the tip. She was lying directly on top of him, with the duvet flung somewhere on the floor. The ancient logs of the cabin were thick enough to retain the bedroom’s warmth against the chilly night outside, she didn’t need covering just yet. Candles in bulbous glass bowls flickered in various alcoves, filling the air with a musky scent of lavender and sandalwood.

“Poor Nigel,” she said with a pout, then smiled happily as his arms tightened around her, one hand was sliding sensually down her spine toward her rump. “What’s his problem?”

“He gave clearance for everything that’s been agreed so far, but moving to High Angel will delay the project by several months, and that includes the new scout mission. He won’t shift on that.”

“What about the ground defense segments of the navy? Do you mind losing out on them?”

“We don’t envisage losing out, exactly. We’re doing what your family is doing, and positioning ourselves. The primary contracts will be handled by the DRNG, but we’ll still come out ahead. Augusta is the largest of the Big15, everything is proportional.”

She looked around to find the bottle of Dom Perignon vintage 2331 was empty and neck-down in the ice bucket at the side of the bed. A quick order to the house array sent a maidbot hurrying to bring another. “It’s going to be interesting to see the New York market board on Monday morning. This weekend is going to see so many stock acquisitions and movements the traders are going to know something’s up.”

“Yeah, we can’t hold off introducing the agency for much longer.” He looked up as the maidbot slid toward the bed. “Ah. More?”

“Yes please!”

He moved his head back to find her grinning devilishly at him. “My God, remind me never to be around the week after you leave rejuve. I doubt any man could survive that.”

The delicious memory of those few days spent in a glade on the side of Mount Herculaneum came back to provoke a warm tingle of satisfaction inside her. “One did,” she murmured contentedly.

Campbell lifted the cold bottle from the maidbot’s grip. “Shall I open it?”

“Afterward.”

“What about the High Angel problem?”

“We’ll find a fix in the morning.”

There was no specific time arranged for breakfast on Sunday morning. The guests arrived as they woke, drifting in across the lawns. For once the day had started without any clouds. Strong sunlight cast the estate’s exuberant vegetation in a pleasant aspect; there were even a couple of red squirrels bounding about over the lawn. Justine sat with Campbell, relishing the tired but happy feeling that was soaking her body. Thompson had said a polite good morning when he came in, although his tone told her he was quite aware of what she’d been up to during the night. Not quite disapproving, but close. She and Campbell shared a secretive grin as her brother walked away. The grins reinforced each other, threatening to become the kind of unstoppable giggles that afflicted school kids.

“May I join you?” Ramon asked.

“Please do,” Justine said. There was no sign of Isabella. Nor Patricia, she realized.

One of the house staff brought Ramon a pot of fresh English breakfast tea. Justine remembered introducing him to that drink, she always found it the best way to start the day. Coffee was too abrupt for her.

“I may have an idea that would smooth the way to move the agency to High Angel,” Ramon said.

Justine and Campbell exchanged a brief look. Everyone was remarkably well briefed this morning, she thought. It was barely thirty minutes since she’d updated Gore.

“We’d certainly appreciate anything which could help,” Campbell said.

“Parallel development. You continue building the first five scoutships at the Anshun facility, while the High Angel shipyards are being put together. That would provide the whole agency concept with the kind of positive outlook which the African caucus can support.”

Campbell was surprised by the notion. “I suppose that would work. There certainly wouldn’t be any of the delays which we’re resistant to. But it would also incur much greater start-up costs than we envisaged.”

“You should speak with Patricia, but I think you’ll find Doi’s team is open to raising the budget to accommodate us.”

Justine waited until they’d all finished eating before cornering Ramon as he walked back to his cabin. “What did she offer you to achieve that little strategic alignment?”

“Who?”

“Patricia.” She so nearly said Isabella.

“The original agreement was that Buta supplies the new High Angel shipyards. It is a logical extension for the construction companies to be awarded the support contracts as well.”

“Smart move,” Gore said later. “Support contracts can ultimately be worth more than construction in the long term. Which I guess is what we’re looking at here.”

“I’d love to know which one of them suggested it,” Justine said.

“Me, too. I’m becoming concerned by just how much money Doi is prepared to sign over. I’m not denying it will be good for us, but it shows a degree of desperation I hadn’t expected from her.”

“I’m not surprised at all,” Justine said. “She’s using this to buy herself the election, and it’s all paid for by tax money. She’s a politician, what did you expect?”

“More subtlety. The senators will know what’s happened here, even if the electorate doesn’t care. If it turns out the Dyson aliens are no threat, then the amount of money she’s offered the starflight agency is excessive and they’ll react to that. It’s not like a politician to support something so radical so wholeheartedly; they safeguard their own careers before anything.”

“But you’re the one that claims the Dysons will prove hostile, and we’ll need to evolve the agency into a navy.”

“I know. But I’m not standing for election. There’s a small part of me that’s tempted to sink this whole venture here and now.”

“What? You have to be joking.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t. But something’s not right.”

“Care to be more specific?”

“I can’t. I’ve analyzed this all night, compared it to a dozen similar guiding weekends this family has been involved with. There’s nothing tangible except my gut feeling.”

“You’re just worried about what the Halgarths will pull. They’ve been biding their time ready for this moment when the rest of us have reached a broad agreement, then they’ll make their bid.”

“Maybe you’re right. I hope so.”

Justine got the opportunity to find out soon enough. There was a general “progress review” meeting scheduled for midmorning. They held it in the library. It was Larry who requested it be limited to those who held level one Commonwealth security clearance. That meant Justine herself only just scraped in, due to her directorship of several companies that supplied equipment to Directorates that avoided the public view. But it certainly excluded everybody’s partners and aides, along with Isabella. There was a short sharp argument at the door when she was turned away. Patricia came in looking slightly flustered. Everyone inside had heard what the girl had shouted.

“Sorry about that,” Patricia said as she sat at the table.

Justine stifled her own smirk, seeing quite a few others doing the same. As soon as the doors were closed, Thompson stood up. “I expect this to be the final session for this weekend. We all seem to be in broad agreement over the principal structure which the agency will follow. This gives us a chance to iron out any final problems; I’m sure none of us want any show-stoppers at this stage. I for one have a number of Senate votes to attend on Monday, and I’d appreciate getting to them.” He sat down beside Gore, whose polished gold face turned expectantly to Justine.

“The major development this weekend seems to be moving the agency’s primary base to High Angel. Given that we’re foreseeing that it, or possibly a navy, will be in operational status for a long time, it does make sense and certainly has our family’s approval. Does anyone disagree?”

“As you said, Justine, we’re all in broad agreement with what’s been negotiated this weekend,” Larry Halgarth said. “The High Angel move, the preliminary work for navy defenses; my family will certainly add its rubber stamp to all this.”

“Here it comes,” Campbell murmured to Justine.

“However, there is one facet to all this planning which has been overlooked.”

“What’s that?” Gore asked sharply.

“Giving the navy an offensive capability. If, God forbid, the Dysons do turn out to be hostile, simply sitting underneath force field domes and hoping they’ll go away isn’t realistic. We would have to carry the fight into their territory.”

“Just hold on a minute here,” Gerhard said. “Since when have we included invasion in our hostile encounter scenarios? All my briefings have concentrated on possible clashes over colonizing new stars in the direction of the Dyson Pair. In other words it’s all going to be down to agreeing on the direction and limits of expansion. And that’s assuming they do want to expand.”

“They filled an entire solar system,” Larry said. “Their culture is just as expansion-based as ours, if not more so. Make no mistake about it, the two of us will meet out there in space.”

“They’re seven hundred light-years away,” Ramon said. “And it’s a big galaxy. Defensive capability is only going to be a sop to public opinion anyway, at least that was my understanding.”

“That’s very comforting. But what if we really need it?”

“Why?” Campbell asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Ramon was right in saying that any future clash with them will be over establishing borders to our respective spheres of colonization. Any navy we create will be a long-term venture. I doubt we’ll need it within a century. There isn’t exactly a rush to fill up phase three space like there was with one and two—more’s the pity. Even if they expand at our rate, we’d be in phase five or six space before the possibility of clashes arose.”

“And if they don’t stick to your timetable?”

“Then we stop at phase five space in that sector, and continue outward everywhere else. Like Ramon said, it’s a big galaxy.”

“Somebody was so concerned about them, they tried to quarantine them off from this big galaxy. And we’ve seen for ourselves how aggressive they are. That tells me we have to prepare for trouble.”

Campbell regarded him as a teacher would a particularly awkward pupil. “What do you think they’ll invade us for, exactly? If they want mineral or chemical resources, they can get them from any star system. Energy? Their fusion systems looked more advanced than ours. There is no economic or logical reason for them to invade us, especially not with a navy in place. It’s a deterrent.”

“Fine, then make it a working deterrent. Give it some teeth.”

“What sort of teeth would you like it to have?” Justine asked. “I take it this is why you wanted everyone here to be security cleared?”

“Yes.” Larry nodded at Natasha Kersley.

“My Directorate has been reviewing the data which the Second Chance came back with,” she said. “You were right to say their fusion systems are more advanced than ours. So are their force fields. If Captain Kime hadn’t pulled back, we estimate that the Second Chance would have been destroyed within a minute of their missiles reaching attack range. The only thing that saved them was the FTL capability. If we are going to confront the Dyson aliens in the future, even if it is solely to establish boundaries, we will need a lot more firepower than we’ve carried so far.”

“Then we’ll scale things up for the next generation of ships,” Campbell said. “Increase the force field strength. Provide more power to the atom lasers and plasma lances.”

“They will do the same,” Natasha said flatly. “And their shipbuilding capacity is much greater than ours will be for the foreseeable future. Their entire civilization is based around spaceflight and manufacturing ships, we cannot win a contest to scale things up. What we need to do is take this to the next level, and develop a new generation of advanced weapons.”

“Such as?” Gore asked.

“The theoretical concepts which my Directorate studies are need-to-know only.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to examine the idea,” Thompson said.

“What my family would like to see is Natasha’s Directorate transferred to the starflight agency’s defense office,” Larry said. He looked at Patricia. “That will require an executive order.”

“I can probably arrange one,” she said.

“It would need to be integrated with the rest of the Commonwealth’s security arrangements,” Rafael Columbia said.

“The rest of them?” Patricia repeated warily.

“If the navy is to have an effective defensive role, then the current Commonwealth security Directorates should be brought together to perform the service. The Special Sciences Supervisory Directorate and the Internal Security Directorate could be combined under the aegis of my own Directorate.”

“Isn’t that a little drastic?” Justine asked. “Not to mention alarmist? What relevance is the Serious Crimes Directorate to all this?”

“We’re the ones already fighting this conflict,” Rafael said. “It is my Directorate which is tracking down the terrorists who attacked the Second Chance. That act amounts to antihuman treachery as far as I’m concerned.”

Justine sat back in astonishment. Talk about gung ho.

LET HIM HAVE IT, her father sent to her. IT’S JUST PAPER EMPIRE BUILDING, AND THE AGENCY’S PLANETARY DEFENSE OFFICE HAS TO START WITH SOMETHING.

“I would point out that as Rafael’s Directorate operates on a quasi-secret basis anyway,” Larry said, “the preparatory functions it will be conducting into strategic planetary defense can quite easily be kept quiet under its standard procedures. I believe that was the original recommendation of the ExoProtectorate Council.”

“It was,” Campbell said. For a moment the two of them locked gazes. Then Campbell offered up a small smile. “Well, I have no objections to that. In fact, it’s rather tidy having everything under one roof. Think you can cope with the extra responsibility, Rafael?”

“And the budget,” Gore grunted.

Everyone laughed.

“You can depend on me,” Rafael assured them.

“It makes sense,” Gore said to Justine and Thompson after everyone else had left. “And it was a brilliant piece of maneuvering on the Halgarths’ part, nobody was going to say no that late in the day. Larry effectively split the navy. The Sheldons will have the ships, while the defense side will all be under Rafael’s control. He’s got the budget strings, which puts the DRNG and Buta subordinate to him.”

“And defense will ultimately be the bigger budget,” Thompson said. “We should have seen that coming. The Halgarths keep their dominance of the force field market.”

“The defense budget will only be bigger if the Dysons are a threat,” Justine observed. “I seem to be the only one who isn’t convinced they will be. You two certainly are, and as for Rafael … Jesus, it won’t be long before he’s designing uniforms with nice shiny jackboots.”

“Who’d blame him. All the girls love a sailor.”

“It’s not funny, Dad. This merger gives him a great deal of power. The Directorates were kept separate for a reason.”

“I’ll talk to Patricia and Doi herself when I get back to the Senate tomorrow,” Thompson said. “You’re right about that, Justine. There needs to be an executive review committee for Rafael’s new empire, and his new vice directors will be appointed from other families and dynasties. I’ve got some contacts on the inside of the Directorate who can keep an eye on him as well. Don’t worry, we’ll keep him in check.”

....

Even with his tight-fitting goggles and fur-lined woolen balaclava Ozzie could feel the freezing wind biting his cheeks. It was infiltrating the edge of his hood as he moved his arms back and forth in a smooth rhythm to propel himself forward with the carved bone ski poles gripped in each hand. The repetitive motion was hard work; he’d only been outside fifteen minutes, and already perspiration was soaking into the T-shirt he wore under his checked shirt, sweaters, and icewhale fur overcoat. His skis bobbed over the crisp ice, leaving clear twin tracks behind.

Out here, on the relatively level surface of the vast depression surrounding the Ice Citadel, he could move with a degree of ease, though it was nothing like the speed he used to reach on resort slopes back in the Commonwealth. It would be a lot slower in the forest, he knew. And he’d be hauling a great deal more weight in his backpack as well. Today, he was practicing with about half the weight of what he would be taking when they left for good.

He twisted his body carefully, curving to a halt before jamming his poles into the thin layer of crusty ice. Red sunlight washed down on the desolate landscape, revealing a multitude of small ripples in the frozen ground. At half a mile behind him the Ice Citadel stood aloof from the flat gray land, green light winking steadily from its pinnacle, prickles of crimson sunlight scattered off facets in its hexagonal crystal mirrors. A hundred yards away, Tochee was sliding along efficiently. They’d started calling the alien that now, rather than the tochee. Communication personalized it, at least from the human perspective. Ozzie figured he owed it that much.

It had taken Ozzie and George Parkin a week to design the vehicle that carried the heavy alien. The main structure was a simple sledge of carved icewhale bone, over four yards long, which could hold Tochee’s entire body with room to spare. At the front was a windscreen of crystal cut from a tree, and secured in a bone frame that angled back. Behind that, stitched to the circular hoops that went over the sledge platform, was a cylinder of icewhale fur that laced up at the rear. The arrangement was the equivalent of a fur coat for Tochee, keeping its body insulated from the sub-arctic air and its ridges of locomotion flesh well clear of the ground. To move the sledge along, a pair of spiked poles were fixed to the framework on either side in a variant of a rowlock. George Parkin had designed, carved, and assembled the four sturdy little mechanisms himself, and was quietly proud of his achievement. All four spiked poles passed through leather rings in the fur cylinder, which allowed them a fair degree of movement. Tochee gripped the ends in its manipulator flesh, and used the poles as combination ski poles and oars.

A big crowd had gathered outside the Ice Citadel the first time Ozzie, Orion, and George had pushed the sledge out from the workshop. It had taken Tochee a couple of minutes of tentative, experimental motions before mastering the poles. Since then, the three of them had been out every day, practicing.

Ozzie watched Tochee maneuver the sledge toward where he was waiting without losing any momentum. The contraption made him think of some bizarre Victorian attempt to build a snowmobile. But it worked, and the alien was proficient enough now to give him a great deal of confidence for their venture. That just left Orion. The boy was skijoring behind Tochee, short skis strapped to his boots, and holding on to a slim rope that was tied to the back of the sledge frame. Ozzie had decided it was a lot easier for Orion to do that than learn how to ski properly. In fact, the boy was probably enjoying himself a little too much as he swayed from side to side behind the sledge. Ozzie wondered if he should insist on a shorter rope, take away the opportunity for delight. Although Orion was a lot happier these days now their preparations to leave were becoming ever more tangible.

The sledge came to a slow stop beside Ozzie, all four poles digging into the gritty ice to score narrow furrows. He was pleased to see Orion angling his own skis correctly to brake. More than once the boy had plowed into the back of Tochee’s sledge. Maybe they did stand a chance after all. Ozzie held out a mitten, thumb extended upward. Behind the thick windscreen of crystal, Tochee’s manipulator flesh formed a similar gesture.

“How are you doing?” Ozzie asked loudly, it was too cold to pull his balaclava aside and expose his mouth.

“All right,” Orion yelled back. “My arms still ache a bit from yesterday, but these skis are easier to balance on.”

“Okay, let’s keep going.” Ozzie struck off across the ice, heading toward a section of the crystal tree forest he’d visited on a harvesting trip three weeks ago. He held a steady pace, concentrating on the ground ahead. There were hidden ridges and little jutting pinnacles of rock that could prove perilous if he hit them wrong. And if Tochee ran over any of them it would be a plain disaster. He wondered if they should take some spare icewhale bone and a few tools for repairs just in case. It would mean more weight, but increase their chances. Like everything they carried with them, there had to be a balance between safety and success. When they started their trial runs in the forest he’d have a better idea.

“Ozzie!”

He turned at the muffled voice, finding Tochee was laboring hard with the sledge’s poles, moving them fast, gradually catching up. Orion was shouting furiously, his free arm waving about. Ozzie moved his legs proficiently, bending from the knees as he slewed around, and quickly came to a halt. He stared out over the empty floor of the Ice Citadel depression to where the boy was pointing.

The Silfen had finally arrived to hunt. A great procession of them was emerging from the forest on the other side of the depression. From such a distance, they were little more than a moving gray line, although dainty lights sparkled along its length. When he used his retinal inserts to zoom in, he saw the actuality. There were over a hundred of the biped aliens already in the open, with two dozen at the front riding on some quadruped animals that moved as fast as horses even in the terrible cold of this world. Those on foot jogged along effortlessly despite the thick coats they were wearing; half of them were carrying lanterns on long poles that danced about as they moved.

After so long spent in the Ice Citadel with its uneventful repetitive days the thrill Ozzie felt at the sight of them was so intense it surprised him. For months he’d been so resolutely dispassionate, he’d almost forgotten that he could experience emotions this strong. We’re on our way out of here!

“Let’s get back,” he shouted at Orion. He made a quick hand signal to Tochee, indicating the Ice Citadel. The alien mimicked another thumbs-up behind the windscreen.

They made good time back to the Ice Citadel. The inhabitants had all turned out for the arrival of the Silfen, milling around on the ice outside. Ozzie grabbed a couple of humans and Bill the Korrok-hi to help push Tochee’s sledge over the last sixteen yards around the base of the big building where boots and hooves had churned the ice and sandy soil to a sluggish shingle. When the sledge’s fur covering had been unlaced, the big alien quickly slithered down into the warmer lower level. Ozzie put his skis into the rack and went back outside.

There must have been two hundred fifty Silfen in the hunt. Their singing and trilling floated across the icy ground, reaching the Ice Citadel long before they did. Even in this bleak perpetual winter the sound was uplifting, a reminder that beyond the forest there were worlds visited by summer. The riders cantered up on steeds that had bodies like fat horses, with necks that extended out horizontally ending in arrow-shaped heads. Their hide was like tawny snakeskin, with a wispy feather rising from every scale. Ozzie was sure he could see slim gills opening and closing quickly along the length of their necks amid the rippling muscle as the riders reined them in just before they reached the excited crowd. He also cast an eye over the long silver spears fastened behind the low saddles—they seemed very impractical, especially for a rider.

The mounted Silfen were warbling away in their own tongue as they looked down on the crowd. They wore long coats of fluffy swan-white fur with hoods that tapered away down their backs. Gloves and boots were made from the same pelt, which made Ozzie wonder what animal it had come from, he suspected it would look rather spectacular.

Sara stepped forward and bowed slightly before the lead rider, then spoke in their own language. “Welcome back, we are always pleased to see you and your brethren.”

The lead rider twittered away in reply. “Dearest Sara, happiness flies with the kiss that fruits among us. Joy we know at the seeing of you and your lifeful people. Cold this world is. Strong you must be to thrive below its red light. Strong you are, for thrive you do amid the deep ice and the high sky.”

“Your Citadel is a fine home for us in this cold wilderness. Will you be staying here tonight?”

“Time among this home long past is what we will reap this day.”

“If we can help, then please just tell us. Are you hunting the icewhales this time?”

“Out there they are, covered in their white deeps. Fast they move in short moments. Big they grow in long years. Loud they call. Far away amid the uncountable stars we hear their refrain. We challenge. We chase. And in the end we share our blood to know such a life we gladly live.”

“We would like to follow. We would like to have the icewhale bodies afterward.”

The rider dismounted in a quick lithe leap to stand in front of Sara. He pushed his hood back, and looked down at her well-covered face as if perplexed. “When all is done and life has lost its body what happens then to that which is left dead matters not.”

“Thank you.” Sara bowed again.

The riders led their animals into the unused stable halls, while the Silfen on foot went straight inside, singing and laughing as they descended the broad spiral passage to the central chamber. It was a gushing invasion of light and good humor and the smell of springtime and cozy fireside warmth, transforming the ancient Citadel to the kind of haven from the cold and desolation outside that its builders must surely have intended right from the start. When Ozzie finally got down to the main chamber the lantern poles had all been slotted into holes in the wall so they overhung the floor, their thick gold radiance holding back the oppressive red sunlight, banishing the grime fouling the carvings. The Silfen had shed their white coats, bringing the tangible taste of a temperate forest to the harsh stone universe of the cavern with their leaf-green toga cloaks. They opened their packs to hand around flasks and clusters of berries and little biscuity circular cakes. It was the carefree party gathering that made Ozzie ache for his earlier life and the simple pleasures it contained. To his horror and disgust he found his eyes filling with moisture at the memories that the sight triggered.

Most of the humans and other alien residents stood around the walls, watching their visitors in simple contentment. Orion was down there on the floor in the thick of things, moving from one Silfen to another to be sung at and admired and given morsels of food and sips from the flasks. A wondrous smile lifted his young face as his friendship pendant blazed with turquoise starlight.

“Quite something, isn’t it,” Sara said quietly in Ozzie’s ear.

“I’d forgotten what they were like,” he admitted. “Christ, I’d forgotten what anything outside this gulag is like.”

A slight frown deepened the heavy wrinkles on her face. “You’re going then?”

“Oh, yeah!”

“George could use some help first.”

“What?” He made an effort to turn away from the exultant Silfen.

“We have to get the big sleds ready. We need those icewhales, Ozzie. People will die without them.”

“Yeah,” he said reluctantly, knowing she was right. Too many people were depending on the hunt and its bounty. “All right. I’ll go help George.” He glanced back across the cavern. “But do me a favor, don’t ask Orion.”

“I won’t.”

Ozzie was just one of forty people who George and Sara had marshaled into the preparations for tomorrow. Even so, it took the rest of the afternoon to load the big covered sleds ready to follow the hunt. There were the triple-layer tents, and the cooking gear, and fuel oil to be transferred into bladders, the butchery kits, the barrels and cauldrons. Then George and the more proficient bone carpenters made some last-minute repairs and patches. More people were readying the ybnan in the stables.

He felt tired but quietly pleased when he finished up and made his way back down to his rooms. Orion was still with the Silfen, but Ozzie insisted he leave them. Tochee was already in their sleeping room when they arrived. Ozzie shifted his retinal inserts to ultraviolet. Ragged patterns were flashing within Tochee’s front eye segment, question upon question about the Silfen.

Ozzie made calming gestures with his arms and picked up a much-washed parchment of cured hide. He used a charcoal stump to write: Yes, they are the aliens who made the paths. Tomorrow they will hunt the big fur creatures. After that, we follow them off this world.

“What’s it saying?” Orion asked excitedly as Ozzie held the parchment up in front of Tochee.

“It’s really happy they’re here and we’ve got our chance,” Ozzie told him.

Orion snatched the parchment from Ozzie, and wiped the charcoal letters away into a broad gray smudge. Then he wrote: It’s great news, isn’t it? We’re leaving!!!!!

Tochee took its own parchment off the small pile, its manipulator flesh closed around a charcoal stump: Together we will do this. Together the three of us will be a triumph.

Orion stood in front of Tochee and raised both hands in a double thumbs up. The alien’s manipulator flesh closed around the boy’s fingers.

“Okay, you dudes,” Ozzie said. “Let’s get serious. We’ve only got one chance at this, so it’s got to be right. Orion, open the security mesh up and get all your stuff packed away. If it isn’t in your rucksack, it’s staying here. Then get your best outdoor clothes ready for the morning. When you’ve done that, pop out to the kitchen range and fill all our thermos flasks with boiling water, we’re going to make up some of that powdered juice, the stuff with extra glucose and crap in it. We’ll drink that outside tomorrow.”

“Can’t I do that in the morning?”

“There’s no telling when the Silfen are going to leave; everyone says it’s always early, so we can’t gamble that there’s like going to be hot water ready for us tomorrow. This has all got to be done now. We’ll have about fifteen minutes’ warning, man. I’ve fixed it with George for us to have places on one of the big covered sleds.”

“All right then,” Orion said. “I’ll get started.”

Ozzie wrote more lines on his parchment, telling Tochee to get the best meal it could tonight.

Don’t forget me, the alien wrote back. Don’t leave me behind.

We won’t.

Ozzie dug out some self-heating packages of Cumberland sausages and mash in onion gravy, which fizzed away while he prepared his own kit. Even piling the tent and various other essentials in bags on the back of Tochee’s sledge, and himself and Orion both skiing with their rucksacks, they’d never be able to take everything they’d brought with them on the lontrus. It was time for hard choices and educated guesses. He decided to leave most of his clothes behind, he was wearing enough to survive on this planet, which gave him enough to live anywhere, just not in any great variety. There was packaged food for fifteen days, which he included in the bundle to go on Tochee’s sledge, though luxuries like chocolates and biscuits and tea he would leave for Sara and George. The medical kit was also a must. His set of ceramic Teflon-coated cooking pans was dumped, as was the small kerosene stove. All the riding gear, the saddle, the pack harnesses from the lontrus—it was all useless to him now.

He looked at the sorely depleted pile of things he wanted to keep, knowing it was still too big.

“We can leave the security mesh,” Orion said when he came back in with the flasks. “That must weigh a bit.”

“Yeah,” Ozzie said slowly. “Guess so. Good thinking there, man.”

The boy picked up his backpack, holding it above his head as he gave a goofy grin. His red hair hadn’t been cut since they arrived at the Ice Citadel, so that it now came down almost to his shoulders, and threatened to cover his eyes most of the time. “And I can carry a lot more for you. See, I’ve got almost nothing in here.” He tried holding his ancient nylon rucksack aloft with one hand to prove his point.

“That’s okay, man,” Ozzie said as the backpack tipped over and Orion made a comical lurch to catch it. “We’ve got everything we need to make it out of here. Anything more and we’d be jeopardizing our chances. No way am I doing that again. Did I ever tell you how totally crap our space suit was when Nigel stepped out on Mars?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Now that was being unprepared in the most serious fashion. Jesus, it was a miracle he ever came back, and he was only a couple of yards from the wormhole the whole time. That would have been fucking impressive wouldn’t it? First person to step through our new machine and he drops down dead from the lack of a bicycle puncture repair kit. History would have been a hell of a lot different.”

“What was it like, Mars?”

“Cold. Colder than this dump. And dead. I mean really seriously dead. Believe me, you know when somewhere has been dead for a billion years before the dinosaurs were killed off. You just had to look at it and you knew.” He shook his head, surprised by how strong the image was after nearly three and a half centuries. “So now, show me what you’ve put in the pack.”

Tochee returned with the bucket it ate its mashed crystal tree fruit from. Ozzie and Orion settled down on their cots with their packaged meals, and the three of them ate in silence. The Silfen out in the central chamber were singing away blithely, clearly intent on partying the night away like a bunch of boisterous students. Ozzie caught the occasional line of verse, most of which praised the icewhales for their size and speed and ferocity.

Sara was their first visitor. Ozzie handed over the items he was leaving behind, which she accepted with brisk thanks. George turned up, with the sledmasters who would captain the hunting party. The other five people who were going to try to find a path off the planet wandered in, four men and one woman. They sat on the cots, and everyone started discussing options and strategies. The modest rock cavern took on the kind of hyped-up atmosphere in the team changing room minutes before the big match. Thinking that, Ozzie briefly wondered who had won the Commonwealth Cup.

It amazed him he even managed to fall asleep. But there he was, tangled up in an unsealed sleeping bag, his arms and neck chilly, as Orion shook him awake. The rug hadn’t even been pulled over the bright crystal duct in the ceiling.

“It’s time, Ozzie,” the boy said in a near-fearful voice. “George says they’re getting ready.”

“Right then, man, let’s get to it.” Ozzie felt like singing, something uplifting, like the early Beatles or the Puppet Presidents. Out in the central chamber the Silfen had quietened down. He pulled the rings on the self-heating breakfast packets, and started to get dressed. Full body thermal underwear, of course, then a thick sweatshirt and his cord trousers, the clean checked shirt. By the time he laced his hiking boots up he was starting to feel warm, so he carried the rest, the two sweaters, waterproofed and insulated trousers, scarf, balaclava, gloves, earmuffs, goggles, and of course the icewhale fur coat, over trousers, and mittens. He checked Orion who was equally well dressed, half of his garments were Ozzie’s, cut down weeks ago and sewn carefully to fit in readiness for this occasion.

They ate their breakfast, took a last visit to the bathroom, then collected Tochee from its quarters. When they got upstairs, the big workshop was abuzz with activity. Silfen riders were already leading their animals from the stables. George was rapping out orders to his teams. Tochee shifted about uncomfortably on the cold, damp stone floor while Ozzie and Orion gave its sledge a final check, then it quickly slithered up into the protective cylinder of icewhale fur. Ozzie handed Tochee three heatbricks before carefully lacing up the flaps of fur at the back, making sure there were no gaps. He and Orion piled their packs on the little space left over at the rear of the sledge platform. Tochee was now going to have to stay inside until they reached a warmer world. Weeks ago, Ozzie had tried asking if Tochee got claustrophobia, but either their pictures and words vocabulary hadn’t developed enough to explain the concept, or the alien didn’t have a psychology susceptible to such things.

It was George himself who helped Ozzie and Orion push Tochee’s sledge outside into the weak predawn light, then they tied it to one of the big covered sleds pulled by a team of five ybnan. After exchanging “okay” and “good luck” signs with the alien, they clambered inside amid all the equipment for butchering and cooking the icewhales. Bill the Korrok-hi was their driver, and Sara wedged herself inside beside them, along with fifteen others. The small brazier hanging from the top of the sled was lit, casting a murky brimstone light around the inside, complete with noxious fumes. The side flap was closed.

As the red sun slowly rose above the horizon the Silfen gathered together outside the Ice Citadel, their white furs gleaming bright in the glow from their lanterns, spears and bows held ready. They began a slow chant, their voices deeper than Ozzie had ever heard before. In a mournful baritone they sounded a lot more alien, and far more menacing. Their riders moved off at an easy canter, leaving those on foot to follow at a slower pace. The sleds pulled by the ybnan lurched off in eager pursuit, with pans and metallic equipment clanking loudly.

It took an hour and a half just to reach the border of the crystal tree forest. So far the covered sleds had kept up with the Silfen on foot. But once they reached the small trees around the fringe they had to arrange themselves in single file. The path between the steadfast trunks was narrow and awkward, slowing them further. They slowly lost distance on the Silfen, although the track they left was easy enough to follow. Occasionally the Korrok-hi drivers would catch a glimpse of the shimmering light from their lanterns through the snow-covered trunks. Several times, Ozzie went over to the door flap to check Tochee was still being towed. The sledge was slipping along without any trouble. Tochee was barely having to use the four poles to steer with.

“How much longer?” Orion asked after they’d been pushing through the forest for over an hour.

“We’ll be in the forest for a couple of hours yet before we reach the hunting ground,” Sara said. “After that, who knows. Their riders went on ahead to try and track some icewhales.”

“How big is the hunting ground?”

“I have no idea. You can’t see the far side no matter how clear the air is. Hundreds of miles across, I suppose. Once we had to turn back we’d gone so far and they hadn’t started hunting. But that is rare. If we’re lucky, and there’s some close by, they might even hunt this afternoon.”

“Will they leave at night?” Ozzie asked.

“No. That is, they never have yet.”

It was another two and a quarter hours before they reached the edge of the forest. Ozzie and Orion both peered through the flap, eager to see the land beyond. They were high up, something Ozzie hadn’t appreciated before. The crystal tree forest sprawled across the plateau of some broad massif. Where it ended, the ground swept down toward a vast plain dominated by hundreds of low volcanic craters. Sara had been right about its size, the ultra-cold air was perfectly clear, yet from his vantage point half a mile above the plain, Ozzie couldn’t see the other side, it was hidden within a hazy crimson horizon. The crater rims themselves were almost flat, but between them the frozen land had ripped open, producing thousands of rocky fangs like small Matterhorns. Crystal trees grew on their lower slopes, although the pinnacles were rugged naked rock with a few streaks of snow and ice caught in crevices, reflecting a dusky scarlet in the pervasive sunlight.

The craters were all filled with ice particles, Sara told them, fine sandlike granules that produced a perfectly level surface, giving no clue how deep they actually were. Most of them had vapor rising from the center in small plumes that drifted almost straight upward, slowly getting wider and thinner as they climbed until, thousands of feet above the plain, they merged into smears of tenuous cirrus that meandered about like spacious contrails. When Ozzie switched to infrared he could see the craters glowing with a weak intensity, no more than a few degrees higher than the surrounding land, but a temperature difference sufficient to cause evaporation. He wondered how much warmer the craters were at the bottom.

Halfway down the slope leading to the plain, he could see the Silfen threading their way past small clumps of crystal trees, lantern lights bobbing about merrily. There was no sign of the riders. One by one, the big sleds crested the top of the slope, and began their precarious descent after the hunters.

It was a rough journey down, with the rucked surface rocking the sleds about. Every so often, the Korrok-hi drivers had to use the ybnan to slow their speed rather than pull them along. Ozzie had a lot of difficulty looking out and checking on Tochee; everyone inside the covered sled was hanging on grimly to the broad bone cage. In the end he just stayed put—there wasn’t much he could do if the tow rope broke anyway. Several pieces of equipment had worked loose to roll around, pans and bone struts jangling as they banged painfully into shins and arms and chests. The brazier was swinging in an alarmingly wide arc on its short chain.

They couldn’t have taken more than forty minutes to reach the plain, although time stretched out to hours inside the cramped stinking cabin. Ozzie had never before appreciated how important it was to be able to see out of a moving vehicle. His imagination filled the whole route down with knife-blade boulders waiting to split them open, and the slope was bound to end with a hundred-yard vertical cliff.

Bill let out a low trumpet of satisfaction to signal the descent was over. Inside the sled, everyone flashed nervous grins around, not willing to admit just how scared they’d been. After that, progress was appreciably easier. Sara was confident they could close some of the distance that had accumulated between them and the Silfen. Orion kept his friendship pendant clasped tightly in his fist, watching its sparkling blue light intently.

The covered sleds maintained a single file, following the fresh tracks in the crunchy grains of snow. They were heading directly away from the massif, rattling along at a good pace. By midday they were skirting along the shoreline ridge of the first crater, with a string of savage rock peaks on the other side. After that there were gullies crowned by curving waves of compacted snow, looking as if the slightest tremble would send them avalanching into the gulf below. Ravines with frozen sheet ice along the floor, where the ybnan had trouble getting a grip with their hooves. Spinneys and forests of crystal trees and bulbous bushes: often when he looked out, Ozzie would see great swaths of them smashed and shattered, leaving jagged stumps surrounded by a pile of ice-encrusted branches. There were narrow, steep saddle valleys to surmount, where their speed was reduced to a painful crawl on the ascent, only to degenerate into a mad slither downward, more abrupt and frightening than the trip down from the massif. Long curves around craters, where the vapor drifted out sideways like a mist, swiftly covering ybnan and sleds alike in a crusty hoarfrost.

When the sun was an hour and a half from the horizon, the massif was invisible behind them, blocked from view by towering spires of sharp black rock. Shadows were lengthening and darkening across the rust-tinted ground. The ybnan teams on all the sleds were beginning to tire, even on the flat their speed was noticeably less than earlier.

“There’ll be no hunt today,” Sara said after she returned from a quick discussion with Bill. “And we need to set up the tents soon. It’s difficult in the dark.”

After another half hour, they emerged from the gap between two rock ridges to look down on a crater measuring over six miles across. Some time after the basin formed, the volcanic activity that riddled the area had thrown up yet another range of fierce crags. This one formed a long promontory extending out almost halfway across the crater.

The Silfen had gathered at the foot of the peak closest to the rim, riders and those on foot bunched together and glowing like a multifaceted jewel in the gathering twilight. A stretch of forest grew up the slope beyond them, its crystal trees taller than those back on the forests of the massif, looking dark and forbidding in the vermilion gloaming.

The sleds pulled up in a broad circle, half a mile from the Silfen, on top of an escarpment that skirted the landward crags. Everyone jumped to, hauling the tents out and slotting the framework together. Once the big tents were up, Ozzie, Orion, and George rigged a smaller frame over Tochee’s sledge, and pulled a big sheet of fur over it. Inside that, they draped another blanket of fur across the top of the sledge’s protective cylinder.

“It should be okay in that,” George said as he crawled out.

Ozzie, who was left inside, grunted agreement. He lit a pair of candles, and put them on the ground in front of the sledge’s windscreen. There wasn’t much space there, probably no more than a couple of cubic yards, but it allowed Tochee to look out, maybe take away any fear of entombment. Looking in through the pane of crystal, Ozzie could see the alien motionless behind it, front eye section aligned on him. He held a mitten out, thumb upward. Tochee’s front eye swirled with ultraviolet patterns, slightly smudged by flaws in the crystal. It translated roughly into: DON’T FORGET ME TOMORROW.

“Not a chance,” Ozzie whispered inside his balaclava.

Tochee pulled the tab on a heatbrick. Ozzie waited until he saw the brick start to glow a deep cherry red, then waved and backed out of the fur coverings.

There was probably another twenty minutes before the sun sank below the horizon. Ozzie hurried off toward the crater rim. It was achingly quiet in the moments just before nightfall. Even the Silfen’s perpetual singing had ended out here under the somber glacial sky. Ahead of him, the surface of the granular ice that filled the crater basin was so flat that the illusion of liquid was almost perfect. As he approached it, he half expected to see ripples. He knelt down beside it, and touched it with his mitten. The surface had the texture of thick oil, though the farther down he pushed his hand, the greater the resistance became.

“Careful you don’t fall in,” Sara said.

Ozzie straightened up, shaking residual grains from his mitten. “Man, you always make me feel like I’m doing something wrong.”

“People have fallen in before. We don’t risk our own lives trying to find them now. They never leave any trace, it’s not as if there could be any bubbles.”

“Yeah, figures. This stuff isn’t natural. Grains of ice like this should stick together.”

“Of course they should. But they’re being constantly churned up and kept loose, like flour in a food mixer.”

“And the icewhales are doing the churning.”

“Them, and whatever else is down there. After all, they have to eat something.”

“Hopefully just iceweed, or whatever the plant life is at the bottom.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d ever seen one.” She turned, and began to walk up the slight incline.

Ozzie started after her. “Why not?”

“Let’s just say they don’t act like herbivores.”

“You got it all figured out, don’tcha?”

“No, Ozzie, nothing like. I understand very little of this place, and all the others I walked through. Why don’t the Silfen allow us to have electricity?”

“Simple enough theory. They’re experiencing life on a purely physical level; that’s all these bodies we see are for, to give them a platform at this level of personal consciousness evolution. And it kills me to say it, but it’s a pretty low level, given their capabilities. You start introducing electricity, and machines, and all the paraphernalia which goes with it, then you start to shrink that opportunity for raw natural experience.”

“Yeah,” she said sourly. “God forbid they should invent medicine.”

“It’s irrelevant to them. We need it because we treasure our individuality and continuity. Their outlook is different. They’re on a journey that has a very definite conclusion. At the end of their levels they get to become a part of their adult community.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

He shrugged, a gesture largely wasted under his heavy fur coat. “I was told that once.”

“Who by?”

“This dude I met in a bar.”

“Dear Christ, I don’t know which is weirder, them or you.”

“Definitely them.” They came to the top of the small rim as the sun vanished, leaving only a flaming fuchsia glow in the sky.

“You also shouldn’t be out so late,” Sara said. “There’s no beacon to guide you back here, you know.”

“Don’t worry about me, I see better in the dark than most people.”

“You got fur instead of skin as well? Even the Korrok-hi don’t stay out at night on this world.”

“Sure. Sorry. Wasn’t thinking.”

“You’ll have to do a lot better tomorrow when you follow the Silfen.”

“Right. You know, I’m still kind of surprised you didn’t want to come with us.”

“I will leave one day, Ozzie. Just not yet, that’s all.”

“But why, you’ve been here long enough. I can’t see you buying into George’s idea about how living here as some kind of penance makes us value our lives more. And as far as I can make out there’s no one special for you. Is there?” Which had slowly begun to nag at him as his own suggestions in that direction over the months had all gone unheeded.

“No,” she said slowly. “There’s no one right now.”

“That’s a shame, Sara. We all need someone.”

“So were you going to volunteer?”

The mild scorn in her voice made him pause. After a moment, Sara stopped and looked back at him. “What?” she asked.

“Well, goddamn, I couldn’t have been any blunter,” Ozzie said.

“Blunt about what?”

“About us. You and me. Rocking the mattress.”

“But you’ve got … Oh.”

“Got what?” he asked suspiciously.

“I thought … we all thought: you and Orion.”

“Me and Orion what … ohshit.”

“You mean he’s not your—”

“No. Absolutely. Not.”

“Ah.”

“And I’m not.”

“Okay. Sorry. Misunderstanding, there.”

“Not that there’s anything—”

“No, certainly not. There isn’t. I had lots of gay friends.”

“Did you?”

“That’s what you’re supposed to say.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Well, that cleared that up, then.”

“It did.” Oh, terrific.

They hurried back up the remainder of the escarpment to the tents in silence. Everyone was inside now, thick black oil fumes were squirting out of carefully designed vents in the top as the evening meal got under way.

“Ozzie,” Sara said in a weary tone just before they went into their tent.

“Yo.”

“Tomorrow, when the Silfen hunt the icewhales, don’t get curious, okay? No matter how exciting or repellent, or fascinating you think it is, stay back, stay right out of their way.”

“I hear you.”

“I hope so. I know why you’re here, I’ve seen it in people before, you think you’re on some kind of mission, you think that makes you invulnerable. Hell, maybe it does, but take it from me, tomorrow is not a good time to test it out, okay? I understand your crazy ideas about the Silfen, and how existential they are, but tomorrow it doesn’t get more real and physical than this.”

“I’ll be careful, I promise. I’ve got the kid and the alien to worry about.”

They were woken as the first magenta glimmer of dawn appeared. Despite being crammed into the tent with ten other people, Ozzie had slipped into a deep dreamless sleep as soon as he zipped up his sleeping bag. It was the first night since he arrived that he hadn’t had to endure the ubiquitous red light.

He and Orion ate their packaged breakfasts, warding off the edgy, resentful comments from the others who were having their standard Ice Citadel meal of mashed crystal tree fruit and fried icewhale rashers. They filled their flasks with boiled water; to two they mixed in the added-energy juice powder, and to the second two they added soup concentrate. While the rest hurried outside to watch the Silfen begin their hunt, Ozzie and Orion packed their rucksacks for what they hoped was the last time on this world.

It had snowed overnight, the wisps of cirrus condensing into tiny hard flakes that drifted down to dust every surface. Ozzie and Orion brushed it off the outer sheet of fur they’d arranged over Tochee’s sledge. They dragged it back, with Ozzie partly dreading what they’d find. A stiff corpse? But the heatbrick had worked. Tochee waved at them from behind the crystal windscreen, apparently unperturbed by its night spent alone.

The pair of them stood beside the sledge, slightly apart from everyone else milling around the tents. It was a good position from which to watch the hunt play out over the land below. Ozzie also realized why the Korrok-hi had driven the covered sleds up the escarpment yesterday evening. Up here they were well out of harm’s way.

Today’s hunt was going to range over the expanse of gullies and spinney-crowned hummocks that stretched back from the crater floor. The mounted Silfen had split into two groups. The first was making their way along the range of crags that plunged out across the crater, heading for the tip. While the second were cantering around the rim away from them. Those on foot were splitting into small parties, and fanning out through the spinneys and boulder fields.

Ozzie watched with considerable interest as individual riders dropped away from the group moving along the base of the crags, to stand a lonely sentry duty just above the uneven shoreline. After forty minutes, the last rider reached the apex and halted. Facing him, a mile away on the crater rim, the other group was spaced out in a corresponding formation.

Somewhere a horn was sounded, its clear note ringing through the frigid air.

“Cover your eyes,” Sara shouted in warning.

Ozzie and Orion exchanged a look. No one had mentioned this before. Ozzie quickly stepped in front of the sledge’s windscreen. When he glanced back at the crater, he zoomed in on the farthermost rider out at the end of the crags. The Silfen was perched on his mount, arm back in a classic spear-thrower position. Ozzie just had time to order his retinal insert filters on-line. The Silfen threw his spear. Even on full zoom, Ozzie was hard pushed to see the silver splinter as it sliced through the air at an impossible speed. When he checked, he could see the Silfen on the crater rim opposite had thrown his spear as well.

“What—”

At the top of their arcs, the spears ignited, stretching out to became lightning bolts. Incandescent white light flashed across the crater, casting the waiting Silfen riders into stark relief. Red sunlight was momentarily banished in the silent starburst splendor.

The twin ribbons of energy dived down into the lake of ice granules. Two blue-white circles of phosphorescence erupted where they vanished below the surface, expanding until they were hundreds of yards across, then slowly dying away.

“What was that?” Orion cried.

“I don’t know,” Ozzie replied truthfully. He was mildly surprised that the surface of ice granules hadn’t shot up like a depth charge explosion, but it remained perfectly calm. A plangent boom rolled in across the landscape, reverberating off the crags and hummocks.

The second mounted Silfen on each wing stood up in their saddles, and flung their spears. White light scorched down again. It wasn’t until the fourth set of spears had been launched that Ozzie saw movement out in the crater. A low, smooth arrowhead wave rose up between the twin pools of light and the shoreline, surging along for almost fifty yards before sinking down again.

A chorus of joyful chanting rose from the Silfen waiting for the beasts to be driven ashore, their cadence mingling with the thunderclap of the fourth set of spears.

“It’s working,” Ozzie mumbled inside his balaclava.

More bow waves were visible out in the crater now, all of them heading in toward the rim as the terrifying spears of light continued to fall behind: goading. The two closest to the shore were permanent, rushing forward ever-faster. Ozzie held his breath, eager to see an icewhale at long last.

The first one burst out of the ice granules a hundred yards from the shoreline; a huge gray shaggy mountain of fur sliding up into the air with the ease and grace of a dolphin sporting at sea. It was like a polar bear grown to dinosaur size, but with a row of arm-length tusks curving out wickedly from each side of its muzzle. The legs, of which there was a whole series running along its underbelly, were more like fur-clad fins.

“It’s huge!” Orion squeaked.

“Yeah, man, pretty damn big.”

The icewhale surged back into the ice granules, splashing up great gouts of the dry powder. Spears detonated into pure light behind it, converting the billowing cloud of particles into a seething mass of whirling rainbows. Its head rocked about in fury at this deliberate provocation, but it kept up its dash for the crater rim. Four more waves were close behind it.

Individual Silfen on foot were racing forward, their smaller black spears held above their heads. They had shed their big heavy coats to sprint toward their prey, dark motes skipping grimly over the bleak land. Overhead, the sky careered haplessly from red to white, spinning shadows around and around with giddy discord as the volley of twinned lightning bolts seared their way along steep curves. Ozzie had seen old documentary videos of soldiers storming ashore in wartime, and the charge of the Silfen was almost identical to that. A breathtaking insanity that made him want to scream encouragement.

The first icewhale reached the rim, and just kept on going at the same speed. Ozzie couldn’t believe anything that huge could move so fast. Its head was still scything from side to side, tusks snapping in berserk rage. Silfen fanned out around it. Several spears were thrown. These didn’t burst into a monochromatic blaze, but held true. They had little effect when they struck the flanks of the icewhale, its matted fur was so thick that most hit and rebounded to clatter on the ground. Those that did manage to stick their tips into whatever flesh was underneath didn’t penetrate far. They simply enraged the creature further. Its body bucked and twisted, contorting to allow its legs to scrabble at the slim poles like a dog scratching at fleas. Those Silfen who had thrown their spears started to retreat; several of them were pulling their bows around ready to shoot arrows. Ozzie had seen no sign of eyes anywhere amid the icewhale’s fur, but it seemed to know where its tormentors were. It lunged forward, giant muzzle snapping. Three tusks sliced straight through a Silfen. Jets of ebony blood squirted from the killer punctures. Then the muzzle sprang open again, ripping the body apart. Legs spun off one way, while the torso flopped to the ground. The icewhale thundered over it, and charged at another Silfen who was falling backward even as he tried to notch an arrow.

Orion screamed in horror.

“It’s all right,” Ozzie shouted. He hugged the boy, turning him away from the carnage. “I promise you he’s all right. They don’t die. Do you understand? The Silfen don’t die. They have an afterlife, a real heaven.”

The boy was shaking violently inside his embrace. “It ate him!” he wailed. “It ate him!”

“No it didn’t. It can’t. They’re too hot. It would burn its mouth away if it tried to do that.”

“But he’s dead.”

“No! I told you. The Silfen go to their own heaven. I’m not bullshitting you, man. That’s the way they are.”

Orion clung to him, his head pressed hard against Ozzie’s chest. “Will the monsters come for us? Please, Ozzie, I don’t want to die. I won’t go to heaven, I know I won’t.”

“Hey,” Ozzie squeezed reassuringly. “Yes you would. It’s me that’s headed down into the heat. Why do you think I keep having to get rejuvenated? The big bad dude with the pitchfork and an attitude is all that’s waiting for me.”

There was no answer; no smart or sarcastic comeback. Ozzie hugged the boy again, and took a quick look down at the hunt. The last of the aggressive spears from the riders had been flung, leaving the red sun victorious in the battle to light the sky. There were four icewhales on the land now, one of them even bigger than the first to emerge. Each of them was encircled by fast-moving Silfen on foot; spears and arrows were fired inward, black flecks shimmering through the air. Most still bounced off the tough lank fur, though the numbers sticking were increasing. Over a dozen Silfen were dead already, torn apart or mashed into the unyielding ground. Blood ran thick from their ruined bodies, steaming feverishly and boiling the snow before the pools and runnels started to freeze.

“Come on,” Ozzie urged. “Let’s get inside and take a major break from this bummer.” Any residual excitement he’d had at the prospect of witnessing the hunt had long since washed away beneath the guilt of bringing the boy here. He half carried him toward the nearest tent.

“They won’t come up here, will they?” Orion asked in a pitiful voice.

“No. I promise.”

Sara caught sight of them stumbling toward the tent together, and hurried over. “Are you all right?”

“No he’s fucking not,” Ozzie barked at her. “You might have told me.”

“It’s a hunt. What did you expect?”

Ozzie’s anger spluttered out. She was right. What had I expected it to be like? Just another TSI spectacular?

Sara tugged at the lacing that held the flaps on the outermost layer. Ozzie sneaked another look down below, making sure his body blocked Orion’s view. The sight was growing more surreal. The Silfen death count had risen to over twenty. Three of the elfin folk had managed to climb onto the back of an icewhale, hanging on to its fur and riding it like the wildest bronco in the galaxy. As he watched, one of them was swatted by the icewhale’s foot, tumbling a long way through the air before crashing onto rock. The surviving two were trying to thrust their spears down into the ruff of fur behind its neck, and having a hard time of it.

A second icewhale was plowing straight through a spinney of crystal trees. It was like an unstoppable bulldozer, bursting the trunks apart into dangerous sparkling shrapnel clouds as it hit them head-on. The sound was already reverberating over the escarpment, a city of glass caught in an earthquake. Silfen were having trouble dodging trees and spinning shards as they ran alongside, trying to take a shot.

As for the third icewhale … Ozzie’s brow crumpled into a frown. Five dead Silfen marked its path from the crater. The fight it had given them was tremendous, and now it was weakening, slowing. It had never been so vulnerable. Yet instead of pressing home their advantage, the blood-crazed elven folk were giving it a wide berth. Its back and flanks were pierced by over a dozen arrows and spears, its head wavered giddily from side to side. Obviously in distress, the icewhale came to an exhausted halt. As it did so, the Silfen began to form two loose lines, creating an avenue that led back to the crater. They held their spears aloft in salute. The icewhale turned sluggishly, and began its long labored trek back to the crater and the safety of the ice granules.

“In you go,” Sara said. She’d opened the tent up. Ozzie pushed Orion through the gap, and followed him quickly. Sara came in with them. Orion sat numbly on one of the cots. Ozzie took off his balaclava mask, letting his hair spring out. He produced a thermos out of his coat’s big pocket. “I want you to drink some of this. It’s hot, it’ll do you good.”

The boy made a halfhearted attempt to pull his hood off. Sara helped him. Then Ozzie almost forced the juice down his throat. He’d never seen the boy look so upset before. Tears were clogging his young distressed eyes.

“Pretty bad, wasn’t it?”

Orion just nodded mutely.

“That one they’re letting get away,” Ozzie said. “What’s that all about?”

“The icewhales have a reserve energy store,” Sara said. “It’s roughly their equivalent of adrenaline hitting the human bloodstream. They use it to get themselves between craters, or fight for territory. Catch their food, too, for all I know. But they take a long time to fill that reserve, and they can burn it off real fast. Once it’s run out, they’re basically screwed. The Silfen don’t see any sport in hunting something that just sits there while they shoot it full of arrows, so they make sure it gets back to the crater.”

“They’re crazy,” Ozzie said. “The whole thing is just fucking stupid.”

“You’re the one who thinks they only live at this level to experience, remember.”

“Yeah.” He plonked himself down on the cot next to Orion. “I remember.”

Sara studied the pair of them for a moment. “I’ve got to get back out there. I’ll let you know when the hunt’s over. It won’t be long.”

“Thanks.”

Orion didn’t say a word, just sat there with the thermos held in his hands.

“It won’t happen again,” Ozzie said to the boy eventually. “Wherever we wind up, it won’t be the same as this shitforsaken dump.”

There was a long moment, then Orion suddenly exploded into motion. He clawed at the front of his fur coat, pulling it open, then he went for his sweater’s collar. “I hate them,” he yelled. “I hate them, Ozzie, they’re not what everyone said. They’re not my friends. How can I be friends with people who do that?” He pulled out the pendant, and tugged hard, breaking the chain. “They’re not my friends.” The shimmering pendant was flung across the tent. “What have they done with my parents?”

“Hey, man, they didn’t do nothing to your parents. I promise you that.”

“How? How can you promise? You don’t know.”

“They’re not evil. I know what’s happening out there doesn’t look nice, but they don’t deliberately hurt people. Your mom and dad will be walking the paths quite happily. Remember what Sara said: they never showed up here. You ask me, this planet is a dead end as far as the paths are concerned. The Silfen don’t bother with it much.”

Orion shook his head, and hunched up. “They’re so cruel.”

“These ones are, yeah. All living things seem to be at some stage in their evolution. We just picked a bad stage to see them at today, is all.”

“Oh.” The boy sniffed, and took a drink of the juice. “Do you think this stage is before they visit Silvergalde or after?”

“Hey, good question. I don’t know, I’d have to think about it.”

“I think it’s before. You have to know what’s awful in the world before you can appreciate what’s good.”

“Shit. How old are you?”

“Don’t know really, not out here where the paths mess with time like Sara said.”

“Well that was totally profound for a fourteen-year-old.”

“I’m fifteen! Probably sixteen now.”

“Okay, ninety percent profound.” Ozzie walked over to the pendant. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to take this with me.”

Orion grunted with perfect teenage sullenness. “Don’t care.”

“Good. You never know, it might just guide us to some of the nicer Silfen.” The pendant was still alight and undamaged; he slipped it into his trouser pocket where it was less likely to fall out. “You okay now? We should wrap up again and get back out there.”

“I’m okay, I suppose.”

When they emerged from the tent, Tochee had pressed a small strip of parchment up against its sledge windscreen. It read: WHAT IS WRONG?

Ozzie wasn’t about to go through the whole writing procedure outside. He made a few simple arm gestures, ending with a thumbs-up. Orion was nudged to do the same. Tochee waved at them, and withdrew the parchment.

“They’ve killed them, look,” Orion said miserably.

Below the escarpment, three icewhales lay dead on the rocky ground, their fur tacky with dark blood from many wounds. Over thirty Silfen bodies shared their fate. The survivors were gathered around the massive beasts they’d brought down. Ozzie zoomed in on the nearest for a close-up. Two of the Silfen were hacking their way into the icewhale with long scimitar blades; they’d already peeled back a wide triangular section of the outer skin, and were now cutting deep into the body cavity. Gooey fluid and bulbous ribbons of offal spilled out around their feet. He saw them pull out an organ that was half the size of an adult human. The remaining Silfen gathered around. One by one they cut out a section and with great ceremony started to eat.

Ozzie blinked and pulled his focus back. “I thought they were vegetarians,” he said.

“You thought wrong,” Sara told him.

Ozzie turned to face her. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I came to tell you to get ready,” she said. A gesture took in the other five humans who intended to follow the Silfen, they were all busy strapping their skis on. “They’ll be moving on right away.”

“No more hunting?” Ozzie asked.

“No.” She paused for a moment. “I know you hated being here, but I’m glad I had the chance to meet you. It’s not often people live up to their reputation. Some of it, anyway.”

“Thanks, I think.”

“Next time we meet, it’ll be different.”

There were a lot of ways he could have answered that, but just about everyone would hear. “Let’s hope so.”

“And you,” she said to Orion. “Make him behave.”

“I’ll try,” the boy said from behind his mask.

Ozzie put his own skis on, then checked Orion had fixed his properly. With the boy holding onto the tow rope at the back of Tochee’s sledge, Ozzie gave the alien their prearranged signal, and pushed off. The escarpment was steep enough to give him a good initial speed. All he had to do was watch for snags and stones that could throw the sledge. Tochee followed him easily, using the four poles with a light touch to steer the sledge along Ozzie’s ski tracks.

By the time they reached the bottom of the escarpment, the Silfen were already leaving. The riders had returned, and those on foot had picked up their lanterns. Their voices were raised in cheerful song again. They set off almost directly back the way they came. Ozzie turned to look back up the escarpment. A lone figure was silhouetted against the sky, watching them, but at this distance he couldn’t tell who it was.

He knew it would be easy at the start. They’d done nothing energetic the day before; they’d eaten well, and had nearly seven hours uninterrupted sleep. For the first couple of hours, he had to take care not to slide up into the midst of the Silfen. Instead he was content to stay maybe forty yards or so behind them as they jogged along. Their feet compacted the light sprinkling of snow that drifted above the hard ground, providing a relatively smooth surface for the skis. Tochee, also, had no trouble keeping pace, staying five yards or so behind him. Every time he turned, Orion would be there, a hand raised to wave, to reassure him that everything was okay. The other followers kept a constant speed, two of them staying level with Ozzie and the sledge, while the three most proficient skiers kept up with the Silfen, determined not to let go of their ticket out.

As the afternoon progressed, Ozzie was aware of their line starting to curve away from the route they’d taken out from the Ice Citadel. The sun gave him a rough guide to their direction, and the massif was slipping farther and farther over to the left. The landscape here began to change. Craters and crags remained the primary features, but they were spaced wider apart, allowing the crystal trees to spread thickly between them, the forests insinuating their way around slopes like the leading edge of some prickly dark tide. It was both encouraging and frustrating. Encouraging, because he believed that the forests would ultimately provide the path off this bitter world. Frustrating, for the difficulty they added to the journey. The Silfen barely slowed as they moved under the trees, skipping fluidly around the trunks and saplings without disturbing a branch. For Ozzie it was harder work, even following the widest set of tracks he was having to swerve constantly. Doing that at the pace they set took both concentration and a great deal of physical effort.

He forced himself to slow down every twenty minutes to take a drink of the hot juice; fully aware how dangerous dehydration could be in these circumstances. It was surprising how much distance they lost even halting for the fifteen seconds it took to open a thermos and take a couple of gulps. Distance that he would then try and regain by traveling faster.

After four hours he was sweating heavily into his clothes, which were chafing badly. His arms ached. He could hear his heart thudding away loudly. His legs were threatening to cramp. One of the skiers who’d kept level with them was now hundreds of yards behind, and still falling back farther, while of those three originally up with the Silfen, two had slipped back level with Ozzie. The path the Silfen were taking was leading them over a whole succession of hummocks, whose steepish slopes were tough-going. On either side, the trees were growing taller. They were shapes that Ozzie hadn’t seen on this world before. The really tall ones had branches that spiraled upward, as if they’d been neatly pruned and trained around the main bole, while the broader variety were simple poles with spheres that resembled glass cages clustered along their length, the ones at the base measuring up to a yard across, with those at the tip barely the size of acorns. Particles of ice had accumulated into irregular cloaks on every trunk, though there were no icicles. It was too cold for the frozen particles to shape themselves like that.

They’d just reached the crest of one small hill when Orion finally faltered, skidding erratically to a halt as he let go of the tow rope. Tochee immediately jammed his four poles into the ground, braking. The other skiers flashed past as Ozzie turned.

“You okay?” he shouted at Orion.

The boy was bent nearly double. Even through the thick layers of clothing, Ozzie could see him quaking.

“I’m sorry.” The boy was sobbing. “I’m sorry. It hurts everywhere. I’ve got to have a rest.”

“Take as long as you want.” The timer in Ozzie’s virtual vision told him they’d been going for just over five hours. The sun would set in another fifty-one minutes.

He pulled a parchment from his coat pocket, struggling to unroll the cold-stiffened sheet. With a charcoal stump held crudely in a mitten, he wrote: Boy very tired. Soon night. Make camp bottom of hill.

Tochee moved about behind the windscreen, lowering its head so that Ozzie could look into its forward eye segment. The patterns flexed and twisted. Roughly translated they told him: ALSO TIRED. CAMP GOOD.

When Ozzie looked along the path, he could just see a few twinkles of topaz and jade light through the trees below as the Silfen moved ever onward. Their singing had long since faded from the air. That was when he realized that the skier who’d fallen far behind hadn’t caught up yet. If the man had any sense, he’d try and make it back to the covered sleds tomorrow. Ozzie didn’t even know which one of the five it was. Some of them had modern camping gear with them—that might see them through the night. His own confidence was bolstered by knowing their own air-insulated tent was good enough, especially with a heatbrick.

Orion was taking a big drink from his thermos.

“Yo, man, can you make it down to the bottom?” Ozzie asked.

“Yes. I’m really sorry, Ozzie. You two should go on. I can probably make it back to the Ice Citadel.”

“Don’t be so stupid. It’s almost time to stop anyway. I want to be in the tent before the sun goes down.” He picked up the tow rope and handed it to the boy.

The track down to the bottom of the hill was undemanding. They kept going for a few minutes more until they found what passed for a small glade. The heavy ice-smothered trees soaked up the red sunlight, turning the forest floor a gloomy crimson. Ozzie pulled their tent from the back of Tochee’s sledge, and gave it to Orion to sort out, while he set up the rudimentary bone frame and fur covering. Once more he lit a couple of candles in front of the sledge windscreen. He saw the alien pull the tab on a heatbrick just as he wormed his way back out of the covering.

Orion had pitched their tent a few yards away, and was already inside. Drowsy yellow light from the kerosene lamp shone out of the open flap. As he hurried over, the impact of how isolated they truly were struck him. Alone in an arctic alien forest, without any natural light or heat, where unknown creatures possibly lurked close by. This was the eternal child-nightmare that never quite left once adulthood had been reached, not even after three hundred fifty years.

It wasn’t just the cold that was making him shiver as he crawled inside and sealed the flap. Orion made a big show of pulling the tab on a heatbrick. The two of them slowly took off their bulky fur coats and over trousers, then their outer layers of sweaters and trousers. Ozzie plucked at his cold, sweat-sodden checked shirt, wrinkling his nose in disgust. As soon as they’d stopped their exertions, he’d begun to get cold very fast, despite the fur coat.

“I’d forgotten how bad it is out there at night,” he grumbled.

“I thought we’d be away from here by now,” Orion said sheepishly. “We traveled so far.”

Ozzie squeezed the boy’s shoulder. “Remember the kind of progress we made when we arrived here? You did really well out there today. I was ready to call it a day anyway.”

“Thanks, Ozzie. Do you think the others made it?”

“I don’t know. Most of them were keeping up with the Silfen.”

“I hope they did.”

Ozzie opened the bag containing some of their food packages. “What would you like for supper?”

Ozzie really didn’t want to wake up when his insert alarm went off. Lying snug in the soft warm folds of the sleeping bag, every limb ached abominably, and as for his abdominal muscles … It was pitch-black inside the tent, so he switched his retinal inserts to infrared, and searched around for the kerosene lamp. It lit with a flare that made him blink, casting its dreary yellow glow around the interior. The flame from the icewhale oil they used as fuel was soon puffing out a little twist of reeking black smoke.

“What’s wrong?” Orion coughed.

“Nothing. It’s morning, time to get up.”

“You’re wrong. It’s night, still. I’ve only just got to sleep.”

“ ’Fraid not, man.” Ozzie unzipped the top half of his sleeping bag. His thermal undergarments had dried out, as had the checked shirt and sweaters that were squashed into the bag with him. But the heatbrick was all but exhausted, so the gradually cooling air had allowed condensation to form all over the inside of the tent fabric. He tried to put his checked shirt on carefully, but every time a hand caught the side of the tent, little droplets rained down. Orion complained some more as he struggled into action, dressing himself.

They pulled the rings on packets of scrambled egg and bacon. For a few glorious moments the smell of hot food overpowered the dreadful oil.

When they were almost ready to venture back outside, Orion asked, “Do you think we’ll get there today?”

“Honestly? I don’t know, man. I hope so. But if not, we just keep going, it can’t be far now. Not even the Silfen can survive here for long.” In his head, their own limit was a constant worry. Between them, they had another eight heatbricks, that gave them three more guaranteed safe nights. They might be able to survive in the tent without one, but it would be an evil night, and Tochee would be finished. How they’d carry the tent and food and other stuff after that was a moot point.

They emerged from the odor of the icewhale oil into the numbing cold of the dark forest. It had snowed again overnight, depositing a thin layer over the fur sheet protecting Tochee’s sledge. Once again, anxiety plucked at Ozzie as they pulled it back to see if the big alien had survived. It had. Manipulator flesh gestured happily to them from behind the windscreen.

The tent and coverings and bags were packed away within half an hour. Fortunately, the snowfall hadn’t been heavy enough to completely cover the tracks left by the Silfen. Just before they started, Ozzie held up the little friendship pendant. Its sparkle wasn’t as strong as yesterday, but tiny slivers of blue light still crawled around inside it. He took that as an encouraging sign, and pushed off.

A wind picked up, drifting through the forest all morning. It carried little flecks of snow with it, forcing Ozzie to wipe his goggles free every few minutes. Whenever he paused for his drink, he had to go and brush solid flakes off the sledge windscreen. He wasn’t sure if it was actually snowing up there above the treetops, or if this was simply residual swirls that the wind was rearranging. It had always puzzled him why the ground here wasn’t covered by several feet of snow and ice. Then Sara had told him that once or twice a year a gale would blow for days, scouring away the loose snow and tiny ice pellets. Somehow that didn’t surprise or even bother him, this whole planet was weird; privately he considered that it might be as artificial as Silvergalde.

He deliberately set a slower pace that morning. Yesterday had been a determined effort to keep up with the Silfen, grasping the faint chance that they might lead him away off the planet before nightfall. There was still an urgency to their trek, but a constant and realistic pace was more important now than pure speed. His new concern was how the little zephyrs were steadily eradicating the compacted footprints. Although, as if in compensation, it did seem like the trees had parted slightly to form a rudimentary path through the forest.

Lunch was soup again, snatched in the paltry lee of one of the clustered sphere trees; with its snow coat disguise it could have passed for a swollen Christmas pine. As before, even a short stop hauled their body temperature down, for which the hot soup seemed unable to compensate. Ozzie hated the sensation of cold sinking into his toes, he couldn’t stop worrying about frostbite. When they reemerged from behind the tree, the falling snow was thicker, eliminating almost all trace of the tracks they’d been following. To make matters worse, it was starting to adhere against the fur of their coats. The sledge was like a small lumpy mound of snow on runners.

Ozzie could feel the tiny particles working their way around the rim of his hood. Slender lines of ice were burning against the skin of his cheeks. After a few minutes, the trees began to thin out. While it made skiing slightly easier, it reduced their protection from the wind and ice flakes. It wasn’t long after that when the Silfen tracks vanished completely. He slowed to a halt, then had to push off again quickly as Tochee’s sledge nearly slid into him.

This was what he’d feared happening right from the start, this world’s weather closing in on them, and losing the path. He fumbled with his mittens, pulling out the friendship pendant. A small bluish glimmer still lurked below the surface. Ozzie turned a complete circle. He thought—possibly—it was a fraction brighter at one point. It was a pretty tenuous assumption to gamble three lives on, but he had nothing else.

He went around to the rear of the sledge and found a length of slim rope. With one end tied to his waist and the other to the front of the sledge, he set off again. The wind at least seemed to have died down somewhat. But if anything the snowfall was thicker. He was stopping constantly to check the pendant, while the whole time a treacherous thought in his mind kept asking why bother? At least when they arrived on this world he had the comforting ignorance of believing that nothing bad could happen to any traveler on the Silfen paths. Now he knew his life was on the line, and he was trusting it to a piece of alien jewelry. How tenuous was that?

His timer told him they’d been out in the open for forty minutes, though it felt like most of the afternoon, when he came to the edge of another forest. As soon as they were inside and under the protective boughs, the swirling ice flakes abated considerably. Ozzie kept the rope tied to the sledge though.

“We’ll make camp in a couple of hours,” he told his companions. He’d really hoped they could have kept going for longer, but once again this world had thwarted them. He was exhausted by two days of battling his way across hostile terrain, and he knew Orion was never going to be able to take much more of this. As for Tochee … well, who knew? But tonight, they would have a long rest, which would at least enable them to keep going for another full day. Beyond that, there was nothing to think about.

He kept going, moving heavy arms and aching legs in slow rhythm. His feet were numb now, the cold cutting off all feeling below his ankles, which allowed his imagination to summon up the worst-case images of what he’d see when he took his boots off that evening. At least the forest was on a gentle downward slope; there were mounds and ridges, of course, but the overall progress was helpful. He wasn’t sure if he could manage another big uphill slog. The snow was deeper, too, covering all the usual stones and snags. Several times he shook it off his fur coat where it was clinging.

“Ozzie!”

He turned at the shout, seeing Orion waving frantically. Now what? Despite nerves that were getting badly stretched, he signaled Tochee to stop, and skied around to the boy.

Orion pulled his goggles off. “It’s wet,” he exclaimed.

Instead of shouting at the boy to put the goggles back on, he leaned in closer to see what had happened.

“The snow,” Orion said. “It’s melting. It’s warm enough to melt.”

Sure enough, the ice on the goggles seemed to be mushy, sleet rather than ice. Ozzie snatched his own goggles off, and looked straight up. A million dark specks were falling out of the uniform coral-pink sky. When they landed on his exposed skin, they didn’t sting and burn as they had before; they were wintry, yes, but they quickly turned to slush and dribbled over his skin.

Ozzie propelled himself over to the closest tree. He raised a pole, and whacked it hard against the trunk. The snow loosened, falling away. He hit it again and again until the bark was exposed. Real, biological bark. It was a proper wooden tree. He laughed with more than a touch of hysteria. It was a stupid irony that he’d gotten so cold he couldn’t actually tell when the environment warmed up to a mere ten degrees below freezing.

Orion had churned his way over. He looked at the exposed patch of crinkled bark with trepidation.

“We did it!” Ozzie shouted, and flung his arms around the boy. “We fucking did it! We are gone from that bastard world. Out, out, out. I’m free again.”

“Are we? Have we really escaped?”

“Oh, goddamn yes! You bet your sweet ass we have. You and me, kid, we did it. Oh, hey, and Tochee, of course. Come on, let’s go tell it the good news.”

“But Ozzie …” Orion glanced up. “The sky’s still red.”

“Ur, yeah.” He squinted up at it, not wanting to damage the image, although it was a very bright pink, especially for this time of day—that is, the time of day on his digital timer. If they were on a different world—“I dunno; there’s more than one red star in the galaxy.”

He tugged out his battered parchment as he slid over to the front of the sledge, and wrote: I think we made it. Can you keep going a little while longer?

AS LONG AS I LIVE.

When Ozzie held the friendship pendant up, the spark of light had almost vanished. “This way, I think,” he said, and pushed off once again, not that he was really worried about direction now. Physically, the conditions had hardly changed, but simply knowing they were clear of the dreadful Ice Citadel world allowed his body to tap some previously unknown energy reserve. Just like an icewhale, he told himself.

Of course, now he knew what to look for, the signs were obvious. The thick snow, different types of tree with bony branches outlined against the sky, the lighter sky itself. With every yard they moved forward things changed. It wasn’t long before he saw thin henna-colored wisps of grass sticking out above the snow. Then there were little rodent creatures scampering about around the trees. Branches shed little piles of snow to fall around them with constant wet thudding sounds as the thaw grew. They were heading down quite a steep slope now, losing height rapidly.

The end of the forest was abrupt. Ozzie shot past the last trees and onto a snowfield that was broken by boulders and widening patches of orange-tinted grass. They were halfway along some massive valley created by Alp-sized mountains. A lake of beautifully clear water stretched out below him, extending for twenty miles on either side. Its shores were also ringed with trees, whose dark branches were just starting to bud. The snowfield died out completely about half a mile ahead of them, with the grass sliced by hundreds of little seasonal streams as the melting edge slowly retreated upward. On either side, the tree line was almost constant, drawing a broad boundary between the lower grass slopes of the mountains and their rocky upper levels.

When he looked back at the forest he’d just come from, Ozzie was sure it would only take five minutes or so to ski through, yet they’d paused a good quarter of an hour ago. A brilliant sun was rising at one end of the valley, and he finally understood the pink sky. They had come out of a gloomy maroon nightfall and straight into a vibrant dawn.

Ozzie slowly pushed his hood back, and smiled into the strengthening light as it began to warm his skin.

EIGHTEEN

No Prime immotile had a name. Names were derived from a communications system completely different from their species’ direct nerve impulse linkages. They did of course have ways of identifying each other. Immotiles even in their group cluster form were above all individual, a factor that sprang out of their early history’s territorialism. Alliances between them were built and fractured with reliable regularity in their planet’s premechanization age, when even the closest partnerships were liable to be swiftly discarded if an advantage could be pursued with another. Disputes in those days were always over the size of territory and the available resources—mainly fresh water and farmland. Little changed over the millennia.

After mechanization flourished, the nature of the alliances altered as the demands of machinery had to be met. Although the maneuvering and ever-flowing tides of allegiance continued to be played by the same rules of deception and force.

There was one immotile that always managed to retain its preeminence among the rest of its species. Always building the strongest alliances, always advancing itself at the expense of others, always holding its boundaries secure, always the most wily. In later times the largest and most powerful of all. Although not named, it could be characterized by its location: MorningLightMountain, a large cone of rock and earth that sprouted at the center of a long valley defined by rugged cliffs rising hundreds of meters from its swampy floor. Such was the alignment of the high walls that the thick beams of sunlight that the irregular edges produced swept across the central peak only during the morning.

It was the perfect place to establish a new Prime immotile territory. At the time of its amalgamation, seven or eight thousand years before Christ appeared on Earth, there were thousands, possibly even tens of thousands, of immotiles served and protected by their clans of motiles, occupying the planet’s equatorial zone. They were primitive then, creatures whose long evolutionary sequence was only just bearing fruit. Sitting in the middle of their covetously guarded fragment of land, immotiles flexed their rudimentary thoughts by plotting against their neighbors. Herds of standard motiles busied themselves consuming their own base cells from muddy streams and tending the edible vegetation; while the soldier variant motiles started to develop as the stronger, more agile members of each immotile’s herd were pressed into duty bashing rival herds’ brains out with wooden clubs.

The little sub-herd of twelve motiles was sent out by its birth immotile, seeking a place where a fresh herd could be established. Such a new neighboring territory would be advantageous to the founder immotile; with a joint personality origin their allegiance would be the strongest of all, at least for the initial years. After a while divergence crept in, it always did.

MorningLightMountain still retained the memory of itself before amalgamation and true thought began. The sub-herd had spent days carefully picking their way down the valley walls, dodging rockslides and clambering over sharp outcrops. Now they bunched together as they walked through the rainforest that sprang from the boggy ground along the valley floor. Every daybreak a mist would slither upward from the lush vegetation, a legacy from the nightly rains hazing the air and turning the mighty sunbeams a delicate orange-gold.

They saw it then, a symmetrical cone rising up out of the shadowed land ahead, the only feature of the entire valley to be struck by light, fluorescing a brilliant emerald against the roseate sky. Sunlight glinted off tiny streams that trickled down its sides. Small black specks circled far overhead, wings extended, idling in the thermals—one of the few remaining non-Prime life-forms left in the planet’s tropics.

The four largest herd members pressed up against each other, allowing their nerve receptors to touch so that their brains were linked together. Their individual thoughts were virtually identical, the simple memories and commands issued by their birth immotile, but joined like this their decision-making capability was significantly enhanced. Since reaching the valley floor they hadn’t encountered any other motile, or seen signs of a herd’s occupation. The valley with its difficult approaches was easy to defend. Its size was capable of supporting three or four herds. One immotile with its herd would have an abundance of water and land, giving it a strategic advantage over the surrounding immotiles.

As to the exact location the immotile should be placed … On each of the motiles, two upper sensory stalks twisted around so their eyes could all regard the conical mountain. With so many streams, there must be a spring of some kind at the top. Such a place would be ideal for an immotile. The water would always be clean, unlike those whose territories were bunched along rivers and had to make do with water contaminated from upstream.

They agreed, then: the mountain that was drenched with light. Their temporary linkage was broken as they moved apart. The other eight members of the sub-herd were summoned. Upper sensor stalks bent around so that nerve receptors could be touched, the instructions passed to all members. In unison they began to march toward the mountain.

Two-thirds of the way up, they found a large pool fed by several of the gurgling streams. The four large motiles fused their thoughts together again and examined the area with their extended intellect. One of them sucked up some of the water, and found it contained a satisfactory level of Prime base cells swarming inside. Their presence confirmed the site would be suitable for an immotile, subject to a few alterations. A host of new instructions were issued to their fellow herd members.

The type of motile that had come walking into the valley was the most simple of all the varieties that the immotiles birthed, and as such the most adaptive in the tasks it could perform. It had a pear-shaped torso of waxy white skin that measured over a meter in diameter across the base, with four tapering ridges of hard skin running vertically up its flanks. That quadruple symmetry was a constant within Prime life. The motile had four legs sprouting at the end of the skin ridges on the rim of its lower torso. Each of them had a flexible support “bone” running down the center, wrapped with bands of muscle tissue to provide a considerable range of movement. Each leg ended in a small hoof of tough ochre gristle that could dig in hard on soil or even wood—not that they often climbed trees.

Four arms protruded from the body, branching out sixty centimeters above the hip joints. They were similar to the legs in respect of their size and all-around flexibility; differing only at the tip that split into a neat quad pincer arrangement that was quite capable of snipping through medium-sized branches. On the top of the main body four gill-like vents were spaced equidistantly around the crest, drawing air down into its lungs. Between them were the food inlets, mini trunks of rubbery flesh that had some independent movement. Motiles grazed on specific vegetation for the chemicals they contained, but mainly they sucked up water saturated with base cells. Both were processed in a large double stomach. The pap could be semidigested before being regurgitated to feed an immotile; after full digestion the residue was excreted from a single anus at the base of the body.

Above the gills and mouths, the body’s crown divided up into the four sensory stalks, which were the most pliable of all its limbs, capable of bending and twisting in every direction. At the very apex of them was the delicate nerve receptor, a thin impulse-permeable membrane stretched over raw ganglions; slightly below them were the eyes, then a pressure-sensitive blister that could detect sound waves, a plume of thin chemically responsive fibers that smelled the air, and a cluster of tactile cells capable of detecting temperature.

For such creatures, modifying the area around the pool to their own requirements was a relatively simple matter. They had long since mastered the rudiments of tool use, and quickly adapted sharp stones and sections of hard bark from the nearby trees. Using these as shovels and scoops, the twelve of them dug a shallow pond slightly upstream from the main pool, then lined it with stone taken from the excavated soil.

With the work complete, the four largest motiles waded into the pond, and once again linked their nerve receptors. This time the union went a lot deeper than simply connecting their thoughts. Their bodies were pressed up tight together, ready for amalgamation. The process was triggered by an internal hormone deluge brought on by the mental merger. Over the subsequent five weeks they underwent a tremendous metamorphosis. Their four separate bodies slowly coalesced on a cellular level to produce a single entity. Where their skin touched, it softened and melted away, creating a single giant body cavity. Inside that, their brains fused together and expanded; a transformation pattern followed by most of the major organs. The muscles simply wasted away, providing a source of nutrition to power the other changes. Legs shrank until they were nothing but a circular series of solid fleshy lumps that supported the new large body. Arms shriveled and dropped off, there was no need for them now. Digestive organs stretched out, and spread up around the new singular brain, like shoots of ivy twining around a tree trunk; underneath the brain, there was a new growth. The reproductive system that until now had been nascent began to grow into fully viable organs. Only the sensory stalks remained the same, feeding the developing brain a dodecagonal impression of the world around it.

At the end of the process, the new immotile Prime, MorningLightMountain, began to secure its territory. The remaining eight motiles came and went continually, feeding the immotile with their regurgitated pap. They had been instructed to gorge themselves on specific types of plants, enriching their food with certain vitamin types.

Triggered by the nourishment contained within its food, MorningLightMountain’s reproductive organs began to ovulate. The first batch of a hundred nucleiplasms was discharged from its body into the water, allowing them to drift down to the large pool. Base cells began to congregate around them.

By themselves, Prime base cells followed a life cycle similar to amoebas; they absorbed food through their membrane walls, and reproduced by fission, remaining a single-cell life-form that inhabited most of the planet’s waterways. But they also carried the DNA for a lot more than that. It was the nucleiplasms that initiated the multicellular stage, releasing activants for new sequences in the DNA, and switching off the amoeba-stage sequence. The cluster of cells around the nucleiplasm began to change, developing fresh organelles that provided specific functions. Like any multicellular organism, the cells began to specialize. The immotile had a degree of control over the type of nucleiplasm it gestated inside its reproduction system. By consciously controlling hormone secretion into the nucleiplasm, it could dictate the size of various organs, and by doing so design the structure and composition of a motile. If it needed heavy work doing, it would produce a batch of nucleiplasms that would congregate the largest and strongest motile. In a time when its territory was under threat, nucleiplasm to engender soldiers would be released.

The first herd of MorningLightMountain’s motiles began to wade out of the pond after three weeks of congregation. The existing motiles guided them over to the immotile, who touched its nerve receptors to theirs. Memory and instructions flashed through the impulse-permeable membrane, filling the motiles’ virgin brains with a compact version of its own thoughts.

Over the first decades, MorningLightMountain began to shape and fortify its valley. In those days there were few non-Prime life-forms left in the equatorial lands. Those that did still inhabit the valley such as the birds and a few rodentlike creatures were swiftly hunted down and exterminated—no immotile would tolerate competition for its own resources. The wild jungle was gradually cut back, the swamps drained into a network of canals that irrigated the big ferns that motiles ate. Stone was quarried, and used to construct a simple igloo-dome over the immotile as protection from the elements and any rogue predators from other territories. Metal ores were mined, and fires were used to forge crude weapon tips. The congregation pool was dredged and lined with stone.

After forty-five years of unrestricted growth, MorningLightMountain was reaching the limits of its management capacity. Over a thousand motiles were at work in the valley, and supervision was becoming difficult. A second immotile was amalgamated to compensate for the shortfall. MorningLightMountain’s pool and dome were extended, and four motiles brought together a couple of meters away from it. While the amalgamation was progressing, MorningLightMountain had six of its nerve receptors linked with those motiles undergoing the merger, pushing its thoughts into the new-growing brain. When it was all over, the two were permanently linked by four nerve receptors, producing an immotile duo with a much expanded mental capacity, and capable of organizing many herds of motiles.

A new phase of productivity began. The valley, when properly agrarianized, was capable of supporting thousands of motiles. To MorningLightMountain’s disappointment, however, it took almost all of its motiles just to keep the valley maintained. Thirty-five years later, a third immotile was amalgamated next to the initial duo. That was around the time it began to trade with immotiles of surrounding territories. Metal ores were exchanged for the use of soldier herds to repel a territory that was starting to encroach the top of the valley ramparts. Food ferns were swapped for hardwood trunks that made better spears and clubs. Ideas were bartered, chief among them the concept of plows and crop rotation brought in from immotiles thousands of kilometers away. It was the start of true agriculture for the Prime civilization, and the associated revolution that the innovation always introduced. The amount of produce that could be grown by a motile doubled within a decade. Seeing the possibility of the concept, the immotiles began to experiment, studying how the plants grew, what soils were best. MorningLightMountain itself was the one who worked out cross-pollination as a method of increasing yield and breeding new varieties. It was the start of the scientific method, and all that implied.

MorningLightMountain amalgamated its twenty-ninth immotile a decade after it began sowing crops. Twenty years later, a thousand years after it had begun its original singleton life, the number of connected units in the group reached forty, an unheard-of rate of expansion. Its linked brains were abuzz with ideas and thoughts as it observed its immediate universe with ever more scrutiny.

On the edge of the tropics, Prime immotiles were pushing farther and farther into the temperate lands, armed with their new knowledge and understanding of nature. Fire made it possible for them to live farther and farther from their original climate. Heated buildings, cultivated fields, canals, bridges, saws, and axes helped them travel farther and farther to establish allied territories.

Inevitably, as they began to grasp the principles of construction, and strength of materials, mathematical tools were developed to aid fabrication. For creatures that were essentially a giant brain, mathematics pushed them into their primacy—it was the key to understanding everything. They devoted themselves to it with a devotion that was almost religious. All the elements were now in place for the mechanical age to begin. When that happened, the pace of change was very, very swift.

After a thousand years, MorningLightMountain was now a group immotile comprising three hundred seventy-two separate units. Few had ever grown to such a size before. Its individual bodies had formed a living ring around the conical mountain. The spring that bubbled up at the top of the mountain was now channeled through clay pipes into the crown building that housed the immotile group in their entirety. They lived inside a single giant hall with a vaulting glass-topped roof letting sunlight shine down. During the night, iron braziers were lit, keeping the inside of the building illuminated, allowing the immotile group to keep working, instructing their motile herds, producing their nucleiplasms, and scrutinizing experiments and projects. Little shower nozzles sprinkled the immotiles several times a day, helping to keep them clean. Waste products were carried away via a network of culverts down the mountain, while dedicated channels swept nucleiplasm batches into the necklace of congregation lakes that had been dug below the building.

The air outside still steamed every day from the nightly rains. But this mist now mingled with smoke from the furnaces that were permanently alight. MorningLightMountain imported coal from several territories to the south, a hilly district where food was hard to grow. It was now cultivating two of the neighboring valleys, after a short series of wars wiped out the immotiles and their herds who used to occupy them. Control over such a huge area was difficult. Motiles needed to be constantly updated with instructions, and they lacked the ability to respond to any unexpected situation. MorningLightMountain knew it would soon be subjected to invasions from the west by immotiles who were worried by the size of its territory, not to mention its aggression. Its use of newly developed chemical explosives to destroy buildings, dams, and motile herds was regarded with considerable alarm.

That was the year Primes found out how to use electricity. While some immotiles studied how to use the new power for lighting, or engines and other industrial-based applications, MorningLightMountain investigated how it could carry signals; specifically the neural impulses that nerve receptors exchanged. It took over a decade; even for that much concentrated brain power inventing an entire technology from scratch was difficult. During that time, it accepted strategic defeats, losing its two additional valleys and agreeing to unfavorable trade terms for its coal and other raw materials absent in the valley. What it developed in that interlude was basic electronics, from simple resistors and capacitors right up to thermionic valves. With those principles established, a whole new chamber was annexed to the crown building on the mountain, the world’s first electronics lab, with eight immotile units devoted to nothing else but instructing the motiles who assembled the new systems and ran experiments with them. It took MorningLightMountain another three years before it successfully inputted signals to a nerve receptor. Primitive tactile impulses were first, such as hot and cold, which it followed up with simple black and white images from a camera. The images were something of a revelation for it; although it could always see what was happening outside by summoning a motile and accessing its visual memory of events, such knowledge was always secondhand, time-delayed. This was instantaneous. Within a matter of months, the entire valley was ringed by cameras that constantly scanned back and forth across the landscape, allowing it to see its entire domain in real-time. Another five years concentrated research advanced its analog signal transmissions to a level where it could finally instruct a motile by remote. It would be decades until the electronics were sophisticated enough to carry the full range of nerve receptor impulses, but that first ability to communicate at a distance was enough to give it a massive advantage over the other immotiles.

MorningLightMountain began to expand its territory once more. Herds of motile soldiers, armed with explosives and rudimentary cannons, overran the two valleys it had conquered before. With soldier motiles trailing long multi-core cables behind them, MorningLightMountain could react to the flow of battle instantaneously, easily outmaneuvering its opponents. Those first victories were followed up by a series of swift advances across the countryside until its herds had established a broad channel of land leading directly to the southern temperate zone. The remaining immotiles reacted cautiously, knowing that holding on to such huge areas was impossible. It wasn’t until months had passed that they realized their error as MorningLightMountain consolidated its grip on its annexed lands. With a grouping that now consisted of over three thousand individual immotiles, MorningLightMountain was easily capable of congregating enough motile herds to occupy its lands, mining and farming them in an operation as tightly controlled as the original valley. For the first time, captured industrial facilities were pressed into service, increasing its manufacturing base relative to the size of its budding empire.

With a direct route from its valley to the fresh temperate lands, its expansionist ambitions could now be realized. A torrent of motiles and machinery were dispatched south to exploit the new resources there, setting up the pylons and cables that knitted the whole edifice together.

It took the remaining immotiles years to build the grand alliances that finally limited MorningLightMountain’s growth, although it could never be completely halted. In typical imperial fashion, MorningLightMountain formed its own alliances as a counterbalance.

Within another fifty years all the immotiles had the ability to send their nerve impulses via cable and wireless relays. This development in conjunction with new and powerful weapons derived from the Primes’ increasing knowledge of chemistry and physics led to an era of consolidation. The smaller immotile territories were invaded and taken over by more powerful neighbors. Temperate wastelands were colonized, with mining and manufacturing operations extending into the polar regions. It was only when nuclear weapons were developed that a kind of equilibrium returned. Fission and fusion bombs allowed the smaller territories to hold their larger brethren at bay with the threat of total annihilation.

Spaceflight and offplanet colonies were the next logical development, and one that the Primes pursued vigorously. MorningLightMountain was one of the earliest immotiles to send ships out to the asteroids and planets to catalogue their resources. Given the distances involved, the old problem of time-delay emerged again. Direct electronic linkages were difficult to sustain, control slipped, and without it the motiles were utterly incapable of responding to any technological situation. They simply weren’t smart enough.

One of the smaller immotile groupings provided the solution. ColdLakePromontory was desperate to secure further resources for itself and its herds, which made it willing to innovate to a degree further than the larger more conservative groupings would consider. It amalgamated a new immotile separate from the main group, using an electronic linkage to integrate its thoughts. In effect, the new immotile was a smaller identical twin of ColdLakePromontory. Even with a time-delay, their thoughts were shared; divergence didn’t occur.

ColdLakePromontory2 was placed on a spaceship, and flown out to an industrial module attached to an asteroid. The notion of a mobile immotile was regarded with near universal shock by the other immotiles. They did however watch the experiment with obsessive interest. ColdLakePromontory2 supervised the mineral extraction processes and subsequent construction of a habitation section. More importantly, it maintained its linkage with ColdLakePromontory back on the planet, remaining part of the group mind. Mineral and metal resources from the asteroid flowed back to ColdLakePromontory’s territory on the planet.

Planet-based immotiles dispersed units of themselves across the solar system. It was a space race of colossal proportions. Territories were extended to take in vast sections of the other two solid planets, and entire gas-giant moons. Breakaways were inevitable as wars and conflicts out among the high frontier severed the vital communications links with the planet, and immotile units went independent from their original groups. In many cases that was the cause of conflicts, as the planetary motiles tried to regain control of their lost space-based territories.

The rate of the Prime civilization’s expansion across its solar system never approached anything like exponential. It would take millennia to occupy and utilize all the resources orbiting the star. But the group immotiles were effectively creatures who could live forever, and many of them were planning for the far future.

MorningLightMountain constructed the first interstellar ship on one of its high-orbit asteroid bases. It was a fusion drive vessel; the Primes with their logical thought processes and observation-based scientific research lacked the mental ability to speculate wildly about such concepts as FTL. With MorningLightMountain8658 on board the starship, it took off toward the nearest star, three and a half light-years away. The mission was supposed to be a reconnaissance, sending back information about the available planets and their suitability for exploitation. MorningLightMountain knew it wouldn’t be able to control MorningLightMountain8658 once the ship was outside the Prime solar system. However, it had deliberately restricted the machinery on board the starship, denying MorningLightMountain8658 the ability to establish any sort of technology-based colony. That should have ensured MorningLightMountain8658 simply scanned the system and returned. MorningLightMountain wasn’t sure what use it would have for another star system, but it couldn’t ignore future possibilities. Knowing what was there would help it determine what to do about other stars. There was the remote option that if the resources of its own star system were completely depleted it could move itself to a new planet entirely, one without any other immotile group to contend with.

The one thing MorningLightMountain, or any other Prime immotile, never expected was to find an alien species. All other animal life had finally been exterminated from the Prime homeworld during the last expansion over the temperate lands. They didn’t think in terms of other intelligences. When MorningLightMountain8658 decelerated insystem, it found an extensive civilization occupying the fourth solid planet. Unfortunately for the natives of the second star system, they were a benign species who advanced themselves through cooperation. Physically, they were trisymmetric, smaller and weaker than a Prime motile. They were also individuals.

The starship might not have had any manufacturing systems on board, but it certainly had weapons. MorningLightMountain8658 subdued a vast area of the new planet with nuclear and kinetic bombardment from orbit, and commandeered what was left of the aliens’ industrial base. It began an extensive research project into the trisymmetric creatures themselves. There was a lot for MorningLightMountain8658 to learn, concepts and ideas that both alarmed and intrigued it. Communication with sound. Reproduction via fertilized eggs. Biology in general, and genetics in particular—a field that provided amazing insights into itself. Research into their own physiology and nature wasn’t something Primes had ever conducted; they’d never had the need. Fiction—that was a strange one. Art. Entertainment. All nonsensical distractions to a Prime.

MorningLightMountain8658 began to build its new territory around the starship landing site, incorporating the useful ideas that the aliens offered up into its traditional concepts. Surviving aliens were treated like motiles, and conscripted to help build the territory. Three years later, the next Prime starship arrived, sent by a different immotile. The firefight that ensued devastated half of the continent where MorningLightMountain8658 had established itself. Neither of the immotiles was damaged. They agreed to an alliance, and divided up the planet.

MorningLightMountain wasn’t surprised when its first starship didn’t return. Interstellar travel was a huge unknown; it expected many setbacks. More starships were already being built in anticipation. None of the starships sent by other immotiles had reported back, either. The starship designs were refined, and new missions launched. All of which were swallowed up by the void between the stars.

After almost a century of starflight, and twenty-eight ships sent to the nearby star, the Primes finally had one return. It was the most heavily armed ship they’d built, and the first to have a force field for defense. MorningLightMountain had led an alliance of the three most powerful immotiles to manufacture the behemoth. Only its devastating firepower had ensured its survival as it was attacked by a swarm of warships on arrival. It had managed to capture a large chunk of wreckage from one of the attackers. The knowledge it contained was horrifying to the entire Prime home system. Not only had the immotiles controlling the earlier starships become independent, they had apparently incorporated alien concepts into their technology. Most alarming of all was the use of the new science of genetics. They were modifying their bodies, blending in alien traits to “improve” themselves. Their motiles were smarter and stronger, capable of making complex decisions, while the immotiles were sequencing refinement after refinement into their neural structure, advancing their thought-processing capacity far beyond their natural state. Machines were also being used to supplement body function, cybernetic additions that allowed immotile movement, and even separation from the group home. They were evolving artificially, diverging from pure Prime. They would be rivals, and their new nature would give them advantages impossible for the original Primes to achieve.

The discovery unified the entire Prime solar system into a single alliance. A fleet of warships were built and dispatched across the void to annihilate their enemies. A second, larger fleet followed. A third, the greatest of all.

In response, alienPrime ships hurtled into the Prime home system, armed with terrible weapons. Before the ships were destroyed, the habitable territories on the outermost solid planet were completely wiped out along with all the industrial colonies around the first gas giant. Hundreds of Prime ships had been sacrificed in the defense.

Then it happened: the strangest weapon of all was used. The enemy alienPrimes established a force field around the entire star system. Nothing could penetrate it; not nuclear weapons, nor quantum field interference. It was impervious to everything Prime science could strike it with. MorningLightMountain and all the others were trapped inside, while the alienPrime immotiles remained free to spread themselves and their contagion across the universe. There was nothing the original Primes could do except repair the damage to their civilization, expand their territories across the frozen outer planetoids, research new weapons, and wait.

Eleven hundred eighty-two years later, the force field vanished as abruptly as it appeared.

MorningLightMountain’s outer sensor satellites detected fluctuations in its quantum structure rippling across the surface for nearly an hour before the field finally lost cohesion. Almost immediately, every immotile launched spaceships from their asteroids and planet territories right across the Prime system. They accelerated hard, rushing to get outside the field’s previous boundary line before it reestablished itself. The eight that MorningLightMountain had held in readiness for just this occasion were among the first to leave.

With that action completed, MorningLightMountain and its allies began an extensive sensor search of space beyond the boundary. Immediately they found a huge rotating spherical structure, twenty-five thousand kilometers in diameter, orbiting along the ecliptic. The structure was larger than the homeworld, but with hardly any mass, so it couldn’t be a planet. Yet it was emitting in every measurable spectrum, and had a completely alien quantum signature. Four ships were dispatched to investigate.

Strangest of all, there was no sign of the alienPrimes. Defenses around every planetary and space territory were brought up to their full capability in readiness for the surely imminent attack. But no weapons of any kind tested them. There was nothing. All the alliances combined their sensor information. Everything remained blank.

MorningLightMountain was uncertain how to proceed. It had planned for what it considered every eventuality when the force field was removed. It could fight and flee; it had a grand alliance ready to build a fleet to exterminate all alienPrime life at the second star, and wherever else they had corrupted. That the alienPrimes would do nothing was confusing it considerably.

Its most powerful telescopes were hurriedly trained on the neighboring star for any clue of their activity. That produced the greatest surprise of all. A force field had encased the alienPrime system as well.

None of the immotiles had ever considered there might be a second alien life, one that was more powerful than Primes. Accepting the concept was a frightening thing. They watched the newly exposed stars with a considerable sense of anxiety. Still more ships were dispatched outward in a frantic attempt to establish Prime life on new worlds where the barriers would not imprison them.

Four days after the force field vanished, the most sophisticated spacial sensors that MorningLightMountain possessed reported a very unusual quantum disturbance washing across the system. The effect was traveling faster than the speed of light. MorningLightMountain considered that such an event might signal the arrival of the aliens who had created the force field. The effect wasn’t repeated, which left it deliberating how to respond: to warn the others and form the Grand Alliance to fight back against the attackers, or to attempt its own evacuation.

MorningLightMountain was still considering its options when its ordinary sensors showed it a fight between ships from TemperateSeaIsland and SouthernRockPlateau close to a cluster of asteroid bases. Even now when the Prime alliances knew they had to cooperate to face their enemy, the old conflicts still raged. Expansion had been massive throughout the last thousand years, and resources within the Prime star system were now extremely scarce. The pressure on individual territories was greater than it had ever been before. For the last two centuries, MorningLightMountain had been increasingly concerned that the immotiles would end up fighting a terminal war and exterminate themselves. It was a common worry. As a consequence, immotiles had diverted more and more effort into building and stockpiling weapons.

Almost a day later, thousands of sensors orbiting the homeworld picked up a microwave emission from a point beyond the second gas giant. The signal was crude, using patterns that had been developed for messaging long before the time when the force field appeared. A brief identification sequence revealed the sender to be MorningLightMountain17,735, who had been on board one of the early starships to visit the alienPrime star system and never returned. The content of the message was short and simple: This ship contains aliens; there are many of them, and they are dangerous. Destroy them.

The message repeated ten times, then ended. MorningLightMountain was puzzled. How had MorningLightMountain17,735 survived for so long? What was it doing on an alien ship? Why was the message so short? Not that it had many options remaining. A scan of the section of space where the message originated revealed a tiny glimmer of infrared next to a small chunk of cold rock. MorningLightMountain knew of no Prime settlement at those coordinates. Other immotiles were already ordering ships to investigate the message’s origin point. MorningLightMountain sent instructions to its subsidiary groupings on the moons of the second gas giant. Four of its most powerful ships launched on an interception course.

Alliances broke down and new ones formed as the first eight ships closed on the alien. Immotiles disagreed on how to deal with the situation. Some wanted to capture the aliens and their ship, others were keen to follow MorningLightMountain17,735’s advice and exterminate the invader.

The alien started transmitting signals at the Prime ships as they closed on it. They were incomprehensible; no immotile could understand it. Missiles were fired as alliances came into sharp conflict over how to proceed.

With the lead Prime ship approaching fast and launching a missile salvo, the alien vanished inside a huge burst of spacial distortion.

The surface-to-orbit transport ship descended vertically through the Prime homeworld’s lower atmosphere. It was a large blunt cone shape, although it made little use of aerodynamics to land. Eight fusion rockets were arranged around the rim of its base, roaring out slim two-kilometer-long jets of incandescent plasma. Between them, they produced point nine of a Prime gravity, lowering the ship gently toward the coastline beneath it.

Steam began to swirl up from the surface of the sea as the wavering tips of the plasma stabbed down into it. Within seconds, a hemispherical tempest of radiant vapor was streaking up and out from the epicenter like a squashed nuclear mushroom cloud. As the ship sank down into the supersonic storm front, force fields came on to protect the fuselage from the maelstrom it was creating. The fusion rockets died away when the ship was only a few meters above the seething surface, and its conical base splashed down with a soft bump into the boiling water.

Tugboats closed in and towed the spaceship back to the piers and loading bays that stretched for over a hundred kilometers along the coast. This was the main planetary spaceport that MorningLightMountain had built to handle the cargo flying between the planet and its offworld territories. Thousands of flights arrived and departed every year, pouring heat and mildly radioactive contaminants into the local environment. Nothing grew within a hundred kilometers of the spaceport anymore, no crops or weeds of any kind, turning the land behind the shore to a desert of sodden lifeless soil. Even the sea was dead, a choppy expanse of gray water with a thin skin of ochre scum.

Once the ship was docked, a sub-herd of soldier motiles came on board. They were slightly smaller than standard motiles, with better sight and hearing; they could move faster as well, and had a much greater agility, though they lacked any long-term endurance. Encased in dark armor they were two and a half meters tall, with electronic sensors complementing their natural ones and limb strength enhanced mechanically. Every arm gripped some kind of weapon. Under direct microwave linkage with MorningLightMountain, they approached the two bipedal alien motile captives with considerable wariness. The immotile wasn’t sure of their potential, so it was taking every precaution. The compartment they’d been confined to was heavily shielded, and they’d been under constant observation for the whole flight back from the asteroid fragment where their ship had been lurking. Physically, they had done nothing, remaining almost motionless for the whole time. Their suits, however, had been emitting those strange microwave pulses almost continually.

When the soldier motiles came into the compartment both creatures stood upright. MorningLightMountain watched the process with considerable interest. Their legs bent in the middle, pushing the main bulk upward. They seemed to have no trouble standing still while balancing on only two legs. A great range of electromagnetic emissions were pouring out of the suits again, the usual fast short pulses. MorningLightMountain ignored them and told the soldiers to load both alien motiles onto the waiting ground vehicle. As the sub-herd moved forward to grab them, the taller of the two swung its upper torso limbs around knocking their pincers away, and tried to speed past them. It could move surprisingly fast, but the soldiers were ready for it, and lifted its twisting body off the ground, carrying it down the ramp to the waiting ground vehicle. The second, slightly smaller alien motile offered no resistance as it was dragged along behind. Both of them were dropped into the cage. A force field flicked on around the mesh.

MorningLightMountain drove the vehicle along the road connecting the spaceport to its original valley. Long black clouds boiled overhead as they did ceaselessly these days. Rain lashed down across the road’s stone and metal surface, warm water saturated with soot particles. The road was hemmed in on both sides by buildings of toughened plastic, shielding manufacturing machinery from the acidic rain. Big vehicles shuttled between them, carrying components around. Herd after herd of motiles worked around the huge blocks of industrial machinery, servicing and repairing. They didn’t live as long as they used to two thousand years ago, especially in and around the spaceport. Many of them had sores and scabs mottling their skin from cold radiation burns. Limbs often trembled and shook from the damage that heavy metal contamination inflicted on their nervous systems. They ate from troughs filled with a treaclelike nutrient sludge that was processed in food factories scattered across the territory’s farmlands. Sensor stalks twitched constantly and gave poor visual reception, degraded by airborne irritants gushing out of the refineries.

In the mountains behind the industrial landscape where the radioactivity was considerably reduced, fields cloaked every slope in a drab unvarying gray-green patina. Plants struggled out of the thin sandy soil, forced into overactive life by chemical fertilizers that were spread across the terraces by farming motiles and tracked vehicles. All wild plants had been eradicated from the planet now, surrendering their valuable land to the intense agricultural cultivation vital to feed the billions of motiles.

As the vehicle carrying the alien motiles drove along the switchback road that led down into MorningLightMountain’s original valley it passed through the strongest force field on the planet, one capable of deflecting nuclear assaults and beam strikes. Rain beat down upon the sparkling energy plane, flowing into rivulets that ran away over the craggy granite ramparts. Light did still shine down into the valley in the morning, though now it was a bruised gray twilight that leaked through the planet-wide smog layers. At night, the smog fluoresced a funereal khaki from the vast lattice of fusion drives that caged the world.

Ahead of the vehicle, the conical mountain rose up from the valley floor. It was home to over fifty thousand immotile units now, still the true heart of MorningLightMountain, even though there were groupings dotted all over the planet, linked to it via secure landlines. The mountain had been transformed into a single building, with each immotile nesting at the center of its own chamber. None of them made physical nerve contact with the motiles anymore; their sensor stalk nerve receptors were all connected to an electronic network that connected them en masse to the herds as well as every mechanical segment of their territory. A battery of maser units perched above the valley ramparts extended the gigantic immotile group’s presence across the star system. Below the building floor, the mountain was riddled with pipes and sewers. The immotiles were bathed in a gentle shower of clean water produced in desalination plants north of the spaceport, and piped into the valley. Waste water carrying away body effluent was flushed straight back into the sea, while water carrying nucleiplasm batches was directed into the moat of congregation lakes around the base of the mountain.

The vehicle drove over a six-kilometer-long causeway between lakes. The alien motiles stood upright in their cage; the fat sensor stalks inside the transparent bubble on top of their suits were turned so the two eyes regarded the emerging herds. Below them, the lake surfaces writhed as tens of thousands of congregating motiles squirmed against each other. Not yet mature, their bodies were partially translucent, with great globules of transforming base cells clustered around limbs and torsos, as if they were surrounded by lumpy jelly. Big pipes poured a torrent of sluggish liquid into each lake: water saturated with base cells that were bred in a huge series of vats at the eastern end of the valley. At the edge of the lakes, motiles helped the newly formed up out of the water. Relay modules were attached to their nerve receptors, allowing MorningLightMountain to fill their brains with its thought routines and commands. On the wide concrete apron ringing the lakes, herds formed up in long ranks to be collected by vehicles that would drive them to their work destination. Over a million a day were transported out across MorningLightMountain’s territory.

At the base of the mountain building, a tall door opened in the clifflike wall of stone and concrete, and the vehicle drove inside. This was the primary research area, where the immotile units had built facilities to explore every scientific discipline. The alien motiles were put in the chemical warfare laboratory, where they were sealed up in a cell that had an independent air circuit. Force fields came on around it, capable of withstanding megaton blasts.

The cell was a broad rectangular room, measuring some fifty meters long, made out of high-density plastic, and completely insulated. MorningLightMountain had installed a lot of examination equipment inside, ranging from scanners that could review the creatures in their entirety, to analysis modules that could sift through their cellular structure molecule by molecule. There were pens where they could be held between examinations, transparent cubes three meters to a side containing water, various food bales, and receptacles for excretion. Lighting was full solar spectrum.

One wall of the cell was made from a sheet of transparent crystal. Three immotiles rested on the other side, sitting in pools of dark water, a gentle drizzle playing over their skin. One of them had a motile pressed up close, feeding it. All of them could observe the aliens directly with their own eyes as they supervised the examination process.

MorningLightMountain bent its sensor stalks over so it could gaze at the alien motiles as they entered the laboratory. It seemed to be a mutual arrangement. The alien motiles walked their lurching walk over to the crystal wall, and stared back at the immotiles.

MorningLightMountain’s priority was to establish a neural interface with the alien motiles so it could determine what kind of threat their immotiles posed to Prime. To do that, it had to discover the nature of their nerve receptors. Once that was ascertained it could manufacture an artificial interface unit and command them directly, as it had done with countless millions of motiles captured from other Prime territories. Their memories would then be drained out into MorningLightMountain so it could see exactly what it was facing.

Eight fully armored soldier motiles were in the cell with the aliens, along with eight standard motiles. MorningLightMountain ordered the soldiers to hold the alien motiles steady, while its own motiles applied various sensors. The alien motiles struggled briefly as they were grasped. The electromagnetic emissions from their suits began again. MorningLightMountain tried a transmission on the same frequencies, ordering them to be still. It had no effect.

Although there was considerable interference, the sensors were able to map out the basic layout of the suits. Their composition was an advanced shapeshifting polymer with various filaments woven through it to control temperature. The atmosphere inside the upper bubble was oxygen-nitrogen, regenerated by several small modules of intriguing design. Most surprising were the complex electronic patterns that covered the entire surface, indicating a great many components. MorningLightMountain couldn’t understand why something as simple as a pressure suit would require so many control circuits.

It ordered the motiles to remove the suits. Under its direction they applied cutting instruments to the surface, and began ripping the fabric apart. As the aliens motiles were exposed so MorningLightMountain heard strange sounds emerging from them. When the upper bubbles were broken open the sound grew to extraordinary levels, making the motiles wave their sensor stalks away in an attempt to lessen it. The single fat sensor stalk on the top of the alien motiles was the source, an orifice that flapped open and shut.

They also emitted a stench so strong that the motiles quivered in reaction. MorningLightMountain hurriedly reviewed the cell’s gas toxin sensors to see if it was a chemical attack. There were some strange nitrates effervescing off the alien motiles, but nothing lethal. It began to catalogue their profile. Even knowing they were alien didn’t adequately prepare it for things so strange. Their skin was a pale white-pink, with slim blue lines visible just below the surface. Thin fibers were sprouting from it seemingly at random and in different colors from brown to white; there were big patches of the stuff on the top of the sensor stalk, and smaller patches between the legs. One had tufts where its arms joined the torso as well as a fine grayish fuzz on the front of its torso, while the other had neither. Physically they had differences, odd limp appendages that dangled like half-filled bags; the larger one had a tiny trunk between its legs next to some kind of external sacs. MorningLightMountain could see no practical use for either set.

Lines of red fluid were leaking from the skin, corresponding to where the cutting implements had been applied. The smaller alien motile had stopped using its legs to support itself, and was hanging limply in the soldiers’ grip; while the larger one was shaking violently. It continued to make the curious sounds as yellow water discharged from its mini-trunk appendage.

Motiles collected samples of the red fluid and yellow water from the floor of the cell. The alien motile that had gone inert was placed in the large scanning unit. The image that arrived inside MorningLightMountain was tremendously complex; the alien motile was densely packed with organs. Lungs, heart, and stomach were obvious, but it couldn’t imagine what half of the other ones were for. The bone structure was odd, leaving some parts of the torso unprotected, although the joint system was innovative. Most interesting was the location of the brain, actually inside the sensor stalk. MorningLightMountain moved the scan focus, trying to track the nerve cords to a receptor membrane. Try as it might, it couldn’t find one. The bulk of the nerves left the brain to travel along the thick segmented bone running down the torso, but they all branched into a tributary network that was distributed throughout the muscle bands and thin skin. Could the entire skin be a nerve receptor? Then MorningLightMountain noticed strands of organic conductors wound through the skin. Many of them were integrated into the nerve cords, especially around the five-segment grippers on the end of its arms. Now it knew what to look for, MorningLightMountain gave the brain a more detailed survey. A cluster of minute electronic components were nestling inside the body at the base of the brain, with a multitude of connective threads joining them to the big nerve cord.

The inert alien motile was taken out of the scanner, and the active one placed inside. Soldiers had to hold it down as the bulbous scan tips moved across it. Where there was no bone beneath the skin, its flesh bowed inward below the probing tips. It started making noise again, a loud burst of high-frequency sound every time the tip pressure increased. MorningLightMountain withdrew a tip, then pushed it forward again. The alien noisegenerated again. It was an interesting correlation, but MorningLightMountain couldn’t understand why it did that.

This larger alien motile had a similar network of organic conductors and electronic components embedded within its body. MorningLightMountain had memories of the alienPrime cybernetics, fusing machines with bodies; but they had all been used to amplify physical functions. These seemed to have no external purpose; they were joined to the brain but nothing else, they weren’t links in a chain. MorningLightMountain’s trouble was that it had little experience of microelectronic systems. It produced simple processors to help govern its own technology, but its own mind always directed the operation of any complex piece of machinery with appropriate thought routines through its nerve linkages. Automation was not a familiar concept; seventy percent of its group brain capacity was involved in controlling technology, from simply driving a vehicle to regulating the plasma flow in fusion reactors. There were few independent machines within its territories. The most advanced were the missiles carried by spaceships, which couldn’t contain an immotile. They used processors that had flexible algorithmic instructions, which were given specific orders just before launch. Otherwise MorningLightMountain ran everything. Machines served life, it could not be otherwise.

MorningLightMountain ordered the soldiers to release the alien motile. It did have the kind of equipment capable of analyzing the processors inside the aliens, but it was all in the physics laboratories. A batch of instructions was issued to motiles. They began dismantling the appropriate units, ready to transfer them to the secure cell. In the meantime the immotile instructed the motiles to extract all the processors from the pressure suits while it observed the aliens.

The soldiers had placed both of them in their pens. The larger one had folded its legs, so that it was resting on the floor. It was knocking its gripper on the wall between it and the smaller alien, which was still inert and leaking red fluid onto the floor. Every few minutes it would noise-generate. The fat sensor stalk at the top twisted, and it stared at MorningLightMountain’s three immotiles again. Both of its arms moved, the grippers forming shapes in the air. It did that for several minutes, then sank back on its folded legs again. The fat sensor stalk rocked about for no apparent reason. Eventually it began to examine the food bales. Small crumbs were broken off by the grippers, and it brought them up to the small twinned orifices at the front of its fat sensor stalk. MorningLightMountain decided there must be olfactory sensors inside the little cavities. Some of the crumbs were discarded, while others were held in front of the larger orifice. A strip of flexible wet tissue extended to touch the crumbs one after the other. They were all dropped on the floor. Next it turned to the plastic cylinder filled with desalinated water. After dipping its gripper in, it pushed one of the segments into its large orifice. There was a short pause, then it lifted the plastic cylinder and poured almost half of the water into its orifice.

MorningLightMountain completed its analysis of the red fluid. As it suspected, the substance was a nutrient, with a high protein and oxygen content. The yellow water appeared to be a waste defecation.

An hour later, the smaller alien motile began to move. The response from the larger one was immediate. It hurried over to the wall between them and began to noise-generate in short loud bursts. The smaller one was emitting a long single sound. It flattened its gripper, and pressed it over the long rip on its side where the red fluid was still seeping out.

MorningLightMountain began to wonder if it was badly damaged. On a Prime, such a rip would seal up and the flesh knit together quickly. That didn’t seem to be happening to the alien motile. Instead the red fluid was undergoing a double transformation, coagulating and then crystallizing into dark flecks. It didn’t think much of that as an integral repair function.

The small alien held its body parallel to the floor, and used both its arms and legs to walk over to the cylinder of water. It ingested some, and then fell back onto the floor, its joints losing stiffness.

The equipment to analyze the processors arrived. MorningLightMountain’s motiles began reassembling it. After several hours, it was powered up, and the first processor placed under a field resonance amplifier. MorningLightMountain was astonished by the complexity of the device, which was right on the edge of the amplifier’s resolution. There were millions of junctions arranged in a three-dimensional lattice of quantum wire, each strand just large enough to carry a single electron. The processing power it contained was enormous. One of these by itself was enough to control an entire salvo of missiles.

MorningLightMountain had a lot of trouble holding a full map of the junctions in its mind; the effort was taking up the brains of a dozen immotile units. That alone was enough to worry it. The aliens clearly had a powerful technology in such devices. It was intrigued with the reason for developing them. Clearly in this instance, the suit polymer must require an inordinate amount of control to hold its shape, presumably far beyond the capacity of the alien motile brain to govern.

In another part of the giant building, MorningLightMountain’s electronics workshop began to assemble an adaptor that could plug into the alien processor. There were several optical interface points, all it really needed was a module that would convert the processor’s output into its own style of nerve impulses.

Although useful, none of this gave the immotile a method of linking itself to the alien’s brain. The memory of their strange body and nervous system hung in its mind where it could be continually examined and analyzed. It simply could not see a natural way to access the brain. Given that, and the obvious lack of mental capacity (as shown by the lack of control over the suit) MorningLightMountain began to wonder just how far down the alien motile caste structure these particular motiles were. They could well be a lot less intelligent that its own motiles, although the similar size of the brain argued against that; and the grippers indicated a high degree of tool usage, for which they would need suitable aptitude.

Aliens, it acknowledged, were paradoxical in more ways than one.

Given its overwhelming need to establish direct control over the brain of an alien motile, and the only connection it had found to that valuable organ, it didn’t have a lot of choice. The small alien motile was clearly badly damaged; its eventual loss was inevitable. MorningLightMountain needed to analyze the electronic processors connected to its nervous system; if it could somehow interface itself with them, then it would have access to the alien brain.

Two soldier motiles carried the smaller alien motile over to a bench where narrow focus scanning equipment was poised overhead. Clamps were fastened around it, holding it in place. High-pitched squeaking noises pulsed out of its open orifice. The larger alien motile was hammering its clenched grippers on the wall of its pen, also emitting a lot of noise.

The scanners focused on the top section of the alien motile, and MorningLightMountain located the electronic systems clustered around the top of its main nerve channel. A motile with a small precision cutting tool began slicing through the intervening tissue. The alien’s noise emissions immediately increased to a much louder volume. Its red nutrient fluid jetted out of the cut. Even though the three-dimensional map of the alien’s biological functions was quite clear in MorningLightMountain’s mind, with the nutrient fluid pump organ beating away in a strong rhythm, it hadn’t appreciated the kind of pressure that the circulatory system operated at. The cutting tool was saturated in the red fluid, which went on to spray across the motile’s skin. Its heat was uncomfortable. The motile had to move away and stand under a small shower nozzle to wash it off. A different motile moved forward to continue the operation.

The alien had stopped its squeaking, now its orifice was emitting a sound like old wood snapping. Its body was straining up against the clamps. Red fluid continued to spray out of the cut. Through the scanner, MorningLightMountain saw a series of impulses flash between the electronic components. All activity between them stopped. A moment later the nutrient fluid circulation pump juddered to a halt. Electrical activity in the brain withered away.

MorningLightMountain instructed its motile to resume the cutting operation. Without the red fluid spray, it was a lot easier to move the cutting tool inward, exposing the thick nerve channel. Micromanipulator grippers were inserted into the opening, and carefully teased the components loose, breaking the minute and terribly fragile strands that connected it to the nerve junctions.

One by one they were subjected to detailed analysis. Three of the devices were for redirecting nerve impulses out into the complicated tracery of organic circuitry etched on the alien motile’s skin. One had a very low power electromagnetic transceiver built in. MorningLightMountain was pleased to find that it could well eliminate the need for a direct physical connection to the remaining alien motile. The final device was odd, an artificial crystal lattice that had conductive properties, with a small processor attached. It took the immotile a long time to understand its function. The crystal was a storage system, a highly sophisticated version of the ones it used to retain command instructions for the missiles. In this case, the theoretical information load was colossal; it could hold almost as many memories as an immotile brain. Unfortunately it was completely blank. As the alien motile died, it must have erased the information.

The adaptor arrived. MorningLightMountain worked quickly, connecting itself to the transceiver processor and feeding power into the tiny device. A deluge of binary pulses flooded into its mind. It used the thought routines it had developed to control its own processors, running the sequences through them, modifying them to handle the new mathematical arrangements. At the same time, it observed the device with the field resonance amplifier. The string of numbers made up from the binary sequences made little sense, but it did see where they originated from, which junctions they came from. It carefully began to return the sequences, seeing what the result was. Most had no effect, but occasionally a segment of the whole sequence would activate a portion of the processor. Slowly, it built up a set of crude control instructions. The processor seemed to have a lot of operation rules integrated into its design. When the immotile finally managed to switch the transceiver on, a list of possible transmission sequences flipped to semiactive status. By trial and error, MorningLightMountain learned how to order them to flow into the transceiver section for broadcast. Although the binary sequences themselves were horribly long and complex, there was an elegant logic behind the device that the immotile quite admired.

It used another adaptor to connect itself to a second processor. This one had even more inbuilt operational rules. Once again, MorningLightMountain patiently worked its way through the combinations, flipping functions to active status. It was rewarded by a deluge of output information. The most basic one was a steady signal that was repeated five hundred times a second. Other functions changed the signal minutely, although its main parameters remained constant.

The immotile flipped the additional signal functions off and considered the basic signal for a long while, working through possibilities before it realized what it might be. It constructed thought routines to run through all the prospective formats, to be rewarded by a simple cube of twelve billion specific points. At this moment over a thousand immotile unit brains were now devoted to interpreting the alien electronics and the binary number sequences they used. In all its history it had never devoted so much of itself to a single problem. It flipped the first additional function on, and was rewarded by a string of symbols appearing in the cube.

The remaining alien motile had become inert, lying on the floor of its pen. As MorningLightMountain worked through the transmission sequences, one made it twitch and raise its fat sensor stalk. The cell picked up a reply transmitted from its embedded transceiver processor that the one now attached to MorningLightMountain acknowledged automatically. The alien motile stood up and stared at the equipment that the motiles were operating. It noise-generated briefly, then turned to the immotiles. Its transceiver processor transmitted a long binary sequence, lasting several milliseconds. A whole series of inbuilt rules in MorningLightMountain’s device suddenly activated, opening up new junction connections and closing others. The immotile watched helplessly through the resonance amplifier as the processor unit effectively shut down. All the primary quantum wire routes making up the lattice of junctions were blocked out. Worse than that, the binary sequences used to accomplish the order were prime number based—those short enough for it to evaluate. Most of them were beyond its mental capacity to determine. It couldn’t reverse the instruction.

Over in its pen, the alien motile held one arm out level toward the immotile units sitting behind the crystal wall, and extended a single gripper vertically. MorningLightMountain knew defiance when it saw it, no matter how alien the species was. It used its own transmitter in the cell to replicate the sequence that had made the alien twitch and rouse itself. There was no response.

New and different symbols continued to appear within the visualized cube as MorningLightMountain flipped additional signal functions. At least that had been unaffected by the alien motile’s transmission. But without knowing the actual functions that the symbols represented, the immotile couldn’t begin a translation. Its chances of establishing communications with the alien had been reduced considerably.

The immotile reviewed its shrinking options. There were only two sources of knowledge left concerning the alien immotiles and what was happening outside the Prime star system: the alien motile’s brain, and its electronic information store. MorningLightMountain had clear evidence that the alien immotile would resist any attempt to establish contact and extract information from its brain. And the smaller alien motile had immediately wiped its information store when it realized what was happening. Logically, the information contained within the store device was valuable.

A soldier motile raised its arm, and shot the alien motile through the top of its fat sensor stalk with a high-velocity kinetic projectile. Red fluid, sticky strings of brain flesh, and splinters of bone exploded across the pen, splattering the transparent walls.

The second dead alien motile was placed on the bench underneath the narrow focus scanning equipment. Clamps held it in place as MorningLightMountain located the electronic systems embedded below the brain. They were all intact; the soldier motile’s shot had been perfectly aimed. The motiles began the extraction operation.

This time, the electronic information store was almost full.

MorningLightMountain’s preliminary investigation revealed the information was protected from access by inbuilt rules that needed activation sequences even more complex than the ones that had been used to switch off the transceiver processor.

The tiny device was transferred to the electronics laboratory, and placed inside a quantum interface detector. It took a long time to read the stored information block by block; but weeks later the entire sequence was incorporated into MorningLightMountain’s memory.

At the same time as the reading, it had been experimenting with the input channels of the wiped device for the smaller alien motile. The overall purpose was quite simple: nerve impulses from the alien’s primary sensorium were transformed into binary sequences, compressed by a series of algorithms, and inserted into the storage lattice. It held a recording of everything that the alien had perceived.

MorningLightMountain derived an elaborate thought routine that would reverse the compression and transformation process, turning the stored information back into analog nerve impulses. It applied the routine to the alien’s information, and allowed the resulting data stream to flow into a single immotile’s brain. The unit was isolated from the MorningLightMountain group by a series of safety cutoffs in case anything went wrong, and the alien thought routines began to leak out and contaminate the group.

Dudley Bose struggled in the grip of armored monsters as the shimmering blade stabbed through the space suit, puncturing both the plyplastic and his right buttock. The tip slashed downward, ripping through flesh in an agonizing line of fire. Pain. PAIN!

MorningLightMountain wanted to throw its head back and scream as the unknown nerve impulse slammed through fifty thousand linked brains with the violence of a lightning bolt. Shock transfixed the immotile group as the naked slime-covered monsters tore and pulled away its coverings, inflicting brutal wounds across its belly and legs. It wanted to squirm loose, but its legs didn’t work. The memory was pushed away from conscious thought, dwindling into the past, becoming bearable as the safety systems reduced the intensity of the impulses delivered to the main group. MorningLightMountain’s lung intake gills fluttered in unison throughout its circular cloisters as it took a juddering breath. Billions of frozen motiles all across the territory reoriented themselves and resumed their tasks. In orbit above the Prime homeworld, MorningLightMountain’s ships returned to their correct flight paths, industrial machinery digesting asteroidal rubble belched and reset their refinery modules.

Pain. What an extraordinary concept. Prime motiles and immotiles had basic tactile senses, indicating pressure and touch against their skin. But this, this was a physical warning on a scale that took away rationality.

But then, it made sense in a way. Humans were individual. Astonishing though it was, they had no motile/immotile caste. It was a civilization of billions of full-sentience entities, all of them in mild conflict with each other. In some cases, not so mild.

>memory<

The sheer intransigent idiocy of the university board. Every month Dudley spent—wasted!—hours of his valuable time in meetings that accomplished nothing but the perpetuation of bureaucracy and the status quo. His department was always overlooked, always underfunded, always patronized by the larger science departments. Bastards.

>explain<

Because this is worthwhile. This is the expansion of knowledge that has a history back to the dawn of human time. This is pure science, driven not by greed but by nobility.

>motivation not comprehended / memory<

The vice chancellor spoke at length.

>vocalization / aliens communicate via sound / selfmemory<

“Fuck you!” the alien Bose screamed inside its pen as Emmanuelle Verbeke lay strapped down on the vivisection table, blood squirting out of her carotid artery. “Rot in hell you motherfucking bastards! We’ll nuke you to shit and kill your babies when they glow in the dark! We’ll wipe you from this whole fucking universe. Not even God will remember you existed!”

>god / human ally / memory<

Written books, hundreds of them, thousands, all multiplying out from a few ancient sacred texts. Stories of how the universe began, how its creator sent segments of itself to the human homeworld to promise salvation. Salvation that came in many forms for many different human alliances. Divine mythology that as a scientist Dudley Bose knew was fiction. Like the woodland elves, which had turned out to be real. The Silfen. What irony.

>more aliens / classifications/ memory<

Hundreds of worlds each containing tens of thousands of nonsentient aliens. Several sentient species had been discovered by the Commonwealth as it expanded, their status as hostile or allied could never quite be determined. And one non-life world, the SI planet.

>SI / human immotile / explain<

It’s not a human immotile. It evolved out of sophisticated programs. It’s artificial.

>human thought transfer to SI / immotile function / confirm<

No, it’s not like that, like you. Some humans download their memories into the SI when they don’t want to rejuvenate, when they’ve had enough of life.

>paradox / explain<

I can’t. It’s not something I would ever do. People are not the same, we all have different motivations.

>SI involvement with starship flight / memory<

Distant recollections of news reports, blurring into one. Politicians arguing about paying for the flight. Nigel Sheldon being interviewed; Vice President Elaine Doi claiming the SI supported the venture, wanting to know more about the barriers. Never confirmed directly because the SI didn’t talk to individual humans, at least not Dudley Bose.

>clarification of status / inclusion on flight / memory<

From nobody to somebody within an instant as he saw the enclosure. Triumph followed by months of cluttered thought of the striving, clawing his way to get selected for the crew of the Second Chance. Surprising himself with the degree of determination and political maneuvering he accomplished, the suppression of all conscience.

>alienPrime involvement / explain<

Never heard of them. Never heard of you before the barrier came down. We were an exploratory flight. Science only.

>message from MorningLightMountain17,735 / explain<

You’re wrong, there was no alien on board the Second Chance.

>paradox / explain<

There was no alien on board. Our hysradar scan showed the barrier was still intact around their star.

>barrier construction / memory<

None. The barriers were in place before humans knew how to cross space. Humans did not build the barrier.

>human commonwealth / memory<

Hundreds of worlds linked together by wormhole. Worlds of land and water and atmosphere, warm worlds with clear empty skies. Worlds that would support Prime life. So many worlds that the terrible pressure and conflict between immotile territories would end immediately if they were to become available to Primes.

>wormholes / memory<

Distortions of spacetime that could reduce distance to no length at all. They could be made large or small. The ultimate method of transport. The ultimate method of communication; with immotile units across interplanetary and interstellar space linked through wormholes there would never be divergence. With wormholes, MorningLightMountain could extend itself across the galaxy, with units occupying every star system. It would never die, never be challenged from such supremacy.

>wormhole construction / explain<

I don’t know the technical details of creating exotic matter, but the equations are fundamental.

>commonwealth location / memory<

Right in the core of knowledge that was the remnants of the Gralmond university astronomer Dudley Bose, the name, spectral type, and stellar coordinate of every Commonwealth star glimmered like a precious jewel.

NINETEEN

With its uncomfortably close G1 sun blazing down through a heat-bleached sky, the temperature along the entire one-hundred-fifty-kilometer length of Venice Coast rose uncompromisingly during the day. It didn’t help that the beautiful island city was only just outside what was technically Anacona’s northern polar region, and the planet was also approaching the middle of summer. This mix of geography and calendar was currently giving the city over sixteen hours of intense sunlight every day. In deep winter, of course, the pattern would be reversed, and the sun would only be visible for about six hours a day. Even then the climate would cool down to something like Earth’s Mediterranean temperatures. Anacona’s proximity to its primary star made the planet uninhabitable from the equator out to fifty degrees latitude north and south, most of which was a rocky desert.

From space, Anacona had the same kind of symmetrical banded appearance as a gas giant, with its broad expanse of coffee-colored sands wrapped around the center, and skirted with black and auburn mountain ranges. The planet had kicked off a large, and ongoing, debate among Commonwealth planetologists about how climate could affect topography, or if the symmetry was just a transient tectonic fluke. For it wasn’t just the central regions that were regular; beyond the peaks that bounded each side of the desert, the cornflower-blue waters of annular seas sparked in the strong sun to the north and the south. Both the polar zones boasted continents, although the southern one was smaller, and their coastlines were completely dissimilar. They did share an abundance of emerald vegetation, with rainforests and grasslands nurtured by the heat and daily rains. Both seas shunted long trails of swan-white cloud across the continents where they formed permanent slow-spinning spiral whirls over the actual poles.

The sea gave Venice Coast an indecent humidity. By midafternoon, the siesta was well under way, hustling tourists and inhabitants alike off the streets. Shops shut for four or five hours at a time, waiting until evening and a low golden sun before they opened their doors again. People took long rests in the shaded courtyard gardens to be found at the center of every block. The only service that carried on regardless was the monorail, which linked every district along the narrow city’s hundred-fifty-kilometer length. Even most of the gondolas, water taxis, and little supply boats that swarmed the canals tied up at some quay or other, bobbing about empty while their skippers lounged around in the bars.

It was these long people-less interludes every day that gave Paula Myo her greatest cause for concern. The surveillance operation would be much better served by crowds and activity providing cover for the Agency’s operatives. As it was they had to linger over long meals and drinks as they sat on the verandas of neighboring cafés and restaurants. It was proving a popular duty. Paula disapproved, they were likely to grow lax during such leisurely episodes.

The center of their attention was the Nystol Gallery, a big three-story canal-side building in the Cesena district that specialized in EK art, electrokinetic machines with hundreds or even thousands of moving parts. Paula had reviewed the gallery’s catalogue, going virtual through the TSI construct, where she marveled as every non-art-lover did at the striking, pointless fusion of art and machine; some were like working sculptures of animals, aliens, and mythical creatures, their micro-gears and pistons running through biological functions with cheeky mimicry, while others were random collections of mechanical components assembled in bizarre asymmetric patterns, that shouldn’t work, yet somehow managed to buzz, whir, rotate, and wobble about with jerky elegance; still others were variants on the old domino relay, with modules of fire, water, air, rubber, protoplasm, and ordinary misapplied components from domestic or industrial machines, all of them reacting against each other, activating the next piece, then somehow resetting themselves in an impossible perpetual motion.

The Nystol was a good cover for its owner, a Mr. Valtare Rigin, whose other specialist enterprise was black-market armaments. For a start, Venice Coast was not the kind of city where such activities took place. It had no industry other than art and fishing and boats and tourism. There had been no grand civic cultural plan back when it started in 2200, no desire to rival the illustrious ancient urban areas of Earth or the dynamic wealth-hungry new cities vying for funds and entrepreneurs that were springing up across phase two space. This was built on a dream and a prayer, starting on a sandy spit called Prato near the center of an eight-hundred-kilometer stretch of swampy coastline on the Calitri continent that was protected to seaward by meandering lines of small marshy islands. Local marine life attracted several families who’d arrived from Italy and were already tiring of the new planet’s capital, San Marino. The waters were thriving with a variety of edible fish eminently suitable to Italian cuisine. Several of the families who settled on the spit were from old Venice, so that boating culture was there right from the start.

Huge dredgers imported from the mega shipyards on Verona scooped out big channels for the fishing boats, then began clearing smaller channels around Prato. More substantial houses started getting built on the higher, reclaimed land, with little canals dug directly to them so the boats could have easy access. That was when the growing town’s inhabitants realized the potential of what they had. The original spit began to expand as the newly dredged swamp silt was piled up on the east and west sides. After a couple of years Prato had become an elongated island with a wide clear lagoon separating it from the main coast where the swamp had once been; with a single causeway for the railway lines. It set the pattern for the future.

For a hundred eighty years the dredgers and constructionbots just kept on going. The long island twisted sinuously many times to keep more or less parallel to the contours of the coast, with districts continually added to both ends. Architects, artisans, and designers collaborated with City Hall to keep their new commissions Italianate in nature, preserving and amplifying the water-bound city’s character. It became fashionable for Grand Families and Intersolar Dynasties and the individual superwealthy to own a villa somewhere along Venice Coast. The thousands of offshore islands proved even more lucrative real estate.

The Cesena district where the Nystol Gallery was situated lay thirty kilometers east of Prato, three stops on the express monorail. After four days, Paula knew it intimately, every street, canal, bridge, covered alleyway, and square. Her hotel was seven and a half minutes’ walk from the local monorail station, with five bridges over the canals; three of carved stone, one wood, and one metal. The Nystol was four and a half minutes, and three bridges; while the local police station was a mere two minutes, with four bridges in the way. She’d arrived at Venice Coast with a team of eight from her office, supplemented by a further five from technical support, and thirty officers from the tactical assault division. Twelve of Anacona’s senior detectives had been loaned to her by the planet’s eager Interior Minister, providing invaluable assistance down on the narrow waterways and maze of streets where it was really needed. Their presence was an indicator of how much importance governments placed on the new Commonwealth Planetary Security Agency, the quiet twin of the Commonwealth Starflight Agency.

With the launch of the scoutships back to Dyson Alpha public interest had been focused solely on the Starflight Agency. Now the Planetary Security Agency was receiving fifty-five percent of the overall budget. For someone who’d scraped in on a pitiful fifty-eight percent of the Intersolar vote, President Doi was strangely forceful when it came to providing funds for the new Agency. There was talk on the unisphere news shows that income tax was going to have to be raised to pay for the vastly expanded facilities.

Greater resources should have helped ease the transition for Paula. She didn’t like it at all; the Agency wasn’t the Directorate she’d joined, even if reorganization had brought her more money and a bigger staff. That staff now unfortunately included Alic Hogan, her new deputy, who Columbia had appointed from his own legal department. If ever there was a political placeman, it was Hogan. His constant requests for full briefings from all the Investigators, and insistence that all procedures were conducted by the book, were causing a lot of resentment in the Paris office. He knew very little about running a case, and everything about watching over people’s shoulders.

Over the last few months she’d begun to wonder if she was becoming conservative in her old age, hating change simply because it was change; refusing to acknowledge that society was altering around her. It surprised her, because if nothing else she considered herself a realist. Police forces always adapted to keep pace with the civilization in which they maintained order. Although more likely it was the increasing degree of political control exerted over Agency operatives that made her uncomfortable. She resented the notion that limits might be imposed over her own work; after so many years served to reach a virtually semiautonomous position it would be awful to be hauled back into the general accounting system.

“Like everyone else.”

“Excuse me?” Tarlo asked.

Paula gave her deputy a mildly irritated smile; she hadn’t realized she’d spoken out loud. “Nothing. Thinking aloud.”

“Sure,” Tarlo said, and returned to the menu.

His California attitude was something Paula could finally appreciate here. Tarlo merged perfectly into Venice Coast’s laid-back lifestyle. The two of them were sitting at a café table, under a broad parasol by the side of the Clade canal. Three hundred meters away, on the opposite side, was the back of the Nystol Gallery. Its sheer red-brick wall rose vertically out of the placid water, with only a single loading door on the lower floor, a meter or so above the black tide line; a couple of wooden mooring posts stood on either side of it, their white and blue stripes sun-scorched to near invisibility. Wide, stone-rimmed windows marked out the second and third floors, below an overhanging roof of red clay tiles. A row of thick semiorganic precipitator leaves were draped just below the guttering, as if some giant vine were growing out of the rafters. Fresh water was an expensive commodity in Venice Coast, by themselves the sieve wells drilled through the basement of most blocks couldn’t support the huge demand of the residents.

Paula’s seat was positioned so she faced the target building, while Tarlo was at right angles to her, giving him a view along the canal. In his white cap and loose orange and black linen shirt he seemed immune to the heat. Paula took off her suit jacket and hung it on the back of the chair before sitting down; her white blouse was clinging to her skin. Her wig was hot, she could feel the sweat pricking her brow, but she resisted the impulse to shift it around. A waiter from the café scowled at them from his seat just inside the doorway. When it was clear they weren’t going to go away, he sauntered over.

“Ah, uno, aqua, minerale, er natu—” Paula began.

The waiter gave her a pitying sigh. “Still or sparkling?”

“Oh. Still, please, chilled and with ice.” The Venice Coast waiters were normally contemptuous of anyone who couldn’t speak even a smattering of Italian.

Tarlo asked for a nonalcoholic beer and a bowl of smoked rasol nuts.

Both of them received a further look of utter derision before the waiter slumped his shoulders and walked back inside.

“Always feels good to blend right on in there,” Tarlo said. He put his sandaled feet up on the rusting iron railing that guarded the edge of the granite-cobbled pavement from the canal.

Paula checked her timer. “We’ll order more drinks in half an hour, then a snack after that. I’d like to have at least two hours here.”

“Boss, we have got the whole place covered by sensors, you know. You can’t get a carrier pigeon in there without us zapping it.”

“I know. Target review is important to me. I need to get a feel for the op.”

“Yeah.” Tarlo grinned. “So you keep telling me.”

If one good thing had come out of the Directorate becoming the Security Agency, it was the expanded intelligence base. For once, the news of Valtare Rigin purchasing a number of sophisticated and very restricted items of technology hadn’t come from any of Paula’s deep assets. Instead, Anacona’s special criminal bureau had been running a monitoring operation with local manufacturers who made dual use products. They ran financial checks on an industrial supply company that purchased some molecular resonance stabilizers with a very high power rating, the kind that could be used in large force field generators. It turned out the supply company was a shell, with its credit supplied from a onetime bank account on StLincoln.

The bureau tracked the shipment, which was routed through a number of blind drops, until a courier picked it up and delivered it to the gallery. That was when they called the Agency in.

Observation, backtracking, and communications monitors had shown them Rigin was acquiring a lot of dual use components. There were no actual weapons, but the pattern fitted one of Adam Elvin’s shipment operations exactly.

“He picked a good cover,” Paula said as she sipped her mineral water. “I’ll bet you Rigin’s lawyer claims that the components make up one of his EK works.”

“So why did he need to acquire them like this?”

Paula smiled in the shade of the parasol as a light breeze washed off the canal. “Radical art, I expect.”

“You reckon he’s going to ship it out all at once?”

“Most likely. The risk was in putting the items together. Now he’s exporting, it’ll be a couple of big crates to a legitimate destination.”

“Right out the back door, huh?”

“Yes.” From behind her big sunglasses, Paula gazed at the solid gray-painted wood of the gallery’s loading door, visualizing the cargo boat tying up beside it, the containers being lowered onto the deck. They’d do it in the middle of the day, of course. A simple honest shipment, nothing to hide. Wherever it went—out to the docks that fronted the Acri district where the big seagoing ships put in, or the cargo yard at the Prato monorail station—she’d follow it. Somewhere down the line, Bradley Johansson would be waiting.

Adam Elvin leaned back against the purple cord cushions in the back of the gondola as it slid gracefully along the narrow canal. It was one of the little waterways that zigzagged around large blocks, connecting and crossing the larger canals. The side walls were high here, slimed with weed and dirt. Water slapped against the cracked brickwork, slowly eroding the mortar—there were entire sections that had been repaired with new bricks and hard cement, looking totally out of place. Bridges curved overhead like miniature tunnels. Each block had a row of near-identical blank wooden doors a meter above the tide line, fastened by heavy iron bolts. They passed several that were open, with little cargo boats tied up outside, their crew manhandling crates and boxes into the dark interiors.

Every delivery in Venice Coast was by boat, adding to the cost of living here. Adam hadn’t appreciated that before he came, that the only transport in each district was either walking or boat. The monorail took you between districts, but that was all.

They turned out onto the famous Rovigo canal, one of the major channels through the Cesena district. The venturi trees lined both sides; planted a century ago their trunks resembled gnarled copper pillars reaching over twenty-five meters high, with arched boughs that trailed long strands of yellow-gold leaves as thin as tissue. Each one had its own sieve well that had been drilled under the pavement into the boggy subsoil, allowing the roots to suck up fresh water. Adam was lucky enough to be visiting during the fortnight they were in bloom. Each branch ended in a triune of brilliant amethyst ruff flowers as big as footballs. Already, though, petals were beginning to fade and fall, snowing onto the heads of delighted gondola tourists like scented confetti.

Adam smiled appreciatively as the gondolier slowed down, allowing him to soak up the sight and smell of the wonderful native trees. The boutiques and galleries on either side of the Rovigo were among the more exclusive in Venice Coast, with dark glass windows illustrating single examples of their expensive prestige products. Not far away, the strange and wonderful twisted neo-Gothic spire of StPeter’s Cathedral towered above the city’s red tile roofs like a pre-Commonwealth silver space rocket.

The Rovigo ended at a junction with the Clade canal. They waited between the last of the venturi trees for a big glass-topped, air-conditioned tourist bus boat to chug past. The wash slapped at the gondola, much to the gondolier’s disgust; half of his conversation during the trip had been a diatribe against any boat that had an engine. Adam looked along the Clade, seeing the broad waterway slowly curving away from him, with the back of the Nystol Gallery just visible. There were only about ten other boats on this section, a couple of gondolas, some cargo boats, a taxi; the pavement along the side was equally empty, with a few tourists wandering along. Even the cafés were almost deserted—

“Stop!” Adam hissed at the gondolier.

The man looked back at him in surprise, the pole poised ready to push them out into the Clade now the water bus had passed. “Is clear now,” he complained.

“Go back. Do not go out onto the Clade. Understand? Do not take me out there. Take me back to the monorail station.” He produced a thick roll of notes from his pocket, and peeled off over a hundred Anacona dollars.

The gondolier’s face brightened at the sight of the money. “Sure. Okay. You’re the captain, I’m just the engine room.” He changed the angle of the pole, and slid it into the muddy water. The gondola’s prow slowly came around, and they began to head back down the Rovigo. A multitude of crispy dry violet petals continued to drift down over Adam’s clothes as they retreated at a speed that was barely above walking pace. He refused to look around. That would be a stupid weakness. He knew exactly who he’d seen sitting there outside the café. After all this time he could recognize Chief Investigator Myo’s profile from almost any angle and distance. She was wearing a blond wig, and large sunglasses, but that couldn’t disguise her from him. Her posture, her gestures. That suit! Who the hell else would wear a business suit in the middle of Venice Coast’s siesta?

His limbs were starting to shake as he realized how close he’d come to the end of … well, everything. He must have just used up every scrap of luck from the rest of his lifetime. If he’d been looking the other way … If Myo hadn’t been on duty at this time of day … He’d undergone cellular reprofiling, of course, giving himself a new image, a drawn face with dark skin. But he knew that wouldn’t have worked with the Chief Investigator. She would know him as easily as he knew her. They could never hide from each other.

....

He walked into the Nystol Gallery by the front door, knowing the Agency team would have his image on record. It didn’t bother him.

The reception hall had an arching roof of white-painted brick, and a flagstone floor. Before being converted into a gallery, the building had been a storage warehouse, which made it an ideal place to house EK pieces. The receptionist sat at a desk in front of a smoked-glass doorway that led into the gallery’s display chambers. She was staggeringly pretty, with a sylph body, Nordic white skin and red-gold hair that hung halfway down her back. Her flimsy brown and emerald dress belonged on a couture house’s runway. She smiled automatically at him, which deepened to mildly flirtatious as he walked over. “Hi, can I help you?”

“No.” He shot her through the temple with a microdart from his arm dispenser. Its n-pulse locked her muscles solid, an instant rigor mortis, holding her upright in her seat. Anyone peering in from the street would see her behind the desk as usual.

His e-butler opened a channel to the desk’s array. A brief software battle ensued as he took control of the building’s electronics network. As it progressed, the weapons and defense systems wetwired into his body powered up, bringing him to full combat status. He disconnected the gallery’s network from the planetary cybersphere, then deactivated all the internal alarms. The front door was locked. Where possible, fire doors were silently sealed, compartmentalizing the gallery. Sensors fed directly into his virtual vision, showing him the location of several people, although he knew there were at least three rooms without sensors.

The first chamber housed a three-meter-high EK gryphon, with a body made from thin sheets of jewel-encrusted brass that moved with fluid grace as they were manipulated from within by hundreds of small cogs and micro-pistons. It was as if Leonardo da Vinci had animated a sculpture with a difference engine. An old couple were walking around it, making admiring noises as they pointed out features to each other. He shot both of them with an ion bolt. The gryphon cooed loudly as he moved into the second chamber.

On the second floor, the fifth chamber had a single strip of machinery running its entire length, each component coming from the same aircraft, and broken in some way so instead of the smooth movement associated with the aerospace industry they jerked around like a damaged bird when power was applied. Ripples of motion ran up and down the strip, each one different to the last. A gallery guide was walking along the side of the piece, with a frown on his face as he came to investigate the strange sounds that had burst out of the fourth chamber.

The ion bolt vaporized the top of his skull. Blood-steam misted the workings of a wing flap electrohydraulic activator, slowing its motion. Loud rattling sounds began to issue up and down the whole length of the EK piece as its synchronization was thrown off and stresses built up.

He went up to the third floor. Valtare Rigin’s office was the second door along the hallway. Like the chambers below, it had a vaulting brickwork ceiling. At the far end, an arched window gave a splendid view out over the Cesena district, with StPeter’s mirror-chrome spire framed almost dead center. Rigin looked up in surprise from behind his desk, where he’d been struggling with his crashed network interface. “Who the hell are you?”

“You are Valtare Rigin?”

Rigin smiled thinly. “Roberto,” he called quietly.

A large black leather couch had been placed on the left side of the door, so it would remain unseen by anyone who entered the office until they were well inside the room. He had of course sensed the human male sitting on it. The man, presumably Roberto, who was now lifting his seven-foot-high frame onto his very large feet.

He brought his left arm up and fired an ion pulse straight through the door at the big human’s head.

Roberto, as a good bodyguard, was wearing a light armor frame below his expensive hand-tailored suit, which wrapped him in a deflector field. The ion bolt sizzled loudly as it bounced off into the brickwork. Carbonized clay puffed out of the strike point. Roberto slammed both hands into the door, which ripped off its hinges.

He barely noticed the impact as the door crashed against him. His arm sliced around hard, smashing three-inch-thick hardwood into splinter shrapnel.

Roberto grunted in surprise, and went for the weapon in his shoulder holster in a slick high-speed motion only available to those with a nervous system wetwired for accelerated response time. The bulky mag-a pistol that he pulled out fired two depleted-uranium rounds at the intruder, whose sparkling force field halted both of them. That was the only chance Roberto got.

He launched himself straight at the big man, right leg swinging up and around to kick the ribs. Roberto shrieked as the blow punched clean through the armor frame. Three ribs broke and pushed inward, puncturing his lungs.

The bodyguard ignored the pain and countered with a left twist, his right arm coming around flat, aimed for the intruder’s neck, armor frame’s e-dump function on and eager to wreck the other’s force field. Energy flared from the impact like a fusion bloom, the blinding discharge flinging off slivers of static that clawed at both figures as they grounded out. But the e-dump never got anywhere near overloading the force field. A fist like the front end of an express train crashed into Roberto’s side, sending him flying backward through the air to smack into the curving brickwork. Trailers of blood smeared the white paint as he slithered down limply to the polished wooden floorboards.

He leaped gracefully across the intervening distance, one heel coming down on Roberto’s leg. The knee joint snapped with a sickening crunch under his heel. Roberto threw up as hands grasped the lapels on his ruined suit, hauling him to his feet. It was difficult for Roberto to focus through the daze of pain, but he just managed to squint at the intruder’s frighteningly emotionless features. Then the head butt caved in the front of Roberto’s face, pushing several splintered fragments of bone from the fractured skull directly into his brain.

He dropped the dead bodyguard, and turned to face the terrified man behind the desk. “You are Valtare Rigin?”

“Yes.” Rigin crossed himself, his eyes watering as he waited to die.

“I do not have time to torture information from you. If you do not cooperate, I will destroy your memorycell insert when I kill your body; then we will infiltrate your re-life clinic and erase your secure store. You will be genuinely dead. We do have the capability to do this. Do you believe me?” Rigin nodded frantically. “Holy Mother of God, who are you?” His eyes flicked to the broken corpse of his bodyguard. “How did you …?”

“The location of the equipment you are buying for Adam Elvin?”

“I … That wasn’t the name he gave me, but everything for the deal I’m putting together right now is in the second storeroom at the end of the hallway. All of it, I swear.”

“Give me the file containing the list of components and the methods of payment to your encrypted bank accounts. I also want the export route.” He ordered his e-butler to open a channel to the terrified arms merchant. Information flowed into his cache. The ion bolt blew a wide hole through Rigin’s chest. He hurried over to the corpse and bent down. A single slender harmonic blade slid out from underneath his right index finger, and he quickly cut through the neck to pull out a bloody glob of flesh and bone that contained all of Rigin’s inserts.

With the arms merchant’s memorycell safe in his pocket, he walked down the hallway to the second storeroom. A single kick shattered the reinforced polytanium door. There were three crates in the windowless room, all unsealed, with packaging foam scattered around them. He went over to the first, checked to see that it did contain high-technology items, then dropped a superthermal demolition charge in.

To exit the gallery he went back to Rigin’s office. He stood in front of the window and activated a focused disrupter field. The entire window of toughened carbonglass shattered before him, its cascade of shards twinkling in the brilliant sunlight as they flew outward. He followed them, sailing through the warm outside air in a perfect swan dive to land cleanly in the Clade canal with a small splash. Underwater, he put his feet together and kept his arms by his side. A ripple of motion swept down his body, and he powered forward with the ease of a dolphin through the muddy water, his enhanced senses showing him the canal walls on either side and the boats above.

The superthermal charge exploded behind him.

....

His training had been hard. Not just physically, Kazimir had expected that, but mentally, too. The things he’d had to learn! The Commonwealth’s history, its current affairs, the multitude of planets and their accompanying cultures, technology, programs, endless programs, and how they managed his new inserts. There had been so many times over the last two years when he just wanted to shout: “I quit!” at Stig and his other tormentor-tutors. But the thought of Bruce stayed with him through all those months spent moving between the secret clan villages of the Dessault Mountains; he competed against the memory, thinking how Bruce would never quit, never turn tail.

Now, finally, Kazimir stood on Santa Monica’s sandy beach facing the water as the morning sun rose slowly behind Los Angeles, and admitted it had all been worthwhile. A pleasant wind blew in off the Pacific Ocean, ruffling the waves, while the first limousines and coupes of the morning’s commuter traffic slid silently and cleanly along the Pacific Coast Highway. To his left was the Santa Monica pier, extending a kilometer out into the ocean; its ancient original structure, a platform of wood and metal and concrete, gradually blended into the first of the three extensions that had been grafted onto it during its four centuries’ lifetime. Out to sea, the newer components of sicarbon and glass and hyperfilament girders had been arranged in mockorganic forms, sometimes discreet, sometimes deliberately garish, especially where the funfair rides were stationed along the east side.

He’d been so tempted to walk along it yesterday when he arrived, maybe go on a couple of the rides. Fit the profile of a visiting tourist mark. After all, that’s what he genuinely was. It was a testament to Stig’s training that he resisted—though he suspected had Bruce been here with him they would have sneaked off and done it, for old times’ sake.

Instead he’d done what he was supposed to. Registered at the hotel behind the Third Street Promenade with its smart ancient shops that pulled in locals as well as visitors. Scouted the area, acquainting himself with the grid of streets. Noted access to public transport points, for escape. Which hotel lobbies were open, and the building’s exits. Position of civic buildings. Rough timings for police patrol cars on the main roads. Location of public observation anticrime sensors.

The reconnaissance had given him a good feel for the city, and he’d been impressed with what he saw, its wealth, neatness, and style. He’d been on a few Commonwealth worlds now, enough that he wasn’t completely intimidated by urban areas that covered hundreds of square kilometers. But this particular part of Los Angeles had threatened to undo all that acclimatization. He hadn’t been prepared for how shiny and clean it all was; after all, most of the cities on the new worlds had large districts that were crumbling into ghetto status. Here, where age had every chance to pour entropy and decay into entire neighborhoods, the residents had resisted. Money helped, of course, and there was plenty of it residing among the condos fronting Ocean Avenue and the exclusive houses between San Vicenti Boulevard and Montana Avenue, but there was more to it than that. It was as if Santa Monica had discovered how to continually rejuvenate itself just like the humans who built and lived in it. For all its age, it had a buoyant vivacious atmosphere, making it a fun and friendly place to be. Surprisingly, Kazimir thought he might actually be able to live here—if he was forced to live anywhere on Earth, that is.

Big city-owned tractorbots were slowly grinding their way along the beach just above the water, fluffing up the dense sand and leveling it ready for the day. Cyclists, joggers, power walkers, ordinary walkers, dog walkers, skaters, pedcrawlers, and n-scoots were starting to appear on the path that wound along the back of the beach. Kazimir was getting used to Commonwealth citizens and their eternal quest for looks and fitness, but the highest concentration of obsessive personalities surely had to be on Earth. Everyone on the path was dressed in high-fashion sportswear, no matter what age, from mid-twenties up to approaching-rejuve-fifty. It was an effort for him not to smile at them as they sweated their way along, faces intent and frowning.

As he watched them idly, he realized how few young people were using the path. But then that was true of Earth in general. The number of children he’d seen here so far was very small.

One of the early morning walkers left the path and headed over the sand toward him. It was an exceptionally tall man in his thirties, with blond hair that under the Californian sunlight was almost pure white. In contrast his eyes were very dark, making his face stand out rather than appear classically attractive. He was wearing a simple white V-necked jersey, knee-length shorts, and midnight-black trainers.

“Kazimir McFoster, I presume?” He put his hand out. There was no hesitancy, no caution that he might have got the wrong person.

“Yes.” It took every piece of self-control for Kazimir not to stammer or gawp incredulously. “You’re Bradley Johansson?”

“Were you expecting someone else?”

“About half the cops on the planet.”

Bradley nodded appreciatively. “Thank you for coming.”

“Thank you for giving me the chance. It’s still kind of hard to believe you’re real. Alive, I mean. I spent so many years learning what you’ve done for us, the stand you took, what it cost you.” He waved an arm at the city above the cliff. “It’s an outrage they don’t believe you.”

“Let’s walk,” Bradley said. “We ought to try and blend in.”

Kazimir wasn’t sure if he’d offended the great man. More likely he’d simply bored him. How many times must Bradley have heard something similar from stupid, awestruck youngsters? “Sure.”

“I always forget what a shock places like this are for people who grew up in the clans back on Far Away. How are you coping?” Bradley asked.

“Okay, I guess. I’m very conscious of trying to appear blasé about everything.”

“That’s good. When you stop making the effort you’ll be taking it all in your stride, everything balances out. So now that you’ve seen the Commonwealth, or some of it, what do you think? Are we right trying to save it?”

“Even if it wasn’t worth saving, we are. People, I mean. Human beings, our race.”

Bradley smiled out across the ocean, taking a deep breath of the fresh breeze. “Right or wrong.” He shrugged. “Sorry, that’s a misquote from before your time. Before mine, too, actually. So you think it is worth saving, then?”

“Yes. It’s not perfect. I think they could have done a lot better with all the knowledge and resources they have at their disposal. So many things are hard for people, when they don’t need to be.”

“Ah, an idealist.” Bradley laughed softly. “Try not to let Adam corrupt you too much about what shape society should take when we’re victorious. He’s a disgraceful old revolutionary rogue. Very helpful, though.”

“What does he do?”

“You’ll find out when you meet him. He’s going to take over from Stig now.”

Kazimir stopped; they were still three hundred meters from the pier. People were wandering down onto the beach from the bridge road that connected it with the land. A whole section just in front of him had been roped off; a city lifeguard stood by the entrance gate. There was nobody inside it.

“Do you know who that’s for?” Bradley asked.

“No.”

“It’s for children, so they can enjoy the beach together without having to share it with a whole bunch of adults hanging around spoiling it for them. They’re getting to be a rare commodity on Earth these days. At least for the middle classes; who can’t really afford to have them anymore. Though they still do, of course, that’s human nature for you. It never ceases to amaze me what we’ll go through, the sacrifices we’ll make, so our kids can enjoy their childhood. That’s the one part of life which our technology can never reproduce; yet after porn it’s the most popular TSI genre. I guess none of us really forget the wonder and joy which that innocence brought us. Psychologists always say we crave the sanctuary of the womb—bunch of overeducated idiots, if you ask me. This is what we actually want. Times when every day is fresh and exciting, and the only worry is if the ice cream is going to last. It doesn’t understand that, you know?”

“The Starflyer?”

“Yes. For all its intelligence—and it is very clever, Kazimir—it cannot grasp this part of us. It has never understood how important our children are to us, the bond of love and adoration which exists between us. Partly because its life cycle doesn’t include offspring in our fashion, but mainly because it regards them with contempt. It believes they cannot affect it, therefore it ignores them. I seriously believe that could be its downfall: our nature. The one thing it believes it controls because it does comprehend our greed and our fear. But we’re more than that, Kazimir, we are more complex than it thinks.”

“I’ll do whatever I can to help. You know that, sir.”

“I do. You’ve shown your loyalty to our cause many times.”

“You mentioned that this Adam person will take over from Stig. Does that mean I passed?”

Bradley turned back from the ocean to give Kazimir a broad urbane smile. “Passed? Passed what?”

“The test. Your approval, sir.”

Bradley draped a long arm around Kazimir’s shoulder, and urged him on around the back of the roped-off area. “Believe me, my dear boy, if I hadn’t approved of you, you’d still be standing on the beach wondering where the hell I’d got to. Or worse.”

Kazimir glanced around, seeing the flash of judgment in the old man’s eyes. It was more disturbing than any diatribe of threats and sneering.

“I need the strongest the clans can produce for the task ahead,” Bradley said. “You know that, don’t you, Kazimir? You will be asked to do many unpleasant things. If I deem it necessary, I will ask you to die so that we can grant Far Away its revenge.”

Despite the moist air blowing in off the ocean, Kazimir’s mouth was dry. “I know.”

Bradley’s hand squeezed strongly. “I don’t feel guilty. What I went through, everything I endured as that monster’s slave, left me with too much determination to feel that weak. Once this is over, I expect I will grieve for everything we have done, for the lives we have sacrificed. But it will be worth it, for we will be truly free again.”

“What was it like, sir? What did the Starflyer look like?”

“I don’t remember.” Bradley shook his head, sorrow tainting his voice. “Not anymore. The Silfen took that away when they cured me. I suppose they had their reasons.” The regret faded from his face. “When this is over, you should try walking the paths they’ve built between worlds. It’s an extraordinary galaxy out there, Kazimir.”

“Yeah. I’d like that.”

Bradley stuck his hand out. “Good-bye, Kazimir. Thank you again for the opportunity to meet you. I consider myself honored that you and your kin continue to sustain the cause.”

Kazimir shook the hand enthusiastically, smiled a fraction nervously, and went back down the beach. Bradley watched him go for a few moments, then went up the set of broad concrete stairs at the side of the pier. He walked back along Ocean Avenue, through the narrow strip of lush greenery that was Palisades Park with its centuries-old eucalyptus trees and ornate flower beds. Gardenbots were patrolling the plants, snipping off dead flowers and trimming any errant shoots that threatened symmetry; water droplets glistened on the tough grass from the predawn irrigation sprinkling. On the other side of the broad street the bold geometrical skyline of condos presented their tiers of perfectly parallel balconies to the beach far below. Right in the middle of the gleaming new architecture their skyline took a sudden dip down, allowing the sunlight to shine on a small 1930s hotel, The Georgian, with its art deco facade painted eggshell-blue. Various brass plaques outside proclaimed the companies and civic authorities that had provided funds down the centuries to preserve the building, easily the oldest in the city. It had a raised concrete veranda along the front, with several tables underneath a yellow and pink striped awning. Adam Elvin was sitting at one, eating his breakfast as he looked out across the park and ocean beyond. Bradley went up the steps and joined him.

“So what’s he like?” Adam asked.

“Depressingly young, trustworthy and honest, and hugely loyal to the cause.”

“Great, another fanatic robot. Just what I need.”

“He’s smart. You’ll get along fine. By the way, I like your new face. Dignified, yet with a hint of street fighter in the past. Very you.”

Adam grunted dismissively.

A waiter arrived and asked what Bradley wanted.

“Same as my friend, please.” Bradley indicated the plate of pancakes, bacon, and syrup that Adam was rapidly demolishing. “With a glass of fresh orange and passionfruit juice, and some English breakfast tea, thank you.”

“Yes, sir.” The waiter smiled and went back inside.

Bradley tried to place the accent—one of the Baltic worlds in phase two space? The waiter would be an offworlder on a service company contract, as were nearly all human staff on Earth nowadays. After all, Earth natives would need much better paying jobs so they could afford to live on their planet.

“So, this must be quite the experience for you,” Bradley said. “The last socialist in the universe having his first power breakfast in LA.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“What the hell happened on Venice Coast?”

Adam put his fork down, and dabbed at his lips with a linen napkin. “I have no idea. It’s only sheer luck that I’m not in some basement at the Security Agency right now, having my memories read. Christ, she was fifty meters away, Bradley. I could have whispered hello to her. It’s never been that close before. Never. Why couldn’t you warn me? Your cover has always been superb, it’s one of the reasons I keep doing this for you.”

“I don’t know. My usual … source … hasn’t been in contact for some time. I find that rather disturbing; it’s not someone who could easily be eliminated from Commonwealth life.”

“The Starflyer got rid of them?”

“You say that with so much skepticism, even now. But no, if it was that powerful, I would be dead and the cause would be lost.”

“Don’t be so quick to class me in there with the skeptical brigade. Remember what happened to poor old Rigin two days after I dodged Paula Myo? That was a goddamn superthermal charge which took out the Nystol Gallery. Now much as I despise and distrust our government, I don’t see them doing that. There were fifteen bodydeaths in the neighboring buildings when the gallery blew up. This was somebody else.”

“It’s not like the Starflyer to be so public,” Bradley said. “What would be the point? The shipment was compromised the moment the Agency discovered it. We were never going to receive those components.”

“You told me its plans were reaching the last stage. Maybe it wanted to make sure we weren’t going to get hold of those components. It can’t risk us screwing it now.”

Bradley smiled at the waiter as he reappeared with the glass of juice and a pot of tea. “I’m glad it was you who suggested that, it adds credibility—from your point of view,” he told Adam. “I’ve been considering the possibility ever since it happened. You have a lot of contacts with the mercenary agents, do any of them know anything about the man who attacked the gallery?”

“No, there isn’t even a rumor about him. Whoever he was, the armament systems he must have had wetwired in were very sophisticated. Even I would have trouble acquiring those kinds of systems for you; they’re all cutting-edge stuff, governments get very edgy about who they’re sold to. Someone put a lot of effort into the operation.”

“If it really is the Starflyer becoming more overt, it’s a disturbing development. We have a lot of matériel to get to Far Away if I am to bring about the planet’s revenge. With her new expanded Agency, Paula Myo is becoming unpleasantly efficient at uncovering and halting our shipments. We can’t afford to get hit from two different directions at once. And I can see the time coming when every piece of cargo for Far Away will be stopped and examined on Boongate.” He paused to pour some tea out. “As I remember, we did discuss blockade running once before.”

“As an emergency option.”

“Given our current situation, I believe a small amount of forward planning in that direction might be appropriate at this time.”

“Damnit. Okay, I’ll look into it.”

“Thank you. I have two other small requests for you.”

“Yeah?”

“The data we’re expecting from Mars, I don’t want it routed to Far Away via the unisphere. There are too many options for interception and corruption, especially if the Starflyer is monitoring us.”

“All right, that’s easy enough. We’ll load it onto a memorycell and use a courier, take it through physically.”

“Fine. Someone like Kazimir, for example.”

“Let’s just see how he works out on an ordinary run first, shall we? What’s your second problem?”

“I’ve been trying to talk to Wilson Kime. It’s not easy. He’s well guarded, physically and electronically.”

“He’s on the Conway. They should be at Dyson Alpha by now.”

“Nonetheless, when he returns, I would appreciate contacting him somehow.”

“What exactly do you want to talk to him about? I assumed you consider him to be a Starflyer agent.”

“No, I don’t believe he is; that’s why I want to try and convert him.”

Adam had to swallow his coffee quickly before he choked on it. “Convert Commander Kime? The head of the Starflight Agency? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Fortune favors the brave.”

“Yeah, the brave, not the insane.”

“I’ve watched him in interviews. He knows something wasn’t right about losing Bose and Verbeke. That gives us an opening.”

“An opening for what?”

“To expose the Starflyer. Kime should be able to find the evidence of its treachery on board the Second Chance.”

“What treachery?”

“The Second Chance switched the barrier off, obviously.”

“It couldn’t have. We don’t even begin to understand the physics behind the barrier. God, man, didn’t you access the images of the Dark Fortress?”

“Yes. But humans didn’t switch the barrier off, the Starflyer did.”

“How the hell did it know how to do that?”

“It is old. It has traveled a long way. I assume the Dyson Pair are a part of its history.”

“You and your assumptions. Did its species put up the barrier?”

“I don’t know, Adam. I wish I did. I wish I knew what it was doing to us. And why. But I don’t. All I can do is try and block its schemes, and warn people.”

“People like Kime.”

“Yes.”

“Why? I mean of all the people you could try to convince, why Kime?”

“Because of his position. He can order another review of the Second Chance data. I’ve gone over everything CST released a dozen times, but all they’ve ever given to the media are the visual recordings. I need the ship’s system logs.”

“What do you think is there?”

“Proof that Second Chance switched off the barrier. Proof that losing Bose and Verbeke was no accident. Kime knows something is not right. He’s ready to believe, he just needs a little nudge in the right direction.”

“CST has been over every byte from the flight a dozen times, not to mention all the media companies and government departments. It’s been analyzed by the best experts in the Commonwealth. They found nothing. No irregularities. No anomalies. No stowaways.”

“They don’t know what they are looking for. I can tell him where to search. With the kind of evidence I know is in there, we can make him realize the true threat to humanity. The whole truth about the Starflyer can finally be dragged out into the public domain. The Commonwealth leadership will be forced to acknowledge we were right all along. You and I won’t have to sneak around in the shadows anymore. Far Away can have its revenge without us having to—”

“All right! All right.” Adam held his hands up. “Stop the preaching, I get the picture. But I doubt I’ll be able to get any closer to Kime than you can. And even if I did, I’m not the nutter with a cause who might at least raise a doubt in his mind, I’m just a wanted killer who’s taken up arms smuggling and incidentally organized an attack on Second Chance while he was up there in it. That’s not exactly the kind of credibility we need to grab his attention.”

“I am aware of that. We need to come at him from an angle. Fortunately, there’s someone else in the Starflight Agency who will listen to you. Someone who has complete access to Kime.”

The look Adam shot across the table was more outrage than shock. “No way! I am not speaking to him. I am not contacting him. I’m not sending him a message file. I’m not even going to visit the same planet he’s on. I will not do that. Not for you, not for money, not for your stupid cause, not if Karl Marx came back to ask me personally. Understand? That is the past. He made his choice, I made mine. End of story. Period. Finish. It is Over.”

“Ah”—Bradley took a sip of his tea—“shame about that.”

After a thoroughly decent evening meal in a bar that specialized in seafood, Kazimir walked the few blocks back to his small hotel. It was a balmy night, so he made a slight detour to take in Palisades Park. In darkness, the park had ribbons of illumination to highlight its plants and trees, bathing them in bubbles of colored light to contrast with their own shades. Out to sea, the funfair on the pier was a continual blaze of multicolored light, reflecting off the black water. Ocean Avenue was busy with people who wound their way between bars and restaurants and clubs, exploiting the city’s vibrant nightlife culture to kick back and relax after their working day. The clubs had immaculately dressed doormen outside, operating strict entrance policies. Little clumps of hopefuls clustered outside, while limos came and went, depositing those who’d made it onto the list. Kazimir lingered opposite a few of the clubs, casually interested to see if he could spot any celebrities. One thing Los Angeles had clung to resolutely down the centuries was its status as capital of the entertainment world. He didn’t see anyone he recognized from the short time he’d been exposed to the unisphere, but then it was very early in the evening.

Hanging over the city, a three-quarters moon shone brightly enough to establish a small haze around it. He paused to stare up at it, fascinated by the wide jet-black equatorial band bisecting the globe, as if a loop of space itself had been wrapped around the swan-silver regolith. Established in 2190, the GlobalSolar power farm had grown from three patches of solar panels spaced equidistantly around the moon’s equator so that one of them was always in full sunlight, until it now ringed the entire circumference. It had become Earth’s main source of electricity. In an age when environmental laws reigned supreme and the pollution legacy of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries had almost been eradicated, it was inconceivable to build any kind of fuel-burning power station on Earth. Instead it was done cleanly and efficiently offplanet. The power that the ring generated was transferred to Earth via micro-wormholes where it was distributed over continental superconductor grids. Kazimir enjoyed the elegance of the idea; it was amusing to think that the electricity that lit the row of condos looming along the other side of the park, as well as the funfair, had all come from the moon. It was nice that nothing had to be burned, fused, or fissioned to keep a whole planet supplied. The expense was phenomenal, but that was just a question of priorities. Once the lunar factories had been established, they just kept on churning out more solar cells indefinitely, processing them out of moon rock.

Adam Elvin had commented on the arrangement, admiring it while simultaneously deploring the fact no other planet had made a similar investment. Kazimir then had to sit and listen over a perfectly good lunch to the plethora of reasons why corporate economics, evil Grand Families, and the Intersolar stock market prevented the rest of the human race from sharing the benefits of civilization in a fair and just fashion. In fact, Adam Elvin had a great many complaints about the economic oppression practiced across the Commonwealth.

Kazimir knew he was never going to like his new colleague. He could work with him—the old man had a lot to teach him about the smuggling and deception techniques that would assist the Guardians—but he could never envisage going out with him and hitting a few bars in the evening as friends would.

As the lunch drew to its end, Adam had slipped him a memory crystal disk. “It contains a list of items Bradley needs for this revenge project of his. It’s all very high-tech stuff, the kind in plentiful supply on Earth. I’ve given you the names of possible suppliers, and the kinds of covers I want you to establish in order to make contact. The payment methods have also been set up.”

“I understand.”

“I want you to go back to your hotel. Study it, come up with proposals how you’d handle each one; what you’ll need, everything from clothes to a tourist TSI bought in the district you’re supposed to have come from. We’ll meet again in two days, and I’ll review what you’ve got.”

“Okay. We meet in person?”

“Yes. Care to tell me why?”

“The cybersphere is susceptible to monitoring even if we encrypt—in fact, especially if we encrypt. Meetings can be spotted and observed, but it’s a question of balance. You obviously believe it’s the less risky option for the location and situation.”

“Very good. It’s nice to know Stig was actually listening to me. We’ll turn you into a covert operative yet, Kazimir McFoster.”

Kazimir had spent the afternoon reviewing the list, and making notes. He kept his proposals straightforward; complexity in this kind of operation could trip you up. He was sure that simplicity was the key. It would be interesting to hear what Elvin said about his tradecraft.

Most of the time he had spent researching through the unisphere. Hundreds of separate queries had returned dozens of answers. It was a question of sifting through them and deciding how they could be applied. Stig had always warned him the job would be boring for ninety-nine percent of the time.

He started walking through the park again, alert for any signs of an observation team boxing him. Of course there was one query he had stoically resisted launching into the unisphere ever since he received his first insert. And he could never break cover to make contact with a civilian while he was on a mission as important as this one. He just couldn’t.

He reached the end of Palisades Park, and crossed over to Colorado Avenue. Five minutes later he was back in his hotel room. Air-conditioning reduced the temperature to comfortable. The darkened glass of the window let in a few specks of light, hinting at the city grid outside. There were almost no sounds from the traffic. He kicked off his trainers and flopped back on the bed’s jellmattress. It was far too early to sleep. Any good, dependable Guardian member would carry on planning to acquire the items needed back on Far Away.

Kazimir closed his eyes and saw the darkness of the tent after night had fallen on Mount Herculaneum. Starlight showed the dusky outline of the angel’s face as she rose above him. She smiled, proud of him, and excited by him, by the things she confessed in low whispers that she wanted him to do.

Nothing in his life had ever come close to the wonder of that time. No girl had—could—ever match her, in any respect. He’d gone on with his life, accepted that nothing would ever be that good again, knowing he could put it all behind him because he would never see her again. She was on Earth, and he was on Far Away, a safe four hundred light-years distant. And so it would remain. Forever.

“Goddamnit,” he shouted to the room. He lurched up, and came close to slapping himself. Instead, he took a breath, perched on the end of the bed, and told his e-butler to open a link to the planetary cybersphere.

“I want an identity check on an Earth citizen,” he told his e-butler. “See if there’s any reference available on Justine Burnelli.”

....

I ought to be getting used to this, Paula thought. She wasn’t, though. And that was far more painful than any irony.

For once she’d gone to Mel Rees’s office. It was a political thing. This was her mess, her responsibility. Once again.

Not that it was any comfort, but Mel Rees seemed to be just as unhappy about the meeting. His office was only marginally bigger than the one she occupied, although his view of the Eiffel Tower was a lot better. The door closed behind her, and he sat behind a big old walnut desk that was devoid of any clutter.

“So what happened?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“For Christ’s sake, Paula. Some psycho takes out a half block of Venice Coast, kills nineteen people in the process, and you don’t know? This is not a good start for the Agency. Columbia is demanding results, and he’s not using nice language to ask.”

“I am aware of the Agency’s situation. What happened out there concerns me a lot more.”

“I understand how concerned you are.” He hesitated, winding himself up, like a doctor preparing to break bad news. “You’ve been on this case a long time. Maybe …”

“No,” she said flatly. “It is not time for me to move on and hand over to someone else.”

Rees didn’t argue. He seemed to shrink a little further behind his desk. “All right. But be warned, Paula, there are questions being raised about your suitability. Things are different here now, and they’re going to change even more. If the order comes down to move you on, it isn’t one that I’ll be able to shield you from. If it wasn’t for your record outside the Guardians case—”

“I am aware of how my reputation protects me. And you know none of your other Investigators would be able to run Johansson down.”

“Yeah.” The thought was visibly worrying him. “So what can you tell me about Venice Coast?”

“I’ve been supervising the forensics operation, trying to reconstruct the sequence of events. It added very little to what we already know.” She told her e-butler to run a file on the deputy director’s wall-mounted portal. It produced an image from one of the observation team’s sensors, showing the man poised in Rigin’s shattered office window the moment before he dived into the canal. “The face is unknown to any database, so we assume it’s a cellular reprofiling. There’s no visual sensor image of him arriving or leaving Anacona at the CST station.”

“A native, then?”

“Unlikely, but we haven’t ruled out the possibility. As far as we can determine, his weapon systems were all wetwired, with the exception of a simple arm dispenser. We recovered the receptionist’s memorycell, and read the last ten minutes. I acquired it myself.” The memory was now as clear as any of her own. She could recall the man walking into the gallery. She’d sat up a little straighter behind the reception desk, smiling when she noticed his youth and looks. Then his arm was raised, something moving below the jacket sleeve—

There was nothing else, no time for her to feel pain, or horror, or fear. Death had been instantaneous. “We were lucky to get that,” she said. “The way the gallery was built meant the ground floor had a degree of protection from the plasma surge after the blast. There were other bodies down there, but they were ninety percent vaporized. And the bodyguard, Roberto, he was fortunate, too. His armor frame wasn’t exactly designed with a superthermal charge in mind, but its deflector field did provide some shielding. The frame’s processors contained some interesting records. Just before the blast it had managed to ward off an ion pulse, then the armor received some terrible physical impacts. Someone used poor Roberto as a punching bag. Our intruder was one sophisticated boy. I asked our new colleagues in the Enforcement Directorate what it would take to build someone up to that standard. They actually had trouble working out the specs for me. Wetwired force fields are cutting edge.”

Mel took a long disapproving glance at the image in the portal. “Do you think Johansson has a lot of them?”

“I don’t think he’s Johansson’s at all. Elvin hasn’t acquired this kind of capability. Besides, he wrecked Elvin’s operation. No, he was sent by someone else.”

“Any guesses?”

“Logically, there are three possibilities. A deep Commonwealth security department sent him in, something we’re not cleared to know about. There have always been rumors about the executive office having its own intelligence sector. Why they’d use an operative in this instance I don’t know, unless it was to send a very clear message to Johansson that we’re not going to tolerate him anymore. The same applies to CST. They could certainly put someone like this together, and they’re not likely to forgive or forget the sabotage attempt on the Second Chance.”

“And the third possibility?”

“The Starflyer sent him.”

“Oh, come on!”

“It’s an option, you have to admit that.”

“No, I don’t. What about Rigin’s enemies? He was a black-market arms merchant for God’s sake. His kind don’t settle disagreements over a meal and a bottle of wine.”

“A rival wouldn’t bother destroying the equipment Rigin was collecting; they wouldn’t even know about it. No, the timing indicates someone who had the same information we did. That fits the first two possibilities. Our operations are available to the executive. It might even fit the third.”

“No. Paula, no! There is no third option. The Starflyer is a cult conspiracy theory. You do not include it in any official report. If you do, I will not even attempt to cover your ass. Don’t you see how political this is? It had to be the President or CST. We can investigate many things, but not them.”

“Nobody is above the law.”

“Damnit. If the executive authorized it, then it is lawful. Same for CST; God, Sheldon and Ozzie own whole planets including a Big15, they are governments.”

“That doesn’t make what happened right. They killed people.”

“Don’t do this, Paula.” Mel was almost pleading. “Let me talk to Columbia, let me find out if this is safe. You never know, I might actually be right. It might have been one of Rigin’s enemies.”

She considered the request. “Very well, I’ll complete the investigation into the gallery explosion itself. How it is carried forward after that, and who it’s assigned to, will be your call.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” he asked suspiciously.

“If the investigation is blocked politically, it will be because it was either CST or the executive which ordered the assault, in which case I’m not interested. Not that I don’t want to see justice done, but it would not ever be possible to achieve justice in those circumstances. I would be wasting my time, which I could be using to pursue Johansson and Elvin. If Columbia wants us to proceed, then that’s a different matter.”

“If we get the all-clear, it’ll be to find out who Rigin was at war with. Do you really want to spend time on that? You’ve got the resources to track down Johansson now.”

“If we get the all-clear, you and I will need to know which of us is right.”

“So do you want the case?”

“I’ll let you know when you bring an answer from Columbia. Until then, I’m still dedicating the team to finding Johansson.”

“Okay. I can live with that.”

“There’s something else I want you to raise with Columbia.”

“Yes?”

“Elvin was after some very advanced equipment; I really think it’s time for every export to Far Away to be searched. Our current policy of random checks is simply not acceptable anymore. Not that it ever was to me.”

“I’ll put it on the agenda.”

“Good.”

Hoshe Finn was just sitting down to supper when the apartment’s door sensors showed him who was approaching. He muttered, “Holy shit,” and stood bolt upright. His wife, Inima, gave him a surprised look, then glanced at the little screen showing the camera picture. “Isn’t that …?”

“Yep.” Hoshe went through the living room and arrived at the door the same time as Paula Myo. “Is something wrong?” he asked after he’d invited her in.

“No, everything is fine, thank you.” She looked him up and down. “You’ve lost some weight.”

“Not before time,” Inima said giving him a shy glance. “We’re considering having a child.”

Paula produced a genuine smile. “Congratulations. Will you be carrying it?”

“Heavens no,” Inima said. “It’ll be a vitro womb pregnancy.”

“Right.”

That seemed to exhaust the Investigator’s small talk. Hoshe and Inima exchanged a mildly bewildered look.

“Do you want to join us for supper?” Inima asked.

“No thank you, it’s midafternoon Paris time. I caught the express.”

“We can talk on the balcony if you’d like,” Hoshe said as his wife shot him a desperate glare.

“If you don’t mind,” Paula said.

“I’ll just get on with catching up on some work,” Inima assured her.

The balcony of the little apartment barely had room for the small round table and two chairs that were pressed up against the railing. Hoshe shuffled around the table and sat down. Paula stood by the rail, taking in the view. The thirty-story apartment block was in Darklake City’s Malikoi district, a long way back from the shore. Paula could look out and see the parks and elaborate buildings that meandered along the shoreline, she could even pick out the tower behind the big marina where Morton used to live.

“You have a nice home, Hoshe.”

“Why are you here?”

She left the rail and sat opposite him. “I need some detective work done. This is not an official request, it’s a …”

“A favor,” he supplied gently.

“Yes.”

“You don’t like working outside channels, do you, Paula?”

“I don’t have a lot of choice in this particular case. I believe my Agency is compromised. That’s why I’ve come to you, and a few others I worked with outside the old Directorate, you can make inquiries that won’t be registered in our office.”

“Compromised by whom?”

“I’m not sure. But they will be very highly placed inside the Commonwealth government, perhaps even the executive itself. If they find out about this, it won’t exactly help your career.”

“What have they done?”

“What they always do, play politics and maneuver among their own kind. But this time it’s resulted in people being killed.”

“Okay. What do you need?”

“Have you seen the recordings of the Venice Coast bomb?”

“Hell yes. Mellanie has been playing them just about nonstop.”

“Mellanie?” Paula hesitated. “Mellanie Rescorai?”

“None other. I sometimes think I did the wrong thing letting the demon out of the bottle.”

“You let genies out of bottles, Hoshe, not demons.”

“Not in this case, believe me. After the court case she went on and made some softcore TSI biogdrama, Murderous Seduction. Did you access it?”

“No.”

“It got a huge rating. The actor playing me looked like a sumo wrestler for heaven’s sake. They got you about right, though. Anyway, Mellanie won a lot of media attention; certainly locally, so Alessandra Baron took her on as Oaktier’s rep for her show. She’s actually quite good. I think she’s got her own personality line as well; all the usual crap, swimwear, holograms, monthly TSI releases, scents, food, there’s even a Murderous Seduction cocktail. She’s got quite a fan club these days.”

“Strange, she didn’t seem the type. I don’t normally underestimate people so poorly.”

“Yeah, there’s some politicians she interviewed who made that mistake when she started out. They don’t anymore.”

“And she’s been showing the Venice Coast recordings?”

“Every news show has. I just watched her because she gets the decent interviews; it was one of Rafael Columbia’s deputies, I think.” He gave Paula a cautious glance. “Mellanie was really pressing the point about how you kept fouling up the Johansson case. Her words.”

“I’m sure.”

“So where do I tie in with what happened on Venice Coast?”

“This is not public knowledge, but not all of the equipment Rigin was collecting got destroyed in the blast. Several items were being stored downstairs. We managed to retrieve them.”

“What kind of items?”

“One was a very high-power superconducting microphase modulator. Its regulator software was modified by a fix that apparently came from the Shansorel Partnership, that’s a specialist software house right here in Darklake City. Elvin couldn’t have placed a regular order for it, this is really technical stuff. They would need an expert brief. And, Hoshe, they would have known it wasn’t a legitimate contract.”

“What was the modulator used for?”

A slight frown crossed Paula’s forehead. “We’re not sure. The best guess forensics could come up with from the items we know were delivered is some kind of customized force field. Though that doesn’t explain half of the components.”

“Okay, so you want me to look into the Shansorel Partnership?”

“Please, yes.”

“What exactly am I hunting for? And how much pressure do you want me to put on these guys?”

“I want to know how deep their connection with Elvin goes: if it’s long-term, or if they were just short of money one time and took a no-questions contract to get the bank off their backs. I’m hoping for the long-term, of course, that way I can run a deep-cover tracker on their contact with Elvin’s team. How you want to play it is up to you, there’s always a weak link in any group of people. See if you can find which one it is in Shansorel, and make them sweat.”

“Okay. But I’m puzzled by this. You’re going after Elvin. How does that help you with the Agency’s internal leak?”

“Standard elimination entrapment. Each suspect is given a different piece of information in isolation; then I sit back and see who reacts.”

Decades ago Thompson Burnelli had made a huge mistake. He assumed that because he was a man and relatively fit, that because his reach and strength gave him an advantage, he would beat Paula Myo at squash. He was good at squash—no false modesty. Whenever he was in Washington, he would visit the Clinton Estate, his ultra-exclusive social and sports club, where no small percentage of Intersolar government business was conducted. Two or three times a week he would play his fellow senators, or their aides, or some committee chair, or a Grand Family representative. Standards were high, and the Estate’s professional was an excellent coach if any part of his game should slip.

With Paula Myo he learned that placement and precision was everything. She barely moved out of the center of the court, from where she sent the ball slamming into places he wasn’t—every time. He had staggered out afterward, red-faced, slick with sweat, and fearing for his pounding heart. It was eleven years before he finally won a game; two years after a rejuvenation when he was at his absolute physical peak, while she was due into rejuvenation in another three years. So their cycle continued over the decades.

Right now, she wasn’t ten years out of rejuvenation, and he didn’t care about points, his only concern was to avoid a coronary before he lost, dashing from one side of the court to the other chasing after her calm shots. Anyone else he played who lacked perhaps his status or seniority—aides, lobbyists, new senators—would allow him to win the odd game. Not every game, but enough to make him feel good. It was simple politics. That would never apply to Paula. It took him a while, but eventually he worked out why. Throwing a game would be dishonest, the one thing she could never be.

When the torment was over, he grabbed a towel and wiped the rivers of sweat from his face. From the ache in his leg muscles he knew he was going to be stiff for a week. “See you in the bar,” he groaned, and slowly made his way to the sanctuary of the gentlemen’s locker room.

Forty minutes later, with at least some of the pain eased by a hot massage shower, he walked into the bar. The Clinton Estate was barely two and a half centuries old, but from the darkened oak paneling and high-backed leather chairs the bar could have dated back to the late nineteenth century. Even the staff looked the part, dressed in their scarlet jackets and white gloves.

Paula was already sitting in a big leather wing chair, in one of the bay windows that gave a sweeping view out over the Estate’s formal gardens. With her smart suit and perfectly brushed hair reaching just below her shoulders she had the kind of easy poise that women from the Grand Families spent decades trying to achieve.

“Bourbon,” Thompson told the waiter as he eased himself into the chair opposite her.

A light smile touched Paula’s lips at the tone of the order, as if she’d scored another point.

“So did Rafael give you a hard time over Venice Coast?” he asked.

“Let’s say I was made aware he was unhappy. People see it as another victory for Elvin and Johansson over me; they are quite blind to what it actually signifies.”

“That we have a new player in town.”

“Not new. But one that has become visible for the first time.”

“You still believe there’s a mole in the executive office?”

“Or a Grand Family, or an Intersolar Dynasty. You’re the ones with the permanent connections, after all.”

“Rumor in the Senate Hall dining room is that you told Mel Rees it could be the Starflyer.”

“It is a possibility.”

“I’m sure it’s logical, but, Paula, it’s not popular. Just so you know. There are some planetary parliaments who have elected people who support the Guardians, not many, and it was all proportional representation votes. But the fact that anyone like that can gather support is worrying.”

“Oh, I know it’s not popular. It’s not something I’m actively pursuing.”

“That doesn’t sound like you.”

“I can’t do my job if I don’t have a job.”

Thompson greeted the arrival of his bourbon with a relieved grin. “We all get backed into corners. I’m sorry. It must be especially hard for you.”

“I said actively pursuing. As the old prison saying went: they’ve only got your body behind bars.”

“I see. So what can I do to help?”

“I need to know if there really is a secret security section which is only answerable to the executive.”

“No, there isn’t. And I should know, our family actually predates the Commonwealth. I can check with my father to be absolutely certain.”

“Please do. It is important.”

It wasn’t what Thompson expected, nobody ever questioned him; but then that was what made Paula so refreshing. They had started their association all those years ago with a quick exchange of information: she was after one of the Zarin Prime Minister’s staff, while he was trying to steer a bill on infrastructure tax credits through the Senate, which Zarin was opposing. Ever since then they had swapped facts and gossip on politics and criminals. Thompson wasn’t sure if they were friends, but the relationship had certainly been rewarding for both of them. And he knew he could trust Paula implicitly, which was just about unique in the circles he moved through. “Okay. What if there is? Will you try and arrest the President? Poor old Doi only just got in, and that was on a miserable percentage.”

“The fact that Columbia hasn’t blocked the Venice Coast investigation suggests that situation won’t arise. I’m just eliminating possibilities at this stage, that’s all.”

“Then let me tell you that I don’t know of any Grand Family who’d do such a thing. We’ve no reason to; Far Away and the Guardian terrorists don’t have any impact on our activities and money.”

“Which leaves us with Nigel Sheldon.”

“Who you will never arrest.”

“I know.”

“Not that the order would have come from Sheldon himself, anyway. Some fifth-level family executive will be trying to earn themselves points.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me. Although, we don’t have any solid evidence that Rigin was ever working for Adam Elvin in the first place.”

“You don’t?”

“No. What we were observing resembled one of his smuggling shipments, that’s all. Although there is one major difference: the nature of the equipment Rigin was collecting.”

“I skimmed the report. It was all high-tech stuff?”

“Yes. But no weapons. If it genuinely was Elvin’s shipment, that would suggest Johansson is moving into a new phase of activity. I’ve no idea what, but there’s a very simple way to prevent it.”

“Which is?”

“A full examination of every piece of cargo shipped to Far Away. I’ve been arguing this for years—decades, actually. Every time I get the same answer: it costs too much and delays play hell with transport scheduling, especially with Half Way’s wormhole cycle.”

“What did Rafael say?”

“That he would press for it. But there’s been no movement. I need someone with real clout to implement the policy. You.”

“Rafael has real clout, believe me. Some of us are getting worried about how much.”

“Then all I can say is he’s not using it to support my request.”

“Probably pissed at you for Venice Coast. His shiny new Agency didn’t look good in the aftermath. Did you watch any of the news shows? The editorials weren’t friendly. Alessandra Baron even took a swipe at you personally.”

“So I heard,” Paula said dryly. “But that should not affect Columbia’s judgment on this issue. Would you lobby the President for me on this, Thompson?”

“It will annoy the Halgarths, they’re the only Intersolar Dynasty who have any real involvement with Far Away. But if you assure me it’s necessary, then of course I’ll use what influence we have. Right now Doi is indebted to my family, she should be eager to grant us something like this.”

“Thank you.”

TWENTY

After departing Anshun, the Conway and her sister scoutships, the StAsaph and the Langharne, took a mere seventy-two days to reach Dyson Alpha. Commander Wilson Kime was thankful for the shortened flight time. For all her speed, the Conway was barely half the size of the Second Chance, with a corresponding shortage of crew facilities. The most obvious change was the lack of a life-support wheel. The new scoutship marque had a crew of twenty-five, whose quarters were integrated with the main fuselage. Although the Conway’s superstructure was still a basic cylinder, blunt at both ends, she was a lot more streamlined than her pioneering predecessor, measuring a good two hundred fifty meters in length, and eighty in diameter. The reduction in both length and volume was mainly due to reducing the plasma rockets to three, along with all the associated cryogenic tankage. Also, given the mission profile, there was no requirement for the auxiliary craft, their hangars, and their support systems.

Kime had known CST was designing second-generation starships before the Second Chance departed, but even he’d been surprised by the seven-month assembly time. More impressive was the way they’d stuck to the completion deadline with all the chaos of facilities and personnel being transferred to the High Angel. He’d still not got over his anger at that particular act of stupidity. After three and a half centuries he’d assumed government had by now learned how to keep bureaucratic interference to a minimum on big projects. Of course he knew it was all down to horse trading between the Grand Families and the Intersolar Dynasties—after all, he’d taken part in enough sessions and deals himself—but surely the executive knew it had to protect a project as important as this one from petty maneuverings and pork barrel politics? Apparently not.

It didn’t help his temper when he found out the scale of the alliance Nigel Sheldon had formed with the Farndale board, with himself as the figurehead of cooperation. So after being perfectly outmaneuvered by committee and bumped upstairs to Commander of the new Starflight Agency, there was nothing left for him except bitching to Oscar and Anna about losing crucial people at critical times because they were needed to establish a duplicate facility at High Angel. His own involvement with the new shipyards was limited to a few administrative visits and one formal reception with the redoubtable Chairwoman Gall. They’d never liked each other. The reception hadn’t changed that.

As before, he’d devoted his time and talent to pushing the construction of the scoutships. The development of High Angel and running the Starflight Agency could wait until his return. Unlike the Commonwealth executive he realized their absolute priority was to find out what was happening at Dyson Alpha since the barrier went down. At least his new, prestigious position meant he could give himself command of the scoutship reconnaissance mission.

So now he was enduring the physical and unfortunately biological discomforts of prolonged freefall once again. The scaling down of crew quarters had included the loss of the more luxurious fittings they’d enjoyed on the first flight. Conway’s compartments were a cluster of connected spheres wrapped around the fuselage axis, behind the sensor bay and above the power deck. Each sphere had padded walls and all the internal equipment had soft rounded plastic edges, alleviating the worst impact bruises. But just like his time back on Ulysses he spent hours a day on various pieces of ingenious gym equipment to prevent his heart and muscles from atrophying. Once a week he visited the doctor for his organ functions to be monitored, resulting in an assortment of biochemicals being administered to counter their decay. Then there were the meal times when he had to force himself to consume the designated mass of food when he wasn’t remotely hungry; and all day long his e-butler reminded him to sip his water bottle to counter the dehydration that his body could no longer feel. To cap it all, and the undisputed chief of everyone’s bitch list, were the visits to the disposal utility chamber. It wasn’t just politics that hadn’t made much progress over three hundred fifty years. Taking a dump in space still involved a disturbing arrangement of straps and suction pumps. At least having a pee was relatively straightforward—that’s if you were a man. The women on board had all undergone a little cellular reprofiling procedure to make suction tube use more convenient and less prone to slippage. It was a supreme test of character to ignore that during sex.

Half a light-year out from Dyson Alpha the Conway came to a halt, though she remained inside the wormhole. The StAsaph and the Langharne moved up beside her. CST had solved the communications problem for ships in hyperdrive by using modulated pulses of the hysradar function. Given the difficulty involved in producing a hyspulse within the wormhole generator, the process was still somewhat crude. It certainly wasn’t a directional signal; they were broadcasting to anyone in range, and it couldn’t carry anything like the amount of datatraffic a microwave beam could. But voice traffic was relatively easy to achieve.

Wilson drifted into the bridge compartment and secured himself in one of the acceleration couches. On either side of the couch, screens and hologram portals unfolded from their pedestals. He studied the displays and asked Anna to sweep around with the hysradar. “Keep it to a quarter light-year radius,” he told her.

“Aye, sir,” she replied from her own couch. She was serving as his executive officer for the flight, and was very conscious of everyone knowing about their relationship. It made her a stickler for protocol and efficiency, constantly proving to the crew she’d won the position on merit alone. More than one had privately asked Wilson if he could make her ease off the tight-arse routine. From that point of view, he was rather looking forward to the flight ending himself. Freefall really wasn’t everything the spaceflight romantics claimed. More than one of his bruises had been obtained inside their cabin.

The hysradar scan showed they were surrounded by clear space; there was no trace of anything under acceleration. His e-butler opened a channel to the other two scoutships, encrypting the transmission.

“Oscar, what have you got?” he asked.

“Nothing in sight,” the captain of the StAsaph replied. “I guess they’ve stopped sending ships away from their own star. At least in this direction.”

“Looks that way. Antonia, have you got anything?”

“Not a damn thing,” Antonia Clark said from the bridge of the Langharne. “It’s clean out here.”

“All right, we’ll proceed as agreed. Antonia, tag along with us until we’re ten AUs from the old barrier location. Stay in hyperspace and gather as much information as you can. Any hostile activity directed at us or you, and you are to get straight back to the Commonwealth.”

“Understood.” During the mission planning sessions back on Anshun she had spent days arguing that her scoutship should be the one accompanying the Conway, but there was no trace of resentment in her voice now.

“Tu Lee, take us in,” Wilson ordered. “Anna, sensors on passive mode, please.”

“Already switched over, sir.”

Wilson tried not to roll his eyes.

The scoutships closed on Dyson Alpha. Their mission profile was simple enough; Conway and StAsaph were to enter the inner system, scanning for any sign of wormhole activity. If they found one, they were to approach the source, drop out of hyperspace, and attempt to open communications. If there was no sign of the Dyson aliens experimenting with wormholes, they would fly to Alpha Major and try an open communications there.

They were still a quarter of a light-year out from the star when Anna said, “We’re registering quantum fluctuations consistent with wormhole activity.”

“From this far out?” Tunde Sutton queried.

“Yes, whatever they’ve built, it’s goddamn powerful.”

MorningLightMountain began working on the problem as soon as its new Bose memories had revealed the theory and practical application of wormholes. It took just a few hundred immotile units to determine and quantify the fundamental principles, assisted by the Bose memory’s basic knowledge of human physics and mathematics. The equations fitted easily enough into its own understanding of quantum physics, simply extending the knowledge in a fashion it wouldn’t necessarily have thought of for itself. After that came the more challenging task of designing the hardware. Of that, the Bose memories had little information.

After a month, during which over a thousand immotile units had combined to analyze the new problem and several advanced industrial manufacturing areas had been switched to producing components for the project, the first crude wormhole generator was up and running. MorningLightMountain used it to open a small communications linkage to its biggest settlement at the large gas giant. There, MorningLightMountain23,957, which supervised the settlement, was connected directly back into the original immotile group in real-time. Over the next few weeks, a series of small wormholes were opened to MorningLightMountain’s other settlements, joining more and more remote subsidiaries to the main group cluster of immotiles back on the homeworld, meshing them all together into a single gigantic grouping.

At this point, all the spaceship production facilities MorningLightMountain possessed across the star system were switched to manufacturing components for larger wormhole generators. As more and more wormholes were opened, linking planets, moonlets, and distant asteroid settlements, the spaceships became redundant. It dismantled them and incorporated their resources into the new transport system. New power stations were deployed around the sun, vast rotating structures protected by force fields, that siphoned up the energy and transferred it (via wormhole) to the second gas giant where the greatest wormhole of all was being constructed, the one that would reach across interstellar space.

It took the full mental capacity of twelve thousand immotile brains to govern the interstellar wormhole; there were so many components to supervise, so many intricate applications of energy to control within the machinery. MorningLightMountain amalgamated the immotile specifically to form the command group; they had no other function, they didn’t take part in MorningLightMountain’s unified thought processes. Even then, with so much brain power devoted to the device’s operation, it had to use more electronic processors than it ever had before to maintain the ancillary equipment.

The interstellar wormhole had been operating for three weeks when several supplementary orbiting quantum wave detectors picked up the distortion points of approaching starships. They were smaller than the previous human starship, the Second Chance, but they were flying from the direction of the Commonwealth. They were also a lot faster.

>ships mission / explain<

I don’t know for certain. I expect a further attempt to establish communication. They’ll certainly want to know what happened to me and Verbeke.

>confrontation probability / extrapolate<

They don’t want a fight. The ships will be heavily shielded, though. They saw several ship battles while they were here before. They’ll know what level of defense they need this time.

>response / explain<

Oh, well, with my great tactical expertise …

>tactical knowledge / memory<

There was none. The Bose memories were lying—no, not lying, being sarcastic.

>sarcasm / explain<

It’s a human personality trait. Culturally related, you either got it or you don’t. I often used it to swat uppity students. I don’t think it applies to your culture, you’re more likely to use a nuke.

Not for the first time, MorningLightMountain considered simply erasing the Bose memories. It often considered the alien thoughts to be a form of insanity. Despite them being securely caged within a single immotile unit, there was noticeable leakage. Strange ideas and concepts often occurred these days—a different way of looking at things. After all, there was, it had to concede, a certain illogicality about releasing so much pollution across its homeworld, allowing so many motiles—parts of itself—to die in sickening fashion from disease and poison. It was killing itself for the now, not planning properly for tomorrow. It wasn’t sure how the notion of sickening had crept into its thoughts.

Such innovative thoughts might lead it into becoming alienPrime, contaminated from within. Though it knew its Prime rationality was still dominant, after all it was a misapplication of resources to let so many motiles waste away. So for now it tolerated the Bose memories, knowing that soon it would no longer require them.

The three human starships slowed their approach, then flew forward again. One came to a halt just beyond where the barrier used to be, remaining within the wormhole it was generating. The other two headed in for the second gas giant, where MorningLightMountain had built the interstellar wormhole. It began to prepare nearby ships for interception.

One of the human ships emerged from its wormhole amid a burst of blue radiation. It was five million kilometers from the interstellar wormhole. Electromagnetic beams swept out, probing space around it, while its wormhole generator emitted pulses of distortion, which the Bose memories identified as hysradar. High-cohesion force fields enveloped the human ship, deflecting most of MorningLightMountain’s sensor scans. They would be tough to break, it acknowledged. But not impossible.

Sixteen ships were dispatched at high acceleration to interdict the enemy. Within seconds of their fusion drives coming on, the human ship directed microwave and laser beams toward them. This time MorningLightMountain understood the binary pulses, the simple mathematical constants, pixel matrices with basic images and symbols, periodic tables. It directed a communications maser back at the human ship.

The Bose memories were marshaled to initiate contact, appropriate “speech” sequences selected.

“Hi, guys, it’s Dudley Bose calling home. You took your sweet time getting back here, didn’t you? But by God I am sure glad to see you.”

The human lasers switched off. A single microwave beam remained focused on the ship that had sent the message.

“Dudley? This is Commander Kime. How … Are you all right? Jesus, Dudley, we never hoped for so much.”

The voice was distorted by what the Bose memories identified as emotions of incredulity and hope.

“I made it, Captain. I’m okay. And I’ve got a whole load of new friends with me just waiting to meet you. Should be able to rendezvous with you in a little while.”

“Dudley, are you on the ship that’s sending your signal?”

“Sure am. How about that for coincidence? I’ve been out here for months helping the Primes with their wormhole.”

“Dudley, that ship’s under ten-gee acceleration.”

The voice had changed. MorningLightMountain’s Bose memories identified it as puzzled.

“Yeah, God don’t I know it. It’s hell on my spine.”

“You can slow down,” Wilson Kime said. “We’re not going anywhere.”

“Right, sure. I’ll tell the captain.”

MorningLightMountain reduced the acceleration on its interdiction squadron to three gees. It didn’t want to scare the humans off—another new concept. So many since the barrier had fallen.

“Where’s Emmanuelle, Dudley? Is she there with you?”

“No, she’s back on the homeworld DEAD RUN YOU DUMB FUCK RUN THEY KILLED US THEY’LL KILL ALL OF US IT’S INHUMAN RUN YOU MOTHERFU—”

MorningLightMountain wanted to scream in pure fury as the betraying corruption burned through its consciousness. Its mind crushed the Bose memories as they blossomed out of the immotile brain where they had been stored, pummeling them back under control. Crushing them. Eradicating them from existence.

Demented, defiant human laughter echoed around inside the giant building that housed the central immotile grouping of MorningLightMountain, the core of its existence. The memory of laughter. Mocking as it faded.

Wilson stared, aghast, at the speaker that just a minute earlier had delivered a joy that had brought him close to tears. The shout lingered in the deadly silence that filled the bridge.

He’d known, deep deep down inside, from the moment the Dudley voice claimed to be on a ship doing ten gees, and speaking as calmly as if they were sitting at a bar with a couple of drinks. If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

“The alien ships have started accelerating again,” Anna called. “Eight gees. Nine.”

“Tu Lee, take us out of here now,” Wilson ordered. Déjà vu plucked at him, almost comforting in its horrifying familiarity. “Oscar, Antonia, scatter pattern one. You heard the man: run for it.”

The screens showing visual spectrum images of space outside began to glow blue, as if they’d glided into a patch of planetary sky. Tu Lee sent the Conway streaking out of the Dyson system at half a light-year an hour.

“Goddamnit, what happened?” Anna said. “What was that talking to us?”

“Whatever was left of Dudley Bose,” Wilson said grimly. Damn, and I always thought bad of him. “Any sign of pursuit?”

“Nothing chasing us in hyperspace, Captain,” Tunde said. “The StAsaph and Langharne are ahead of us, and spreading out.”

Wilson studied the displays around his couch, breathing deeply to try to calm his racing heart. He watched the other two scoutships diving wide into the depths of interstellar space, making it difficult for any potential enemy to chase all of them. A pitiful maneuver, really. If the aliens had built FTL starships they could send a thousand after each of us.

“We were out of hyperspace for six and a quarter minutes,” Anna said as the bridge crew started to relax. “Our mission time out here just keeps getting shorter, and we still have no idea what they look like.”

Wilson gave his e-butler some instructions, and it folded back one of the display screens around his couch. He turned to look at Tunde Sutton. “What did our sensors collect?”

“Almost nothing, Captain,” the physicist said glumly. “We weren’t there long enough to obtain any decent imagery.”

“What about that giant wormhole?”

“Ah, yes.” Tunde seemed curiously reticent to say anything. “You know, we’ve never attempted to build anything on such a scale. And the amount of quantum activity we did manage to detect indicated a considerable number of wormholes have been opened within the Dyson system. All of them were significantly smaller than the one above the outer gas giant. It confirms our previous conclusions about their industrial capabilities. A year and a half ago they didn’t have one wormhole generator.”

“Just how big was that one above the gas giant?”

Tunde began to call up hysradar records, concentrating on the outermost gas giant with its three large moons, and superimposing what little visual imagery they’d snatched. He focused the image on the third moon, orbiting seven hundred ninety thousand kilometers above the turbulent equatorial storm clouds. It was a rocky planetoid with half of its fractured surface covered in ice sheets averaging five kilometers thick. Hundreds of force field domes had encased nearly a quarter of the total surface area. Fusion drive ships clouded space around it, forming a bright ring two hundred fifty kilometers above the equator. From that a sparkling river of blue-white plasma stretched across to the moon’s outermost Lagrange point, fifteen thousand kilometers away. The aliens had stationed the wormhole at the center of the gravitational null-point, where it kept its position with a minimum of thruster usage. There was no visual data, the generator structure itself was very dark, although it showed as a gleaming crimson spark in infrared. Hysradar revealed a toroid with a central aperture measuring two and a half kilometers across. Ships were flying into the center at the rate of one every five or six minutes, large ships.

“Son of a bitch,” Wilson murmured. “Is there any way of telling where that leads?”

“No, sir,” Tunde said. “But judging by the strength of its quantum distortion, I’d say several hundred light-years. Where they get that much power from I don’t know, there’s no corresponding neutrino emissions which would indicate fusion sources.”

“Have they reached inside the Commonwealth?” Wilson asked sharply.

“It won’t extend that far. Four hundred light-years, possibly, maybe five.”

Wilson wanted to feel relief. It should have been there, knowing the aliens hadn’t reached home behind him. But the sensation eluded him completely. What they’d seen was too worrying. Even for a civilization this size, the giant wormhole was too obviously a crash project: an act of desperation. He was sure he knew where it would take them eventually. The why of it, though, he couldn’t understand. What could they possibly want with the Commonwealth?

....

It was an astonishing landscape. Nothing you couldn’t find on any H-congruous world, but scaled up twenty percent. Higher mountains. Deeper valleys. Wider rivers. Broader plains. Even the sky seemed bigger, though that might have been due to the absence of clouds during the (long) daytime.

All of which made Ozzie worry about what kind of animals they might encounter. Rats the size of dogs? Dogs the size of horses? What might the elephants be like, or the dinosaurs?

They’d been here for eight days now, though, and hadn’t seen so much as a gnat so far. The plants didn’t quite match up to the scenery; they were all bland. Grass that was like a sheet of moss. Bushes that were globes with slender little leaves that were woven together so tightly that from a distance they looked like a single membrane. Trees that had a simple conical symmetry with dark green finger-sized leaves. Botany at least wasn’t adventurous here. In fact, he hadn’t seen a single flower since they arrived. Maybe evolution had bypassed the whole concept of pollination. Or maybe there were no insects to pollinate.

That made Tochee the most colorful thing on the planet. The big alien had recovered quickly from its frostbite as they wandered along the paths after escaping the Ice Citadel planet. Its rubbery locomotion ridges had almost completely healed up now after weeks of sliding along through temperate grassland and loamy forest floors. Of the three planets they’d progressed through, one of the paths had been in a tropical zone. Tochee had really liked that. The little shriveled fronds sprouting from wrinkles in its brown hide had sprouted into colorful life. They now resembled feathery ferns whose vivid pigmentation acted like a silky flowing cloak; ripples of scarlet, tangerine, turquoise, and emerald swayed along its body with every motion and gust of wind.

“It looks like a furry rainbow,” Orion had said when the fronds began to grow again.

The boy was a great deal happier now as well. A lot of his former chirpy confidence had returned, strengthening with every additional step they put between themselves and the Ice Citadel.

Ozzie was half expecting him to start asking: “Are we there yet?” Which given their circumstances was just about impossible to answer. The Silfen paths had been reasonably obvious on the worlds they’d visited so far, and the little friendship pendant had helped a couple of times when Ozzie was uncertain. But to date they’d found themselves in areas where the forests were close together, with just a couple of valleys or hills separating their boundaries.

This big world was different. They’d emerged from a tree line to see a vast undulating plain stretching away ahead of them. The forest behind filled a V-shaped valley; there was only the one path through it, leading straight out alongside the swift stream that gushed down the valley floor. So they simply carried on walking, keeping close to the stream. It was one of many tributaries feeding the river that cut across the plain.

In five days’ continuous hiking they’d found plenty of similar woods hugging steep valleys, not one of which had a Silfen path leading out. The trees did have edible fruit, globes the size of melons with a fibrous pap that tasted similar to bland apples. That seemed to be a constant on the worlds linked by Silfen paths: nothing edible had a strong taste.

Orion would knock the fruit down with a big stick, sometimes with Tochee holding him aloft in its tentacles so he could reach the ones dangling on higher branches. Every time Ozzie watched the laughing boy flailing away at the fruit, he would think of curries and chili burgers.

The river was leading them toward a range of snowcapped mountains that marked the end of the plain. As they neared the foothills, the pervasive mat of grass thinned out, leaving stretches of thin sandy soil exposed to the air. Soon only the broad ravine through which the river flowed held any greenery. They picked their way along the boulder-strewn sides, testing carefully for boggy ground. Ozzie and Orion were both carrying heavy rucksacks, while Tochee had a pair of big old panniers slung over its back. As the ravine started to slope down, the river flow quickened, foaming around stones sticking up from its bed.

“Still wish we’d made a boat?” Orion asked cheerfully as they passed one set of boulders that were sending out great spumes.

It was something Ozzie had suggested earlier, at around the third forest they’d examined for paths. While it made sense, his diamond-tipped blade wasn’t the ideal tool for cutting and trimming that many trees. In any case, they hadn’t had any rope to lash even a crude raft together. At the time he’d just wanted to get off the plain. Days spent under the silent expanse of sky were bad enough. But at night, he hurried into the tent, unnerved by the emptiness around them. Some deep-buried intuition was wary of the planet.

“I’ve been down worse rapids than these,” Ozzie told him defensively.

After half a day trailing along the side of the ravine, it turned sharply and opened out into a massive canyon. The river surged forward and fell away down a series of steep steps, each taller than the last, ending with a waterfall that thundered over a cliff three hundred yards high. After so many days immersed in the deep silence that blanketed the empty plain, the roar from the cascading water was shocking.

“So now what?” Orion asked. He was facing the giant canyon that carried the water away beyond the falls. It seemed to slice clean through the mountain range.

“There’s no way off this world behind us,” Ozzie said, thinking out loud. “We either keep following the river, or look for some other way around the mountains.” He brought out a very tatty sheet of parchment. His last charcoal stump was down to a small nub, so finding the sharpest edge, he wrote: I think we should go on. This seems to be the path.

I AGREE, Tochee’s forward eye segment flashed.

All throughout the long afternoon they picked their way down the side of the falls. With the rocks slick from all the spray, they moved slowly and carefully. If there was to be any kind of accident here, the chances of help were effectively zero. Traveling alone had instilled a sense of caution into them; even Orion didn’t make any complaint about how long the descent was taking. Tochee took the lead; with its locomotion ridges it was easily the most agile of the three of them on the precarious gradient.

The sun had long vanished behind the canyon walls when they reached the floor. According to Ozzie’s virtual vision timer they still had another two hours of full daylight left. He took his sunglasses off to squint at the bright naked rocks all around. Somewhat inevitably, the sun here was bright enough to make them wear the protective glasses all day long. The mist thrown out by the waterfall had fooled him for a moment, producing a pocket of cool humid air around the base of the falls. But even out of the direct sunlight, he was better off with the glasses on.

They walked past the deep rock pool formed by the churning impact of the waterfall, and carried on to where the river resumed its calm flow, gurgling across the sandy pebbles that made up its broad bed. He stood on the bank to take in the view. The near-vertical walls of iron-red rock on both sides were about two-thirds of a mile high, and as the canyon curved gently around to the east in front of him, it looked as though they were growing progressively taller. At the widest, the canyon floor stretched about five miles wide. Nothing grew within the canyon, no grass or scrub. The floor was shingle and sand, all the same sandstone red as the walls. He could see great conic mounds of jagged rock piled up all along the base of each cliff, where giant sections had broken off far above to crash down into pulverized scree.

One of Tochee’s manipulator flesh arms poked up, a very human gesture it’d developed to attract their attention. When Ozzie turned to check the alien, mauve patterns were flickering in its forward eye segment. SOMETHING AT THE FIRST CURVE. POSSIBLY A TREE.

Ozzie ordered his retinal implants to zoom in. The air was shimmering from the heat of the rocks and the air, but some dark smudge was visible beside the river just as it turned out of sight. Could be, he wrote.

They started off along the canyon, and almost immediately came across the ancient fire. It was a simple circle of stones, their inner sides blackened. The ash had blown away long ago, leaving just darkened sand inside.

“Look!” Orion cried and ran off. He stopped a few yards past the fire circle and picked something out of the sand. His smile was victorious as he held up his trophy.

“Son of a bitch,” Ozzie grunted. The boy had found a soda can. Its coloring had bleached badly over the years, but the familiar logo was easily visible.

“Are we on Earth?” the boy asked excitedly.

“Sorry, man, no way.”

“This must be somewhere in the Commonwealth, though. We even had soda on Silvergalde.”

Ozzie scratched at his large fuzzy beard. “I think it’s just litter. You know what people are like, the biggest hooligans in the universe. But hey! It proves we’re on the right path.” He didn’t want to crush the boy’s fragile hope.

Orion gave the can a vexed look, and chucked it back onto the sand.

An hour later they stopped and set up camp for the night. Ozzie and Orion pitched their tent on a small rise several hundreds yards from the river, then set about washing socks and shirts before the last of the light vanished. Ozzie would have loved to dive right in and give himself a decent clean, but even though they still hadn’t seen a single living creature on this world, he just couldn’t quite bring himself to trust the water. Too many late student nights with a pizza, a couple of six-packs, some grass, and a bad sci-fi DVD. God only knew what lurked along the bottom of the river, maybe nothing, but he certainly wasn’t going to wind up with alien eggs hatching out of his ass, thank you. All of a sudden, the long evenings spent lazing around in the Ice Citadel’s hot pools didn’t seem so bad after all.

They were making their way back up to the tent when Orion stopped and said, “There’s a light.”

Ozzie looked down the canyon where the boy was pointing. A tiny golden spark was shining a long way downstream. He wasn’t even sure it was on their side of the river. His retinal insert zoom function couldn’t get a clear image; no matter how high the magnification, it remained a flickering blur. When he switched to infrared, it barely registered. Not a fire, then.

“Probably someone else walking the path,” he said with a reassurance he didn’t feel.

Tochee had seen the light as well, though the alien’s eye was unable to focus on it either. They kept watching it as they ate their evening meal of tasteless fruit and cold water, but it wasn’t moving. Ozzie and Tochee took turns through the night to make sure it didn’t come any closer. It was Ozzie who got the midnight to morning shift. He sat on a flattish rock beside the tent, dressed in his cords and checked shirt, with his sleeping bag wrapped around his shoulders like a blanket. The river murmured away quietly, and occasionally he heard a low rattling wheeze from Tochee that he classed as alien snoring; other than that there was only the deep silence he would always associate with this world.

A brilliant multitude of stars shone down through the cloudless, moonless sky. He’d never seen so many before, not even when he went worldwalking on new Commonwealth worlds before they were contaminated by civilization’s light pollution. One hazy nebula, four or five times larger than Earth’s moon, kept drawing his attention. It bent sharply at one end, with a reddish spike protruding away from the main haze. He couldn’t remember any astronomical phenomenon remotely like that being close to the Commonwealth. The Devil’s Tail, he named it. Shame nobody would ever know.

In the wilderness hours just before dawn he heard voices. He sat up immediately, unsure if he’d been drifting off to sleep. They could have been the start of some dream. But they weren’t human voices, or at least not ones speaking any language he recognized.

The spark of light hadn’t moved. He switched his inserts to infrared and slowly scanned around, turning a complete circle.

The voices came again. Definitely not a dream. They swept past him, causing him to turn so fast he almost lost his balance. Several of them babbling together. A nonhuman language. They sounded urgent. Frightened.

But it was only the sound. Nothing moved in the canyon. Nothing physical.

Almost he asked: “Who’s there?” Except that really was the stuff of late-night horror DVDs. Dumb.

Whispers slithered past him, somebody—something—whimpering into the distance. Ozzie dropped the sleeping bag and held his arms out, concentrating on his hands, trying to feel air being stirred, the tiniest hint of movement. He closed his eyes, knowing that a visual sense was no longer any use to him. Listening, stroking the air. The sound came again, conjuring up the old phrase “voices on the wind.” He heard what was said, and repeated it back to them softly. It made no difference. They carried on past him, paying no attention.

That was how Orion found him as the first wave of a pale dawn lifted over the canyon wall: standing motionless with arms outstretched like some religious statue, mumbling words in an alien tongue. The boy clambered out of the tent, rubbing sleep from his eyes as he yawned. “What are you doing?”

Ozzie sighed and let his arms down with a suspiciously yogalike sweeping motion. He gave Orion an inscrutable grin. “Talking to the ghosts.”

Orion’s head whipped around, trying to find … anything. “Are you all right? Did you hit your head or something?”

“Not since that bar on Lothian, and that was years ago. This world is haunted.”

“Ow come on, Ozzie, that’s not funny. Not here. This whole planet is creepy.”

“I know, man. I’m sorry. But I did hear something, like a bunch of people or aliens.”

“The Silfen?”

“No, I know their language. I don’t know what these guys were saying, but you get a feel from the tone. They were sad, or frightened. Maybe both.”

“Hey, quit it! I don’t like this.”

“Yeah. I know. I think that’s the point, man.”

“The point of what?”

“Whatever I experienced.” He frowned. “What did I experience? Accept there’s no such thing as ghosts, so … some kind of projection? Bit childish just to spook travelers. I mean, why not go the whole hog and put a white sheet over your head and jump out on them from behind a rock?”

“You said the Silfen did have an afterlife,” Orion said quietly.

Ozzie gave him a thoughtful look. “You really do pay attention, don’t you?”

“Sometimes.” The boy shrugged as he smirked.

“Okay then, let’s think about this. None of our electronics are working, so the ghosts can’t be any kind of normal projection, holograms, sound focus, that kind of crap. The Silfen are active here, which implies it must be happening with their knowledge or consent.”

“Unless it’s them doing it,” Orion said, suddenly excited. “There’s nothing alive here. We haven’t seen any animals or insects. Maybe this is their afterworld, where all the Silfen ghosts live.”

Ozzie grimaced, and looked around the stark, massive canyon. “Somehow I think not. I’d expect something a little more impressive. But I could be wrong.” He finished up by looking along the canyon. “Yo, can’t see the light anymore, either.”

Tochee slithered up between them, raising a limb of manipulator flesh. WHAT’S HAPPENING? the patterns in its eye asked.

“This should test our vocabulary,” Ozzie muttered.

By midmorning, they could see the black pillars ahead were indeed trees. Even by this world’s standards they were giants, perfect thin cones reaching over a hundred fifty yards into the air. They had been planted in a double row, half a mile to the side of the river, forming an impressive avenue down the canyon.

“Somebody does live here, then,” Orion said as they drew near to the start of the avenue.

“Looks that way.” Ozzie tilted his head back to see the tops of the first trees. “You know, either they’re made out of a wood harder than steel, or there’s hardly any wind here, ever.”

“Is that important?”

“I dunno, dude. But it’s definitely a spike on the bizarro graph.”

Orion giggled. “This whole place is a spike.”

“I’m not arguing.”

An hour later, when the canyon walls straightened out, allowing them to see ahead for miles, they made out a group of figures walking along the avenue ahead of them. Seven people, a long way in front, moving at a steady pace.

BIPEDS LIKE YOU, Tochee’s patterns declared. THEY MADE THE LIGHT LAST NIGHT.

Could have done, Ozzie wrote.

THEY MOVE SLOWER THAN US. WE CAN CATCH THEM TODAY IF WE INCREASE SPEED.

Ozzie had been thinking the same thing. Of course if he really wanted to attract their attention there were several flares left in his backpack, though he didn’t want to use them for anything less than a genuine emergency. And the group in front would have to be looking around at the right moment. He was slightly surprised they hadn’t seen them already, especially given the way Tochee’s fabulous technicolor coating clashed against the drab ironstone.

Speeding up will be hard on us. We will reach them eventually.

AGREED.

In the afternoon, when they’d been walking down the empty avenue for several hours, they came to the first ruin. A small stream wriggled across the canyon, running from the base of the cliff wall down to the river, crossing through the avenue at right angles. At some time long ago, a simple curved stone bridge had carried the path over it. Now all that was left were the solid foundations on either side, sticking up from the dusty ground like a set of broken teeth.

There were gentle grooves in the stonework, resembling the trails snakes left in sand. Ozzie couldn’t tell if they were natural wind-erosions or ancient carvings. Thinking about the trees again, he suspected carvings. How long it would take for them to wear away like this he had no idea. Centuries, at least.

“I wish my arrays were working,” he sighed. “They could carbon date this right down to the afternoon it was built.”

“Really?”

“Pretty close, yeah.” It was always slightly unnerving how little Orion knew about technology. He had to be careful what he said, especially jokingly, which wasn’t an Ozzie trait. But the boy tended to take everything he said as gospel.

They splashed through the little stream, and carried on walking. Ozzie resisted the urge to carve his name into the bridge. He was mildly surprised that no one else had, especially the guys who’d left the soda can.

By the time they made camp they’d passed another ruined bridge, as well as a big circular depression in the ground whose edges were made from tight-fitting stone blocks. Neither archaeological remnant provided any clue as to what kind of creatures had built them. A bridge was a pretty basic design for any species, as were sturdy foundations, which is what Ozzie suspected the circle to be.

Through the day, they’d managed to close the distance on the group of travelers in front of them to about a mile. Once they got the tent up, the gold light became visible in the gathering darkness.

“That’s just about where they are,” Orion said. “You should fire a flare, Ozzie. There’s no way they can’t see it now.”

Ozzie gazed at the steady point of light. “They know we’re here. If they don’t want to talk to us, there’s no sense in trying to force them.”

Orion nodded cheerfully, and cut into one of the big fruits. “I get that about people now, you can’t rush somebody who doesn’t want to be rushed, right?”

“You’re learning.”

“So I let the girl set the pace.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And she’ll always find a way to tell me when she’s ready to go to bed? You’re sure about that?”

“Uh, yeah.” Ozzie was beginning to dread evenings around the campfire. The boy did have an amazingly one-track mind. “But, look, man, it’s going to be subtle. You’ve got to be alert and in tune.”

“Like how do you mean?”

“Okay, if she’s happy for the date to go on as long as you want, that’s a good sign.”

“I thought you said don’t try to get her to bed on the first date?”

“Yes, yes, that’s right. But this is the second date, or later.”

“Okay. So it goes on all night. Do I ask them home, or will they ask me?”

“I don’t know, man. It depends on the girl, okay? Use your judgment.”

“But, Ozzie, I haven’t got any, that’s why I ask you.”

“Want another line to use?” He’d found that was always a good way to make Orion stop, although the cost to his own dignity was always painfully high.

“Yeah!”

“All right. But you’ve got to have a ton of self-confidence for this one, okay, show no fear. ‘Is it me or do you always look this good?’ ”

“Maybe,” Orion said dubiously. “But you’d have to have a good follow-up line.”

“Hey, I’m just showing you how to open the door, once you’re in the room you’re on your own.”

The voices returned in the deep of night. This time they were slightly louder, occurring more frequently.

Orion woke with a start as one set of voices passed right beside the tent. Ozzie was already sitting up in his sleeping bag, listening to what was spoken and the way it was said.

“It is ghosts, isn’t it?” Orion said solemnly.

“Kinda looks that way, yeah. You scared, man?”

“Ozzie! It’s ghosts!”

“Right. Well, I’m scared, just in case you wanted to know.” He wriggled out of his sleeping bag and unzipped the tent. The night air was alive with sound, hundreds of voices that swirled chaotically around their little camp. He walked out into their midst, turning—into daylight. His feet were standing on a lush carpet of blue-green grass that covered the canyon floor, along with trees and thick bushes. The avenue of trees had been replaced by a road built from stone cobbles. Strange five-legged bovine animals pulled wooden carts along it, piled high with barrels and some local version of hay. The drivers were aliens that looked like pear-shaped jellyfish, with hundreds of slender tendrils emerging from their lower half, serving as both legs and arms. Individually weak, the wax-white tendrils would twine together to produce a stronger limb for whatever use was required. Dozens of them were sliding along the road, the tips of their tendrils twisting and scrabbling like impaled worms to move them forward. They called to each other in low gurgling voices.

One of the carts was heading straight for Ozzie. He waved his arms frantically. “Hey, watch what …” The driver obviously couldn’t see him, or the tent, or Orion standing at his side. He grabbed a frozen Orion and hauled him aside, falling off the side of the road—into nighttime.

“Fuck me!” Ozzie grunted. He raised his head and looked around. Nothing had changed, stars glittered in the night sky, casting a faint illumination. The avenue of trees stood impassively along the side of the quiet river, marking the course of the old road.

“Wow!” Orion gushed. “Cool.”

“Uh?”

Starlight showed the boy’s wide smile. “Don’t you get it? This canyon is a time machine, like the Silfen paths are wormholes. How smooth is that?”

“That was just an image, man,” Ozzie said, somewhat stiffly as he clambered back to his feet, brushing sand off his shorts. “It’s showing us what used to be here.”

“I smelled them, Ozzie, it was like vinegar. That was real, not an image. We were there in the past. Anyway, you thought we were there, why else did you dive for cover?”

“I was surprised, that’s all, and I didn’t know what level the image extended to. People have gotten themselves hurt in TSI, you know, man.”

“You were scared.” Orion flung his arms wide, laughing wildly at the canyon wall. “Hey, you scared Ozzie. Bad time machine.”

“This is not—” Ozzie got a grip, although he’d noticed the smell, too. He looked along the avenue, checking on the golden light from the other group. It was still there, unmoving. The ghost voices had come back, slipping sinuously through the air. “Damn, this place is weird.”

“Ozzie!” Orion gasped.

One of the jellyfish aliens was slipping past them, wrapped in its own little nimbus of daylight. Tochee pushed its icewhale fur blanket aside, rearing up on its locomotion ridges in shock as the seemingly solid apparition glided along.

WHAT WAS THAT.

Tochee’s eye patterns were shining so brightly Ozzie half expected Orion to see them. He shrugged—they certainly didn’t have anything like the vocabulary for time-traveling spooks. When he glanced around, the lone jelly alien had gone.

“I think we’d better get off the avenue. It’s only a few hours to dawn. We should try and get some rest.”

“Oh, Ozzie, this is wonderful. We might wind up finishing this journey before we started. I could go back to Silvergalde and stop my parents from ever leaving.”

“Look, man, I know you think a time machine is a groovy thing, but take it from me there are quantum fundamentals that prevent it from happening. Okay? I know what this looks like, but it isn’t real.”

Orion was about to answer when a small mechanical car appeared, with two jelly aliens sitting in the cab. Smoke and steam belched furiously from stumpy chimneys in its rear. The boy drew in a sharp breath and swayed backward. “I think maybe you’re right. We’ll get run over here.”

Ozzie was sorely tempted to just stand there and let one of the apparitions glide right through him. But they looked so damn real!

The three of them gathered up their packs and hurried away from the avenue. As soon as they were outside the line of trees the voices faded away, although they never fell completely quiet. Ozzie and Orion sat against a boulder, wrapping their sleeping bags around them. Every now and then opalescent light would burst out of the avenue, silhouetting the bottom of the trees as the long dead aliens walked their old road. After a while Ozzie stopped trying to figure it out, and closed his eyes.

“I’ve got a theory,” Orion said eagerly as they munched on their tasteless breakfast. “I think Sara walked down this canyon. That’s why she’s still alive after so long. The canyon brought her into the future.”

“It’s not a time machine,” Ozzie said for what must have been the tenth time. “Time cannot flow backward, you cannot move back through time. It is a one-way current. Period, dude.”

“She moved forward.”

“Okay, not so difficult. Even we can do that.”

“Can we?” Orion was fascinated.

“Well … in theory, yeah. The internal structure of a wormhole can be modified so its time frame is desynchronized. In other words, you go in at one end, and a week later you come out of the other. But, for you, only a second has elapsed. I’m pretty sure that’s what’s been happening on the Silfen paths. It certainly makes sense, especially when you think of people like Sara.”

“Have you done it with your wormholes?”

“No. It’s very complicated. We don’t have the technology to match the math yet.” He grunted in disapproval. “Maybe we will by the time you and I make it back.”

That morning they walked parallel to the avenue of trees, keeping a good three hundred yards distant. They kept noticing movement on the path. It was almost subliminal. Shadows that flickered between the trunks, vanishing when any attention was focused on them. The apparitions certainly weren’t as vivid during the day.

A couple of hours after they started, they realized they were finally catching up with the other travelers. The group had remained in the avenue. They now looked as if they were walking into a strong wind, leaning forward to push on doggedly, their cloaks streaming out behind them.

“They’re Silfen,” Orion said. “I’m sure they are.”

Ozzie zoomed in. The boy was right. “Another spike,” he muttered.

“Are we going to talk to them?”

“I dunno.” Ozzie was torn. They hadn’t seen any sentient creature since leaving the Ice Citadel world. On the other hand, the Silfen never made a lot of sense at the best of times. “Let’s see where they’re at when we catch up with them.”

As they hiked on, a big gap slowly became visible in the avenue up ahead. They could see the trees carry on on the other side, but for over a couple of miles the canyon floor was empty. “I can’t see any fallen trees,” Ozzie said as he scanned the ground. “Looks like the people who planted them wanted a break.”

“Is there anything built there?” Orion asked.

“Can’t see any ruins.”

They were catching up quite quickly with the Silfen group now. Ozzie estimated they should be level with them just before the gap in the avenue. The dark spectral shadows still flitted along the path, accompanied by the occasional mournful gabble. He was fairly sure it was the same language he’d heard the jelly aliens use when he’d been inside the projection.

When they were only a few hundred yards behind the Silfen, Tochee raised a tentacle. THAT IS NOT NATURAL, its patterns claimed. The tentacle was now pointing directly at the canyon wall in the long gap.

Ozzie studied the rock, trying to see what Tochee was looking at. Some of the vertical crevices did look a bit too regular … He shifted his sense of scale, and gasped with astonishment; the edifice was so large he hadn’t recognized it for what it was.

Millennia ago, the cliff had been carved with the profiles of the jelly aliens. There were two of them, a mile apart; each one must have measured nearly half a mile high. Entropy had slowly gnawed away at them, rock falls and slippage pulling away huge segments, distorting the outline. The piles of scree along the cliff base below them were exceptionally tall. But even after nature’s vandalism, the shapes were still distinct enough for him to identify. Between them was a palace that used to stretch nearly the entire height of the cliff. He assumed it was a palace, though it could easily have been a vertical city or temple, possibly even a fortress. The architecture was vaguely reminiscent of Bavarian castles he’d seen built to crest rugged Alpine peaks, although in this case one built by termites. It was almost as though the curving turrets and half-moon balconies had grown out of the rock, not that there were many of them left, and none were complete. Overall, there was even less of it remaining than the giant statues that guarded it on either side. Flying buttresses protruded from the sheer surface, curving upward to end in jagged spikes as whatever structure they once supported had snapped off to plummet onto the vast foothills of rubble strewn along the base. Stairways and pathways zigzagged all over the exposed surface. Hundreds of rooms were visible as small cavities where their front halves were missing. Thousands of open black caves showed where passages tunneled back into the rock linking interior rooms and halls.

“What happened here?” Orion asked, his voice verged on the reverential.

Ozzie shook his head, for once humbled by the scale of the tragedy. It was profoundly disturbing that a species obviously so capable and intelligent could allow their civilization to fail in such a fashion.

“I think we should ask the Silfen.”

As soon as they started to angle back toward the avenue they discovered why the Silfen were making such hard going. It wasn’t the wind that pushed against them, the memories of the old road were growing stronger. All the past travelers who’d used the ancient highway were retracing their journey, each of them using the canyon at the same time. They lacked the solidity that the apparitions of last night had possessed, but they more than made up for that by the sheer weight of numbers.

At first Ozzie merely flinched as the phantoms flew toward him sporadically, bracing himself as they hit only to find they’d passed straight through him without any contact. Some of the aliens, the majority, were simple walkers. Others drove rickety carts or rode animals. A few were in mechanical contraptions.

The density of the spectral travelers increased proportionally as they drew nearer to the avenue. With them came their noise, the cries of hundreds of aliens talking and shouting at once. And their numbers finally added up to a little gust of pressure. Ozzie put his head down as he headed into them. He felt something touch his wrist, and jumped in shock. When he looked down he saw Tochee’s tentacle of manipulator flesh coiling around his hand. The alien was also taking hold of Orion’s wrist. Linked together, the three of them pushed in farther toward the Silfen.

Inside the line of trees the bygone aliens merged together into a single blurred slipstream of color. Their voices became a single unending howl. It really was a gale pushing against them now. Ozzie leaned into it, thankful for Tochee’s steadying grip. His shirt and sweater were flapping wildly against him. He set his face with grim determination and forced his feet to move onward.

The Silfen were easy enough to see, a knot of darkness amid the torrent of color and light and noise pouring through the avenue. As they forced their way closer he realized that the Silfen were all old. Their long hair was thin and gray; deep creases lined their flat faces, etching dignity into their features. He’d never seen signs of aging among them before—of course, he’d never seen Silfen children either, assuming there were such things. But age had given them a distinction that humans normally lacked as their years advanced. And even now as they pushed themselves against the road’s history their long limbs never faltered.

“Greetings,” Ozzie called in the Silfen language.

One of the Silfen turned, her wide dark eyes regarding him with the curiosity of a grandmother who’d forgotten the name of her favorite grandchild.

“It’s me, Ozzie. Remember me?”

“Never can we not remember, dearest Ozzie, least of all amid this place of remembrance. Joyful that we are to find you here where you sought to be.”

“Sorry, but I never wanted to be here.”

Her gay laughter seemed to calm the whooping of the ghosts. “Demanding you were that all wonders should be shown and known in places far from home. How fast your mind skips and changes with your fickle mood, a delight and a sorrow burn behind your eyes with the beauty of twin stars forever dancing around their perfect circle.”

“Are these wonders to you? I think they are times long gone.”

“Hearken to the knowing, Ozzie, as you tread paths through lost worlds. Full with understanding you shall become to the delight of your stubborn self. Wonder begats not only the joy but the sorrow. Both must be for the other to live for ultimately they are twined into the one. Here you come where few have been, so deep is your need, so loud is your song. Still we love you though you are not ready to fall into the one circle of light and air where the song will be sung to the end be it bitter or be it sweet.”

“This? This is the answer to the Dyson barrier? Tell me of the imprisoned stars, I would so much like to learn.”

“So you will as you walk down this valley of death to the shadows that linger and mourn.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding,” he muttered in English. “You’re quoting the Bible at me?”

The Silfen woman’s long tongue shivered in the center of her mouth.

“Is this where I looked to be? Is this inside the prison around the stars? Do your paths reach through walls of darkness?”

“Cast aside your numbers and your coarse voice and learn how to sing, sweet Ozzie. Song is the destiny of all who live who love to live.”

“I don’t understand,” he groaned through clenched teeth. “I don’t know if this is the answer. What is this fucking place?” He gave the Silfen a look of anguish, and switched back to their language. “Why are you here in this dead valley? Why do you endure this?”

“Here we come to complete our song, small and frail we are, and searching for our place amid that which is to come. Long our journey has been, bright has been the light shining upon us, loud the songs we have had sung to us, hard and soft has been the land upon which our feet have trod. Soon we shall walk no more.”

“This is it? This is the end of the Silfen path? Will your feet end their walking in this valley?”

“Ozzie!” Orion called. “Ozzie, the ghosts are going.”

Ozzie looked around. They’d reached the last two trees, and the pressure was fading rapidly. The ghosts were fading away, allowing the full rays of the sun to sweep down across the broken rock of the valley floor. As he looked around in bewilderment their warbling voices dwindled to nothing. He was left stumbling forward, bracing himself against nothing. Stretching above him for the full height of the canyon wall was the ancient crumbling alien palace city.

“The path we walk and love goes round and round, and thus it can never end, Ozzie,” the Silfen woman said. She sounded profoundly sad, as if she was telling him about death. “It begins when you begin. It ends as you end.”

“And in between? What then? Is that when we sing?”

“Walking the path you hear many songs. Songs to treasure. Songs to fear. Come, Ozzie, come listen to the broken song of this world. Here lies the melody you desire to walk farther amid the tangle of mystery that is all of us.”

The Silfen had joined hands. Now the tall woman held out her hand to him. Orion was giving him a nervous look. Tochee’s eye patterns asked: WHAT NOW?

“Tell our friend I don’t know,” Ozzie told Orion. “But I’m going to find out.”

“Ozzie?”

“It’ll be fine.” He put his hand out to the Silfen woman. Her skin was warm and dry as her four fingers bent supplely around his hand. In an obscure way he found that comforting.

Together they started walking toward the vertical ruins. At the foot of the huge pile of shattered stone was a featureless black globe. It was as high as a Silfen was tall. Ozzie wasn’t sure if it actually rested on the ruddy sand or floated just above it.

“Now you will know this planet’s song,” she said as they approached the sphere. “All it used to sing comes from within its last memory.”

Ozzie almost hesitated. Then he saw the planet floating at the center of the sphere. He peered forward like an eager child.

It wasn’t the image of the planet, it was a ghost just like the aliens who haunted the roadway along the canyon. Long ago it had floated blissfully in space, known to the Silfen who walked their paths through its bucolic forests. Its inhabitants, the jellylike aliens, built themselves a peaceful civilization, advancing their knowledge as did most species. They had even begun to explore their solar system, sending crude ships to land on planets and moons.

Which was when the imperial colonizers arrived. Vast starships plunged into the star system on fusion flames, curving into orbit around this quiet happy world. They had taken decades to cross interstellar space, and were hungry for their prize, a new world on which to reestablish their old empire.

The war of conquest was as short as it was futile. The planetary inhabitants resisted as best they could, modifying their instrument-carrying rockets to assault the huge invaders above their beautiful planet. Some damage was inflicted on the big ships, which goaded the imperialists into fierce retaliation.

In the forests and glades below the Silfen hurried down their paths to regain the peace and freedom denied to those whose home this was. But even the elfin folk whose life was one of happiness and fey interest in the worlds they passed through were troubled by the horrific violence erupting around them. In penance, they watched.

Ozzie was shown the dark armored starships sending their missiles and kinetic projectiles hurtling down onto the planet below. Explosions ripped through the sleeping clouds, distorting the world’s air. Waves of destruction rolled out. Solid ground rippled like water. Oceans rose in rage. Towns and cities were blasted apart. Aliens died in the tens of thousands in the first few seconds. Ozzie knew them. He felt their death. Their grief. Their fear. Their loss. Their sorrow. Their regret as their homes disintegrated. Their bitterness as their children were torn apart before them. Every one of them was there for him to identify and experience. And the deaths multiplied as the empire’s weapons cast this world into smoking, radioactive oblivion before the starships departed in search of new worlds, worlds easier to subdue.

Ozzie fell back from the globe, curling up into a fetal ball as the tears flooded down his cheeks to stain the dead world’s dry sandy soil.

He wept for hours as the terrible anguish of countless deaths soaked through him. He hated it as he had hated nothing in his life before. Hated what was done. Hated the blind stupidity of the imperialists. Hated the Silfen for standing by and doing nothing. Hated the waste of so much life, so much promise. Hated knowing what a better universe it could have been if only the quiet simple aliens whose world this once was had survived and finally met the gaudy flawed human race as the Commonwealth expanded. Hated that such a meeting of unalike minds would never happen.

Late in the afternoon, when his tears had long since dried up, he stopped his pitiful whimpering lament, and rolled onto his back, blinking up at the cloudless sky. Orion and Tochee gazed down anxiously at him.

“Ozzie,” Orion pleaded, his own face close to tears. “Please don’t cry anymore.”

“It’s hard not to,” he croaked. “I was here. I was with every one of them when they died.” He started to tremble again.

“Ozzie! Ozzie, please!”

He felt Orion’s hand grasp his own, in desperate need of reassurance. A boy lost light-years from home, abandoned by his parents, on an adventure that had become a nightmare for too many months. The frail human touch was what he needed not to fall into that black infinity of horror. And how much of an irony was that, the superindependent Ozzie needing someone?

“Okay,” Ozzie said weakly, and gripped the boy’s hand roughly. “Okay, give me a moment here, dude, yeah.” He tried to sit up, only to find his body barely responding. Tochee’s manipulator flesh slid under him, helping to shift him upright. He looked around at the canyon, almost fearful of what he would see. “Where are the Silfen?”

“I don’t know,” Orion said. “They left ages ago.”

“Huh. Finally got something right. I’d kill the bastards if they’d stayed.”

“Ozzie, what happened? What did you see?”

He put a hand up to his forehead, surprised at how hot the skin was, as if he’d come down with a fever. “I saw what happened to this world. Some aliens arrived in starships and … and nuked it to shit.”

Orion gazed around uncertainly. “Here?”

“Yeah. But a long time ago, I guess.” He looked at the ruined palace city, feeling a fresh wave of sadness.

“Why did they show that to you?”

“I don’t know, man, I really don’t. They thought it was what I wanted, for my song. Song, hell!” A dismissive grunt escaped from his mouth. “I’d say we’ve got some serious translation problems here. Reckon I’m gonna sue someone in the cultural department when we get home for like a trillion dollars. I’m never going to recover from this.” Ozzie stopped, knowing just how true that was. “But then, I guess that’s the whole point. It’s a memory that belongs to the Silfen. They’re the ones who watched it all. And they did nothing.” He scooped up some of the sandy soil, then let it trickle away through his fingers, mesmerized by the drifting grains. “This is for them, it’s their grief, not mine, not the people whose world this used to be. It’s about them. Nobody else knows or cares, not anymore.”

“So what do we do now?”

Ozzie eyed the black globe wearily. “Leave. There’s nothing here for us.”

TWENTY-ONE

Even now, after all these years, Elaine Doi still got a thrill ascending to the rostrum. From the floor of the Senate Hall it looked imposing, a broad raised stage at the front of the seats, with a big curving desk made from centuries-old oak where the First Minister sat directing debates. In reality, when you came up the stairs at the back, the lights shining down from the Hall’s domed roof were so bright you had trouble seeing the last step. The purple carpet was worn and threadbare. The grand desk was despoiled with holes drilled in to accommodate modern arrays, portals, and i-spots.

In the past there had been countless occasions during working sessions when she had to come up here to make a policy statement or read a treasury report. The massed ranks of senators had heckled her mercilessly, their cries of “shame” and “resign” echoing around the Hall, while the reporters in their gallery to the right of the rostrum had grinned like wolves as they recorded her dismay and feeble rejoinders and fluffed lines. Despite all that, she’d been the one they ultimately paid attention to, the one controlling the debate, pushing through her legislation, doing the deals that made government work, not to mention scoring political points off her opponents.

Today, of course, the seven hundred senators in attendance fell into a respectful silence and stood in greeting that was tradition whenever the President got up to address them. They would have shown that much consideration if it had just been her monthly statement of review, but this time she could feel the genuine trepidation running through the Hall. Today they were looking to her to provide leadership.

Her ceremonial escort of Royal Beefeaters saluted sharply and moved away to stand guard at the back of the rostrum. She always thought their splendid scarlet uniforms added a real touch of class to these moments. Although they were technically assigned to the presidency as a courtesy from King William during the founding of the Commonwealth, the executive security office had long since taken over their funding and organization.

“Senators and people of the Commonwealth, please be silent for your Honorable President Elaine Doi who wishes to address you on this day,” the First Minister announced. He bowed to Elaine and returned to stand behind his desk.

“Senators, fellow citizens,” she said. “I thank you for your time. As I am sure you are aware from media reports, our Starflight Agency ships—the Conway, the StAsaph, and the Langharne—have now returned from Dyson Alpha. What their investigations discovered there was unpleasantly close to our worst-case scenarios. Commander Wilson Kime has now confirmed that the Dyson aliens, the Primes as they appear to be called, are indeed hostile in nature. Even more worrying, he discovered that these Primes have turned their considerable industrial prowess to the construction of large wormholes that can reach immense distances across this peaceful galaxy.

“This day we thank and pay tribute to him and his crews for the dangerous flight they undertook on our behalf. To learn what they did under such perilous conditions was a show of tremendous courage, which should give the Primes considerable pause for thought when they come to consider our resolve. However, we should never forget that they received help from a most unexpected source.

“After enduring horrors which we cannot begin to imagine, Dr. Dudley Bose sacrificed whatever was left of himself to warn us of the Primes’ true intent. Expressing the debt of gratitude which every human alive today owes to this great man, and his shipmate Emmanuelle Verbeke, goes beyond words. I am informed that their re-life procedure goes well, and we can only give thanks to whatever gods we believe in that they will soon rejoin our society so we may embrace them with the welcome they so richly deserve.

“In the meantime there is much to be done if we are to safeguard this wonderful Commonwealth of ours. My fellow citizens, after centuries of peaceful expansion, we now live in a time when our civilization faces the possibility of a uniquely hostile encounter. If this should happen we cannot rely on others, our friends the Silfen, nor the High Angel, to come to our aid. Humanity must do what we always do in times of darkness, and meet the challenge with the courage and resolution we have shown again and again throughout history that is our birthright.

“To that end, I have today signed executive decree one thousand and eighty-one, which transfers a new responsibility to the Starflight Agency, that of physically defending the planets and stars which make up the Common-wealth by whatever means necessary. It will henceforth be known as the Commonwealth Navy. Into this great venture we pour our trust and hopes for the future. I have faith that those men and women who serve will bring about a swift and resounding conclusion to the threat which is rising out among the distant stars. No task they face will be more difficult, nor so rewarding. To that end, I have the honor of promoting Wilson Kime to the post of admiral, and appointing him to lead our new navy. It is a heavy burden, and one which I am sure he will carry with the fortitude and leadership qualities which he has already demonstrated so ably.

“To the Primes, however, I say this: whatever your aspirations for malevolence, however much you covet our beautiful worlds, You Will Not Prevail. We, all of us poor flawed humans, have a heart that has been tested in the heat and pain of battle; we know we have the will, we know we have the right, and we know we have the determination to throw down any force for evil and tyranny. To that end I pledge myself and my presidency.”

She bowed to the senators, and stepped sharply off the rostrum, her Beefeaters falling in behind to follow her down the stairs. The applause and cheering that chased after her was awesome, both in its unanimity and enthusiasm.

Patricia Kantil was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, clapping passionately, a huge smile on her face. “Perfect,” she said, falling in beside Doi as they left the Hall. “You pitched it just right. Confident without any smugness, and what you said made people feel secure.”

Doi flashed a worried smile. “Glad they are.”

As soon as they were through the door, the Beefeaters handed over security to agents dressed in ordinary suits. Staff members and aides took up their usual position, following their chief down the broad corridor like a small comet’s tail. All of them looked indecently cheerful, still applauding her speech. After eleven months of what she herself charitably described as a lackluster term, her presidency had finally taken focus out there on the rostrum.

By the time they got back up to her offices on the Senate Hall’s third floor the good news was arriving thick and fast. Messages of congratulations and approval were flooding in off the unisphere. Aides returned to their own desks to handle them.

“Nice speech, thank you,” Doi said to David Kerte as she passed his desk. The young man looked up and smiled his gratitude. Until the election he’d been Patricia’s principal assistant, now he was turning into one of their staff team’s best speechwriters.

“My pleasure, ma’am. I cribbed some of Kennedy’s moon speech for you, I thought the parallel was appropriate.”

“It was.” Doi walked on into the glass lounge. It was a bubble sticking out from the side of the Senate Hall, completely transparent from within, glossy black to anyone outside trying to look in, and protected by force fields should any sniper want to test their ability. She flopped down on one of the broad sofas, and let out a long breath of relief.

“You want something?” Patricia asked, walking over to an antique teak cocktail cabinet.

“Want, yes. Having, no. Give me a fruit juice. It’s going to be a long day.”

Patricia opened the door and took a can of orange and triffenberry from the shelf. The web of thin silver lines around her eyes were pulsing as her virtual vision clogged up with polling data. There were certain indicators she could always rely on, which she scanned with her usual efficiency. “The Hill-Collins unisphere poll gives you a seventy-two percent personal approval rating,” she said as the results streamed in. The can frosted over as she pulled the tab. “Fifty-three percent are still worried about the Primes—that’s down four from yesterday. Eighty-eight percent approve of you forming the navy. Stock market is up; analysts are predicting sharp increase in government spending to build the navy, which is correct. The finance sector is jittery about taxes to pay for it all. On balance, it’s favorable. Second term’s in the bag.”

“Not a chance,” Elaine said, taking the can from Patricia. “There’s a long way to go. And what happens if the Primes do invade?”

Patricia snorted. “Give me a break. I’ve been researching this. Populations flock to support their leadership in times of war. Historical fact. It’s after the war you’ve got to worry about. Churchill, Bush, Dolven, they all got dumped right after their victories.”

“I was always nervous about backing the Starflight Agency so publicly even if it was the price of getting Sheldon’s support. But by God it paid off today.” She drank some of the juice.

“Don’t bring God into this,” Patricia said quickly. “Too many voters are atheists these days.”

The President gave her a disapproving look. “You were always in favor of the Agency and its progression. Do you think there’s going to be a war?”

“I was in favor of the Agency for the options it gave us.”

“Do you think there’s going to be a war?”

“Honestly? I don’t know, Elaine. I can handle the Senate and the media for you. But this … it’s way out of my field. All I know is that finding the Primes are building a giant wormhole has frightened the bejesus out of half our tactical analysts. Did you see Leopoldovich’s report? There’s no logical reason for them to build something on that kind of scale; therefore their motives are unknown. That’s not good news, because all we know about them is what Bose told us. We have to assume the worst. Whoever put that barrier up, it’s starting to look like they had good reason.”

Elaine Doi let herself relax into the deep cushioning. “That never made sense right from the start. Every expert we have claims the effort which went into building the barrier was colossal; yet it gets switched off the minute we go sniffing around.”

“I told you, if you’re asking me, you’re asking the wrong person. Nobody has come up with a reason; all we’ve got is a bunch of half-assed theories and crank conspiracies like Johansson’s; even the SI is at a loss, or claims it is.”

“Claims?”

“You know I never trust it.”

“You’re a xenophobe.”

Patricia shrugged. “Somebody has to be.”

“All right,” Elaine said. “We don’t know why, but we do know we’re in a possible war situation—”

“That’s another word I’d like you not to use, please. War has too much historical baggage attached. Conflict, or the Prime situation, are preferable.”

“You’re developing a nasty habit yourself, there. People like some natural traits.”

“Traits I can manage, prohibited words I can’t.”

Elaine ran a hand through her hair, a gesture she always reverted to when she was irritated—as Patricia always pointed out. “All right, I’ll mind my language.”

“Thank you.”

“There’s something that Leopoldovich and everyone else seems to be avoiding.”

“What’s that?”

“The High Angel. I know siting Base One there was part of the Agency start-up deal, but if there is a possibility of conflict, is it going to hang around?”

“Actually, someone on Leopoldovich’s team did analyze that, it’s in one of the appendices. It has always assured us it will give notice before it leaves, so transferring Base One construction personnel to Kerensk won’t be a problem. They can still get to the assembly platforms through the wormhole; using High Angel as a dormitory was a political move to bring Chairwoman Gall on our side, and through her the African caucus. Physically, it’s nonessential. There’s also a proposal from Columbia’s staff on using it as our species’ lifeboat.”

“What?”

Patricia shrugged. “Basically, if it looks like we’re losing, we put as much of our culture and genetic template as possible on board, as well as a few million living humans, and ask the High Angel to take the survivors to a less hostile part of the universe. We’re pretty sure it has a transgalactic flight capability.”

“My God, you’re serious.”

“Columbia’s security office was, yes. The President would be classed as an essential component of the emergency evacuation. You’d be going.”

“No, I goddamn wouldn’t; and I want you personally to make very certain that this lunatic idea is never leaked to the media. They’d crucify us if they knew we were planning to escape.”

“Very well, I’ll see to it.”

Elaine let out a long breath. “You really do read all the appendices, don’t you?”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

“Okay, then. What’s next?”

“Meeting with Thompson Burnelli and Crispin Goldreich. You’ve got to thrash out the navy’s first budgetary presentation for the Senate. Did you see the request from Kime?”

“Yes. I thought fantasy had gone out of style! Five more scoutships, twenty new ships with full attack capability, a Commonwealth-wide wormhole detection system, bringing that Natasha Kersley’s Directorate up to full active status, incorporating a dozen more government science departments. We’re looking at a percentage point increase on taxes. I can just see how the planetary governments will respond to that.”

“It might have had Kime’s name on it, but the request was drafted by the Sheldons and Halgarths. They’re already working on steering it through the Senate. With the Intersolar Dynasties and the Grand Families cooperating, it’ll sail through. The level of fallout dropping on you will be minimal.”

“I suppose so. Is the meeting here?”

“Yes. But we’re due home for lunch.”

“Good.” Elaine looked out through the lounge’s clear curving wall at Washington’s old Capitol building. The Commonwealth Senate Hall had been built here, and paid for out of UFN taxes by commissioners keen to keep Earth at the center of Commonwealth politics; but the Presidential Palace was on New Rio, as a gesture to the new worlds, along with a host of Directorates and departments that were spread out among phase one space in accordance with the Commonwealth policy of inclusion. She always felt more secure in the New Rio Palace, like any animal in its home territory.

As she looked out at the rain sweeping across the old city her virtual vision was displaying a simple star map. New Rio was on the other side of Earth from the Dyson Pair, over a thousand light-years away from the Primes. That also was a comfort.

....

Hoshe parked out on Fairfax, and walked a block back down Achaia. It was midday, and the heat had just about cleared every other pedestrian off the sidewalk. Hoshe took his jacket off as he walked, dabbing at the perspiration on his brow. Achaia was one of those narrow streets in the city grid that looked like it ran on forever, with the cracked concrete’s heat shimmer obscuring the far end as it slipped into the commercial district. The housing on both sides was mainly three-story apartment blocks, fronted by small yards that were filled with overgrown ornamental bushes and trees that had nearly reached roof level. Air-conditioning units hummed constantly above all the narrow balconies where their fins radiated away the excess heat. Cars came and went in front of him, turning out of ramps that led down to underground garages.

When he reached the first alleyway, he stopped and scanned around. High fences guarded both sides, with flowering shrubs and creepers tumbling over them in colorful shaggy mats. Beneath his feet, enzyme-bonded concrete gave way to a hard-packed surface of stone chippings and dirt. Several dogs barked as he passed gates. He even heard the distinctive metallic gabbling of a catrak and hoped to heaven it was securely chained.

He was about a hundred meters along the alley when he came to the backyard of 3573. A low double gate opened onto a short section of concrete that led to a big double garage made from prefab stonesteel sections that were bolted together. A wooden bungalow stood behind it, its windows dark and closed, yellow paint peeling from the planks. Vines with droopy sapphire flowers had engulfed every pillar that supported the overhanging roof, looking like thick elongated bushes the strands were wrapped so densely.

Hoshe went through the gate. One of the garage doors was open. Someone was moving around inside.

“Hello?”

A young man jumped at the sound, and hurried to the door. “Man, who the fuck are you, man?” he blurted. His black jeans had been washed again and again until they were a pale gray, above them he wore a purple T-shirt that was equally overused. He had gold frame sunglasses perched on his nose, their rose-pink lenses displaying moving graphs and columns of text—Hoshe hadn’t seen anything like them since early in his first life, when they’d briefly been in fashion. But they did complete the geek image, it was hard to imagine him as anything other than a software writer.

“I’m Hoshe, I’m looking for Kareem.”

“Never heard of him, man. Now, I’m kinda busy.”

“Giscard sent me. Giscard Lex. He told me Kareem lived here. I’ve gotta see him, it’s urgent.” He took a thick fold of Oaktier dollar bills from his pocket. “Really urgent.”

The young man licked his lips, eyeing the money greedily. Paula had been right about that, there was always a weak link. It hadn’t even taken Hoshe much effort to find it. He’d run a simple search against every registered partner in the Shansorel Partnership. When none of them had a criminal record, cross-referencing had produced old friends and colleagues who had. Namely Giscard Lex, who’d been Kareem’s classmate at college, where his academic career had been cut short by illegal experimentation in narcoware. A couple of weeks’ casual observation confirmed that the two still saw each other.

Hoshe dropped by on Giscard Lex one evening and was offered everything from dimension-shifting sensory morphware to a couple of girls who’d be sweet on him. At which point Hoshe returned the favor by offering to introduce him to the precinct desk sergeant. Giscard Lex was almost relieved that all he had to do was provide an introduction to Kareem.

“Okay, man,” Kareem said, he looked back down the alley, little OCtattoo lines turned emerald on his ears as he checked for anyone lurking. “Come inside.”

The garage was filled with crates. A bench running along the back was lined with tools that were being cleaned. They were very old-fashioned ones; Hoshe couldn’t see a single power tool among them. He picked up a screwdriver and gave it a close examination while Kareem activated the garage door. The plyplastic closed up with a quiet slurping sound. “Are you an antiques collector? I didn’t even know they still made manual screwdrivers.”

“No, man.” Kareem gave a shifty grin. “This is my survival gear. Ain’t no electricity where I’m going.”

“Where’s that, exactly?”

“Silvergalde, man. I’m gonna live with the elves, me and my girl. They’ll protect their own planet from the Primes. This fucking government won’t, we haven’t even got a force field to cover Darklake City.”

“Right.” People like Kareem were getting wider coverage in the media recently. It was hyped as the Exodus by excitable reporters, though the actual numbers were so small governments didn’t even register them, no more than a few thousand from each planet, and most of them first-lifers. But together there were enough for CST to have to triple the number of trains running to Silvergalde. “What about the navy?”

“Ha! What, like both ships? Fat lot of fucking use they’re gonna be when Hell’s Gateway blows open above Earth, and ten thousand flying saucers carry the demons down to massacre us. They don’t call the giant wormhole that for no reason, you know. Johansson’s Guardians are right, we’re in deep shit, and our corrupt politicians don’t help.”

Coincidence, Hoshe told himself sternly, though it was an unsettling one. “Okay, so are you leaving tonight, or can you help me out?”

Kareem waved a hand at the crates. “I haven’t got everything yet. There’s a lot of medicine and shit I need. Books, too. The paper ones are hard to get hold of these days, and expensive. Did you know Ozzie’s got a library of all human knowledge printed out and stashed away somewhere on his own planet? That’s one guy who’s ready for the apocalypse.”

“So you can help, then?”

“Depends what you want, man.”

“Giscard told me you’re the man to come to for software fixes.”

“Yeah. Maybe. I know some moves. Place I work at, we got us some private teams for solving private problems, you catch?”

“Caught. I’m paying too much tax.”

“Ho, brother, we all do.”

“I own a company that imports spare parts for the auto trade, and the government is killing me for it. I’m just trying to earn a living, feed my family, but those bastards …”

“Yeah, right!”

“What I need is a fix that covers over some of my trading. If I could just shift ten or fifteen percent of my stock without them penalizing me for it I can keep afloat. What I need is some safe encryption that can resist the Revenue Department’s audit engines so I can run the money through offworld accounts.”

“Sure, I can do that. Hell, I don’t even need to bring the guys in. What accountancy software are you using?”

Hoshe held up a memory crystal disk. “System and network is all in here.”

“Excellent. A man who is prepared, I respect that.” Kareem took the memory crystal and smiled. “That’ll be a grand for a full fix, payable in advance.”

“Two hundred now.” Hoshe slapped the notes into his hand on top of the crystal. “The rest when the installed fix is running.”

“Okay, man, I’m cool with that.” The notes were shoved into the back pocket of his jeans. “Must be my lucky week. This is the second private contract I’ve had.”

“Oh, really?”

....

To the Commonwealth’s general public, it was as if their new navy appeared by magic. One day President Doi announced its formation, and within a week it had become a physical reality. Ships were already being put together over at High Angel; planetary security teams started assembling wormhole detectors on the worlds closest to the Prime threat. Things were safely under control. Even Alessandra Baron was moderately complimentary on her show, though possible tax raises received a detailed analysis.

Admiral Kime was surprised by how smoothly the transition went. Of course, it helped that the personnel and equipment from Anshun had all been transferred to High Angel while he was flying the scouting mission to the Dyson Pair. That left him free to concentrate his staff on the huge expansion of capacity and capability that turning the Agency into the navy entailed. In fact, precisely the kind of large-scale managerial role that had taken up ninety percent of his adult life.

Navy Base One was primarily a cluster of freeflying starship assembly platforms holding station thirty to forty kilometers away from the High Angel in their own little archipelago. They’d kept the basic malmetal globe design used above Anshun; although these didn’t have a wormhole connection. A fleet of new cargo shuttles swarmed between them and the vastly expanded and upgraded wormhole station linked to Kerensk, ferrying out the components that would form the next generation of starships. Passenger commuters carried the freefall workforce between the assembly platforms and High Angel, where they’d taken over a considerable portion of the freshly grown Babuyan Atoll dome. The dome’s young buildings were also where Kime had set up his office along with the major part of the navy’s administration, design teams, crew training facilities, and research bureaus. At the center of the parkland campus was a thirty-story tower that had five concave-curving sides surrounded by a DNA helix of skyway rails—dubbed Pentagon II by Alessandra Baron, a name that was catching on rapidly among the media shows and reporters.

Wilson’s office was on the top floor. He didn’t like it. While he was away on the scout mission, the designer had gone for a retro-modern image: slick flow-curving furniture of white tragwood from Niska, monochrome illumination floors and walls. It was like working in an operating theater. The one redeeming feature was the view it gave him out over the compact ecology of his new domain. Only a third of Babuyan Atoll had any urban structures, the rest was burgeoning parkland, with saplings and young bushes pushing up eagerly through the lush grass. Between the paths and lakes were flat patches resembling pearl-textured concrete, which would one day grow into buildings. He enjoyed the panorama, not least for the nightly sight of Icalanise and its fast-moving bands of tawny cloud as it drifted high above the dome’s crystal. It was surprising just how much the last few years had rekindled his old first-life wanderlust. Every time he looked out and saw the exotic gas giant he was less sure he could ever go back to his old job at Farndale.

Anna was first into the conference meeting that was scheduled to draw up the navy’s rules of engagement, but then she had the shortest distance to travel. With her promotion to lieutenant commander, and her position as his chief staff officer, she had the office next door, where she organized his days and acted as a filter against everyone who wanted his personal attention directed to their own particular project or cause. She came in with Oscar; Wilson heard them laugh together as they came through the door.

“Kantil’s commuter shuttle docked a few minutes ago,” Anna told him. “She’ll be up here soon.”

“Right.” He canceled the data filling his virtual vision. She smiled warmly at him, which he returned. Her engagement ring shone brightly as she waved her hand teasingly at him. He’d proposed as the Conway docked. She’d said yes. Oscar said about time. They still hadn’t set a date for the actual ceremony, a classic case of work pressure, although they had taken a lavish apartment together in a block near the edge of the dome.

Rafael Columbia arrived, dressed immaculately in his black uniform. He quickly asked if they’d set a date yet. “My own engagement record was fifteen years,” he said. “I’m sure you can beat that if you set your minds to it.”

Wilson gave him a martyred smile. The lack of a firm date was turning into a standing joke around Base One.

Columbia had become Vice Admiral and Wilson’s second in command when President Doi formed the navy, taking over responsibility for the planetary defense operation. He’d sited his division’s office on Kerensk, and was rapidly assimilating the various Commonwealth Directorates and agencies that now formed the basis of his expanding empire. Given the more political nature of pressuring planetary governments into installing or upgrading force fields around their major population centers, it was a task he was eminently suited to. The only real argument to date between him and Wilson had been about who had direct control over Natasha Kersley’s Seattle project.

Columbia had argued for it to be incorporated within his planetary security division, and the project sited on Kerensk. Wilson eventually overruled him, pointing out that Kersley’s systems would ultimately be carried by starships, and should therefore be part of Base One’s operations. A quick call to Sheldon had secured executive support, and confirmed the decision. Columbia hadn’t challenged him again.

Daniel Alster was shown into the office with Dimitri Leopoldovich.

Wilson was mildly surprised, he’d expected Alster to share the commuter shuttle with Patricia Kantil. Both of them were representing the oversight committee during the meeting, while Leopoldovich was an academician specializing in tactical analysis at the StPetersburg Institute for Strategic Studies. It was a field with few practitioners, used mainly as an advisory and research service by the Commonwealth when secessionist and national autonomy movements started to use physical force against their legitimate planetary governments. During his time on Farndale’s board, Wilson had often heard senior politicians and their staff disparagingly refer to tactical analysts as war games nerds with a history degree. But then astronomy was a minority profession before this, he thought in amusement.

Dimitri had undergone his third rejuvenation a few years back, leaving him with a mid-twenties body whose lank blond hair had already begun to thin out. His skin was pale verging on albino-white, which combined with a diet of fast food and total lack of exercise gave him the appearance of a podgy vampire. He nodded at Wilson and took his usual seat, which left him facing away from the broad window.

“How was Bose?” Anna asked Daniel Alster.

“Re-life always freaks me out,” Daniel confessed. “Those accelerated growth clones just don’t look human.”

“But his personality is intact?” Wilson pressed.

“Oh, yeah. The download from his secure store was completely successful. The last thing he remembers is making a short update on the Second Chance before going over to the Watchtower.”

“And Emmanuelle?”

“The same. Though she’s a lot calmer than Bose.”

“How do you mean?”

“I only met Bose once before; he seemed quite edgy then. That trait has become … amplified a little. The doctors said the information he’s received subsequent to re-life hasn’t helped.”

“You mean the warning we were given on the scout mission?”

“Yes, partly. It’s unfortunate that we don’t know exactly what did give you that warning. Re-lifers often worry that their earlier self is alive somewhere. In this case, the prospect is throwing up some unique schizophrenic problems.”

“The warning specifically said the Primes killed them.”

“I know. But Bose is obsessed by what actually transmitted that warning at you. He suspects his original self is still alive back there, in some form or other, which is reasonable enough. It hasn’t helped that his wife has told him she’s divorcing him, either. The psychologist says that he’s interpreted that as a rejection of his new self, which reinforced his focus on his old self.”

Wilson and Anna exchanged a look. “We always wind up feeling guilty about him, don’t we?” she said.

“Yeah,” he said uncomfortably. “So what else did the docs say about him?”

“The clinic will discharge him in a few months. Physically, he’ll be in top shape by then. Mentally—well they say that every re-life case takes another life to get over the trauma. Bose is no exception. Dose him up on antidepressants and let him get on with it.”

“Did he say what he wanted to do afterward?”

“No. He’s receiving a lot of offers from media companies, not just for his life story as a biogdrama, they want him as a commentator on the Prime ‘situation.’ I expect his university will welcome him back. We can drop a hint to that effect, a strong hint. He can’t do much harm back on Gralmond.”

“So he doesn’t want to join the navy, then?”

Daniel grinned. “No. You’re perfectly safe this time around.”

Oscar laughed at the relieved expression on Wilson’s face.

Patricia Kantil walked into the office. “Thank you for waiting,” she said with ever-professional courtesy.

“You’re not late,” Daniel said. “Just to finish off on Bose, there will be some kind of ceremony when he and Verbeke leave the clinic. Patricia, that came from your office?”

“It did. Given their profile, especially Bose, we thought some official welcome back to Commonwealth society would be appropriate for them. They’re the nearest things we have to heroes right now. The Vice President will be there, and it would be nice for some of their shipmates to participate as well.”

Wilson almost groaned out loud. “All right,” he said. “We’ll send someone on the day. Now, if we can get started.”

“My report’s simple enough,” Oscar said. “We haven’t had any contact with the scoutships yet.”

“When was the first due to report back?” Daniel asked.

“The St Asaph should be back at Anshun within another ten days, assuming they didn’t find anything.”

“And if they did?”

“They’re searching fifteen star systems three hundred light-years from the edge of phase three space. Basically their course is a big curve to take them within hysradar range of each star. If the Primes have opened their giant wormhole to any of those systems they’ll be able to detect it. But given the nature of the flightpath, their journey back will be a long one. As they’re not back yet, we know that they didn’t find anything at the first eleven stars.”

“Or they did, and the Primes caught them,” Rafael said. He shrugged into the silence. “Just being realistic.”

“The remaining six scoutships we’ve got out there should be returning over the following two months,” Oscar continued. “Between them, they’ll have covered over a hundred star systems. Admittedly, that’s not many considering the distances involved and the number of stars between us and Dyson Alpha. But if the Primes are coming this way, then one of those stars will be used as a staging post. We need to find it; at the very least that will enable us to start building realistic tactical scenarios.”

“Are these scouting patrols going to be constant?” Patricia asked.

“Yes,” Wilson confirmed. “We need to establish some early warning if the Primes are moving in our direction. It’s a three stage approach. Rafael is overseeing our short-range detector network which will find any wormhole opening inside the Commonwealth. The fleet will be running scoutship flights past the stars within one hundred light-years in the direction of Dyson Alpha on a continual basis; if the Primes appear at any of them we’ll know about it within three days maximum. Outside that, we’ll fly regular patrols to more distant stars, but the revisit times will be months apart rather than days.”

“When does this come into effect?”

“We’ve already begun siting the first elements for the border network detectors,” Rafael said. “If they come at us directly, we’ll know about it. Our estimates for completing the full Commonwealth-wide network are anything up to a further eighteen months.”

“I see. Admiral, what about the scout flights?”

“It depends on ship numbers, of course. Once this preliminary operation we’re running now is finished, I’m going to pull back those scoutships to begin patrols of the closer stars. We’ve got two more scoutships undergoing flight trials, and the remaining five of batch three will come off their assembly platforms over the next four months. That’ll give me fifteen, which is enough to provide the near-border patrols. The distant patrols will require another ten scoutships, though I’d prefer fifteen to twenty.”

“They cost three billion Earth dollars each,” Patricia said tersely.

“I’m aware of that; and their operating and maintenance costs as well. The executive knew the budget would have to increase almost exponentially for the first three to five years of the navy’s existence.”

“I’ll take those preliminary figures back with me. What about the warships?”

“The first batch of three is due to finish assembly in four months. After that, we’ll be building one every three weeks. How many we ultimately need depends on the nature of the Prime threat.”

Everybody turned to Dimitri Leopoldovich. Since the return of the Second Chance he’d been consulted by the Commonwealth executive and the Senate on an increasingly regular basis. The experience gave him a degree of confidence facing down high-powered questioners in a way that wasn’t evident in his appearance. “Just about the only thing we know for certain about the Primes is that they cannot be assigned human motivations,” he said in mildly accented English. “Even with such a huge civilization contained within a single solar system, a vast amount of their resources had to be diverted to construct the giant wormhole which my team has named Hell’s Gateway.” His lips twitched, as if expecting censure. “We do not fully understand why it was built on such a scale. One of the most obvious possibilities is that it was built without any reference to economics because it is a species survival route. The Primes fear the return of the surrounding barrier, and are trying to spread their seed across the galaxy. Arkships will travel through it, carrying breeding stock and enough machinery to support a colony. If they switch the other end of the wormhole to a new star system every week, or even every day, they will have dispersed themselves in such a fashion that will make it very difficult for the barrier builders to imprison them again. In effect, a fast-forward version of our own Commonwealth.”

“Wait,” Patricia said. “You’re claiming they’re not even a threat to us?”

“Not at all, my team is simply providing you with theoretical possibilities. A second option is that they know the location of the barrier builders, and have crossed interstellar space to confront them and finally wage the war which the barrier was put up to prevent. A third option is that they built it to reach the Commonwealth. This is the only option which concerns us. We have to emphasize here that we cannot assign a satisfactory motivation to this, but we are hampered by the human perspective. As the Silfen and the High Angel have demonstrated, our logic and behavior patterns are not universal. And the very existence of Hell’s Gateway demonstrates how true that is. Therefore, for the purposes of this meeting, it doesn’t matter why they are coming here, only that they are. Those are the terms on which we must consider their actions. They have now had two opportunities to begin peaceful contact procedures with us, and have chosen not to do so on both occasions. Following this, it is my team’s conclusion then that if the Hell’s Gateway was constructed to allow the Primes access to the Commonwealth it is for hostile purposes. We recommend that if the Primes open a wormhole either close to or within the Commonwealth that the navy responds with maximum force.”

“Won’t that be tantamount to us declaring war on them?” Patricia said. “I’m not sure the executive, or even the Senate, would approve those rules of engagement.”

“To use an old analogy: you are playing croquet while they are kick boxing. If the Primes did succeed in extracting information from Bose and Verbeke, as the evidence we have so far indicates, then they know everything about us. They will know that our attempts to contact them were peaceful. They know how to reciprocate by opening channels of communication to us in a nonhostile, nonthreatening manner. That they have not sought to at least investigate the state of the galaxy around them after a thousand years of isolation is extremely suggestive. In tactical terms, they are maneuvering themselves into a position of considerable advantage.”

“But why come all this way?” Oscar asked. “If all they want is material resources, then there are hundreds of star systems close to their own that they could spread out to and exploit.”

“The number of unknown factors we’re dealing with means we really do have to concentrate on the few facts we have, rather than engage in perpetual speculation,” Dimitri Leopoldovich said somewhat reprovingly. “We still don’t know why the Dyson barriers were put up, nor by whom. We don’t know why one was switched off. Break it down to basics, my friends, all we know is that they’re demonstrably hostile, they have tens of thousands of warships, and they’re building wormholes that can reach us. We have to reset our civilized way of thinking to default mode: shoot them before they shoot us. In this instance, we have no alternative other than to prepare for the worst-case scenario. I’d rather spend a trillion dollars on the navy and live to regret the waste of tax money than not spend it and find out we really needed to. Remember Pearl Harbor.”

Wilson watched with silent enjoyment as Patricia forced herself not to comment on Leopoldovich’s trillion-dollar navy. “I’m not sure the parallel strictly applies,” he said. “But I do understand where you’re coming from.”

“We will have one strategic advantage,” Dimitri Leopoldovich said. His rigid smile of emphasis made him look even more vampirish. “Precisely one. It must be exploited no matter what the cost to ourselves for it will be our only chance of survival. The Primes are at the end of a very long, singular supply line. Without it, there can be no hostilities. That is why my team makes the urgent recommendation that the Prime wormhole is attacked the instant they open it in Commonwealth space. Attacked and destroyed. I cannot emphasize this strategy strongly enough. There will be no rules of engagement once they start coming through. We have studied the records from the Conway; they were sending dozens of ships through Hell’s Gateway every hour, and that was months ago. While here you talk of building one warship every three weeks, and the first one isn’t even finished yet. If we devoted our entire industrial output to shipbuilding, it would take decades to reach the number which the Primes can deploy against us right now.”

“Is that combat scenario possible?” Patricia asked. “Can we fire something back through their wormhole which will destroy the generator mechanism at the other end?”

“A crowbar or even a slingshot can knock out a wormhole generator if you know which critical components to smash,” Wilson said. “The key is getting close enough to inflict the relevant damage. You can be sure the opening at this end will be defended by squadrons of ships, and the strongest force fields they can throw up. We would have to break through them to reach the station at the other end. At the moment, the kind of systems which can do that are not part of the armaments we’re fitting to the warships.”

“Then they must be designed and installed,” Dimitri Leopoldovich said forcefully. “Immediately.”

Patricia and Daniel looked at each other. Daniel inclined his head minutely.

“Very well,” Patricia said. “If that’s your team’s official recommendation, academian. Admiral, would your staff look into the proposal, please, and cost it out for the steering committee to review.”

“Certainly,” Wilson said.

....

In summer, Paula actually quite enjoyed sitting out on Paris’s pavement cafés. The coffee in the deeply nationalistic city was still bitter and natural, avoiding a great many UFN processing regulations, while the pastries accompanying them contained way too many calories. The sun and the people made a refreshing change from the sanitized office environment. But for this call she went inside a little bistro a few hundred meters away from the office, and took a private booth. She’d been using the same place for fifty years; the waitress showed her to the booth at the back without even asking. Paula ordered a hot chocolate, and one of the pastries with almonds and cherries.

Her e-butler said the call was coming through. She put a small handheld array on the table, and waited for its screen to unfurl. It wasn’t that she couldn’t take this call in the office, she just felt it was more appropriate to take it in her own time. Thompson Burnelli’s face appeared on the thin plastic; from the blurred gold and white background she thought he was in his Senate Hall office.

“Paula.” He gave her a relaxed smile. “No uniform?”

Anyone else would have earned a crippling stare for that dig, the Senator merely got a raised eyebrow. “It must be in the wash,” she said. The formation of a Commonwealth navy had caught Paula by surprise; she wasn’t prepared for the brand-new Planetary Security Agency to be switched to naval funding and change once again. But like it or not, she was now in naval intelligence with the rank of commander. The day after the changes had been announced to the Paris office, Tarlo had saluted her as he came in to work. Nobody would be doing that again. Nobody in the Paris office wore uniforms, either, although they were technically entitled to. Office rumor said that several members of the staff changed into them before going out for a night clubbing in town, testing the ancient theory that every girl loves a sailor.

Uniforms were the least of her worries. To start with Mel Rees had told them the whole office would be moving to Kerensk, where Vice Admiral Columbia was establishing his administration. That led to a showdown between her and Rees where calls were fired off to political allies with the speed of Prime missile salvos. Mel Rees desperately wanted the move to the navy’s planetary defense headquarters where his chances for promotion inside the new navy were considerable; Paula threatened to resign if any kind of relocation or team alteration went ahead.

Rafael Columbia solved the problem with his usual political deftness. Paula was appointed commander of the Johansson project, which would remain in Paris for strategic reasons. Mel Rees was also promoted, and would run a new unit on Kerensk dealing with the deployment of the wormhole detector network. She was rather pleased to find that her contacts outweighed his family connections.

“Sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you on this,” Thompson said. “Life in the Senate hasn’t been this exciting for … well, I don’t ever remember a session like this one before. Kime’s second flight really stirred things up. I never really thought we’d have to form a navy, and I was heavily involved in the early preparation work.”

“Did you know the old Serious Crimes Directorate would end up as navy intelligence?”

“No, Paula, I didn’t realize quite how ambitious Rafael was going to be. I heard about your fight with Rees. I’m glad they managed to work out a compromise that allowed you to stay on. Hell, we only just managed to hang on to Senate Security. Can you believe Columbia wanted that as well?”

“It can’t last, Thompson. We still need some kind of Intersolar department to track down criminals. Apart from Johansson, there is nothing for navy intelligence to do. My former colleagues are still working on their old cases. They just wear uniforms to do it.”

Thompson smiled sadly. “Not quite. There is a small amount of opposition to the navy taking shape. Disaffected hotheads for now, but they need to be monitored, those that don’t go and join the Exodus.”

“Local police can handle that.”

“I’m not going to argue with you, Paula. I’m calling because I have news.”

“I’m sorry, go ahead.”

“Okay, first, there is no secret security department run by the executive. That’s a definite. I did consult my father. Whoever it was that made the hit at Venice Beach, they weren’t authorized by the President or Senate Security.”

“Thank you. What about Boongate and the Far Away cargo?”

“Ah.” Thompson shifted around uncomfortably. “This is where it gets interesting. I spoke to Patricia Kantil about that myself, pointed out that we really needed to inspect everything going to Far Away. She said she agreed, and she’d put it on Doi’s agenda. Since then all I’ve had is memos about how the proposal is under active consideration. Even before your suspicions I would have been curious about that. Something this trivial should be easy for me to arrange; normally I’d just tell an aide to sort it out. The fact that I can’t swing it is very suggestive.”

Paula felt a cold shiver run down her chest, despite the warmth of the chocolate she’d been sipping. The decades she’d spent filing requests for this very action with every new boss in the Directorate, to see them come to nothing every time. All of them must ultimately have been blocked by the executive office. “Who is opposing you? Surely not Doi herself?”

“No. This is Newton’s law of politics, for every action … Somebody will be lobbying the executive office to allow the cargo to go through unchecked.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. It’s the arena of whispers and spin we’re dealing with here. At this level of the game, your opponents don’t reveal themselves, that’s part of the game. But, Paula, I’ll find out. You’ve got me worried about this, and that’s not easy.”

....

Warm summer sunlight poured through the circular windows above Mark Vernon’s head, diffusing evenly across the hemispherical study. The illumination was brighter than he’d envisaged when he and Liz had sat down to plan their new home together. Not that he didn’t want his study properly lit, it was just that he’d always had an image of a slightly darker room, maybe a little cluttered with his personal stuff; the kind of room a man could happily use to retreat from his family on occasion. But with its airiness and pearl-white drycoral walls, he never felt happy allowing any mess to build up. So his desk was clear, and his stuff was all neatly organized in big alvawood cabinets. Given that Barry and Sandy had free run through the rest of the house, it made the study the tidiest place inside.

He stood just inside the frosted glass door, and looked around in confusion. The short coat he knew was in there wasn’t.

“Dad! Come on!” Sandy shouted in the main hall behind him.

“It’s not here,” he called, hoping Liz would take pity on him.

“It’s your coat,” Liz called back at him from the hall.

He gave the study another perplexed glare. Then Panda, the family’s young white Labrador, came in pulling his favorite woolen coat along with her. Her tail wagged happily as she stared up at him.

“Good girl.” He started to approach her. “Drop it. Drop it, girl.”

Panda’s tail wagged even faster in anticipation of the game; she started to turn.

“No!” Mark shouted. “Stay!”

Panda bounded out into the hall, pulling the coat with her. Mark ran after her. “Come back! Stay! Drop it!” He tried to think of the other commands they’d gone through together at obedience classes. “Heel!”

Over by the front door, Liz was pulling Sandy’s windbreaker on over her head. Both of them turned to watch.

“Stay! Stop that. Come here!” Mark had got halfway across the hall when Barry emerged from the kitchen and said, “Here, girl.” He patted his knees. Panda scampered over to him and dropped the coat at his feet. “Good girl.” Barry made a fuss of her, letting her lick his face and hands.

Mark picked up the coat with as much dignity as he could muster. There was a big soggy patch on its shoulder from the dog’s jaw. They’d got Panda nearly a year ago when they’d finally moved into the drycoral house. A family dog. She only ever did what Barry told her. “That’s because she’s still a puppy,” Mark had been claiming for the last three months. “She’ll grow out of it.” To which Liz simply replied, “Yes, dear.”

Although he’d never owned a dog before, Mark had always enjoyed the idea of them having one; envisaging long rambles along the Ulon Valley with their pet trotting beside them. Such an animal would be loyal, obedient, and loving, an excellent companion for the children. And anyway, most of the homes in the Ulon Valley had dogs. It was part of the whole Randtown ideal.

The owner of the pet shop on Main Mall had assured the Vernon family that white Labradors had all the breed’s natural friendliness, but with a higher intelligence sequenced into their DNA along with the snow-white coat. Mark thought that had sounded perfect. Then Sandy had spotted the fluffy white puppy with its black-circled eyes, and the choice had been made before Liz and Barry got a say.

Mark draped the coat over his arm. “Everyone ready?”

“Are we taking Panda?” Barry asked.

“Yes.”

“You’re in charge of her,” Liz said sternly. “She’s not to be let off the lead.”

Barry grinned, and hauled the dog along out of the front door. Liz checked that Sandy’s windbreaker was on properly, and ushered the girl out after her brother.

“Barry has got coursework, you know,” Liz said. “And the nursery is short-staffed enough without me taking afternoons off.”

“If you want him to get on with the work, then he doesn’t have to come,” Mark said. “But you know I have to do this.”

She sighed and looked around the hall with what could have been a nostalgic expression. “Yes, I know.”

“We’re protecting our way of life, Liz. We have to show the navy they can’t push people around like this.”

Liz gave him a fond smile, a finger stroking down the line of his cheek. “I never realized I married someone with so many principles.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. I think it’s admirable.”

“So should we take the kids?” he asked, suddenly uncertain. “I mean, these are our views, and we’re forcing them to take part. I keep thinking about children who are vegetarians or religious, just because that’s what their parents are. I always hate that.”

“This is different, darling. Going on a blockade protest is not a lifelong vogue for them. Besides, they’ll love it, you know they will.”

“Yeah.” He tried not to grin, and failed miserably. “I know.”

The Ables’ pickup was parked next to Liz’s small four-by-four on the patch of compacted limestone where the old temporary house used to stand. Although the building was long gone, Mark had never quite got around to programming the bots to clear the stone away.

The kids were already in the backseat, arguing. Panda was barking happily as she tried to clamber up with them.

“Straps on,” Liz said as she got in the front.

Mark led the dog firmly around to the back and shoved her into the covered cab before climbing up into the driver’s seat. “All ready?”

“Yeah!” the kids chorused.

“Let’s go.”

They drove out along the Ulon Valley into Highmarsh, then turned onto the highway, heading north, away from Randtown. After a few kilometers the valleys began to narrow, and the four-lane highway was climbing up the side of the mountains where it ran along a broad ridge cut into the rock. Thirty kilometers out of town they passed through the first tunnel. There was no traffic at all coming the other way. When the road straightened out, Mark could occasionally see a vehicle of some kind up ahead of them.

It was early summer, so the multitude of streams running down the side of the mountains hadn’t dried up yet, though the flow was noticeably reduced from the spring deluge. The Dau’sings were rising high on either side of them as the highway wound its way northward. Often they’d have a sheer fall of several hundred meters at the edge of the road, with only a thick stone wall as protection. On the lower slopes, boltgrass was turning from its usual wiry yellow to a richer honey color as it approached its week-long spore season.

Fifty kilometers out of town, they passed by one of the abandoned JCB monster roadbuilders that Simon Rand had used to carve his highway through the mountains. It was sitting on a wide patch of broken ground that one of its cousins had hacked into the side of the slope beside the road. Decades of fierce southern continent winters had reduced its metal parts to melted-looking chunks of rust, while the composite bodywork was bleached and cracked. The huge solid metal tracks had sagged on their runner wheels, allowing its belly to settle on the ground where it had bent and buckled. Souvenir hunters had picked most of the smaller components away, while the glass of its insect-eye cab at the front had been smashed.

Both kids got excited at the sight, and Mark had to promise to bring them back sometime for a better look.

Eight kilometers beyond the roadbuilder, on the high shoulder of MtZuelea, the highway was clogged with stationary vehicles. Napo Langsal waved them down. He owned one of the dive tour boats in Randtown. Mark had never seen him anywhere other than in the town or on his boat; he wasn’t even sure Napo owned a car.

“Hi, guys,” Napo said. “Colleen’s about to head back to town, so if you could slot this in where her truck was parked we’d be grateful.”

“No problem,” Mark said. “We brought some lunch, but the kids will need to get home by tonight.”

“I think there’s some vehicles coming out about seven o’clock, they’re going to take the night shift.”

“Right then.” Mark eased the pickup forward, driving down the narrow zigzag gap between the vehicles that were parked at right angles across the lanes, most of them pickup trucks or four-by-fours, the kinds of vehicles driven by Randtowners. People walking along the road saw the Vernons and gave them a wave or thumbs-up. A section of the central barrier had been removed, and he went over onto the southern lanes. Colleen’s big truck was easily visible; the sides were painted in the bright pink and emerald logo of her precipitator leaf business. Since they’d arrived, Mark had had several arguments with her about the semiorganic equipment she’d supplied, but now they both smiled cheerily at each other as they passed.

“Community spirit is high today,” Liz murmured slyly so the children couldn’t hear. They grinned at each other.

Mark parked in the gap Colleen had left. They walked up to the head of the blockade, where big civic utility trucks, bulldozers, tractors, snowplows, roadsweepers, and double-decker buses were parked end to end, as tight as any mosaic. Simon Rand himself came to greet them, a tall figure in an apricot Gandhi-style toga made from semiorganic fabric that swirled around his limbs as he moved, always covering the skin and keeping him warm in the fresh mountain air. His apparent age was approaching sixty, an aging that had produced long distinguished creases in his ebony face. He fitted his role as nature’s guru perfectly, charismatic and passively stubborn, traits that provided universal reassurance to anyone engaged with his ideals.

A flock of people trailed along in his wake, an entourage like that of the staff of any major politician, except these were more like acolytes. Some were intent and focused, while others moved as though in a daydream. Over half were women, and all of them were attractive, either rejuvenated or first-lifers. Simon’s commitment to his own ideals drew him a lot of admirers from the people who came to live the Randtown life; and as he kept saying, he was only human.

“Mark, how good of you to come,” Simon said warmly. He grasped Mark’s hand in a strong grip.

Very definitely a politician’s handshake, Mark thought.

“And Liz as well. This is so kind. I know how difficult it is for people who work for a living to contribute their time to a cause, especially those who have just joined us and have mortgages to pay. For what such words are worth, I appreciate you being here today.”

“We can spare a few afternoons,” Liz said archly. She was one of those immune to his personal charm, though even she appreciated his resolution.

“Let us hope this situation doesn’t require more than that,” Simon said. “I have already heard—unofficially, of course—that they are willing to consider negotiating an alternative power source to that dreadful plutonium which they have brought with them.”

“Sounds good,” Mark said. “Where do you want us?”

“There’s a big no-man’s land between us and them, many families are gathered there. The children will be able to play with their friends.”

“Can I take Panda?” Barry asked.

“Your dog?” Simon gave both the Vernon kids a wink. “Of course you can, we welcome everybody to the protest. I’m sure Panda will have fun. Try not to let him bite too many police officers. They’re only doing their job, and our quarrel is not with them.”

“Her,” Sandy said indignantly, patting Panda. “Panda’s a lady dog, you know.”

“I do apologize. She is a fine-looking lady dog.”

“Thank you. Panda says you’re nice, too.”

“We’ll get over there, then,” Mark said, zipping up his coat. He was beginning to wish he’d brought his gloves.

“Stay only for as long as you are comfortable with,” Simon said. “It is the act of coming here which is relevant. We do not measure commitment by the hours you put in.”

“I gather you’re sleeping in one of the buses,” Liz said.

“Yes. We do not want to give the navy the chance to break the blockade, so my closest supporters and myself maintain the vigil at night. I cannot leave, Liz, this is my home now and forever. My roots are here. My soul is at peace with what has been achieved. So you will understand that I must stand fast on this road and prevent any violation of the life so many have chosen for themselves.”

“I understand.”

He breathed deeply, a look of serenity on his face. “I had forgotten the taste of the mountain air. Its rawness and purity is refreshing. Up here we can all reaffirm our commitment to ourselves. This road I built is more than physical. From this point you can make many choices regarding your destination.”

“I think we’ll just go home at the end of the shift, thank you,” Liz told him.

And Simon inclined his head, smiling graciously just like any mystic hit by a solid fact.

“That was rude,” Mark said as they carried on up to the head of the blockade. Simon and his close personal followers had gone off on some inscrutable business.

“Pompous old farts need to have the piss taken out of them every now and then.” She put her hands together in Buddhist fashion, and crossed her eyes. “It puts them in touch with their Oneness.”

His arm went around her shoulder, hugging fondly. “Tell that to the midnight lynch mob.”

Beyond the big trucks at the head of the blockade, the road was empty for a couple of hundred meters. Several hundred Randtown residents were milling around on the empty enzyme-bonded concrete. Adults clustered together in little groups to talk, stamping their feet against the chill air blowing across from the higher peaks to the east where there was all-year-round snow. Children split up into their own groupings, chasing around in various games. Buzzbots zipped through the air above them, the latest craze: little flying saucer-shaped aircraft with contra-rotating fans at the center, controlled by v-gloves. It looked odd, children standing perfectly still to wiggle their fingers as if playing an invisible piano, each motion sending the tiny craft swooping and soaring above the road. Occasionally one would make a fast pass toward the line of bored police on the other side of the gap. A sharp call from a parent would soon force its return.

Behind the police on the southbound carriageway was a long convoy of twenty-six-wheel SAAB Vitan trucks. To begin with they were all diesel-powered, in direct contravention of the highway rules that only permitted electric-powered vehicles. That was almost irrelevant when compared to their contents. They were carrying all the equipment necessary to build a wormhole detector station for the navy’s planetary security division, which was due to be set up in the Dau’sings just above Randtown. That equipment included three fission micropiles to provide power for the detectors.

There had been a big argument at the toll gate at the northern end of the highway when the convoy arrived there. But the navy officer in charge called in the local police who overruled the operator and sent the convoy through. Simon Rand had been informed straightaway, and set out to stop them from the southern end, accompanied by his followers driving every piece of big civic equipment they could find. When they arrived at the high point on MtZuelea they stopped, disabled the vehicles, and waited. The standoff had now lasted two days.

Mark and Liz soon found the Conants, and the Dunbavands, David and Lydia, who owned the vine nursery where Liz worked; they’d brought their kids along for the afternoon, too.

“Is there anyone left back in Randtown?” Liz wondered.

They spent a couple of hours talking to the others, mostly about what this would do to the tourism industry. The buses that brought groups in to the hotels weren’t even waiting behind the stalled navy convoy anymore, and the tour operators were raising hell, and talking about suing. Flasks of warm drink were passed around. People went back to their vehicles to fetch warmer clothing. Kids had to be taken to the toilets on one of the buses. The whole protest was more like a giant picnic than a political statement.

After a couple of hours, Mark went back to the pickup to fetch the box containing their lunch. There was a flash of orange between the vehicles over on the other lanes as Simon Rand walked purposefully on some mission, his courtiers tagging along loyally. Mark was nearing the end of the parked vehicles, craning his neck to find the pickup, when he saw her.

He didn’t think she was a tourist; something about her made him doubt she’d ever be a part of a tour company’s herd, a spark of independence or self-confidence he was adept at recognizing. Exactly the kind of first-life girl who came to Randtown to join in the party scene and spend her spare time doing extreme sports all around the landscape. Although he’d not seen her around town before, waitressing or helping out in any of the stores.

She was gorgeous. Which made him nervous, because that kind of beauty made him think what kind of wife he’d have after Liz. Because they both knew it wouldn’t go on forever. Even though it was good right now. He was a realist, and so was Liz. Which meant it was okay to consider such things. Right?

The girl caught sight of him staring, and gave him a cheeky smile. “Hi,” she drawled. It was a husky come-on of a voice, perfectly suited to her long young face with its beguilingly flat nose. Her skin was a healthy tanned bronze, matching the tawny hair she wore long and wavy.

“Hello,” he replied. Already his voice was strained as his stomach muscles tightened, holding his abdomen taut, the way it used to be only a few years back. “Are you looking for someone?”

“Not really, I’m just looking around.”

“Ah, well, um, the main action is up there at the front. Not that there’s a lot of action. Apart from the kids’ football game. Ha!”

“Right.” She came right up in front of him, still smiling. Everyone else up here was dressed for the cold, but she seemed comfortable in a white short-sleeved T-shirt and a suede skirt that stopped above her knees; there was a small silver M logo just above the skirt’s hem. The outfit showed off broad shoulders and a gym-junkie belly. Her cowboy boots had flat heels, even so her eyes were level with Mark’s. She put her hand out. “I’m Mel.”

“Mark.” He tried not to read too much into the physical contact. She was a lot more confident and sophisticated than most of the young first-lifers in Randtown.

“So did you come all this way just to see the football?” she asked.

He blushed at the teasing tone, the way her intent stare never left his face, the proximity—he still hadn’t let go of her hand. “Oh, God, no. I’m here to support Simon Rand. And the rest of the town.”

“I see.” She gently removed her hand from his. “Do most of the town support this blockade?”

“Yeah absolutely. It’s an outrage what they’re trying to do to us. They’ve got to be stopped.”

“Stopped from building a wormhole detector station?”

“That’s right. And we’re going to do it. Our ideal will only be safe if we act together.”

Her lovely face crinkled slightly with a frown. “I’ve not been here long, but I can see how the simple life attracts people. What exactly is that ideal, would you say?”

“Just that, we’re devoted to living a simple, clean, green life.”

“But surely the navy won’t destroy that? The station is due to be sited kilometers out of town, up in the mountains where it can’t affect anybody. And the Commonwealth really needs to know if the Primes open a wormhole inside our boundaries.”

“It’s the principle of what they’re doing. The station has nuclear power systems, which is the absolute opposite of everything we believe in. And they didn’t ask us about this, they just barged onto the highway and set out to build their station without our permission.”

“Did they need permission?”

“Sure they did. The whole Dau’sings range is included in the Foundation charter, and nuclear power is specifically excluded from it.”

“I understand that, but the navy really needs a series of wormhole detector stations on the southern continent to give the whole network complete coverage. Surely if you oppose that then you’re taking an antihuman stance.”

“If this is being antihuman, then bring it on and give me more,” he said with bravado, which earned him an encouraging smile. “It’s not, of course; the decision to site the station in the Dau’sings was taken by a bunch of bureaucrats sticking a pin in a map. They didn’t care about the wishes and beliefs of the people who live here; they probably didn’t even bother to find out any of our customs. All we’re doing with this blockade is making them take our requirements into account. Apparently, they’re already starting negotiations about other power sources.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, that’s unofficial. But, yeah.”

“Won’t that cost more?”

“The navy budget is so big nobody will ever notice it. In any case, they’re supposed to be protecting our way of life. That’s worth paying a little bit extra for, isn’t it?”

“I guess it is.”

“So, er, how long have you been in town? I haven’t seen you around before.”

“I only just got here.”

“Well, if you want to stick around and try some extreme sports, I know a few places that have vacancies.”

“That’s very sweet, Mark, but I can pay my own way, thank you.”

“Right, uh, fine.” He suddenly remembered he was supposed to be collecting lunch for his family. “Well, I guess I’ll see you around then.”

Her lips pouted up. “I’ll look forward to it.”

That evening, they managed to leave Barry and Sandy sleeping over with the Baxter kids in Highmarsh so they could spend an evening in town. They started off at the Phoenix bar on Litton Street, which ran parallel to Main Mall. Like every building in Randtown it was newish, with a solar panel roof and insulated composite walls. But inside, the owners had built up stone walls to mask the carbon girder framework, and then gone on to lay heavy ash beams above to support a wooden ceiling, making the long rectangular room dark and cozy. The bar itself took up most of one wall, serving a few beers along with every type of wine produced in the valleys behind Randtown, including some from the Vernons’ own vineyard. A fireplace dominated the far end, wide enough to require two chimneys; the iron grate could hold enormous lengths of wood to burn in the winter months, giving off tremendous heat. Now, in summer, it was filled with a long ceramic trough of fresh-cut flowers. Several settees were arranged in front of it, which Liz and Mark claimed along with Yuri and Olga Conant. Normally the settees were already occupied this early in the evening, but the blockade had thinned out the bar’s usual crowd.

“It’s not just here,” Yuri said as he settled in with a glass of vin noir from Chapples, a vineyard in Highmarsh. “Most of the cafés in town are suffering, even the Bab’s Kebabs franchise takings are down.”

“They’d just started rotating the tourist groups when the blockade went up,” Liz said. “A whole load left, and the next lot haven’t arrived. The hotels are three-quarters empty.”

“And everyone left trapped in town is raising hell,” Olga said. “I can’t blame them.”

“There are worse places to be trapped,” Yuri countered.

“Simon should have worked out how to let them get through the blockade. His principles are starting to hurt people.”

“There’s a difference between hurt and inconvenience,” Mark said.

“Not really, not in this case. Most of the tourists have come to the end of their holiday; they just want to get back to their homes and jobs. How would you like it if someone stopped you earning a living?”

“It will only go on for another couple of days at the most.”

“Yeah, but it was badly thought out.”

“We didn’t have a lot of choice. You’ve got to wonder why the navy didn’t give us any advance warning about building a station here.”

“It’s a crash project,” Olga said. “They probably didn’t even know until a few days before the equipment arrived on Elan.”

“Okay, so why didn’t the Ryceel Parliament’s First Speaker say anything?”

“Because he knew what Rand’s answer would be.”

“Exactly, it was a conspiracy to dump this thing on us before we knew what was happening. They wanted a fait accompli.”

Mark’s e-butler informed him that Carys Panther was calling. He blinked in surprise, and told the program to let it through. “Are you accessing Alessandra Baron?” Carys asked.

“Nice to talk to you, too,” he replied. “It must have been six months.”

“Don’t be an asshole, access it now. I’ll call you back when it’s over.” She ended the call.

“What?” Liz asked.

“Not sure.” Mark turned around. “China,” he called to the barman. “Can you access Alessandra Baron’s show for us, please?” He normally stayed away from accessing Alessandra and her haughty show, which always criticized and never did anything constructive, he felt it was like being lectured by snobs who specialized in satire.

The ancient little man behind the bar obliged, putting the show on the big portal.

“Oh, fuck,” Mark whispered. It was his own face dominating the image, magnified one meter high. “… we’re devoted to living a simple, clean, green life,” he was saying.

“She was a reporter,” he told his wife. “I didn’t know, she never said.”

“When was this?” Liz asked.

“This afternoon. She came up to me when I was getting the lunch. I though she was from town.”

The image switched back to the studio where Alessandra Baron was sitting at the center of a big couch, her classically beautiful face holding an amused expression, the way adults responded to a precocious child. Mellanie Rescorai sat beside her, looking even more sophisticated than she had up on MtZuelea, wearing a simple clinging scarlet dress and a black jacket with a little silver M on the lapel. Her hair had been elaborately tousled.

Liz gave Mark a long sideways look. Her eyebrow rose several millimeters. “That was the reporter?”

“Uh-huh.” Mark waved her quiet.

Yuri and Olga swapped a knowing look.

“So what did he say next?” Alessandra asked.

“By this time I think he wanted to say: can we go to a motel for the rest of the day?” Mellanie laughed. “But I managed to keep his hot little hands off me for a while by telling him the navy had no intention of wrecking his simpleton lifestyle. Can you guess what he said to that?”

“He was grateful?” Alessandra suggested archly.

“Oh, yes. Take a look.” The image shifted back to Mark at the blockade.

Sitting on the settee in front of the fireplace, a glass of wine in hand, and hindsight showing him what to watch for, it was all rather easy to realize that the smile he put on that afternoon for the girl was somewhat forced. Anxious, even. The one a man used when trying to impress. Eager to impress, possibly.

“It’s the principle of what they’re doing,” his image said. “They didn’t ask us about this, they just barged onto the highway and set out to build their station without our permission.”

“Did they need permission?”

“Sure they did.”

The show went back to the studio. “Incredible,” Alessandra said, shaking her head in saddened bewilderment. “Just how backward are they in Randtown?”

“That was edited!” Mark protested to the bar at large. “I … That wasn’t what I meant. I said other stuff, too. I told her about the nuclear micropiles. Why isn’t that in there? She’s making this—Christ, I look ridiculous.” He felt Liz take his hand and squeeze reassuringly, and shot her a desperate glance.

“It’s okay,” she whispered.

“The kind of backward you get from three generations of marrying cousins,” Mellanie confided to Alessandra.

The Phoenix bar was totally silent now.

“So in his view, not only do we, the Commonwealth, not have the right to put vital defense equipment on an uninhabited mountain,” Mellanie said. “But wait for this next bit.”

“Oh, God,” Mark said. He wanted the program to end. Now. The universe to end, actually.

Earlier that day up at the blockade, Mellanie asked, “Surely if you oppose that then you’re taking an antihuman stance?” in a fully reasonable tone.

Mark’s giant face smiled goofishly. “If this is being antihuman, then bring it on and give me more.”

Back in the studio Mellanie gave a what-can-you-do shrug to Alessandra.

“Bitch!” Mark yelled furiously. He jumped to his feet, his wineglass tumbling to the stone flag floor. “You fucking bitch. This is not the way it happened.”

Everyone in the bar had stopped drinking and talking to look at him. Alessandra Baron’s show vanished from the portal to be replaced by the New Oxford invitation open golf tournament. “Enough of those smartmouth whores,” China growled, several OCtattoo curlicues glowing scarlet on his bald head. “You sit yourself back down there, Mark. We can all see it was a stitch-up job. I’ll get you a refill for that glass, on the house.”

Liz put her hand around his wrist and tugged him back down. “That can’t be legal,” he said. “Surely?” Anger was giving way to shock.

“Depends what you can prove,” Yuri said earnestly. “If your memory of the event is replayed to a court, then you can demonstrate they produced a detrimental edit.” He trailed off under Olga’s sharp stare.

“Don’t worry about it,” Liz said soothingly. “Everyone here knows you, they can see that the interview is a phony. It’s the navy’s response to the blockade. They’re putting the pressure on Simon to let the convoy through. Newton’s law of politics.”

Mark put his head in his hands. His e-butler was telling him Carys Panther was calling again. So was Simon Rand. Messages were coming in from the unisphere at the rate of several thousand a second, directed at his public code. It seemed that everyone who had accessed Alessandra and Mellanie wanted to tell him what they thought of him. They weren’t being kind.

....

The heat seemed to be increasing with every step, along with the humidity. Ozzie was surprised by that. He’d walked enough Silfen paths between worlds now to know when the tracks were taking him over the threshold. The signs were subtle and very gradual. Not this time.

They’d been walking through a deciduous forest on the second world since the ghost planet; it was midsummer, with wildflowers providing a gentle carpet of pastel colors across the forest floor. Palm trees and giant ferns began to intermingle with the doughty trunks of the forest. There was a strengthening scent, too, which took Ozzie a while to place. The sea. It had been a long time since he’d seen the sea. No Silfen path had ever led close to one.

It was growing brighter as well; strong sunlight tinged with a hint of indigo. He fished in his top pocket for his sunglasses.

“We’re somewhere else, aren’t we?” Orion asked eagerly. He was looking around with an entranced expression at the thick fronds crowning all the trees. Even the undergrowth had become thicker, with grass growing higher and turning a darker green. Creeping vines rose up to wrap themselves around the trees, sprouting white and lemon-yellow flowers.

“Looks that way,” he said reassuringly. When he turned to look at the boy he could see that the path curved sharply behind them. He’d been walking in a more-or-less straight line for hours. Orion hadn’t noticed; he was holding up his friendship pendant, studying it intently. Since the ghost world he’d reclaimed it from Ozzie. The experience there had changed the boy’s opinion of the Silfen once again. They’d never be unquestioned idols again, but he was starting to accept them as true aliens. Ozzie supposed it was a sign of maturity.

“Are there any of them nearby?” he asked.

“I dunno,” Orion said, troubled. “I’ve never seen it like this before. It’s turned green.” He held it up to show Ozzie. The small exotic gem was shining a bright emerald as it dangled on the end of its chain. “Do you think it means something else is here?”

“I’ve no idea what it means,” Ozzie said truthfully.

The palm trees were thinning out, the thick grass coming up to their knees. Tochee was having to produce large powerful ripples along its locomotion ridges to shove its wide body through the clingy blades. Ozzie slowed in confusion, there was no path anymore, only the grass they’d trodden down behind them. Without the floppy fronds above his head, he could feel the star’s heat on his bare skin. Below his booted feet the ground was sloping downward. There were a lot of undulations ahead of them as the slope dipped away, but several kilometers in the distance was the unmistakable blue sparkle of the sea.

NOW WHERE? Tochee’s eye patterns queried.

Ozzie faced their alien friend and shrugged—a gesture that Tochee knew only too well by now.

“We never walked through that,” Orion said abruptly. He was facing back the way they’d just come. Behind them was the rounded top of a modest mountain, its crown roughly covered by a jungle of palms and big ferns with a few spindly gray trees that might result if pines were crossed with eucalyptus. The whole patch couldn’t have been more than a kilometer across.

Ozzie was working out what to say when an electronic bleep emerged from deep inside his backpack. The sound, so integral to Commonwealth society, was profoundly shocking here. He and Orion looked at each other in surprise.

“Link to my wrist array,” Ozzie told his e-butler. There were function icons appearing in his virtual vision that hadn’t been there since the day he rode out of Lyddington. His inserts were regaining their full capacity. He shrugged off the backpack as if it had caught fire. His e-butler confirmed that his inserts were receiving a signal from his wrist array. He shook the contents of his backpack onto the ground, heedless of the mess. A tiny red power LED was shining on the side of his burnished wrist array. He slipped it around his hand and the malmetal contracted snugly. The OCtattoo on his forearm made contact with the unit’s i-spot. Lying amid the pile of clothes and packets he’d tipped out was a handheld array. He picked it up and switched it on. Its icons appeared immediately in his virtual vision. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. His e-butler started to back up insert files in both arrays. He let it do that while his virtual hands rearranged icons for the handheld array. Its screen unfurled to its full extent, measuring half a meter wide. “Please,” he prayed, and translucent amber fingers plucked symbols out of the linguistic files he’d painstakingly built up over the last few months.

On the screen, the spiky flower patterns that Tochee used were displayed in the deepest purple that the screen’s resolution could manage.

Tochee became very still. HELLO, its forward eye segment projected.

“Our electronic systems are working again,” Ozzie said out loud. The handheld array translated into a series of patterns that it flashed up.

I UNDERSTAND.

“Are those Tochee’s speaking pictures?” a fascinated Orion asked, peering at the screen.

The array translated, and Tochee produced an answer.

“That is correct, small human one,” the array said. “They sit in an incorrect visual spectrum. However I can read them.”

Orion whooped exuberantly and gave a massive victory jump, punching the air. “It’s me, it’s me, Tochee. I’m talking to you!” He gave Ozzie a radiant smile, and they high-fived.

“I am aware of the communication,” the array translated for Tochee. “I have wished for this moment for a long time. My first true speech is to thank you, large human one, and small human one, for the companionship you have given me. Without you I would remain at the cold house. I would not like that.”

Ozzie gave a small bow. “Our pleasure, Tochee. But this isn’t one way, man. We would have had difficulty leaving the Ice Citadel without you.”

Orion rushed over to Tochee, who extended a tentacle of manipulator flesh that the boy squeezed happily. “This is great, it’s wonderful, Tochee. There’s so much I want to tell you. And ask, as well.”

“You are kind, small human one. Large humans two, three, five, fifteen, twenty-three, and thirty also showed some consideration for my situation, as did other species at the cold house. I hope they are well.”

“Which ones are those, Ozzie?”

“I don’t know, man. I guess Sara is large human two, and George must be in there somewhere.” His virtual hand pulled the translation routines down out of stasis, slotting them into the large processing power of the handheld array. “Tochee, we need to improve our translation ability. I’d like you to talk to my machine, here.”

“I agree. I have my own electronic units that I want to switch on.”

“Okay, let’s go for it.”

The big alien reached around with its manipulator flesh, and removed one of the heavy bags it was carrying. Ozzie, meanwhile, picked several sensor instruments out of his pile, switching them on one by one. “Man, I came this close to leaving these back at the Ice Citadel,” he grunted.

“What have you got?” the excited boy asked.

“Standard first contact team stuff. Mineral analyzers, resonance scanners, em spectrum monitors, microradar, magnometers. Things that’ll tell me a lot about the environment.”

“How are they going to help?”

“Not sure yet, man. It kinda depends on what we find. But this place is different from the others we’ve walked through. There must be a reason the Silfen have stopped screwing with electricity.”

“Do you think …” Orion stopped, and looked around cautiously. “Is this the end of the road, Ozzie?”

Ozzie very nearly told the boy not to be stupid. His own growing uncertainty stopped him. “I don’t know. If it is, I would have expected something a little more elaborate.” He gestured out at the rolling landscape. “This is more like a dead end.”

“That’s what I thought,” the boy said meekly.

Results from the sensors were building up in grids across Ozzie’s virtual vision. He ignored them to give the boy a reassuring hug. “No way, man.”

“Okay.”

Ozzie turned his attention back to the sensor results. He noticed that Tochee had switched on several electronic units. His own scans showed the alien’s systems to be sensors and processor units not entirely dissimilar to his own. Apart from that, there was little for his own units to go on. Strangely, this planet seemed to have no magnetic field. The general neutrino level was above average, though. Local quantum field readings were fractionally different to standard, though nothing like enough to produce the kind of warping necessary to open a wormhole—he thought it might be a residual from the electron damping effect. “Weird, but not weird enough,” he said quietly.

“Ozzie, what’s that in the sky?”

The handheld array flashed the question up for Tochee as well. The alien put aside its own gadgets to follow Orion’s pointing arm. Ozzie followed the boy’s gaze, narrowing his eyes as he squinted almost directly into the vivid sunlight. It looked as if there was some kind of silver cloud at very high altitude, a thin curve that stretched across the sun. When his retinal inserts brought their high-intensity filters on-line and zoomed in he changed his mind. No matter what magnification he used, the little strip of shimmering silver didn’t change. The planet had a ring. He tracked along it, using both array memories to file the image. The scintillations he could see coming from within the cloud were actually tiny motes. There must have been thousands of them. He wondered briefly how their composition differed from the rest of the ring. Then he came to where it crossed in front of the sun. It didn’t. And the scale shifted again, to a terrifying degree.

“Christ fuck a duck,” Ozzie mouthed.

What he could see was a halo of gas that went right around the star. Which meant the planet they were standing on was orbiting right inside it.

“I know this place,” he said in astonishment.

“What?” Orion blurted. “How could you?”

Ozzie gave a very twitchy laugh. “I was told about it by someone else who walked the Silfen paths. He said he visited artifacts called tree reefs. They floated in a nebula of atmospheric gas. Wow, whatta you know, and I always thought his story was mostly bullshit. Guess I owe him an apology.”

“Who was it, Ozzie? Who’s been here?”

“Some dude called Bradley Johansson.”

....

After a five-minute trip, the train from Oaktier pulled up to platform twenty-nine in the Seattle CST station’s third passenger terminal. Stig McSobel stepped out and asked his e-butler to find the platform where he could catch a standard-class loop train to Los Angeles, which was the next stop on the trans-Earth line. It told him the loop trains all left from terminal two, so he hopped on the little monorail car that carried people between the terminals. He slid smoothly along the elevated rail as it took him out over the vast marshaling yard that had spread out over the land to the east of Seattle, while two-kilometer-long goods trains pulled by hulking great Damzung T5V6B electric engine units passed underneath him as they rolled out of the bulk-freight gateway to Bayovar, the Big15 connected directly to Seattle. While trans-Commonwealth express trains flashed along on their magrails like aircraft flying at zero altitude. Down to the south he could see a long line of gateway arches throwing off a pale blue light that produced long shadows across the weed-colonized concrete ground. The Seattle CST station was a junction for over twenty-seven phase one space worlds in addition to Bayovar, routing all of the freight and passengers that flowed among them. Thousands of trains a day trundled across the station, providing the huge web of commercial links that helped maintain Seattle’s high-tech research and industry base.

Stig sat at one end of the tubular monorail car, quickly scanning his fellow travelers and transferring the images into files. His wrist array ran comparisons with the thousands of visual files he’d accumulated since he began working in the Commonwealth itself. Seven of the people in the monorail had been on the train from Oaktier, which was only normal. If one of them was following him, they had reprofiled their face since the last time they’d shared a train together.

Terminal two was a huge metal and concrete dome, half of which was underground. Its multitude of platforms were arranged in a radial fashion on two levels, lower level for incoming, upper for departures. Stig paid cash for his standard-class ticket that would take him all the way around the loop to Calcutta, and took a moving walkway out to platform A-seventeen, where one of the twenty-carriage loop trains was just pulling in. He stood waiting casually by an open door on the second carriage, watching latecomers hurry across the platform. Nobody from the monorail car got onto the loop train. Satisfied, he went on board and walked down the carriages to the fifth. Only then did he take a seat.

Hoshe Finn stood in the queue for the Bean Here franchise stall at the end of platform A-seventeen and watched his target get onto the local train. “Have your people got him?” he asked Paula, who was standing beside him.

“Yes, thank you. Team B is boxing him. He just sat down in the fifth carriage.”

He bought a coffee for himself and a tea for Paula. “So do you suspect any of team B?”

“I don’t have any real suspects, sadly,” she said, and blew across the top of her cup. “That means I have to treat everyone as the possible leak.”

“Does that include me?”

She sipped her tea, and gave him a thoughtful look. “If you are working for an executive security service, or some corporate black ops division, then whoever planted you has resources and foresight beyond even my ability to counter.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Thank you for doing this, Hoshe.”

“My pleasure. I just hope it gets you what you need.”

“Me, too.”

He stood beside the Bean Here stall and watched the train pull out of the station. All in all, it was a strange business, and whatever the outcome, he knew he wouldn’t like it. Either the President was killing off citizens with impunity, or that lunatic Bradley Johansson had been right all along. He wasn’t sure which was worse.

It took ten minutes for the loop train to reach LA Galactic. Most of that was spent crawling slowly through the Seattle station as they waited for their slot amid the goods trains at the trans-Earth loop gateway. Centuries ago, when it was starting out, not even CST could afford a chunk of real estate in LA the size it needed to house a planetary station. So it moved south of San Clemente and leased some of Camp Pendelton from the U.S. government, in an agreement that provided the Pentagon with direct access to wormholes, giving them the ability to deploy troops anywhere on the planet (or off it). The military requirement had slowly ebbed as more and more of Earth’s population left to find their own particular brands of freedom and nationalism out among the stars, leaving fewer and fewer warlords and fanatics behind until finally the Unified Federal Nations came into existence. While the old armies were dying off, CST had continued its inexorable expansion. Over half of phase one space’s H-congruous planets had been discovered and explored from LA Galactic; and when the CST finally moved its exploratory division out to the Big15, the commercial division quickly stepped in to take up the slack. LA Galactic rivaled the stations on any of the Big15 for size and complexity.

Stig got off the loop train on platform three in the Carralvo terminal, a giant multisegment modernistic building of white concrete bled even whiter by California’s unforgiving sunlight. Despite the sheer size of the structure, it thrummed and vibrated from the passage of trains that wound in and out of it along elegant curving viaducts, that were sometimes stacked three high thanks to elaborate twisting buttresses. He could have found his way around the Carralvo in complete darkness, and not just the public areas; the utility corridors, management offices, and staff facilities were all loaded in his insert files. Not that he really needed the reference. The other seven passenger terminals were equally familiar.

He had spent years working here. If the Guardians could be said to havea regular base of operations in the Commonwealth it was at LA Galactic. It was the perfect, and essential, place for them. Hundreds of thousands of tons of industrial and consumer products were routed between its gateways every day. Food imports came to over a million tons, while raw materials in transit accounted for an even bigger market. Thousands of import-export companies, from the Intersolar giants to virtuals that were no more than a coded array space and a numbered bank account, had their offices and warehouses and transport depots within the city-sized station compound. Each one was plugged into the giant network of rails and CST cargo-handling facilities, both physically and electronically. Each one with multiple accounts in the finance network. Each one with links to the Regulated Goods Directorate. Each one with offices, from entire skyscrapers to suites of leased rooms. They grew, shrank, went bankrupt, floated and went Intersolar, moved headquarters from one block to another, changed personnel, merged, fought each other bitterly for contracts. It was supercapitalism in a confined pressure-cooker environment that was merciless to any weakness.

Over the decades, Adam Elvin had formed and folded dozens of companies at LA Galactic. He wasn’t alone. The number of companies that came and went within a single month could often be measured in hundreds. His were hidden amid the flow, no different from all the other chancers who set themselves up to supply markets they either knew about or believed in. He would create identities for himself, along with all the associated datawork, and use the name to register a company that wouldn’t be used for years. When he did start it up, it would be as a legitimate business competing for trade along with all the others.

It was a process that had served the Guardians well. Every operation to deliver armaments and equipment to Far Away involved a front at LA Galactic. It allowed him to track the shipments passively. And at some time all the items would pass through for checking, or switching, or to be disguised. As far as Paula Myo and the Serious Crimes Directorate knew, they were just another rented warehouse in the chain.

This time, with Johansson embarking upon his planet’s revenge project, and the navy becoming perilously efficient in pursuing them, the scale of the operation was larger than ever before, and its focus expanded. After Venice Coast, Adam was developing his paranoia to new heights.

Lemule’s Max Transit had leased an entire floor of the Henley Tower, an unimaginative thirty-five-story glass and carbon and concrete building on the San Diego side of LA Galactic, standing in the forest of similar office towers that made up one of the station’s commercial administration parks. Twenty Guardians worked in its offices. Four of them were occupied by the shipments of illicit goods to Far Away, while the rest devoted themselves to security.

As soon as Stig bought his ticket for the loop train he sent a message to a onetime unisphere address. Kieran McSobel, who was on duty at the Lemule office, received it, and as procedure required, launched a battery of onlook software into the planetary cybersphere. The programs installed themselves in the nodes that served the loop train Stig was using. They began analyzing the data flowing through the nodes.

The results flipped up across Kieran’s virtual vision. “Damnit. Marisa, we’ve got internal encrypted traffic in Stig’s train. Five sources, one in his carriage.”

On the other side of the open plan office, Marisa McFoster accessed the onlook information. “That doesn’t look good. It’s a standard box formation. The navy’s burned him. Shit!” She called Adam.

“We need the software he’s carrying,” Adam said. “Can we go for a dead recovery?”

“The bots are in place,” Marisa said. She ran diagnostics on the little machines, bringing them up to operational status. “We’ve got time. Gareth is covering the Carralvo. He can walk by.”

“Do it.”

“What about Stig?”

Adam kept his face composed, not showing the youngsters how worried he was. How the hell did the navy find him? “We can’t break the box, that’ll alert the navy and betray our own capability. He’ll have to do it himself. Send him a discontinue and break order when we’ve confirmed recovery. And activate the Venice safe house. He’ll have to undergo reprofiling if he makes it there.”

“Yes, sir,” Marisa said.

“Don’t worry, he’s good, he’ll make it.”

Stig walked down the long curving ramp at the end of the platform. It was one of ten that connected platforms to the central concourse where the flood of people had reached the density of a baseball stadium crowd rushing for their seats. He counted off the emergency exits as he moved along the ramp. When he reached the concourse it would take another three and a half minutes to get to the taxi stand. From there to the office would take another ten minutes at least, depending on how heavy traffic was on the station compound’s internal highways.

Ahead of him, Gareth stepped onto the ramp, and began walking toward him. He was wearing a smart gray jacket over a yellow shirt.

Training made sure Stig didn’t turn his head as the two of them passed. But it was hard. Gray on yellow. A dead recovery order. There could only be one reason for that: he was under observation.

They were good, he had to admit that. For the whole trip back from Oaktier he’d been checking, and hadn’t seen anyone. Of course, it could be a virtual surveillance; a team with an RI hacking onto him through public cameras and sensors. Even harder to shake.

As he stepped off the ramp, the concourse layout was looming large in his mind. He headed left for the even numbered platforms, then took one of the triple escalators down to the lower level mall. All the while he was watching. It was difficult now. He was conscious of looking up when he reached the midlevel and took the next set of escalators. The sure sign of someone hunting for a box. Would it tip them off? Yet if they’d been following him, they would have seen him going through the check routine. Not looking might be worse. He settled for a brief, casual glance upward, locking the image in an insert file.

As the escalator slipped smoothly downward he studied the ghostly image in his virtual vision. There was one person up there, a typical West Coast surfer standing close to the balcony rail, who had also got off the loop train from Seattle. They hadn’t been in the same carriage, though. Stig expanded the image and studied the man. Thick blond hair in a ponytail, sharp nose, square jaw, casual plain blue shirt and jeans. He couldn’t tell. But the image was on instant recall now.

The escalator delivered him to the marble and neon mall, and he walked over to the public washroom. Most of the stalls were empty. A couple of guys were using the urinals. Father and young son at the washbasins.

Stig took the second empty stall, locked the door, and dropped his pants. If the box had covered the washroom ahead of him, there was nothing for them to be suspicious about yet. On his handheld array he transferred the software he’d collected from Kareem into a memory crystal, and ejected the little black disk from the unit. He put it into a standard-looking plastic case, wrapped that in toilet tissue, and dropped it into the pan. It flushed away easily enough, and he left the stall to wash his hands.

When he went back out into the mall, the blond-haired man in the blue shirt was window shopping twenty meters away.

Stig went into the nearest sports shop and bought himself a new pair of trainers, paying cash. The box team would have to check that out. Next was a department store for a pair of sunglasses. He went back up to the main concourse, and stopped at one of the small stalls that sold tourist T-shirts and chose a fairly decent sun hat. Then he went along to the left luggage lockers and put his credit tattoo on the locker he’d taken three days before. It opened, and he removed the black shoulder bag that contained the emergency kit.

Without looking back or running any more checks he went straight to the taxi stand. As the revolving door offered him up to the warm Californian sunlight, Stig smiled; despite the seriousness of being burned, he was going to enjoy the next few hours.

The warehouses didn’t annoy Adam as much as the districts of office towers that nestled along the southern side of LA Galactic. He hated the multitude of handling and transport companies that survived in parasitic bondage with the CST rail network. They were true capitalist entities, producing nothing, charging people to supply products, adding to the cost of living on a hundred worlds, living off those who worked in production. Not, he had to concede, that those who worked in production these days were the old working classes in a true Marxist definition; they were all engineers who went around troubleshooting cybernetics. But for all the changes and undeniable improvements automation and consumerism had brought to the proletariat’s standard of living, it hadn’t changed the financial power structure that ruled the human race. A tiny minority controlled the wealth of hundreds of worlds, bypassing, buying, or corrupting governments to maintain their dominance. And here he was, living among them, a keen consumer of their products, daunted by their size, his life’s purpose almost lost as he sold more and more of himself to Johansson’s cause. A cause that was now giving him a great deal of concern. It wasn’t something he’d told anyone—after all, who could he tell?—but he was having to face up to the daunting, and terrifying, prospect that Bradley Johansson might just be right about the Starflyer. The whole Prime situation was too odd; there were too many coincidences piling up: the Second Chance mission, the barrier disappearing, Hell’s Gateway, the attack on Venice Coast. Adam was certain there was going to be a war, and he wasn’t sure which side the Commonwealth government was going to be on.

So he went about the meticulous job of assembling Johansson’s equipment without his usual cynicism. The Party had been avoided for a long time now, he didn’t provide any chapter on any planet with support. It was the Guardians who received his full attention. Crazy, enthusiastic, devoted youngsters from Far Away, who were riding gleefully off on their crusade and didn’t have a single clue how the Commonwealth worked. They were the ones he was protecting, guiding like some old mystic promising nirvana at the end of the road. Except today it looked like Stig wasn’t going to make it.

The station car drove him carefully along the internal highways into the Arlee district, two hundred fifty square kilometers of warehouses on the east side of LA Galactic. The blank-faced composite buildings were laid out in a perfect grid. Some were so large they took up an entire block, while some blocks had as many as twenty separate units. They all had light composite walls and black solar cell roofs, cumbersome air-conditioning units sprouted from walls and edges like mechanical cancers, their radiant fans shining a dull orange under the hot sunlight. There were no sidewalks, and cars were a rarity on these roads. Vans and large trucks trundled along everywhere, their driver arrays navigating the simple path between their loading bay and a rail cargo handling yard on a twenty-four/seven basis. But at least this district involved the physical movement of goods, it wasn’t the dealing and moneymaking of the offices. That normally made it bearable for him.

He drove into the loading bay park at Lemule’s Max Transit warehouse, a medium-sized building, enclosing four acres of floor space. Bjou McSobel and Jenny McNowak were working inside. Lemule’s had a big order for sourcing and supplying packager modules for a supermarket chain on five phase two worlds, and their crates were stacked up across half of the cavernous interior awaiting shipment orders. Flatbed loaders and forklifts slid up and down the lanes between the high metal ledges, shuffling farm equipment, carpentry tools, GPbots, domestic hologram portals, and a hundred other items that formed the company’s legitimate business, packaging them for their train ride out across the planets. By itself, Lemule’s Max Transit was a viable operation. Every morning when he left his hotel on the coast and drove into LA Galactic, Adam felt the irony that after so many years spent running identical concerns he could manage a transit company far better than the entrepreneurs and opportunist chancers who were desperate for their own company to succeed.

Bjou closed the heavy roll door at the end of the loading bay as Adam got out of the car. “How are we doing?” Adam asked.

“Jenny has opened the access hatch. The S&Ibot should be here in another forty minutes.”

“It definitely retrieved the case, then?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Some good news, then.”

They went down to the far end of the warehouse where the Guardians had set up a secure area. Bjou and Jenny had been preparing a shipment of equipment for Far Away, disguising the components in basic industrial tools and consumer electronics due for shipment to Armstrong City. On the other side of the open crates and disassembled machines a concealed manhole cover had been opened in the enzyme-bonded concrete floor. Below it was a small circular shaft leading down five meters to one of the sewer pipes that served LA Galactic. That, too, had been breached, the hole sealed up again with a flush-fitting hatch. Jenny was sitting on the rim of the shaft, an anxious expression on her face as she followed the progress of their S&Ibot through the maze of sewer pipes that lay underneath LA Galactic.

“No problems, sir,” she said. “Our monitors haven’t picked up anything tracking the bot.”

“Okay, Jenny, keep on it.”

Bjou pulled over a couple of chairs, and Adam sat down gratefully. His e-butler reported an encrypted call from Kieran.

“Sir, we thought you should know. Paula Myo just arrived on a loop train from Seattle. She’s being escorted by CST security personnel, looks like they’re going to the operational center.”

A little shiver of cold ran down Adam’s spine. If she was giving Stig’s operation her personal attention then she knew he was important.

“Do you want us to hack into their internal network?” Kieran asked. “We might be able to see what she’s doing.”

“No,” Adam said immediately. “We can’t guarantee a clean hack, not into CST security. I don’t want them tipped off we know about them, that’s Stig’s only advantage right now.”

“Yes, sir.”

Adam resisted putting his head in his hands. He sat on the hard plastic seat, staring at the secret hole in the floor, while he called up files and displayed them across his virtual vision. Somewhere there had to be a weak link, a way Paula had found to infiltrate his couriers. When the faint amber information floated in front of him he cursed himself for making such an elementary mistake. Stig was collecting software from an insider at the Shansorel Partnership, the same insider who had supplied regulator software for a set of microphase modulators that Valtare Rigin had acquired. It would have had the partnership’s signature embedded in the subroutines. Easy to trace. “Damnit,” he grunted. I’m getting old. And stupid.

“Is everything all right, sir?” Bjou asked.

“Yeah, I think so.”

Tarlo was waiting in the operations room of LA Galactic’s CST security department when Paula Myo came in.

“Sorry, Chief,” he said. “I think he made me when he came out of the can.”

She nodded. “Don’t worry about it.”

He glanced at the CST security officer who’d escorted Paula. The whole department had rolled over and given full cooperation at the mere mention of her name. “We should have gone for a virtual observation.”

“I have my suspicions about their electronic support capability. They certainly found your box fast enough. If they’re that good they would have been aware of a virtual as soon as we began it.” She turned to the security officer. “I’d like a clean office we can use as our field headquarters, please.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He showed them down a corridor to an empty office, and activated the systems, giving them full access.

“There’s a support team en route from Paris; they’ll be here in half an hour,” Paula told Tarlo when they were alone again. “They’ll be able to back up the rest of your crew.”

“It should have been a bigger op from the start.”

“I know. It was very short notice.” Paula surprised herself by how easy it was to tell the lie; it wasn’t something she was practiced in. But the support team was inevitable now. What she had to concentrate on was the people who knew before the target had started to rabbit. That was where the leak must have originated.

“Are you sure he discovered the box?” she asked Tarlo, uncomfortably aware that he’d been on the Venice Coast operation.

“He’s on a courier run, right?” Tarlo said. “That’s what you told us. But he went through his little spotter routine, then went and retrieved something else from the locker. That is not what happens. You run the route as quickly as possible, you don’t pick up a second item, that doubles the risk. Besides, I was watching him, he knows he’s been made.” He gave a lame shrug. “My opinion, for what it’s worth.”

“Don’t worry, I still value it. Which leaves us guessing what he’s going to do next.”

“Only one thing he can do, try and shake us.”

“How are we doing on that?”

“Carol and the others are in four taxis, ahead and behind him. They’ve overridden the driver array software, and the LA traffic police have been informed this is a navy operation. We have full route authority. He’s not going to get away from us in a taxi.”

“Humm, I’m concerned what was in the black shoulder bag he retrieved.”

“Has to be stuffed full of weapons for when he makes his break.”

“You might be right. Either way, we can’t take any chances. Get in touch with the LAPD, tell them I need a tactical armaments squad on standby.”

“You got it.”

It was over thirteen kilometers as the crow flies from the Carralvo terminal to the Lemule’s Max Transit warehouse in the Arlee district. By sewer pipeline, it was a lot farther. Nor was it a direct route. The Service & Inspection bot had to pass through several junctions, opening and closing flow valves like airlocks so that it could switch pipes. Forty-three minutes after Adam arrived at the warehouse, it finally crawled up under the hatch. Jenny scurried down the open shaft and popped the hatch at the bottom. Bjou and Adam stood above her, shining powerful flashlights down so she could see what she was doing.

Adam pulled a face as the hatch opened and the smell hit him. Jenny was reaching down to the filthy S&Ibot they’d cloned from the LA Galactic utility service company. She took the little plastic case from its electromuscle limb and hurriedly shut the hatch.

Once she was out, Bjou shut the manhole cover and started to seal it against casual inspection. Jenny handed the case to Adam, who opened it and slipped the memory crystal into his handheld array.

“Checks out,” he said as the program menu scrolled down the unit’s screen. Jenny let out a happy sigh.

Adam put a call straight through to Kieran. “Give Stig the go code for discontinue and break.”

The CST security division office was filling up. As well as the backup team from Paris, there was now a detective lieutenant from the LAPD who was acting as liaison. In the two hours since leaving LA Galactic, all the target had done was drive into LA and stop on Walgrove Avenue, then start walking. He’d slowly made his way toward the shoreline, walking up and down the streets, and was currently on Washington Boulevard, close to the Del Rey Marina.

Tarlo got the city RI to access several public cameras in the area. Their images were coming up on screens in the office. Paula wouldn’t let them focus on the target in case the Guardians were monitoring the dataflow, so they continued their slow sweeps, occasionally catching him as he walked past.

“Heading for the marina,” Tarlo said. “Do you think he’s got a boat waiting?”

“Who knows,” she said. “But get a list of everything moored there from the harbormaster.”

“I’m on that,” Renne said.

Paula’s e-butler told her that Senator Burnelli was placing an encrypted call to her. She went to the back of the office and authorized the link.

“Paula, how are you?”

One of the street cameras caught the target walking into the Del Rey Marina. Two of the box team had gone in ahead of him. “Busy,” she said. The LAPD liaison was ordering the tactical armaments squad to a new position.

“I won’t take up too much of your time, but I rather thought you’d want to hear this. I’ve got good news and not so good.”

“Tell me the good,” she said.

“I took it kind of personal that my request about Far Away had been blocked, so I confronted Doi directly. Nice to know I still have some clout. A century of public service hasn’t been entirely wasted. As of next week, all cargo being shipped to Far Away will be examined at Boongate. No exceptions. She’s going to order Columbia to form a specialist division to take care of it.”

“Thank you very much, Senator.” A camera above one of the wharfs showed the target walking along the wooden planks to the end, looking at the beautiful, expensive boats moored on either side. She frowned. “Have we got a pursuit boat available?” she asked the liaison officer.

“I can find you one.”

“Please do.” She flipped the link to the Senator back on. “What was the other news?”

“I’m not sure how you’re going to take this,” Thompson said. “I was kind of surprised myself. I’ve been asking questions in a few dark places since we talked last. The people lobbying the executive against examining cargo for Far Away work for Nigel Sheldon.”

“Repeat, please.”

“Nigel Sheldon has been blocking your request.”

“Are you sure?”

“One hundred percent, Paula.”

“I need to see you.”

“I agree. As soon as possible. I think we might want to bring my father in on this as well.”

The target reached the end of the wharf, hopped over the chain railing, and dropped into the water.

“Holy shit,” Tarlo cried. “Did you see that?”

“Has the tactical armaments squad got divers?” Renne asked the liaison officer.

He was staring incredulously at the screen. “I … I’ll check.”

“Tarlo,” Paula ordered, “focus all available cameras on the water in the marina.”

“No problem.”

“Deploy the tactical armaments squad right now,” she said. “No boat is to leave that marina. I want every available policeman in Venice down there. Each boat is to be checked individually. Get me a helicopter above the marina now, have them scan the water. And I want a coast guard boat or something with sonar at the mouth of the marina, now!”

The office was suddenly busy, with everyone issuing instructions.

“I’ll have to call you back,” Paula told the Senator. “Things just got a little hectic around here.”

Kazimir stayed out in the house’s little back garden as the sun fell below the horizon. Lights came on all along the canal where the other houses backed onto the water. Half a kilometer away, bright old-fashioned streetlamps illuminated the little bridge with its white railings. The city’s nocturnal noises crept over him, carried by the warm still air. He was very aware of the sirens. So far none of them were close. The timer in his virtual vision kept adding up the minutes and hours since Stig had jumped into the water. Too many. Way too many.

At eleven o’clock the helicopters were still hovering above the marina. Sitting in his seat on the porch, Kazimir could just look through the gap between the low houses opposite to see their powerful searchlights sweeping back and forth, illuminating the rigging of the moored boats. The tension of the wait was screwing his guts up. Waiting on a Charlemagne for the command to charge was a child’s game compared to this.

“Kaz?”

It was a faint, pained voice. Kazimir lurched over the few meters from his seat to the edge of the water. Stig’s face was looking up at him.

“You made it!” Kazimir gasped.

“Just about. I’m not sure I can get out, Kaz.”

Kazimir splashed into the water and grabbed hold of his old tutor. Stig had virtually no strength left, so Kazimir hauled him out in a fireman’s lift and staggered into the house.

Stig lay on the couch while Kazimir locked up the windows and doors, activating the security system. When he’d pulled the drapes shut, he finally switched on the lights.

“I fucking hate swimming,” Stig moaned. A gill mask was hanging from its strap around his neck, its small red low-power warning light gleaming softly.

“Me, too,” Kazimir said. “But I remember who taught me.” He wrapped a blanket around Stig’s trembling shoulders, then started to undo his soaking, mud-smeared trousers.

Stig looked down and grunted a laugh. “Very gay. Let’s hope Myo’s team doesn’t come crashing through the window right this minute.”

“You want a drink?”

“God, no. No fluid. Not now, not ever again. I must have swallowed half of the canal network. I thought Earth had strict antipollution laws. Didn’t goddamn taste like it. I swear I was swimming through raw shit out there.”

Kazimir got the trousers off, and put another blanket around Stig’s legs. He was looking like someone who’d been rescued from the north pole. “Didn’t you have flippers?”

“Only to start with. I lost them along with everything else—” He laughed weakly. “Including the shirt off my back. Let this be a lesson to you, Kaz; doesn’t matter how good your gadgets and fallback plans are, real life doesn’t cooperate. Now for Christ’s sake tell me Adam retrieved the programs I brought back.”

“He got them.” Kazimir drew a breath ready to say: But, then thought better of it.

His hesitation didn’t go unnoticed.

“What?” Stig asked.

“The news shows announced it this evening: from now on there’s going to be an inspection of all cargo shipped to Far Away. Elvin and Johansson haven’t said anything, but it looks like we’re screwed.”

The station security people had cleared a big semicircular space around the left luggage lockers in the Carralvo terminal. Curious passengers on their way to catch trains lingered to see what the fuss was about. Eventually they were rewarded by the appearance of Paula Myo. There was a scattering of applause, someone even whistled appreciatively. She ignored them, watching impassively as the forensics team went to work on the locker. Tarlo and Renee stood behind her, fending off questions from the reporters who’d appeared, and the attentions of the CST security officer. They knew how much their boss valued an uninterrupted examination of any crime scene.

“So, is it coincidence?” Tarlo asked. “Or is this their standard operating policy now, do you think?”

“Is what coincidence?” Renee said.

“Underwater getaway. Hey, if they start doing this all the time, maybe the navy will pay for us to be modified. That would be cool, I could handle growing a dolphin sonar.”

“Yeah? I can think of something useless it could replace on you.”

“That’s seen a lot of use, thank you.”

“It isn’t standard operating policy,” Paula said. “Our target today was a Guardian. The Venice Coast operative was working for someone else.” Nigel Sheldon. But how did he benefit from all this? Why allow the Guardians to smuggle arms to Far Away, then attack a merchant they contract? It didn’t make sense.

“Are you sure he was a Guardian today?” Tarlo asked.

Renee shot him a warning look, but Paula didn’t react.

“Our problem is we don’t know what they’re hoping to accomplish next,” Paula said. “This new stage is puzzling. Renee, I want you to put together a new team to study the equipment we know Valtare Rigin was putting together for them.”

“The weapons division report said there were too many unknowns,” Renee said cautiously. “They couldn’t give us a definite use.”

“I know. Their trouble is they’re made up from solid thinkers. I want to go off the scale with this one. We’re in the navy now, there shouldn’t be any problem finding and drafting specialists in weapons physics, especially ones with overactive imaginations. Get me a list of possible uses, however far-fetched.”

“Yes, Chief.”

The navy lieutenant in charge of the forensics team came over to Paula and saluted. Tarlo and Renee tried hard not to smile.

“We’ve got a family match on the DNA residue, ma’am,” the lieutenant said. “You were right, he is from the Far Away clans. We’ve gathered enough samples in the past to confirm the correlation; he’s a seventh or eighth descendant of Robert and Minette McSobel. Given the level of inbreeding, it’s hard to say which.”

“Thank you.” Paula turned to Tarlo and raised an eyebrow.

He gave an elaborate shrug. “Sorry, Chief.”

“All right then, we know there’s another active equipment smuggling operation, probably being run by Adam Elvin. Start putting together some options for tracking it.”

....

The professional’s little office had a desk with an array that connected directly to the Clinton Estate’s network. He moved the corpse to one side, wiped away the blood that had burst from the man’s neck when it was wrenched backward, and put his hand on the desktop array’s i-spot, opening a direct channel into it. Software from his inserts infiltrated the Estate network. The club had extremely sophisticated routines, hovering just under RI level. Given its clientele, it was inevitable that the security would be top-rated. That was what made it the ideal place for the extermination. People were comfortable enough to let their guard down here.

His software identified the nodes that served the club’s squash courts, and infiltrated their management programs as diagnostic probes. The nodes couldn’t be crashed, that would be detected by the network regulator immediately. What he wanted was the ability to divert emergency signals.

When he was satisfied his subtle corruption was integrated and functioning, he changed his clothes, slipping into the white shirt and shorts that was regulation for the club’s sports staff. He waited in the office for forty-one minutes, then picked up a squash racquet and walked down the short corridor to the court that Senator Burnelli had booked for his lesson.

The Senator was already inside, warming a ball up. “Where’s Dieter?” he asked.

“I’m sorry, Senator, Dieter is off sick today,” he said, and shut the door. “I’m taking his lessons today.”

“Okay, son.” The Senator gave an affable smile. “You’ve got a hard task ahead of you. I got beaten by Goldreich’s aide this week. It was humiliating. And now I’m looking for a little payback.”

“Of course.” He walked toward the Senator.

“What’s your name, son?”

His hand came around fast, chopping into the Senator’s neck. There was a loud snap as the man’s spine snapped. The Senator’s body turned limp and fell to the floor, inserts shrieking in alarm.

He paused for a second, checking his software to see that none of the network nodes were relaying the alert. The diverts were working, routing the dying man’s calls for help to a useless onetime address code. He clenched his hand into a fist, and used his full amplified strength to smash it into the Senator’s face. Thompson Burnelli’s skull shattered from the impact.

TWENTY-TWO

We had stories of small strange animals that were not animals who could sometimes be seen in our forests,” Tochee said through the array’s translator program. “There are also stories of forests that have other forests inside them, hidden from normal travelers. But as we entered the age of reason and science, such stories faded into legend. Nobody in modern times has experienced either. Even I treated them as stories generated during our primitive past and used to explain some facet of nature, or act as a warning to younger family members. It was my venerable elder family parent who planted the doubt in my mind. Just before the elder died, it told me it had seen the small not-animals, and even ventured along a path to an inner forest many years ago when it was a youngster, before technology became so widespread. For me, the idea that such legends were not legends, but could actually be experienced, was too much to ignore. I made my plans quietly, without telling my colleagues, and set off to the forest where my elder parent said it visited the inner forest. I spent many days exploring, and eventually realized I was not only lost, but also no longer on my own world. And now I have my own stories to tell which are greater than all of those collected in our archive.”

“Wait,” Orion said, a smile bursting onto his heavily freckled face. “You’re a librarian?”

The array bleeped and said, “Non-equivalent translation inserted.”

Tochee said, “I am a custodian of our culture’s history. I impart the stories of what was and what might have been to the youngsters of many families. This way our knowledge is not only maintained, but appreciated.”

“A librarian!” Orion grinned at Ozzie.

“That’s nice,” Ozzie said pointedly. Now that the translator was relaying everything they said to Tochee, it was becoming both difficult and embarrassing to explain away Orion’s outbursts of laughter. The boy seemed to find a lot of Tochee’s culture amusing. Ozzie had to admit, the alien’s life did seem to be rather, well … prim and proper.

“How did you know you were on another planet?” Orion asked. “Do your people have space travel?”

“I realized the planet was different to my own when I saw the sun in the sky was a different color, and at night the star pattern was different,” Tochee said. “We do not have space travel.”

“Why not?” Orion waved at the gadgets Tochee was holding in its manipulator flesh. “You’ve obviously got the technology level.”

“We do not have the need. We do not have the internal nonlogic which you possess, the constant desire to explore without reason.”

“You wanted to find the legends,” Ozzie said. “Wasn’t that an unreasonable pursuit?”

“Yes. And in that wish I demonstrated a wild aberration from my kind. If verification of my elder parent’s story was required, then my colleagues and I should have begun a systematic investigation. I went by myself because I believed my colleagues would show no interest.”

“Wild!” Orion was giggling again. Ozzie flashed him another warning glare.

“I’m interested that your people don’t consider spaceflight to be necessary,” Ozzie said. “If you’ve reached an advanced technological level, are you not finding diminishing resources to be a problem?”

“No. We do not build anything beyond our ability to sustain it.”

“That’s very admirable. Our species is nothing like as rational.”

“From what I have witnessed on my travels, that attitude seems to be in the majority.”

“Yeah, but there are varying degrees. I’d like to think we’re reasonably restrained, but by your standards we’re probably not.”

“That makes neither of us right, nor wrong.”

“I hope so, after all, we all have to share the same galaxy.”

“I believe that intelligence and rationality will always be primary no matter what shape sentient creatures take. To not think that would be to doubt the value of life itself.”

Ozzie gave the big alien a quick thumbs-up. They were approaching another steep incline that was half rock. Tochee could scale such obstacles with the greatest of ease, while he and Orion had to scramble up, sweating with the effort. Ozzie glanced toward the sea on his left. They’d been walking along the top of the coastal cliff for two days. It varied considerably in height, but it was a good twenty meters high here, and there didn’t seem to be a beach at the bottom. Not that there was an easy path down in any case.

“Up we go, then,” he told Orion. The boy pulled a face, and retied the band of faded blue cloth that was holding his long hair back away from his eyes. They both started to clamber up, jamming feet into narrow crevices, hands gripping precariously at strong tufts of grass so they didn’t lose their balance when the weight of the rucksacks pulled at them. Tochee flowed up the incline, its ridges of locomotion flesh clasping at the rock and vegetation as it went. Ozzie hadn’t asked, but he figured the big alien could probably slide straight up a sheer cliff.

Once they were on top, they began walking along the edge of the cliff again. The ground was sloping down again now. He knew they were on an island, the small central hill with its crown of jungle had been in sight on his right for the whole two days of their trek. His array’s inertial guidance unit was plotting their wide circular course around it. He hadn’t told Orion yet, but in another mile and a half they’d be back where they started.

“Is that an island out there?” Orion asked.

Right on the horizon there was a small dark smudge. When Ozzie zoomed in, it resolved into a solid little peak rising out of the sea, much like the one they were on. “Yep, that makes five. This is some kind of archipelago.”

“We haven’t seen any ships,” Orion said.

“Give it time, it’s only been two days.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” There hadn’t been any night since they arrived on this world. In fact, the bright sun’s position hadn’t moved at all. The planet was tide-locked, with one face permanently pointing toward the sun. Ozzie wasn’t sure how the climate could function normally with such a setup. But then the gas halo was hardly a natural phenomenon. Between them, he and Tochee had used every sensor they had to scan the multitude of twinkling specks that were orbiting through the gas with this planet. The other specks weren’t planets, that was for certain, although there was very little else they could discover about them. They weren’t emitting any radio or microwave pulses, at least not strong enough to be detectable at any distance. That just left Johansson’s brief description to fall back on. Giant lengths of some coral variant that was home to vegetation. He wondered if the Silfen used them as cities, or nests, or if they even bothered with them at all. Maybe they were just there to keep the gas in the halo fresh and breathable, as forests and oceans were to planets.

As for their measurements of the halo itself, the best they could come up with was that it had a circular cross section roughly two million kilometers in diameter that orbited a hundred fifty million kilometers from the star. What contained the gas was unknown, but had to be some kind of force field. The idea of building a transparent tube this big was mind-boggling, and introduced a whole range of engineering and maintenance problems. Exactly where the power came from to generate a force field on such a scale was also unknown, although Ozzie was pretty sure the builders must have tapped the star’s power. Frankly, there was little else that could provide the kind of energy level required. Why anyone would create such an artifact in the first place was beyond him. It lacked the practicality of a Dyson sphere or a Niven ring. But then, if you had the ability to do this, you probably didn’t actually need to. And if it was the Silfen home system, he strongly suspected the answer to such a question would be: why not. He didn’t really care, he was just happy someone had done it—and he’d seen it.

“Ozzie, Tochee, look!” Orion was racing on ahead of them through the grass. There was no cliff here, the ground had dipped until it was almost level with the sea. A big sandy beach curved away ahead of them. The boy ran onto the sand. A dead fern frond was standing on top of a low dune at the back of the beach like a brown flag. Ozzie had stuck it in there when they started their exploratory walk.

The boy’s delight crumpled as he pulled the frond out of the sand. “This is an island.”

“ ’Fraid so, man,” Ozzie said.

“But …” Orion turned to look at the small central mountain. “How do we get off?”

“I can swim to another island,” Tochee said. “If you are to come with me, we must build a boat.”

Orion gave the sea a mistrustful look. “Can’t we call someone for help?”

“Nobody’s listening,” Ozzie said, holding up his handheld array. The unit had been transmitting standard first contact signals since it started functioning again, along with a human SOS. So far, the entire electromagnetic spectrum had remained silent.

“If this is where the Silfen live, where are they?” the boy demanded.

“On the mainland, somewhere, I guess,” Ozzie said. He stared out to sea. Three islands were visible to his retinal inserts on full zoom, though he wasn’t sure of their distance. If they were the same size as this one, they’d be nearly fifty miles away. Which given he was now only a couple of yards above sea level should have put them far over the horizon on any Earth-sized planet. He wondered if this one was the same size as Silvergalde.

“Where’s that?” Orion asked grouchily.

“I don’t know. In that cloud bank we saw from the other side of the island, maybe.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No, I don’t,” Ozzie snapped. “I don’t get this place at all, okay.”

“Sorry, Ozzie,” Orion said meekly. “I just thought … you normally know stuff, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well this time I don’t so we’ll have to find it out together.” He told his e-butler to call up boatbuilding files from his array’s memory.

....

Even in midsummer, the waters of the Trine’ba were cold. Filled with snowmelt every spring, and deep enough to keep sunlight out of its lower levels, it guarded its low temperature jealously. Mark wore a warmsuit as he drifted among the fabulous dendrites, fans, and arches of coral that sprouted from the main reef. So far marine biologists had identified three hundred seventy-two species of coral, and added more every year. They ranged from the dominant dragonback, with its long amethyst and amber mounds, down to beige corknuts the size of pebbles. Unicorn horn formations poked upward from the patches of bright tangerine ditchcoral, seriously sharp at the point. He was pleased to see Barry was showing them due respect. So many people wanted to see if they were as sharp as they looked. Warmsuit fabric gave no protection for fingers and palms. Every year Randtown General Hospital treated dozens of tourist impalements.

Barry saw him watching, and gave the circular OK signal with his right hand. Mark waved back. Cobalt ring snakes thrummed inquisitively in their niches as they swam lazily overhead. Rugpikes crawled over the reef, hundreds of tiny stalk eyes swiveling as if they were a strip of soft green wheat waving in a gentle breeze. Fish were clotting the water around them like a gritty kaleidoscope cloud. Thousands of brilliantly colored starburst particles whose spines and spindles pulsed rapidly, propelling them along in jerky zigzags. They came in sizes from brassy afriwebs half the length of his finger up to lumbering great brown and gold maundyfish, bigger than humans and moving with drunken sluggishness around the lower reefs. A shoal of eerie milk-white sloopbacks wriggled right in front of Mark’s goggles, and he made a slow catching motion with his hands. The palm-length creatures bent their spines back to form a streamlined teardrop and jetted away.

Barry was doing slow barrel rolls, his flippers kicking in careful rhythm. Both hands were clenched around flakes of dried native insects, which he was slowly rubbing apart. Fish followed him, feeding on the tiny flecks. They formed twin spirals in his wake, like intersecting corkscrews. As they ate, their unique digestive tract bacteria began to glow, illuminating them from within. Looking down on them against the murky bottom was to see an iridescent comet tail spinning in slow motion across the darkness.

With the food almost gone, Barry slapped his hands together, creating an expanding sphere of broken flakes. The Trine’ba fish swarmed in, creating a galaxy of opalescent stars around him.

Mark smiled proudly inside his gill mask. The boy was everything he could have wanted in a son: happy, cheeky, confident. He’d grown beautifully in this environment. It was becoming hard to remember Augusta now. Neither of the kids ever talked about it these days, even Liz called her friends back there less and less, and he hadn’t spoken to his father in months.

He kicked his legs, closing in on his son as the shroud of luminous fish darkened and swam away in search of more food. The timer in his virtual vision said they’d been exploring the reef underwater for forty minutes now. He pointed to the surface. Barry responded with a reluctant OK hand sign.

They came up into warm bright sunlight that had them blinking tears against it as they searched around for the boat. The catamaran was a hundred fifty meters away. Liz was standing on the prow, waving at them. Mark took the gill mouthpiece out. “Got a long swim over there. Better inflate your jacket.”

“I’m all right, Dad.”

“I’m not. Let a little air in, huh, make your mom happy.”

“Okay, I guess.”

Mark pressed the pump valve on his shoulder, and felt the warmsuit jacket stiffen as the fabric inhaled, puffing up around him. They rolled onto their backs, and began a steady kick.

Sandy was still snorkeling around the yacht, along with Elle, one of the Dunbavand kids. Lydia and her two lads, Will and Ed, were already back on the catamaran, washing their diving gear. David and Liz were starting to prepare lunch on the middeck.

Panda barked delightedly as Barry swam up to the small dive platform at the back of the yacht.

“Stay,” Liz called. The dog looked like she was about to jump in and swim again.

Barry clambered onto the dive platform and took his flippers off. “Did you miss me?” he asked Panda. “Did you?”

The dog was still barking excitedly, her tail wagging furiously. Barry made a fuss of her when he climbed up the small chrome ladder to the main deck. He started to reach for one of the boiled eggs from the salad Liz was setting out. “Clean up and dry out first,” his mother warned him.

Mark helped Sandy onto the dive platform. She lifted her mask off, and smiled happily at her father. “I saw a grog down there, Daddy. It was hugely big.” Her arms stretched out wide to show just how big.

“That’s lovely, darling,” he said as he pulled his own flippers off. “Did you put your sunscreen on before you went in the water?”

“Uh-huh.” She nodded vigorously.

Even though Sandy’s skin was a lot darker than his, he was suspicious about the back of her neck and arms; they looked slightly sunburnt to him. “Well, let’s put some aftersun salve on, shall we?”

Happy with the attention, she agreed readily.

“You shouldn’t have taken him out for so long,” Liz chided when he sat down and began applying the salve to Sandy’s back. “I was getting worried. And look how far away from the boat you got.”

“But, Mom, it was so clear down there today,” Barry protested. “You could see for kilometers. It’s never been so good before.”

Mark gave his wife a helpless look. How could you prevent a kid having that much fun? She gave the pair of them an exasperated stare, and carried on with the salad.

The catamaran belonged to David and Lydia, who used it during the summer months to explore the little coves and inlets along Trine’ba’s shoreline. In wintertime it was hauled up the Randtown yacht club’s slipway, so on the weekends David could spend hours in the boatshed painting the hull and repairing the rigging ready for the next season. Mark loved the yacht, and had already begun to think seriously about getting one himself. Not that they could afford one yet. It was a bit like having a dog and a four-by-four, all part of Randtown.

When everyone was finally washed and dry and sitting down to lunch, the catamaran’s electromuscle rigging unfurled its sails and set off for one of the tiny conical atolls that poked up from the very deepest part of the lake. They’d promised the kids they could visit one in the afternoon to see if the balloon flowers were inflating yet. It was almost time for the annual event, which Randtown celebrated with parades and a huge lakeside barbecue in the evening.

“The vineyard association said they haven’t noticed any decline on orders,” David said when the kids had all gone to sit on the stern to eat their lillinberries and ice cream. “I was at the meeting last night. You should have come, Mark.”

“Not sure I’d be welcome.”

“Don’t be so paranoid,” Lydia told him. “You didn’t even get your fifteen minutes of fame; you were just a one-minute wonder that evening. All the media cares about right now is the Burnelli murder.”

“That Baron woman is still using the phrase,” Mark said. “According to her show all of Randtown is antihuman.” Everyone in the district was worried about the effect Baron’s propaganda would have on their small economy. So far it hadn’t been bad. After a five-day standoff, the navy trucks had eventually retreated back down the highway, and the tourist buses had returned. Of course, the summer bookings had been made months before; it was too late for anyone to cancel. The true test would be next season’s bookings. A surprising number of visitors had congratulated the residents on making their stand—Mark’s interview was politely never mentioned. In the meantime, people were watching to see what would happen to their small export trade of wines and organic food.

“Nobody on Elan is going to organize a boycott, for heaven’s sake,” Liz said. “In any event, half of the wine we make is sold right here in the district; and the kind of people who buy proper organic produce support what we did anyway.”

Mark nodded glumly, and poured himself some more Chapples wine. “I might have got away with it, then.”

David leaned over and touched his glass to Mark’s. “I’ll drink to that. Come on, the future’s looking good. Liz has almost cracked the Kinavine’s rhizome sequence; once we have that fixing its own nitrogen we can sell it for cultivation right across the valley. People will be ripping up their old vines and replanting. There won’t be a vineyard on Ryceel that can compete against that wine when it crops.”

“It’s going to take a little while yet,” Liz said.

Mark put his arm around her. “You’ll do it,” he said softly.

She grinned back at him.

“What in God’s name are those?” Lydia asked. She was shielding her eyes with one hand, pointing back toward Randtown with the other.

Blackwater Crag dominated the skyline behind the town, then there was a short break in the mountains to the west of it where the highway valley led back into the Dau’sings. After that the rugged peaks rose again to stand guard over Trine’ba’s shore. One of the tallest peaks on the western side was Goi’al, the southernmost of a cluster collectively called the Regents, where the district’s snow bike sports and racing was based. Only now, in midsummer when the ice and snow finally lifted from the sheltered high ground, did the little machines pack up for a few months.

Black specks were circling slowly to the side of Goi’al. To be visible from this distance they must have been huge.

“Bloody hell,” David muttered. He went straight to the cabin, and brought back a pair of binoculars from the locker. Electromuscle pulleys began to furl the sails, reducing speed to make the catamaran more stable. “Helicopters,” he said. “Bugger, but they’re big brutes. I’ve never seen anything like them before, they’ve got double rotors. Must be some kind of heavy cargo lifter. I make that at least fifteen of them up there, could be more.”

He offered the binoculars around to the others. Liz took them. Mark didn’t bother, he slumped down into the middeck’s semicircular couch. “It’s the detector station,” he said in dismay. “After everything we did, everything we said, they brought it in anyway. The bastards.”

Liz handed the binoculars to Lydia. “You knew it was going to happen in the end, Mark. Something that big isn’t stopped by a bunch of people standing in the middle of the road.”

“I thought we lived in a democracy.”

“We do. We exercised our democratic right to protest, and they ignored us. Ultimately, the navy is a government department, what did you expect from them?”

“I don’t know. Would a little sensitivity be too much to ask?”

She went over and sat beside him. “I’m really sorry, baby. I don’t want them here any more than you do. But we’re going to have to knuckle down and live with it for the duration. These are strange times, we have to make allowances for that. Once this whole Prime thing is over, and the warmongers and profiteers have finished frightening the life out of everyone, then the station will be gone. We’ll make damn sure they take all their crap with them, as well, I promise that.”

“Yeah,” he sighed, conscious how he must be coming over as a petulant brat to the Dunbavands. “Yeah, I guess so. But I don’t have to like it.”

“Nobody’s asking you to.”

He drained the last of the Chapples wine from the glass, and looked back across the cool calm waters of Trine’ba. The helicopters had already begun to land on the other side of Goi’al.

....

“Our worst fears have been proved right,” the Guardians’ spokesman said in a calm, significant voice. “The Dyson aliens are preparing to invade the Commonwealth. They have an overwhelming force pouring through Hell’s Gateway which will be unleashed against us any day now. We warned you this would happen, and now sadly, millions if not billions of citizens will be killed to confirm everything we have always said is tragically true. They will die because our Commonwealth’s defenses are completely inadequate. We know that every person serving in the navy will do their utmost when the invasion begins—we support them wholeheartedly in their awful task—but there are too few of them, and not enough ships. If we could provide them with assistance, we would, but that is not our arena.

“We will carry on our own lonely fight against the Starflyer creature who has brought about this disaster. It is not often we are able to expose one of its agents, for they are normally hidden and protected. However, in this case, the evidence is overwhelming. One person put forward the proposal to launch a starship to investigate Dyson Alpha. One person now governs the size of the navy budget. One person knows the true size of the resources we need, and continually denies us those resources. One person sends their murderer to kill their opponents. This one person is the most powerful puppet the Starflyer has ever used against us. It is President Doi herself.

“Be warned, and remember the true crisis we are facing is not the physical one from the Dyson aliens. It is the one corrupting us from within. We have always been honest with you. Now, in humanity’s darkest hour, we ask you to believe in us this one last time. Doi and her master are our enemy, she will obliterate us if left unchallenged.

“Challenge her.” The spokesman bowed his head. “I thank you for your time.”

....

The whole office was spending the morning filing reports and filling in finance department forms to cover the cost of the LA deployment. Thankfully, Paula just had to skim the summaries and attach her authorization code. That left her with some time to contemplate what had happened, although all she could really think about was Thompson Burnelli’s murder. Tarlo and Renee were busy sifting through the pitifully small amount of leads resulting from the pursuit so they could draw up an action plan. Alic Hogan had chosen to examine the camera images from LA Galactic in a virtual projection to see if the software had been handed over inside the station terminal. She didn’t object; for all he was Columbia’s placeman, Hogan was relatively efficient at his job, and it would keep him away from her for most of the day.

As so often happened with the Johansson case, LA had become a problem that had multiplied unexpectedly, and always in the wrong directions. Although on the positive side, she at least knew that Elvin was putting together another smuggling operation.

At eleven o’clock Rafael Columbia appeared in the office. He was dressed in his full admiral’s uniform, with several staff officers in attendance. Everyone in the office stopped what they were doing to look at him.

Paula stood up just as he reached her door. “Wait for me,” he told his officers, and closed the door.

“Admiral,” Paula said. She closed the file in her virtual vision that had been displaying the names of everyone she’d informed of a target arriving at Seattle, along with their time frame.

He gave her a humorless smile as he sat in the visitor’s chair. “Commander.”

“What can I do for you?”

“Ordinarily, I would say you can explain your latest fuckup. But, frankly, I think we’ve gone beyond that, don’t you?”

“Los Angeles was unfortunate, although we did learn that …”

“Not interested. It was a half-assed operation from the start. And that is indicative of the way you run things. Some target appears out of nowhere, and without any planning or prior notification you put an underresourced team on pursuit duties. Not only that, but when things go wrong, you drag half of the LAPD into the operation just in time for them to watch it blow up in our face. We’re a fucking laughingstock, Commander. And I will not tolerate that.”

Paula saw how much anger was behind Columbia’s steely expression, and realized she was going to have to confide in him. “I’m sorry about the negative publicity, but I can assure you the operation was planned with considerable forethought. I used a small team for a reason.”

“Which was?”

“I believe there is a leak of some kind in navy intelligence. I have been running isolation and identification operations for some time in an attempt to identify the source.”

Rafael Columbia’s face darkened. “A leak?” he said with false calm.

“There has to be.”

“And you didn’t bother informing me nor Lieutenant Hogan about this?”

“I was waiting for some concrete results first.”

“So then you don’t have a suspect, yet?”

“No, sir, not yet.”

“Outside your suspicions, is there a single shred of evidence to back up this allegation against your fellow officers?”

“I believe Venice Coast was …”

“Ah! The other very public setback you inflicted on us.”

“As I was saying,” she said forcefully. “Venice Coast was leaked. The unknown attacker must have received information from a source inside the navy.”

“And this unknown attacker, who was wetwired with the most sophisticated armaments the Commonwealth can produce, is working for Johansson’s Starflyer?”

“That is an option.”

“An option you’ve been shouting very loudly to your political allies.”

“Somebody has been deflecting my investigation for decades. I need to start widening my approach.” She just held back from telling him what Thompson Burnelli had told her.

Rafael Columbia took a small paperscreen from his pocket. He held it up as it unfurled. “Recognize him?”

Paula stared at the image on the paperscreen. “That’s the Venice Coast attacker.” The image had been taken from a bad overhead angle, and he was wearing sports whites, but she would never mistake that face.

“I’m glad we agree on something. That image was given to me by Senate Security. It was taken by a camera at the Clinton Estate. That is the man who walked out of Thompson Burnelli’s squash court after the Senator was murdered.”

“He wouldn’t,” she whispered in horror. Sheldon eliminating his political opponents? I don’t believe it. That’s not how the Grand Families and Intersolar Dynasties operate. Something is wrong about this. Badly wrong.

“Who wouldn’t?” Rafael demanded.

“The murderer. Why would he be used to kill the Senator?”

“I don’t fucking know. But according to you, he goes around causing mayhem on the orders of a navy officer.”

“I did not say that, and you’re a fool if that’s what you think.”

Rafael Columbia sat back in the chair and gave her a steady look. “When I became chief of the Directorate I was just as impressed with you as all those media morons you play up to in your trials. The legendary Paula Myo, who solves all her cases except one, and she’s still working on that after all these decades—never giving up. So like all the other chiefs before me, I gave you plenty of space, and never questioned your methods. After all, Johansson and his sidekick are just a pair of lunatic conspiracy fanatics spouting paranoid propaganda. Kind of romantic really, like pirates in sailing ships. Because the only physical damage the Guardians cause is on Far Away, where nobody ever goes, and certainly nobody cares about apart from the Halgarths, and they can afford it anyway. Except, the pirates were actually the most bloodthirsty psychopaths, who slaughtered the crews of entire ships and wrecked economies because of the trade routes they closed down. You see the parallel here? It took decisive naval action to eliminate piracy. Now I gave you an entire department, with unlimited government resources, tasked to do one thing. I gave you that in good faith, because you are the Paula Myo, and everyone believes you are the one person in the Commonwealth who can run down Bradley Johansson for me.”

“I can.”

“You haven’t. The reason you’re still chasing him—and I’m sorry if this causes offense, but it happens to be true—is that you’re an obsessive compulsive. The only reason, Commander Myo.”

“I am what I am. And that makes me perfect for the job.”

“I disagree. You have poor leadership skills; you antagonize and alienate your fellow officers; you do not follow procedure; you do not believe anyone is capable of performing tasks as well as yourself—in other words you belittle them and are distrustful of them, which is why we find ourselves in this whole business of leaks. It has to be a leak, doesn’t it, because it couldn’t possibly be your fault, your screwup.”

“Would you like to say what you came here to say?”

“Certainly. As of now, I am appointing Alic Hogan to take charge of the Johansson operation.”

“No.”

“You will continue to be a part of the operation, of course, but it will be in an advisory role only. Hogan will direct the day-to-day running of this office, and facilitate policy and strategy.”

“That is not acceptable.”

“You are a navy officer, you will obey my orders.”

“I am not a navy officer, I am not a part of this bureaucratic farce. I am a police officer.”

“Not anymore. If you refuse my order you will be dismissed from the service.”

“This is my investigation.”

“It is not.”

Paula’s e-butler told her it had just been locked out of the office network. She gazed over the desk at Rafael Columbia; some kind of shock was holding her body rigid, she could feel her skin cooling. Some sick feeling that she suspected was close to panic had begun to clog her thoughts. It was obvious Rafael wasn’t going to accept a compromise, he wanted his man running the operation, LA was just the excuse. One thing was perfectly clear, she couldn’t continue the investigation as part of the navy.

“Fine. I resign my commission.” Paula stood up, which made Columbia flinch. She picked the quartz cube hologram off her desk and put it in her shoulder bag, then she took the rabbakas plant from the windowsill.

“Word of advice,” Columbia said. “Next time you get rejuvenated, get your Foundation fixed dominants taken out. The clinics can make anybody normal these days.”

She raised an eyebrow in interest. “There’s hope for you yet, then.”

Everybody in the office was sitting behind their desks as she walked out, holding the same position they were in when Columbia arrived. The only difference was the surprise on their faces.

“Good-bye,” she told them. “And thank you for all the hard work you did for me.”

Tarlo half rose from his chair. “Paula …”

She shook her head fractionally, and he fell silent. Without looking left or right she walked out of the office.

When she got down onto the street she walked automatically back to her apartment, a kilometer away. It was on the second floor of a centuries-old block that had a central cobbled courtyard overlooked by shuttered windows. Narrow stone stairs wound upward in the kind of central well that looked as if it had been water-eroded rather than built. In her one visible concession to security, the solid oak door of her apartment had a modern electronic lock to supplement the ancient mechanical one.

Inside, there were three rooms: a bedroom, a bathroom, and the living room with a small kitchen alcove. She didn’t need anything more, she didn’t use anything more. It was somewhere to sleep conveniently near the office, an address for her clothes valeting service.

When Paula walked in the maidbot was sitting passively in the corner of the living room. It had already run through its daily cleaning routine, polished the age-darkened floorboards, dusted every flat surface, and put her breakfast crockery in the dishwasher. She opened the window that overlooked the courtyard, and put the rabbakas on the little dresser beside it where it would catch the sunlight every afternoon. With that taken care of she looked around the neat living room as if searching for a clue. There was nothing else for her to do. She sat on the sofa that faced the wall-mounted portal, perching on the edge.

Memories were filtering up inside her mind. Memories that had never been erased or transferred into safe storage at any of her rejuvenations. Memories she’d assumed were dormant. Right after her parents’ trial she’d gone back to the hotel with her police escort. That had been a big new tower in Marindra’s capital, with its cube rooms and clean new furniture and air-conditioning. The escort had left her alone, giving her a break before the Huxley’s Haven government official arrived to take her “home.” Now the trial was over, she didn’t know what to do. There was nothing to fill her time, no school to go to, no Coya to hang out with, no boys to eye up. She sat on the bed, perched on the edge looking out through the big picture window at the capital’s skyline, and waited. Strange things happened inside her head—Coya’s hysterical crying and pleading was still echoing around in there—and while her eyes looked through the window all she could actually see was her parents being led from the dock. Her father’s head hung low as his dreams and hopes lay broken around him. Her mother, equally haggard. But Rebecca turned to look across the court, meeting her stolen stepdaughter’s gaze, and mouthed: “I love you.”

In her small, empty Paris apartment Paula whispered, “I love you, too, Mum.” Then just as she had in that hotel room a hundred sixty years ago, Paula Myo started crying.

....

Preparation had taken many months, vast amounts of resources and industrial capacity had been diverted from the expansion expedition being mounted on the other side of the interstellar wormhole, but MorningLightMountain was finally ready. The other immotiles had been forming alliances that might eventually challenge its dominance. They were worried about its new technology. It knew that they had been experimenting with wormhole construction; its quantum wave detectors had picked up the telltale fluctuations from many settlements across the Prime system. If it didn’t act now, they would soon reach parity, its advantage would be lost permanently.

Three hundred twenty-eight wormholes were opened in unison. They were small, each of them measuring a meter and a half wide. Just enough for a ten-megaton warhead to pass through. The wormholes closed.

MorningLightMountain had opened them next to the primary groupings of all the other immotiles on the planet, inside the ultrastrong protective force fields that guarded them from the sky, and next to the sprawling buildings that sheltered and nurtured them. The warheads detonated immediately, wiping out every motile and immotile within a twenty-five-kilometer radius. Even as the first round of nukes were exploding, MorningLightMountain was opening the wormholes again, this time at the next series of targets, the subsidiary immotiles orbiting the Prime homeworld. After that it targeted the first of the two solid planets, the second. Then came the innermost gas giant, its moons, the asteroid habitats, the outermost gas giant, industrial stations. The wave of obliteration rippled out across the system for over a day. Not that many of the remaining immotile groupings ever knew they were at war; they had little or no warning of their doom. MorningLightMountain’s wave of assaults traveled across the star system faster than the speed of light.

When it was over, when every other immotile grouping had been reduced to a lake of radioactive lava, MorningLightMountain used the wormholes again. This time it sent connections through, microwaves or fiber-optic cable, inserting itself into the core-less communications networks of its vanquished rivals. Its thoughts and orders flooded into the minds of the surviving motiles, expelling their mental heritage, turning MorningLightMountain into the sole sentient entity in the star system. Every motile was enmeshed in its thoughts as it took control of the infrastructure and spaceships that remained. For over a week it sent its billions of new motiles out to survey the wreckage and list the mechanical systems that had survived unscathed. Most of the farms and food production plants had come through intact, as had a great many industrial facilities. The information was used to assemble a strategy for integration, bringing together every production center in a single unified organization. It began to amalgamate thousands of motiles into new subsidiary groupings of itself to cope with the huge demands of managing an entire star system. Without rivalries, and acting in conjunction, the combined industrial output of every manufacturing plant was greater than before.

Synergy, the Bose memories called it. The alien’s concepts and words still lingered and lurked amid MorningLightMountain’s system-wide thoughts, even though the coherent article had long been erased. It had even taken the precaution of physically eradicating the immotile unit that the Bose memories had been stored in. All that remained now were memories of memories, disseminated information that manifested in the odd alien phrase. There was no concern left of possible contamination. It was pure now, a single life that lived throughout this star system, and was now expanding into a second.

The effort to reach the Commonwealth resumed, with hundreds of ships flying daily through the interstellar wormhole to the staging post star system, carrying equipment that would build the next sequence of wormholes.

Out of all the hundreds of billions of motiles hurrying to perform their appointed tasks, one did not obey MorningLightMountain’s instructions. Because such individuality was impossible to a Prime, it moved where it wanted and saw what it needed. No other motile possessed the kind of independent thought structure that would question it; as long as it avoided the attention of MorningLightMountain’s main thought routines it was perfectly safe to come and go as it pleased.

For over a day it had been moving around the base of the giant mountain building that contained the original heart of the massive interlinked creature that was MorningLightMountain. It didn’t move as smoothly as all the other motiles, it wasn’t used to four legs, nor the strange way they bent and twisted. But it made progress.

In the background of its mind were the directives and thoughts of MorningLightMountain, emerging from the little communications device attached to one of its nerve receptor stalks. It ignored them because it wanted to, a mental ability that other motiles did not have. Although the images and information coming out of the communications device were a useful guide to what was happening across the Prime system.

High above it, dazzling lightning bolts lashed down repetitively against the protective force field dome, sizzling away to ground out along the top of the ancient valley. Clouds boiled along at a speed it had never seen before. They were thick and black, blotting out the sky as they unleashed monsoon-like downpours several times an hour. So heavy was the unnatural rain that rivulets formed across the force field, carrying away the water to the saturated ground beyond. Whole tides of mud were slithering around the protected, sacrosanct valley.

The motile regarded the new weather intently, with one thought starting to dominate its mind: Nuclear winter.

....

Paula Myo took the express from Paris direct to Wessex. She had a long wait in the CST planetary station there; the train to Huxley’s Haven only ran once a day. It was dark outside when she eventually went to platform 87B, which was situated in a small annex at the end of the terminal. The train she found standing there was made up from four single deck carriages being pulled by a steam engine that could have come straight out of a museum. She’d forgotten that the journey was on a historical throwback. On any other world such a contraption belching out thick black smoke from the coal it burned would have been prohibited under any number of antipollution laws; here on one of the Big15 nobody cared.

She climbed into the first carriage and sat on one of the velvet bench seats. A couple of other people came in, and ignored her. Just before their scheduled departure time a guard walked down the carriage. He was dressed in a dark blue uniform that had bright silver buttons down the waistcoat, and a tall peaked cap with red piping.

“Ticket, please, ma’am,” he said politely.

She handed over the small pink hard copy the machine at the end of the platform had printed out for her. He produced a pair of clippers, and punched a small Z-shaped hole in the corner.

“Won’t be long now,” he said, and touched the peak of his cap.

The one hundred fifty years of cynicism and cultural sophistication that formed her usual defensive shell wilted away. “Thank you very much,” she said, and meant it. There was a great deal of comfort in a culture that was so honest and straightforward.

She held the ticket in her hand, looking at it as the steam engine tooted loudly and began to pull out of the station amid a cloud of pure white steam and clanking pistons. In theory Huxley’s Haven represented home, though she felt no attachment of any kind to the planet and its people. Going back would seem to any observer (and she was sure Hogan would be keeping a virtual eye on her) as if she were running for cover, returning to the one place she would fit in.

There was the usual slow crawl across the planetary station yard. Other trains seemed to charge past, the lights from their carriage windows producing a smear of illumination. Signals were bright red or green points against the dark background, stretching away for kilometers like a thinly populated city. Every now and then the glaring front lights from a heavy goods train would flow across the silver rails, followed by the dark bulk of the wagons, eclipsing the rest of the yard.

Their gradual progress forward took them into a pale amber light that washed across this section of the yard like strong moonlight. When she pressed her face against the window, Paula could see the gateways lined up ahead of them, over two-thirds illuminated by the daylight of the worlds they led to. In front of them, the rails were full of trains. It was unnerving seeing how little distance there was between each one as the station traffic control arranged them in a continual sequence. Only the single track that the steam engine rolled along was empty ahead and behind. They curved around to face the gateway, which glowed with a diffuse primrose light.

Paula experienced the usual tingle over her skin as they passed through the gateway’s pressure curtain. Then they were on another world and in full daylight, picking up speed across a rolling countryside that was made up from verdant checkerboard fields. Dense, neatly layered hedges were used to separate out the land, with the occasional drystone wall acting as a more substantial barrier. Native trees with reddish leaves were interspaced with terrestrial oak, ash, sycamore, and beech. All of them had been pollarded, their thick main trunks sprouting long vertical branches. The farms used the cut wood for fuel during the winter months, reducing dependence on fossil reserves. One of the benefits of using such simple mechanical technology was the low energy requirements; all of the planet’s electricity was easily supplied from hydro dams.

She could see farmhouses sitting amid the folds of land, big brick buildings with blue slate roofs nestled at the center of Dutch barns and pigsties and stables and store sheds. Some of them had grain silos, tall clapboard structures painted dove-gray, which she knew were among the tallest buildings on the whole planet. Single railway tracks branched off from the main line, snaking out to the silo yards through narrow cuttings and along embankments. The rails were rusty now, in early summer when the grains were still green in the fields; but later in the year when the harvest was gathered the grain wagons would make daily collections; the lines would be shiny again and the weeds coming up between the wooden sleepers would shrivel and die from the heat of the engines and blasts of steam. Paula had to admit, it looked every bit the bucolic idyll. She accepted now what she had so strongly rejected as a confused uprooted teenager, that the whole point of this society was that it didn’t change, that was what its people were designed for. The Human Structure Foundation had chosen a level of technology equal to the early twentieth century, prior to the electronic revolution; the kind of engineering and mechanics that was easily maintained. Nothing here needed computer diagnostics when it broke down; engineers could see what was wrong amid a machine’s cogs and cables. It was the same with information, there were no arrays, databases, or networks; offices of clerks and accountants kept books and files and Rolodexes. The Foundation had designed people to work at specific jobs, and those jobs wouldn’t metamorphose with progress—there was no progress. Huxley’s Haven provided its inhabitants with the most secure stable society it was possible to have. She still couldn’t decide if the Foundation had been morally right to begin the whole project, but looking out at the trim neat fields and the picture-perfect farms, she had to admit now that it worked.

The train started to move through the outskirts of Fordsville, the capital. They were climbing up on a wide embankment now, giving her a view down on the streets of the outlying districts. Long rows of neat terrace houses stretched away in regular lines, their bricks all a rust-red, with broad windows painted in every color of the rainbow. Larger civic buildings stood high among them, sometimes as much as four or five stories tall, made from a dark gray stone. There were no churches of any kind, but then they didn’t have any religion here, this was a world where everyone knew they had been created by man, not God.

Even when the train moved through the center of the city, the buildings were all the same uniform size; neat houses interspaced by the commercial buildings, and plenty of large parks to break up the urban sprawl. It was unlike other cities in the Commonwealth, where money and political power collected at the center, and the architecture reflected that concentration. Here, equality reigned supreme.

Alphaway, the main station, was probably the biggest single structure in the city after the original Foundation clinic, with three long arched roofs of iron and glass, tall enough that the clouds of smoke from the steam engines dissipated upward through the ridge vents. She walked down the platform and went out onto Richmond Square outside. The roads were busy with three-carriage electric trams riding down their rails in the central lanes; more numerous were buses, whose methane engines produced a high growl as they raced past; taxis and goods vans struggled for space among them. The only personal transport were the bicycles, which had two lanes to themselves on every street.

People on the pavement hurried past. Many of them gave Paula a surreptitious glance as they went, which she found amusing. It wasn’t fame that earned her the looks, nobody knew about her here; it was her plain business suit that marked her out as an offworlder. Contrary to Commonwealth comedians, whose routine had everyone on the planet dressed in identical boiler suits, people were wearing just about every fashion the human race had ever devised. The only thing they didn’t have was artificial fiber.

She crossed the square and went into the main tram station. There was no cybersphere for her e-butler to consult, no useful stored information about routes and stops. Instead, she had to stand in front of a big colored map with the tram lines overlaid in primary colors, and work out for herself which one she needed.

Ten minutes later she was sitting in a tram heading out on its loop that she hoped was going to take in the Earlsfield district. It was very similar to a vehicle she’d used last time when she left Huxley’s Haven, though she couldn’t remember the route number. As they moved away from the center the number of large shops and warehouses decreased, and the streets became more residential, with blocks of factories clumped together. Watching them go past she was still convinced she had done the right thing by leaving all those decades ago. After an upbringing in the Commonwealth this world would have been too quiet.

Not for the first time, she reviewed her nuclear option: go for a rejuvenation and erase all her memories of life in the Commonwealth. Without that experience, the rich cultural contamination so beloved of her stepparents, she would be able to fit in here. It wasn’t something she could bring herself to do, not yet, anyway. There was still her first real case left to solve, though it had become inordinately difficult and complex now.

It had begun in 2243, a fortnight after Paula had passed her Directorate exams to qualify as a Senior Investigator. That was nine months after Bradley Johansson claimed he returned to the Commonwealth after traveling the Silfen paths, and set about founding the Guardians of Selfhood. As with any leader of a new political movement, especially one that waged armed conflict, he needed money to support his cause. As he no longer had direct access to the Halgarth family money, he hatched a simple plan to steal what he wanted.

On a warm April night, Johansson and four colleagues broke into the California Technological Heritage Museum. They ignored the marbled halls filled with giant aircraft and even larger spaceplanes, crept past the display cases full of twentieth-century computers, never even glanced at the first G5 PCglasses, avoided the original motility robots, the SD lasers, a stealth microsub, the prototype superconductor battery cell, and went straight for the dome at the heart of the buildings. Right at the center was the wormhole generator that Ozzie Fernandez Isaac and Nigel Sheldon had built and used to visit Mars. It had taken a lot of negotiation and political maneuvering, but the museum had finally acquired the display rights.

When Johansson and his little team blew open the main door into the central dome, alarms went off and force fields came on. The duty guards responded swiftly, and had the dome surrounded in under a minute.

In order to prevent theft, the museum had laudably installed various force fields to isolate sections of the interior as soon as any form of criminal behavior was detected. As the central dome contained what was arguably the most important, and therefore valuable, machine the human race had ever built, its force field enclosed it completely. When it came on, it trapped the intruders inside. So far, so good.

With over fifty armed guards outside the dome, the chief used the public address system to give those inside the time-honored recital to throw down any weapons and come out with their hands up and their inserts deactivated. The chief then tried to switch off the force field. That was when they found that on his way in Johansson had burned through the force field generator’s main power cable and the command links. The force field had come on automatically with the alarm, powered by its emergency backup supply, but for now the guards couldn’t switch it off.

No real problem. They just had to wait five hours until the emergency backup supply was exhausted. However, what no one in the museum had really thought through was the nature of the machine that the dome’s force field protected. Peering through the small gap provided by the wrecked door, the guards could see the intruders working frantically on the historical device inside. Johansson plugged in the niling d-sink his team had carried in with them, and slowly powered up the old wormhole generator. It might have been nearly two hundred years old, but its components were essentially solid state, and Nigel and Ozzie had built it with a large fail-soft redundancy factor. After an hour, Johansson managed to open a wormhole. It didn’t reach over any real distance, not compared to its huge commercial descendants used by CST. That didn’t bother him, he didn’t want to go to Mars, or even the moon. All he wanted was to be four hundred kilometers away from the museum, in Las Vegas. To be precise, in the maximum security vault that served the eight largest casinos on Earth.

With the wormhole established inside the vault, the team walked through. Once again a barrage of alarms went off, triggered by their presence, and once again force fields came on around the outside, designed to confine any thief who had managed to get this far until the guards arrived. One of Johansson’s team used microthermal charges around the vault door to seal it from the inside. They then spent forty-nine minutes transferring bags full of banknotes back through the wormhole and into the museum. The casinos welcomed currency from every planet in the Commonwealth, and each bag contained notes to the value of five million Earth dollars. It took a team member on average one minute to grab a bag, take it through the wormhole, and go back for the next one.

Paula Myo arrived ninety minutes after the California Technological Heritage Museum alarm was triggered. For the last week she had been working on the strange case of a stolen niling d-sink from a factory outside Portland. Nobody at the Serious Crimes Directorate could work out what anybody would want with such a thing; any company that had a requirement for one could afford one. Now they knew. She struggled through the hyped-up crowd of reporters, then had to get past the small army of LAPD and museum guards that had the criminals encircled. She pressed herself right up to the ruined door, which gave her a narrow awkward view into the dome where one side of the venerable wormhole generator was just visible. Squinting against the sheet of air hazed by the force field she could make out figures moving around.

Two weeks qualified, and she was actually watching the largest robbery in human history in progress.

Once the last bag was dropped into the dome chamber, Johansson moved the wormhole exit again, this time to an unknown destination. The team labored for another fifty minutes taking the bags through. Then they left, and a simple software timer function powered down the wormhole generator behind them.

Two hours later the force field shut down. Paula was among the first people into the dome, supervising the forensics team she’d called in. The Directorate wouldn’t give her the case, of course, she was still a first-lifer and way too junior (her abnormal heritage was never mentioned). Senior Investigators with twenty years’ experience were brought in to head the case, and she was given a secondary role on the task force.

By morning the casinos had confirmed that one point one seven billion dollars had been taken. The media called it the Great Wormhole Heist. Senior Directorate officials assured their contacts that the Investigators would soon be making arrests. It simply wasn’t possible to get rid of that much money unnoticed.

Johansson, though, had planned well. He spent his cash with the kind of people who asked no questions, and certainly didn’t make large unexplained deposits with banks. On Far Away the Guardians began to expand their numbers and activities, starting their campaign against the Starflyer in the form of its principal agents, the Research Institute, with the Halgarth family as occasional secondary targets.

The Directorate task force did manage to identify Johansson’s DNA from samples of hair left in the dome. It meant nothing at first; with a multitude of people walking through the museum every week, he was just one name in two and a half thousand confirmed samples. He did have a query in his file, given the circumstances of his earlier disappearance from his family and job five years earlier. It was only when the acts of sabotage began on Far Away and the Guardians shotgunned the unisphere with their propaganda that the Directorate Investigators finally put it all together. Catching Johansson was an altogether more difficult task. He only ever used front men to make his arms purchases, and Guardian members to release his propaganda messages. All the arrests they made were peripheral. They never got close to him.

Over the years, then decades, Investigators left the task force or were reassigned, or simply retired from the Directorate. Paula moved up the hierarchy until she commanded the task force. Finally, however, even the task force was quietly dissolved and the Great Wormhole Heist case was downgraded. Even then, she kept the case active as part of the overall Guardians investigation. For a hundred thirty-nine years she had not quit. She couldn’t.

The tram stopped at the end of Montagu High Street, and Paula stepped out. The town hadn’t changed, at least not from her vague first-life recollection of it. When she looked along the street with its small stores and hotels she could see it dipping down toward the cove at the bottom. There was a stone harbor on one side, she remembered, with fishing boats drawn up on the rocky bluff, and nets stretched out to dry. Flocks of big scarlet birds swirled overhead, tetragulls, whose oily feathers allowed them to swim almost as well as fish.

Midafternoon wasn’t a busy time for Montagu. Most people were at work, leaving the pavement sparsely populated, and the buses half-empty. The nearest shop had two large bay windows, displaying well-dressed mannequins. There were no chains or franchises on Huxley’s Haven. Technically, the economy was market communism, with nonessential goods and products allowed to be supply led, which gave designers considerable liberty and innovation. The dresses on the mannequins were certainly attractive, as were the pashminas draped around them.

Paula walked in to be greeted by the assistant, a young woman whose clothes were all chosen from the racks around the shop. For a moment Paula found herself studying the woman a little too closely, but what exactly did someone designed to be a shop assistant look like? Same as you, she told herself crossly, an ordinary person. There was no specific shop assistant caste anyway, all the fixed dominant gene would give her was a behavioral trait for public service; she could just as easily have been a cook or librarian or gardener. It was only after primary school, which took them up to age twelve, that people on Huxley’s Haven started to choose what sort of specialty they wanted to follow within their predetermined sphere of interest.

The assistant smiled faintly as she took in Paula’s clothes. “Can I help you, miss?”

It took a second for Paula to realize that she still looked younger than the assistant, even in a formal suit. “I don’t need clothes, sorry, I’m looking for directions to the Denken house.”

“Ah, yes.” The assistant was almost pleased at the question, as if it was what she expected an offworlder to ask. “It’s on Semley Avenue.” She gave Paula a string of directions, and asked, “If you don’t mind me asking, why do you want to visit him?”

“I need some advice.”

“Really? I didn’t know Commonwealth citizens used our freethinkers.”

“They don’t. I was born here.” She grinned at the woman’s startled expression.

Semley Avenue was still the same, a street of bungalows with tidy front gardens. The exception were the pines and conifers planted along the edge of the pavement, which had been tended properly over the intervening century and a half to grow into huge sturdy trees. Their strong scent mingled with the fresh breeze coming in off the sea, giving the avenue a restful quality. It put her in mind of a retirement village.

The Denken house was the last bungalow before the avenue opened out into a swath of parkland that ran along the top of the cliffs. It was bigger than all the others, in itself a bit of a novelty on a world where everyone earned the same salary no matter what their job. At some time someone had built a big brick annex on the side, with a few simple high slit windows. It didn’t really match the rest of the bungalow’s chalet-style architecture.

Paula walked up the little path to the front door and rang the tarnished brass bell. The garden was subtly different from all the neighbors, who favored rigid layouts of lawns, flower beds with colorful annuals, and the occasional stone birdbath or sundial. This garden was lined with evergreen shrubs to provide a range of pastel colors, and the lawn hadn’t been mowed for a week or more.

Paula was just about to press the bell button again when a man’s voice said, “Coming, coming,” somewhere inside the house. A moment later the door was opened by a tall man in his mid-thirties, with untidy shoulder-length brown hair that already had several gray strands appearing. He was wearing a much-creased turquoise-blue T-shirt and a pair of lemon-yellow shorts. “You’re early.” He gave Paula a bleary look. “Oh, couldn’t your mother come?”

“I don’t have a mother.” She could see his ancestor’s face; his cheeks were rounder, and the hair was darker, but that nose was the same, as were his expressive green eyes. The slight bafflement at everyday life was identical, too.

The man rubbed his face as if he’d just woken up, and looked closer. “My my, an offworlder. What are you doing here?”

“Are you Denken?”

“Leonard Denken, yes?”

“I’m Paula Myo, and technically I’m not an offworlder.”

Leonard Denken frowned, then a startled expression appeared. He straightened up, suddenly wide awake. “Oh my, oh my, yes of course, the last stolen baby. My grandfather! No! It was my great-grandfather who advised you. My father always talked about that.”

“I need some more advice.”

Leonard gasped, then smiled broadly. “Come in, please, do come in. I’m sorry about the mess. My mind isn’t quite as tidy as people expect. The house reflects that. Matilda keeps threatening to tidy up, but I haven’t had a chance to compile an index, yet. One day. Yes, one day.”

There were books piled up along both walls in the long hall, hardbacks and leather-bound tomes. Some of the stacks reached up to Paula’s shoulder, looking terribly unsafe. “I need to get myself some more bookshelves,” Leonard said apologetically as he caught her looking around. “There are several carpenters in the street, but I just haven’t gotten around to asking them yet. I need wood, too.”

He led her into the big annex, which was a single room. “My father intended this to be our library,” he said. “But I seem to have subverted that, a little.”

Every wall was fronted by bookcases that reached from floor to ceiling, with every inch of space taken up. Leonard was now building new piles along the floor. It was only the back wall that had high slit windows, long since covered by shelving. The front had two large arched French doors that opened onto the bungalow’s main garden, giving a superb view out over the cliffs and sea beyond. A big old desk had been set up in front of one, awash with magazines, papers, books, and cardboard files.

“Please sit down.” Leonard gestured to a spindly antique seat in front of the desk. “Matilda! Matilda, we have a guest. Would you like some tea? Or coffee? I’m afraid I don’t have any Commonwealth brands. I do have some passable sherry.” He looked around as if he were in a strange room until he saw an old grandfather clock. “Or maybe it’s too early?”

“Tea will be fine, thank you.”

A girl came through the door.

“This is Matilda,” Leonard said. The adoration in his voice was almost embarrassing to hear. His face had taken on a dreamy quality as he smiled at her.

Paula, who was used to the sequenced and modified women of the Commonwealth, was surprised by how beautiful Matilda was. She was in her early twenties, with delicate cheekbones that still managed to give her strong features complemented by wide ice-blue eyes that allowed her an unnervingly piercing stare. Her hair was the fairest blond, and she’d let it grow very long, right now it was gathered into a single braid that fell all the way along her spine to the top of her narrow hips. She was also tall, with long legs whose perfect shape was produced by muscles that any dancer would envy. Paula could see that easily; all Matilda wore was a small pair of red bikini bottoms and a cutoff white T-shirt. Her skin had a rich healthy tan.

When Paula looked out of the open French doors again, she saw the towels in the garden where the two of them must have been sunbathing.

“I’d like you to meet Paula Myo, our very distinguished guest from the Commonwealth,” Leonard said.

“Hi,” Matilda said. “What can I get you?”

“Just some tea, thank you,” Paula said.

“Sure.” Her smile was guileless. Paula found herself smiling back.

“Isn’t she lovely?” Leonard asked when the girl had left. He was as shy and eager as a teenager who’d unexpectedly found himself dating the prom queen. “I’m going to ask her to marry me. I think. There’s nothing I want more, but … I’m a little bit older than her. Not that she’s ever said anything about that.”

“Don’t wait too long,” Paula said. “There’ll be another hundred men wanting to ask the same question if you don’t. And she’s where she wants to be. That ought to tell you something.”

“Yes, oh yes, you’re quite right.” He caught himself and sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m not supposed to be asking you for advice.”

“It’s okay. I’ve had a lot more experience with these kinds of things. And I’m used to seeing age differences over a century or more. Love normally wins out.”

“Yes, yes of course. I must say this is something of a shock having you come to me. That’s why I’m not handling this well. Your letters to my great-grandfather are around here somewhere.” He waved a hand at the library’s piles. “I read them when I took over from my father. You had just qualified to be some kind of detective in the Commonwealth government.”

Paula had forgotten the letters she’d written. At first they’d been a welcome contact with the one person in the galaxy who seemed to understand her; then when her insecurities had slowly abated she wrote out of politeness. Eventually of course, her job took up so much of her time … It was a very tired excuse. She should have realized Alexis would have kept the letters, it had been a very intense affair during the short time it lasted. “Yes, I qualified as an Investigator. I’ve been successful, too. No false modesty.”

He smiled in that proud way that stirred up a few too many old memories. “Of course you succeeded. You’d be the best they ever had. Not that they’d ever admit that.”

“I have your great-grandfather to thank. He was the one who told me to go. He knew that I wouldn’t be happy here, not after being exposed to so much of the Commonwealth.”

“I’d dispute that; but I’m not him, and you’ve obviously flourished. I have to ask, and I’m sorry if this is intrusive, but do you ever have any doubts about rejuvenation, you’ve obviously been through the process several times. I think you were a teenager when you left Huxley’s Haven.”

“No, no doubts. Not ever. There is so much crime out there.”

“And nobody else can do the job.”

She pulled a face. He was very similar to Alexis. “A few might manage,” she admitted.

“I’m asking because rejuvenation is the one thing that is debated endlessly by my caste. We simply cannot decide if we should adopt it here.”

“I’d say it was contrary to your whole ethos. This society was formed so people could live their lives and be content. A great deal of that contentment comes from a natural cycle which lies undisturbed, and was never sequenced in by the Foundation. They just gave you the ability to enjoy what was available within a relatively simple framework—at least compared to majority Commonwealth culture. There will always be a job for you whoever you are, a job, or purpose that you will enjoy, and you will be rewarded financially by it no more or no less than anyone else. If you introduce rejuvenation you will start to expand beyond the rate sustainable by your current economy. And your current technoeconomy is the only one suitable for fixed trait castes. The best the Foundation could sequence in was behavior suitable for a particular profession, along with a few extras like dexterity for doctors. But you simply can’t produce dedicated fusion techs or microbiologists, those kinds of professions have too many requirements, there’s no single recognizable aptitude. To support a more modern economy you’d have to despecialize the traits to the point where they’d effectively be dissolved. You’d wind up with normal humans living in an economy that was ideologically driven rather than needs related. There’d be nothing to stop them going and getting a better-paid job on another planet, especially after a couple of centuries of going in to work in the same office.”

“Goodness me, and I thought freethinkers such as myself were the only ones who could put together solid logical arguments.”

Matilda returned with a tray carrying mugs of tea. “Don’t let him distract you,” she said as she gave Paula her mug. “He’s a very bad freethinker. He always asks questions, he never answers them.”

“To think about things, I have to know about them first.”

Matilda gave Paula a told-you-so shrug as she gave Leonard his mug.

“What do you do?” Paula asked.

“I’m a nurse. I work at the maternity ward of the local hospital. I like children.” She gave Leonard a meaningful glance. He blushed.

Paula wanted to snap at him: For God’s sake ask her. There was way too much recycled history in this house. A static, timeless society was one thing, but you could take it to extremes. At the time, over a century and a half ago, she’d been younger than Matilda, while Alexis had been older than Leonard. It had broken Alexis’s heart having her leave, and he’d been the one who pushed her out knowing it was the only way for her to have a future. Although if she could have been happy anywhere on Huxley’s Haven it would have been here with him. That was the trouble with freethinkers, they had overactive imaginations that made them uncertain. Maybe that’s why they’re always men, the Foundation just amplified their natural inability to make a commitment.

Matilda looked from her lover to Paula. “I’m going to leave you two alone to talk. Let me know if you need anything else.” She kissed Leonard on the forehead, and went back out into the garden. As she slipped out of her scraps of clothing to lie on the towel, Paula had a memory flash of Mellanie and Morton, a couple she could really do with forgetting about.

“Aren’t you the perfect counter to your own argument, though?” Leonard said.

“Somebody recently claimed my Foundation trait was obsessive compulsive disorder. He was an idiot, but he might have had a point. It is an excellent quality for a police officer to have. My type is probably the only kind who can adapt to the Commonwealth.” She paused, troubled by where her thoughts were leading. “Freethinkers, as well, possibly.”

Leonard held his mug in both hands and peered at her over the rim. “We’re not quite as free as people think. If I had to define us it would be as psychiatrists for society. The Foundation considered us necessary to assist this world in addressing questions and problems beyond the norm. As a collective, we are effectively the politicians. Our council is supposed to provide alternatives which everyone else gets to vote on.” His expression softened. “It’s a bit of a myth that everyone else is sequenced to do as we tell them. Though I have to admit, were it true, the possibilities for dictatorship are fabulous.”

“I don’t think you’d make a very good dictator, Leonard.”

“No, I suppose you’re right. It is an irony that we are known for our micro work rather than our macro. I really do get treated as the local psychiatrist, you know. Any slightly out of the ordinary problem, and this house is the first stop.”

“I’m as guilty of that as all the others.”

“I understand. So what did you come here for?”

“You might need to prepare some options for this planet. Have you been following the news about the Dyson Pair and the Prime aliens who live there?”

“Dear me, yes, it’s been in the newspapers, though I’m afraid we don’t have many column inches devoted to Commonwealth affairs; but I have received briefing papers from the Commonwealth office here in Fordsville. Are you connected with that?”

“I used to be.” She started to tell him what had happened.

Two hours later, when she’d finished, Leonard’s face had taken on a somewhat daunted look. He pressed both hands to his temple and exhaled loudly. “Apart from me going up to this Rafael Columbia character and punching him soundly on the nose, I don’t see there is much I can do to help you. Have you really been working on the same case for over a hundred and thirty years?”

“Yes. It’s not in my nature to quit.”

“No. No, of course not. I’m sorry, I’m just not used to working with this sort of timescale. So what exactly do you want to do next?”

“My instinct is to catch Johansson.”

“Yes, I can see that. Well, of course I do have some discretionary power, it’s in the Foundation’s charter. I can have the Treasury pay you a monthly salary. It won’t be much, but it will leave you free to pursue this diabolical man without worrying about money.”

Paula laughed somewhat unkindly. She was beginning to think she’d made a huge mistake coming here. But it was just an instinctive thing to do, he was a freethinker, and the last link she’d have with Alexis. She let her gaze wander around the library, wondering what she would have done with the bungalow if she had stayed; the paint, furniture, wallpaper that could be used to lift away the air of academic shabbiness. “Leonard, for a hundred and fifty years the Commonwealth has been paying me a good salary and even better expenses. I finished paying for my apartment a hundred and eight years ago. I eat most meals in the staff canteen. All I buy are six suits a year, and some casual clothes. After my R&R pension, all my money is paid into an SI managed fund account. It adds up, even with inflation. I don’t need financing, but thank you for the offer.”

“Then how am I going to help you?”

“Freethinkers are supposed to be objective with the larger picture. I wanted your opinion on what I should be doing. Even though that comes perilously close to absolution.”

“What’s religion … no, forget that. Are you saying I should tell you what to do next?”

“Convince me, possibly. And yes, I appreciate you don’t do specifics.”

“I’m not even sure I can handle an overview in your case. What options have you got? It is in your nature never to give up. You know Johansson belongs in custody. Use your talent, Paula, catch him.”

“But should I?” she murmured. Even saying it sent a cold shiver along her arms.

“Why shouldn’t you?”

“What if he is right? What if there is a Starflyer, a malicious alien that has been influencing human politicians?”

“Dear me, is that likely? It does sound suspiciously like a conspiracy theory to me.”

“I know. But there are an increasing number of inconsistencies in the case that I’m having difficulty with. Until now it did look like Johansson had very simple motivations, that the Guardians were formed first to help him steal the money from Las Vegas, then to cover up his subsequent lifestyle and allow him to live off the proceeds. But if he’s right, and the Starflyer did somehow push us into the flight to Dyson Alpha, it would explain a lot of things. For one, he has never wavered in projecting his belief in the Starflyer. The only other person I know who could maintain such a constant position after so much time is me.”

“Ah, now I understand why you have come to me. This is a moral question. Should you drop your pursuit of Johansson, even though you know for certain he has committed crimes, and go after the Starflyer, whose existence as yet remains unproven.”

“That’s about it, yes.” She didn’t mention there was no one else she could talk the situation through with. Right now she wasn’t sure who she could trust.

“However flattering your appearance here today, I hardly think I’m qualified to give you a judgment on this. I have no knowledge or understanding of Commonwealth politics. And that’s what this seems to be.”

“No, it’s not. Politicians and their aims are tied into this, very strongly in the case of Columbia, but it’s not their squabbling for power which concerns me. It is the results of that squabble. And even if you doubt the existence of the Starflyer, I suggest you examine the name Nigel Sheldon. He is somehow mixed up in this. Whatever way I look at it, Johansson has been confronting something with political power. In which case he may be operating with another small political grouping. That would certainly explain why he’s been given help from inside the Commonwealth government for so long.”

“Wait a minute; I thought you said Sheldon was the one preventing inspection of the cargo shipped to Far Away.”

“That’s what Thompson Burnelli told me.”

“So how could he be the one Johansson is acting against?”

“I don’t know. Presumably he’s not. That’s if Burnelli was right. If Johansson could convince Nigel Sheldon the Starflyer was a threat, there would be no need for the Guardians or the Great Wormhole Heist. My old Directorate and every other government agency would have been turned over to finding the alien. But he didn’t convince him, although Sheldon blocked the inspections anyway.”

“How reliable was the Senator?”

“In something like this? Completely.”

Leonard sat back, looking bemused. “Then this is not logical.”

“It would appear to be a paradox only because as yet we don’t have all the information.”

“Hence your determination to carry on with the case, yes I see. But which part of it? Humm, a merry dilemma. Can you confront Sheldon?”

“Given my current circumstances, I could probably get one interview with one person of power. As such I would have to choose carefully. If Sheldon is mixed up with this, he will simply deny it, and it may be that I then face the same fate as the Senator.”

“Yes. To be avoided. Of course, if you were to catch Johansson he will be able to supply answers for a great many of your questions.”

“Finding the Starflyer would also end this.”

“How would you do that?”

“Travel to Far Away. If Johansson is right, there will be an abundance of evidence at the Marie Celeste Research Institute.”

“Won’t that be somewhat dangerous?”

“The risk is acceptable. No one will expect me to do such a thing. And it would be quick.”

“I can see the appeal in that. The Starflyer would be the greater crime, which will allow you to pursue it with a clear conscience. If you’re sure that’s not a reaction to the shock of being dismissed from your position.”

“It’s not. I will catch Johansson eventually. However, I have to consider that given the Prime situation I might not have much time left, especially if Johansson is right and it was engineered to our detriment. The whole purpose of exposing the Starflyer to the authorities would be to prevent any kind of conflict.”

“Ignore the time factor, it is an unknown you cannot outguess. You have to go after Johansson. You know how he works, his pattern. And you now have a huge advantage.”

“How so?”

“If you work alone, he will not receive any leaks from your office. He won’t know you’re coming.”

She smiled thinly. “You have more in common with Alexis than I thought.”

“Why thank you. So how will you go about the case now?”

“I will travel to Far Away and contact the Guardians. They will take me to Johansson. As you said, he won’t expect me to come at him from that direction.”

“Oh dear, oh dear. I suppose you know what you’re doing, but please be careful. I’d like to think my great-grandchild will sit here listening to your next quandary.”

She stood up and offered her hand. “Tell him to watch out for me.”

“You really are going to take my advice?”

“It helped me focus on what I have to do, yes.”

He looked out of the French doors at Matilda who was still stretched out on the towel. “Then I really should take your advice.”

A huge black Zil limousine was parked outside the entrance to Paula’s apartment building, almost completely blocking the street. She was surprised the police hadn’t towed it away; at the very least they should have fined the driver. As she drew up level, a gull-wing door in the side lifted up silently. A man whose skin was pure gold put his head out.

“We need to talk,” he told Paula.

TWENTY-THREE

Tulip Mansion was situated just outside of New York, in Rye County. The building itself sat on top of one of the small mountains that made up the majority of the rugged region, where it was surrounded by pine forests that swarmed over the adjacent hills. Mingling in among the tall trees were huge rhododendron bushes that enjoyed the stony soil, producing the most exquisite carpet of color when they were in flower. People who had homes there tended to stay for many lives and centuries. Rye’s proximity to the city made it an excellent area to live for those who could afford the land prices. It wasn’t as chic as the Hamptons—but it was very convenient.

Miles Foran had thought so when he began his estate at the start of the twenty-first century, an Internet billionaire whose share stock had achieved a near-ballistic trajectory upward. With the Tulip Mansion it was his goal to build “the first true American stately home of the new millennium.” Not for him the standard timber-frame mansion clad in brick and stone. Mock was not in the vocabulary when architects were summoned. His ornate stone walls had cores of concrete and steel that would last for centuries. Craftsmen were flown in from all over the world; master carpenters and stone masons chipped and chiseled away, crafting a work of art you could live in. Aristocratic designers were contracted to produce a modern classic interior that would make the palaces of oil potentates seem cheap and tacky by comparison. The grounds were shaped and landscaped into gardens that would rival those of Versailles.

The decade-long project was well under way when Jeff Baker released into the global market his new crystal memory: the pinnacle of electronic data storage, eliminating all other competing systems, obliterating copyright, and revolutionizing the Internet into the datasphere. Gravity suddenly took a very firm grip on Foran’s stock trajectory, which not even filing Chapter Eleven bankruptcy could protect him from.

Several years later the creditor banks were quietly grateful when Gore Burnelli made them a small offer for the estate and its half-completed folly. Work was resumed. The central stamen tower was completed, topped out with its gold anther crown. The four wings laid out around it were the flower’s petals, stretched-oval shapes that were given curving scarlet and black roofs whose design was stolen directly from the Sydney opera house. Inside were reception rooms, a ballroom, a grand banqueting hall, fifty guest bedrooms, a library, swimming pools, solariums, games rooms, and cavernous underground garages stocked with a range of vehicles that any motor history museum would kill to obtain.

All in all, it was excessive to the point of vulgar; but Justine spent more time at the Tulip Mansion than she did at any other family residence. If anywhere was home for her, it was here. And now she was having to host Murielle’s engagement party in the gardens at a time that was monstrously inappropriate.

But the party had been planned months in advance. The negotiations between lawyer teams representing the Burnellis and the Konstantins had been completed. Their union had to be examined for share block shifts between the two families—not that core blocks would change, this couple’s relatively junior status meant they’d only be awarded secondary shares, a few small companies spun off, a virtual finance house, real estate in phase three space. Though given this was a direct line merger the lawyers had also allowed for the possibility of closer fusion for the children in a couple of centuries. It was an interesting dynamic, which had taken a long time to be cleared.

A tearful Murielle had bravely volunteered to postpone the party; after all, Thompson was her ancestor. Justine had smiled at the bewildered first-life girl and said: Not at all, Thompson would want you to carry on.

So at midday she stood under a rose-covered gazebo receiving guests who rolled up in modern limousines or fabulous antique cars. She paid no attention to the vehicles; her interest in one-upmanship among Society had been exhausted centuries ago—although she had to own up to a certain awareness when it came to who was wearing what. Costumes were supposed to be themed from around the 1950s, and the pavilions set up across the garden’s high lawn reflected that. Waiters in period uniforms served cocktails from the era.

For herself, Justine had chosen a formal sea-green evening dress with a mermaid tail skirt. She drew the line at heels on the grass, though.

A ’56 Oldsmobile pulled up, and Estella slowly got out of the back.

“What on earth happened to you?” Justine asked as her friend limped over to the gazebo. Estella was wearing a scarlet dress with white polka dots, and pink winged sunglasses. Instead of shoes, she was wearing a pair of electromuscle support boots.

Estella gave her a brief kiss on both cheeks. “I’m so sorry to spoil the look of the thing, darling. But I went and sprained both ankles. It was hideously painful, I kid you not.”

“How did you do that?”

“So silly. I was dancing on the coffee table at a party. When I jumped off I landed badly. I don’t understand it, darling, I’ve danced on that table a hundred times, and nothing like this ever happened before.”

Justine didn’t scold, it would have been far too parental. “I never get asked to parties like that anymore.”

“I should think not, Senator, you have a reputation to consider now.”

“Oh, thanks. It’s people like you I need support from.”

“I know, darling.” Estella laid her hand on Justine’s arm. “How’s it going? Is it really awful?”

“Thompson had an excellent staff team. I just vote the way they tell me to. I haven’t started doing deals myself yet. It’s just a temporary appointment, after all, though the senators did give me a unanimous vote to carry on his representation. Even his opponents endorsed me, I think they were all shocked, or running scared. Nobody’s ever killed a senator before; this was supposed to send a message to the killer that you can’t stop politicians like this. So all I’m doing is basically holding the fort till he gets out of the clinic.”

“Be brave.”

“You know me.” She gave a brittle laugh.

“Do they know who did it yet?”

“No. Nor why. It’s all so stupid. Who kills people in this day and age? We’re not in the barbarian era anymore.”

Estella plucked at her dress. “We are this afternoon.”

“Yeah. Are you staying for the play tonight? It’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Tolthorpe actors are supposed to be very good, and the gardeners have built an open-air stage in front of the lower beech woods.”

“I’m not walking off anywhere, darling. A stiff drink and a decent-looking first-life waiter is what I need.”

“Good, I’ll talk to you later, yeah?”

“Sure thing. Now, is this Murielle?”

“Of course.” Justine introduced her friend to the girl and her fiancé who were waiting on the other side of the gazebo. Murielle was wearing a copy of the white dress Marilyn Monroe had on in The Seven Year Itch. And carried it off well, Justine had to admit. She did have a fabulous figure; and with it such a wondrously sunny disposition that Justine had to acknowledge how old and jaded she truly was nowadays despite wearing a body of young flesh. Young Starral Konstantin was so obviously smitten as he stood at her side, the two of them holding hands the entire time. Simply being around them was wearying to Justine. For ages she’d been swept along by Murielle’s ingenue enthusiasm for her fiancé, and the party, and the marriage, and their future life together, and the many children she wanted to produce (with natural pregnancies—for God’s sake) for her handsome beau. It had been a marvelous distraction helping the girl plan everything; Murielle had been living at the Tulip Mansion for the five months since she finished Yale. Even the Primes and the navy were just parallel subjects.

Then some lunatic had killed Thompson.

Why?

And now she had to be tough and resolute the way everyone expected a senior Burnelli to behave, when all she really wanted to do was put her arms around her little brother and cuddle him like she used to do when she was five years old and he was a baby.

“Are you all right, Grandee?” Murielle asked.

To her horror, Justine realized her eyes were moistening. Not now, goddamnit! “Coping,” she said staunchly. “I just remember him every now and then. That’s all.”

Murielle put her arms around Justine. It was such a childlike gesture, spontaneous and genuine, that Justine was in danger of sobbing out loud. “It’s all right, Grandee,” Murielle said softly. “He’ll be back soon.”

“Yes. Thank you.” Justine nodded appreciatively, wanting to escape from Murielle’s big concerned smile. “Sorry, I’m ruining this for you.”

“We’re family, Grandee. That means accepting the rough with the smooth, and standing together through all of it.”

Justine picked at the girl’s shoulder straps, adjusting them. “Better or worse, eh?”

“I’ve got the better part of it right now.” She glanced across at Starral, who gave an understanding smile. “You know he’s very good in bed,” Murielle said in a low confidential voice.

“Yes, dear, you told me.”

“I don’t mind if you want to spend a few nights with him, Grandee. Before we get married.”

Justine started giggling. She couldn’t help it; Murielle was absolutely serious. How wonderful to be that young. “That’s all right, dear. You enjoy him, he really is a great catch, anyone can see that. Take him upstairs every night and simply ruin him for any other girl.”

“I do my best to be bad,” Murielle said demurely.

“Good. Us Burnelli girls have reputations to maintain, you know. I’m depending on you to uphold the family honor. If they can still walk in the morning we’ve not been bad enough.”

Murielle was giggling now. Starral directed a faintly suspicious and worried look at the little female conspiracy meeting.

“Oh, lordy,” Justine murmured. She’d just seen a stretched Skoda pull up. “Look who’s here, and—joy—she’s brought her new whore with her.”

The two Burnellis straightened up and put on their false smiles as Alessandra Baron walked up to them.

“My dear Senator, I’m so sorry about your brother,” Alessandra said. “Thompson was always such a delight to have on my show. A decent politician I always called him. One of the last.”

Justine gave the celebrity a pretentious exaggerated air kiss. “Why thank you. He thought the same about you.”

“As soon as his new body is conscious, tell him I was asking after him. And I’d love to have him back on my show.”

“I’ll tell him. Thank you.”

“I want to introduce my newest and best affiliate reporter,” Alessandra gushed. “This is Mellanie Rescorai.”

Justine smiled as she shook hands with the young woman. She was a first-lifer, about the same age as Murielle, but that was about the only similarity. This one was a raw street fighter, Justine saw, dangerously ambitious. Strange that Alessandra hadn’t recognized that. But then perhaps she was off guard when looking into a mirror.

“An honor, Senator,” Mellanie said. “You have a lovely home here.”

“Thank you. I’ve accessed your reports several times. You seem to be making quite a name for yourself, especially on Elan.”

“Those people were awful, opposing the navy like that. The Commonwealth should know what they were doing.”

“I’m sure they should.”

“Now, Mellanie, this is a party,” Alessandra chided. “And this has to be the blushing bride.” She took both of Murielle’s hands. “Congratulations on your engagement, my dear. You look wonderful. You’re putting the rest of us to shame in that dress. Quite right, too.”

“Why thank you,” Murielle said sweetly.

“Yes, congratulations,” Mellanie said. “You’re very lucky.” It almost sounded as though she meant it.

Justine waited until the reporters had said hello to Starral and left the gazebo. “Remind me, why did we invite her?”

“It’s a Society wedding, Grandee. There are rules.”

“Oh, yes, I knew there was a good reason.”

“Do you think Gore will come? Starral’s family has all shown.”

“Don’t worry, he’ll be here. He knows what I’d do to him if he doesn’t show.”

Gore Burnelli did turn up in his huge Zil limousine, although it wasn’t until well after five o’clock. Justine broke off from the group of Halgarths she was talking to and went to greet her father. He was wearing a perfectly cut tuxedo, though not even that could help make his gold face and hands seem human. There was a woman with him that Justine didn’t recognize at first; very attractive, with a young face that had some Oriental features, black hair tied back neatly. She was in a modern business suit, which was annoying, the invitations had been most specific.

“Don’t scowl,” Gore said. “Paula is here as my guest.”

“Delighted,” Justine said. Then she recognized the woman without even having to reference her e-butler. “Investigator, I’ve followed a lot of your cases.”

“Ex-Investigator,” Paula said. “I was dismissed.”

“Which is why we’re here,” Gore said.

Justine didn’t know why, but she had hoped that just for once this party wouldn’t be cover for business and deals, that people might actually kick back and enjoy themselves. She sighed. “We’ll use your study.”

Like Justine, Gore treated the Tulip Mansion as his main base of operations. Not only was it perfectly physically secure, it had a cybersphere nexus larger than that of most corporate headquarters. The principal access was his study. Like Gore himself, it represented the pinnacle of interface technology; when linked together they were synergistic. Technicians from family-owned laboratories were always rebuilding it and then modifying systems, incorporating advances that wouldn’t appear on the commercial market for years.

Visually it was difficult to see its true size, there were no reference points. The surface was a hard pearl-white plastic that glowed from within. Little points of light sparkled away inside it, traveling slowly. Justine always had the impression of being inside some giant photonic processor.

Once the door was closed, the three of them looked like they’d been superimposed inside a blank hologram projection. Curved chairs morphed up out of the floor, shaped like sculpted beanbags. Their internal glow changed from neutral to a faint copper, allowing them to be seen. After they’d all sat down, the tinge faded away.

“I’m appointing Paula to the Senate Security service,” Gore announced. “She’s to have department head status; you’ll have to clear it.”

“I see,” Justine said peacefully. “And why is that?”

“Your brother’s murder was committed by someone connected with the case I’ve been working on,” Paula said.

“Johansson, you mean? I don’t wish to be critical, particularly now, but you’ve been working on that case for quite a while now. That was the reason Rafael Columbia dismissed you, wasn’t it? Lack of results.”

“Columbia is a fucking asshole,” Gore said. “We’re going to have to watch him. That little shit won’t be satisfied until he’s crowned emperor.”

Justine gave Paula a level gaze. “He does have a point, though. You had nearly a hundred and forty years.”

“The case involved a lot more than the Great Wormhole Heist,” Paula said. “I always knew Johansson was being protected by someone inside the Senate or the executive. Your brother confirmed that for me. Then he was murdered.”

“Who murdered him?”

“I don’t know. The assassin is an unknown operative. Nor do I know who he works for, although I have my suspicions.”

“Who?” Justine growled.

“The Starflyer.”

After the anticipation, Justine fell back into the chair, disgusted. “For God’s sake!”

“I believe it,” Gore said.

“Dad! You cannot be serious?”

“We were played by an absolute expert. I knew there was something suspicious about putting the navy package together. It was too fucking easy. Someone else had been laying the political groundwork.”

“Garbage. Nobody knew we’d have a need for a navy until the Second Chance returned. I’m still not entirely convinced myself. We only got involved for the contracts.”

“Damn right. That’s our motivation: naked greed, the fear of being poor, unprotected, not in control. It knows us very well, doesn’t it?”

“No.” Justine shook her head. “What did my brother tell you?” she asked Paula.

“I have been asking for an inspection on all goods shipped to Far Away for decades. If I could nail down the arms shipments, it would help me solve the Johansson case permanently. Your brother found out that Nigel Sheldon has been preventing it.”

“That’s … that’s …” Justine turned to her father, appealing. “You can’t believe this?”

“Why can’t the Starflyer exist?” he asked her in return.

“The Institute on Far Away would have found it.”

“According to Johansson, they did,” Paula said. “He was the director, remember?”

“I know he was,” she said wryly. Her thoughts had slipped back to the sunny glade in the forest where her hyperglider had landed. Dear, sweet Kazimir’s utter conviction in his mad cause. “All right, just assume this alien does exist, and Nigel Sheldon is working for it, or has been taken over by it, or whatever. How does that get Thompson murdered?”

“Because he finally pushed through the inspection,” Paula said. “I only just realized the relevance myself last night; but keeping the Far Away route open and free of any official interference has been something of a devil’s alliance for the two factions. The Guardians want it so they can smuggle their weapons back there. The Starflyer wants it so that it can return.”

“Return? You mean to its ship?” Justine asked.

“Yes. That’s what the Guardians believe, that when it has ruined the Commonwealth it will go back.”

“Why? The ship’s a wreck, the planet is half dead. I know, I’ve been there.” She caught it: shift of the eyes, change of breathing pattern, a dozen other indiscreet indicators. Most people wouldn’t have noticed, but Justine had been a player for three and a half centuries, dealing with master-class politicians and corporate lords. To her, body language was a million-watt telepathic broadcast. And that last statement had just turned her into Paula Myo’s newest suspect.

“Nobody understands its motivation,” Paula said. “Except perhaps Johansson. And I wouldn’t consider him reliable even if he turns out to be right in the end. All we have to go on is the Guardians’ propaganda. They claim it intends to return.”

“And you think that’s what got my brother murdered?”

“He put an obstacle in its way.”

Justine gave her father a long look, seeing a curved image of herself in his smooth golden mirror face. His silence made it obvious whose side he was on here. “So how does appointing you to Senate Security help find the murderer?”

“It will give me access to all navy intelligence information on the case. I can see what they’re doing but they won’t know I’m looking over their shoulder. That way I can stay one step ahead of them.”

“Just wait on, here,” Justine protested. “Who are you trying to catch?”

“Ultimately the Starflyer. But to do that I will need Johansson. He is the only expert we have on it.” Paula glanced at Gore. “Unless I go to Far Away.”

“Out of the question,” Gore shot back. “I told you. You’re too valuable to go off chasing around an unknown countryside full of guerrillas. Besides, you’re not geared up for that kind of operation. Your public profile is too high, we need to keep you out of sight behind a desk. Now that I know what’s actually been going on around here we can send some covert agents from our family security teams to take a damn close look at both factions on Far Away. I want to know exactly what the fuck’s been happening out there.”

“Very well,” Justine said. “I’ll have Thompson’s office arrange your clearance. You should be able to start tomorrow.” It wasn’t that she agreed with her father; she simply couldn’t see any other way to proceed for now.

Morton would have liked the party, Mellanie knew. It was full of players that were in a league far above any he’d moved among on Oaktier. Even that airhead Murielle had more money in her trust fund than Morton’s beloved Gansu Construction was capitalized at. He would have been dealing from the moment they arrived until the cateringbots started clearing up in the wee small hours.

She was entranced by the Tulip Mansion. That much wealth and antiquity and style in one package was overwhelming to a girl from Darklake City. Growing up in such an environment would leave anyone with real confidence and poise. A childhood spent here must have been magnificent. She could see groups of children running about across the grounds, carefree and happy as they played simple timeless games of catch and chase. Her blank smile concealed her envy.

Looking around at the beautiful people as they chatted in groups on the lawn, she still felt she was living in someone else’s TSI biogdrama. She knew how to move with them, how to laugh at their inane jokes. When to smile knowingly as they gossiped. The names of wines and food, how to pronounce them correctly. Art was still difficult for her, the Grand Families and Intersolar Dynasties seemed to have an encyclopedic history of art available at a genetic level; but her e-butler kept the files on quick recall.

“Ah, there’s Campbell Sheldon,” Alessandra said. Her hand waved discreetly toward one of the marquees. “See him?”

Mellanie turned slowly, scanning the group standing around the marquee, framed by one of the giant flower arrangements. Her virtual vision displayed the file picture of Sheldon, and she matched it with the real man. “Got him.”

“Campbell is your fuck tonight. He was their family’s chief negotiator when the navy was put together; so he’ll have access to the stats. How are the construction schedules holding up, what’s the true budget overspend. You know what we need.”

Mellanie said nothing.

Alessandra gave her a disapproving look. “You’re not going soft on me, are you? There are about a billion other girls who would like to take your place.”

“I know. But he’s a Sheldon, he’s not going to give me figures on stuff like that. He’s not dumb.”

“Of course not. He knows who you are and why you’re sucking his dick. That’s the point, he won’t give you figures, but he’ll show us the direction to take. They’re all at war with each other, young Mellanie; all struggling for dominance, and information is their weapon. If one of his rivals is screwing up, you’ll be told.”

Mellanie gave the group a second look. It was half past six, she’d had too many cocktails and too many vacuous conversations where every sentence began and ended with “darling.” There were lights on inside the marquees, and paths across the lawns were glowing blue as if they were phosphorescent streams. “Why do they have marquees? This place must have force fields. They’ll turn them on if it starts raining.”

“I’m sure they will,” Alessandra said in an annoyed tone.

“So if we’re not going to get wet, why put up marquees?”

“Go ask Campbell. The Sheldons are all technology bores, I’m sure he’ll love explaining it all to you.”

“Do you like anybody?”

“I like you.” Alessandra leaned forward and gave her a firm kiss. Mellanie was slow to respond.

“Don’t be such a bitch,” Alessandra complained.

Mellanie glared at her through the alcohol buzz; then she blinked, peering across the darkling grounds. “That’s Myo.”

“Paula Myo?” Alessandra couldn’t keep the twang of interest out of her voice.

“Yes.”

“Curious.” She kept facing Mellanie. “Who’s she with?”

“A nobody. Security man.” Mellanie was quite pleased she could tell.

“So she’s dealing with the Burnellis.”

“Let me have it.”

“You’ve got to stop obsessing on the woman.”

“It’s a good story, and you know it. I’ll fuck whoever you want, but give it to me.”

“That’s my Mellanie. All right, I can spare you for a couple of days. If you can find out what she’s doing for the Burnellis I’ll be impressed. But if not, I want you back on Elan in forty-eight hours.”

“Thank you.” Mellanie kissed her, properly this time.

“All right,” Alessandra said eventually, chortling happily. “Campbell! Remember? Now go.”

Mellanie dropped her cocktail glass into the rosebushes, shook her tousled hair back, pushed her tits out, and started walking toward her target.

The engagement party was going well after all. Justine surveyed the guests as they drifted in for the evening buffet. A twenty-piece band had set up in front of the big fountain pool to play merry 1950s tunes. She could hear a lot of laughter amid the drone of conversation. Thick flower scents drifted on the fresh night air. Overhead, the constellations burned brightly. Down toward the beech wood, the Tolthorpe troupe was running through their final rehearsal with the stage techs.

Her mood had lifted considerably since her father and the Myo woman had left. She supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised at her father accepting conspiracy theories in his desperation to catch the murderer. It was just that he was always the ruthlessly logical one. Thompson’s murder must have shaken him up a lot more than he was admitting to.

In the morning, she would take the time and talk to him properly about the whole situation. In the meantime, however, there was still time to have a lot of fun. And there were several men on the guest list she’d be happy to spend the night with. When she started searching around she saw Campbell Sheldon. He had a blissful smile on his face as he chattered away to Mellanie Rescorai. The girl had obviously decided he was going to take her to bed. Justine rolled her eyes at the folly of the male psyche. Ah well, he was a big boy, he’d probably survive the experience.

Ramon DB was over by the marquee, giving the food a long guilty look. She smiled warmly. He’d been a tower of strength for her at Senate Hall, helping her through long difficult days. He was due for rejuvenation in another year. She’d miss him in the meantime; although when he was twenty he was so handsome.

She looked for Estella, who would be good uncomplicated company.

“You left this behind, ma’am.”

Justine turned to face the young waiter who was holding out a silver tray. There were no glasses on it, only a tatty, faded old sunhat.

“I don’t think I—” She stopped. Stared at the sunhat. Suddenly some strange force was squeezing her throat, making it difficult to breathe. That same force that was making incredulous tears sting her eyes as she looked up into the waiter’s face. “Oh. My. God. Kazimir!” Her legs almost gave out, but she still managed to fling her arms around him. He was bigger. Older. With much broader shoulders. A dark handsome face with jet-black hair flopping down over his forehead. And he was as ecstatic as she.

“Every night I have dreamed of you, my angel,” he whispered into her ear as his hands stroked her hair. She clutched his back, almost tearing the waiter jacket fabric.

“Every night.” He was trembling now.

Justine tightened her grip on him.

“Every night I wanted you to be happy. I wanted you to love your beautiful life. Yet even wishing you all that, I wished I could see you for just one minute more.”

“Shush.” She slid a finger down over his lips, then kissed him. Tenderly at first, not believing this could be real. Then demanding, passionate, shaking in his embrace.

He pulled back, staring intently into her eyes. His smile of wonder was as bright as ever, brighter than her memory. “It is you,” she said exultantly. “Really you.”

“I had to come, my angel. Different worlds or different galaxies, I couldn’t be apart from you. I had to find a way. Forgive me.”

“Oh, Kazimir.” She knew she was going to cry and didn’t care. Her gorgeous, romantic, foolish lover had pursued her across the stars.

“Come with me,” she said softly, and pulled him imploringly, longingly toward the Tulip Mansion.

In the full dark of midnight, hologram projectors cloaked the open-air stage in broad strokes of primary color. Dry ice flooded spookily through the beech trees. Cleverly positioned force fields allowed Puck and the fairies to fly gracefully through the air. Soliloquies were declaimed with bravado and majesty, to be greeted with enthusiastic applause from the audience.

Justine neither heard nor saw any of the Tolthorpe troupe’s finest hour. In the darkness and peace of her bedroom, her own body was performing the most erotic, sensual acts she could physically achieve. She had forgotten what it was like to be adored so completely, so unselfishly. He was so much more responsive now, matching the pleasure she gave with ease, willing and eager to satisfy her. They could be gentle and slow with each other, moving in tender rhythm, or fierce, almost fighting to bring themselves to climax. It didn’t matter, both kinds of lovemaking were right for them. Time after time amid the silky shadows she watched his enraptured straining features soften into a smile of unbearable joy, only to lose herself in the same delirium. For once there were no chemicals or programs to help. This was real.

When the dawn cast its bland gray illumination into the bedroom she smiled at their bodies, still wrapped together, sweat mingling on their skin, faces inches apart, sharing perfect secret contentment.

“I love you,” he said fearfully.

“I love you.”

“I won’t let you go again.”

She smiled in admiration at the conviction in his voice. “What are you doing here on Earth?” She knew the answer she wanted, that it was for her and her alone.

“There was a chance that I could see you. How could I ever let that go by?”

“My wonderful love.” She put a finger on his thorax and slowly drew a line down his sternum, playfully following the ridges of hard muscle. His body was fabulous. How long would it have taken a boy born into low grav to build himself up to handle standard gravity? The effort he’d made, the determination. She was rather glad she’d kept up her own aerobics classes and maintenance diet, still slim and trim.

“It will be difficult to get away to see you, but I will manage it.”

Her finger stopped just as it reached his navel. Already, she knew this was going to be bad news. “Get away from whom?”

“The Guardians, of course. I’m here on a mission.”

“Oh, Christ.” She pushed at him, slithering herself over the sheets until she was an arm’s length away, and stared at him in dismay. Already his youthful sympathetic face had produced a puzzled expression.

“A mission,” she croaked. “You’re here on some kind of Guardian mission?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Kazimir, no; no you can’t do that kind of thing here. This isn’t Far Away. You have to stop.”

“I cannot stop. This is our time. This is when the planet will have its revenge on the Starflyer. I’m a part of that, Justine. Bradley Johansson chose me.”

She wanted to put her head in her hands, or maybe belt some sense into him. “Kazimir, listen to me. We have a navy now, which has a branch dedicated to stopping Johansson. Hundreds of officers are working on the case. They will catch you. They will.”

His kindly smile was one that told her she simply didn’t understand. “They won’t. We’re perfectly safe.”

“Kazimir, this is not a game.”

“I am the one who has always known that. And now you have become a victim of the Starflyer, too. I wept when I heard its creature had murdered your brother. How cruel that fate: that of all the people in the Commonwealth, it hurt the only person I love.”

“No, God no, this isn’t happening. Kazimir, please, there is no Starflyer. My brother was killed by his rivals. It’s ugly, and brutal, and shocking, and it’s never happened in Commonwealth politics before. But it is not the fault of a secret alien.”

“Politicians are its creatures, too. They are the easiest of all humans to corrupt.”

“Listen to yourself. You’re just repeating student slogans. Johansson is an evil old man who’s using you, and all the other clans back on Far Away.”

“Justine, I’m sorry, but it is you who cannot see the truth in this.”

“I can’t believe we’re having this argument. You have to stop, Kazimir, just walk away. I’ll clear any problem with your involvement. God knows, you’ve been indoctrinated since birth. Nobody will blame you.”

“How could you ask me that?” he demanded, shocked and hurt. “I had hoped you would help us. The planet’s revenge can be your revenge as well, if you let it. You can make sure the Starflyer is defeated.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Get the cargo inspections lifted.”

“What?”

He couldn’t have appalled her more if he’d slapped her. “Is that why you came?” she asked.

“No!” he protested. “I risked everything to come to you. Everything. I love you, Justine, I am fighting to save your world.”

She leaned forward and grasped his hands, desperately conscious of how young and idealistic he was, how much he had to prove himself. “I don’t want you to, not like this. Kazimir, it is a far braver and nobler thing to admit you are wrong. I know, I’ve had to do it many times. Please, just consider leaving the Guardians to manage without you for a while. You and I can talk this through.”

“You can browbeat me, you mean.”

“That’s not what I mean at all. I just want you to learn that there are other viewpoints than the Guardians’.”

“I cannot desert my comrades. You should not ask me this. I watched my best friend die in front of me; I have lost many others. Now you say it was for nothing.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What are you going to do?” he countered. “Will you try and stop me returning to my comrades? I will not let your security people interrogate me.”

“Calm down,” she said hurriedly. “Nobody’s going to stop you leaving. I don’t want you to leave, but that’s the only chain around you: how much I love you, and don’t want to see you harmed.”

“I have been through many battles. I have no fear of my enemy.”

“God!” she growled through clenched teeth. “Men!”

He gave her a twitchy smile and rolled off the bed.

“Where are you going? You’re not going now?”

“I have to.” He shrugged, almost blushing. “I hadn’t expected to spend the night.”

She felt her own cheeks coloring at that. “I want you to spend every night here, Kazimir. I want every night to be like last night. I don’t do this anymore … Damnit, I thought … I didn’t think I could care for someone like this, not anymore. But you …”

“When this is over, when nothing lies between us, I will be yours for as long as you’ll have me.”

“Damnit.” Her eyes were watering.

“Don’t cry. I won’t have my beautiful angel cry for me. I’m not worth it.”

“You are. You are so worth it. You have no idea.”

He finished dressing, then held her for a long moment. “I will come back for you,” he promised gravely. “I swear it.”

She nodded, too exhausted emotionally and physically to do anything else. After a while, with fresh tears running freely down her cheeks, she placed a call to Alic Hogan at his Paris office.

....

It started raining an hour before dawn, cold drops splattering down on the cobbles to form grubby rivulets racing down the gutters. Tired, miserable, and hungry, Mellanie stood in a doorway three down from Paula Myo’s Paris apartment as the sun rose, exposing the narrow street to a gray shading that belonged to the Middle Ages. The time-bowed wooden lintel above her was dripping steadily on her head, wrecking her expensive hairstyle. There had been no time for her to prepare properly; she knew Alessandra wouldn’t allow her a second longer than the two days unless she got a real story. So her jacket collar was turned up in a grim attempt to keep some of the cold out, because the 1950s party dress she wore under it was certainly no good for that. Both feet were soaking inside her handstitched Italian leather shoes, which were now ruined.

The early-morning monotony was occasionally broken by a civic GPbot rolling past her. By six o’clock people had started using the street. She received a few curious glances. Their eyes soon slid away, deciding she was some hooker waiting for her pimp or pusher after a bad night.

Close, she told their backs as they hurried away.

At half past seven Paula Myo walked out onto the street. She wore a long raincoat, unbuttoned to show her usual business suit; her feet were protected by calf-high booshide boots, and she switched on a plyplastic umbrella stick that flowed out into a wide black mushroom shape.

Mellanie waited until the woman had almost reached the end of the street, and left the scant cover of the doorway. Her virtual vision displayed a simple map of the area. As she’d expected, Myo was walking to the nearest Metro station. She kept twenty meters or so behind her, trying not to be too obvious. The wider streets had some traffic and pedestrians, making cover easier. Headlights cast bright reflection ribbons on the black tarmac, while their tires produced a thin dirty spray. The smell of fresh-baked bread emerged from patisseries that were opening their doors. Mellanie’s stomach growled from the temptation.

Ahead of her Myo turned a corner. Mellanie hurried forward. When she turned the corner, the Metro station sign gleamed brightly fifty meters ahead. Myo had vanished.

“Where …” Mellanie scanned around. The woman hadn’t crossed to the other side of the road. None of the shops were open, so she couldn’t have hidden inside anywhere. “Damnit.” In her mind the plan had been perfect: follow Myo to wherever she was working. That would give a clue what she was working on for the Burnellis, or even if it was the Burnellis. Whatever, it would give her enough interesting questions for Alessandra to keep her on Myo.

“You would make a dreadful field operative.”

“Huh.” Mellanie spun around.

Myo was standing there, umbrella held straight, giving her a quizzical look. “It is illegal to run search programs through restricted city listings. Paul Cramley, the hacker you used to gain access, is old enough to know that.”

“What are you going to do, arrest us?”

“No. He will have a formal charge filed against him. It will probably result in a fine and confiscation of his equipment.”

“Bitch!”

“He broke the law. So have you. Being a reporter does not place you above the law, Ms. Rescorai. You have to obey the rules like every other citizen, however inconvenient that is to your so-called profession.”

“I’ve never heard of this Paul Cramley. You can’t prove anything.”

Myo’s stare hardened. “I don’t have to. You are interfering with a government official, which is also an offense.”

“You’re not, you got fi—” Mellanie drew a deep breath. “I’m sorry, I was desperate for an interview with you.”

“I don’t give interviews. Everyone in your profession knows that.”

“But you must be able to tell me if there are any suspects in the Burnelli murder.”

“Ask the navy intelligence media office for an update.”

“They’re not as good as you. If they do catch anyone it’ll be on the foundation you laid. I want the whole story.”

“I don’t respond to flattery, either.”

“I’m not flattering you. I despise you. But I’m also a realist.”

A dark gray limousine drew up to the curb beside them. Its rear door opened. “You’re wasting your time following me,” Myo said. Her plyplastic umbrella flowed back into a simple fat stick. “Even if you were any good, you wouldn’t find anything of interest where I’m going.”

“Where would I find something interesting?”

“In truth, I’m not sure. You might try space, deep space.” She got into the back of the limousine, and its door closed.

Mellanie stood shivering in the rain, watching the plush vehicle’s scarlet taillights merge into the Parisian traffic. “Is it true she never lies?” she asked the SI.

“It is true she never tells a direct lie; though she is capable of modifying the truth if it will forward her investigation.”

Hell. Deep space? Who knows about deep space?

....

There had been quite a celebration on High Angel last night. StAsaph had returned from another flight, scouting eleven stars. Captain McClain Gilbert had reported that they hadn’t encountered any Prime wormhole activity. Then along with Admiral Kime and Captain Oscar Monroe he’d gone to watch the Dauntless disengage from her assembly platform. The warship was a distinct design change from the Second Chance and the earlier scouts. She’d been built inside a single three-hundred-meter-long hull, shaped like a stretched teardrop, with eight blunt thermal radiator fins at the rear to complete the aerodynamic illusion. A crew of thirty were in command of a marque 4 hyperdrive, with a top speed of one light-year per hour; a seven-tier force field complemented with a locked molecule hull field; fifty missiles containing fifteen independent twenty-gee sub-warheads carrying hundred-megaton charges capable of diverted energy functions; and thirty directed energy beam weapons. To supply power for the hyperdrive and the combat systems, fifteen high-capacity niling d-sinks had been installed. Charging them up to flight readiness was now beyond the generator capacity of Kerensk, which was already supplying power for the entire scoutship fleet. CST was laying in superconductor power lines from other planets to supply the anticipated fleet. The construction of new generators was providing a bull market for power bonds right across the Commonwealth as entrepreneurs and existing utility companies bid to supply the navy with gigawatts.

Dauntless had disengaged right on time, small blue ion flames around her base pushing her slowly away from the open assembly platform. She’d curved around the High Angel, giving the people in the crystal domes a good view of her size and shape as she traversed Icalanise, before switching on her hyperdrive and vanishing in a burst of violet light.

“Three completed, another ten authorized,” Wilson had said as the big ship slipped over Babuyan Atoll. “Defender is next out. She’s yours if you want her,” he told Oscar.

“Oh, I do. Yes, indeed, I truly do.”

Mac had laughed delightedly and congratulated his old friend. Then the pair of them had gone out and hit the town, such as it was in Babuyan Atoll, to toast the new command and the successful return.

Oscar groaned miserably as the express shot into strong lemon-yellow sunlight, which shone through the first-class carriage windows. He reached for his sunglasses.

“So where did you two finish up last night?” Antonia Clarke asked from the seat opposite.

“I have no goddamn idea,” Oscar grunted. “There was a band there. I think. Maybe jazz?” He picked up the cup of black coffee that the steward had just poured, looked at it, felt strange fluids start to churn in his stomach, and hurriedly put it down again.

Antonia laughed. She’d already had to baby-sit him through the freefall commuter flight from High Angel to the Kerensk wormhole station. Keeping his uniform clean under those circumstances had been tricky; then there had been the complaints from their fellow passengers.

“Have you got your speech ready?” she asked.

“Fuck off.”

“You want another tifi hit?”

“Look! Just shut—Oh, God, yes please.”

Grinning, she took out the packet of tubes and pressed one to his neck. There was a capacitor whine as the membrane pad on the end fast-tracked the drug into his bloodstream. “That’s your limit. No more for another six hours.”

He touched his fingertips delicately to his sweating forehead, testing to see if the pain was abating. “They only print that to keep the lawyers quiet. You can take at least twice the dosage before anything bad happens.”

“Ever the optimist. How do you feel?”

“I think that one might actually be working.”

“Good.”

The express went through another wormhole gateway, and the light became even brighter, a sharp blue-white. Antonia looked out of the window. “We’re here. New Costa Junction. Let’s go.” She stood up.

Oscar gave the cup of coffee a last longing glance, and decided against.

A senior manager from the clinic was on the platform to greet them. He had a car for them, which slid smoothly onto highway 37.

“Ten-minute trip from here,” the manager promised. “We’re between shifts, so the traffic is light.”

The Nadsis Hotel was set back off the freeway, a twenty-story X-shape, with five separate conference facilities. Over a thousand media reporters were packed into the Bytham auditorium where the welcome-back ceremony was to be performed. Both of the honored guests and all the VIPs walked en masse onto the stage, to considerable applause. Dudley Bose, a lanky adolescent with a stock of ginger-blond hair that refused styling, broke his sulk to grin around before eventually giving the thumbs-up that had been his interview trademark. Emmanuelle Verbeke was a surprise to those who had accessed her file for background information. On the Second Chance she’d been sober and professional to the point of dullness, a woman with rather bland features who didn’t care about appearances. Today she was almost indistinguishable from a genuine first-life eighteen-year-old. She’d chosen a strap-top purple dress with a short skirt to show off long legs that had been toned to perfection by the clinic’s physiotherapists. Her dark hair, still shortish despite the accelerated growth phase of cloning, was arranged in neat curls that emphasized her youth. Her perpetual gleeful smile and very girlish giggles illustrated a rare case of someone being highly suited to the whole re-life procedure.

It was Oscar who was scheduled to make the initial speech. He said hello to everybody. Then he had to perform the introductions—a stupid thing to do. After that was his own quick “personal” welcome to his former crewmates. He told a happy anecdote from the Second Chance to show what great friends they all were; while what he wanted to do was blurt out the story of how Bose had managed to screw up the shower filtration unit for his deck.

After five minutes of torture he sat down to polite applause and Antonia’s mocking smile. Vice President Bicklu was next, making the formal welcome back speech. A tall man whose features were sequenced and profiled to produce a bland handsomeness, along with Nordic white skin to contrast with Doi’s African ethnicity. Oscar had to sit with a fixed smile as the VP made a very good speech, with plenty of easy jokes that had the media laughing and the other guests smiling appreciatively. He made Oscar look like the amateur warm-up act.

When it was her turn, Emmanuelle got up and gave the VP a sweet kiss on the cheek. She smiled at the big audience, said how nice it was to be back, how she was impressed by the progress the navy had made, how she wanted to join up again as soon as she was old enough—applause and a few whistles—and a big hello to all her friends and thanks for all the support they’d shown while she was in re-life.

She gave Dudley Bose an encouraging wink as he went to the podium. “I’ve heard a lot this afternoon about how dedicated and friendly everyone was on the Second Chance,” Dudley said. A hand came up automatically to play with his ear. “What a great ship, what a good job it did flying that mission. I’m puzzled by that. Because I haven’t got a fucking clue which Second Chance they’re talking about. It certainly isn’t the one I flew on. The bastards I was crewing with LEFT ME THERE. ALONE! Our great so-called captain didn’t even check to see if we were still alive, he was so desperate to save his own arse.” His arm shot up, a rigid finger pointing at the ceiling. “I’m still out there, you know. Somehow. Some alien has kept me alive, or bits of me. So why am I here as well? What are you doing to me, you shits?” He stomped off the stage, leaving all the VIPs staring at each other in embarrassment.

“Do something,” Antonia said out of the corner of her mouth.

“Why me?” Oscar mumbled back. Every reporter in the audience was looking at them expectantly, relaying the image through the unisphere. Many of them were smiling. It wasn’t in sympathy.

“You’re the MC.”

“Ohshit.” Oscar walked slowly over to the center of the stage, where the main lights were focused. He cleared his throat. “Kids today, huh?” He’d never known a silence so deep, so unbroken. “Look. Okay. I’m sorry Dr. Bose feels the way he does. Had we stayed at the Watchtower, we would have died. It’s that simple. The Primes were firing nuclear missiles at us. You can’t hang around philosophizing in circumstances like that.”

At the front of the audience, Alessandra Baron stood up. “Captain Monroe, the Second Chance had FTL capacity. The Primes did not. So why didn’t you circle back and make a final pass to see what had happened to your crewmates?”

“Our primary mission was to report our findings back to the Commonwealth. Everybody on board knew that, Dr. Bose included. We all accepted the risks.”

“But didn’t your actions increase the risk factor in this case? One check wouldn’t have endangered anybody on board. Didn’t you care about your crewmates?”

“They screwed up,” Oscar snapped back, angry at the allegation. He remembered only too well what it had been like on board at the time. Now this moron prima diva was questioning their decisions from the safety of time and distance. “Or at least Bose did. He wasn’t properly trained to join the exploratory team. Nobody wanted the old idiot on board in the first place.”

This time the silence that opened up was even deeper. Then a thousand questions were shouted at once.

Antonia’s arm came protectively around Oscar’s shoulder. “Thank you for your time, ladies and gentlemen,” she bawled through the PA at full volume. “Drinks and canapés are now served in the lounge. Enjoy.” She physically hauled Oscar off the stage in something approaching a wrestling lock. He got one glimpse of Baron’s diabolically victorious smile before they reached the wings.

Vice President Bicklu’s white skin had turned puce. “Why didn’t anyone brief me this was hostile?” he was shouting at his aides. He caught sight of Oscar. “You! What the hell was that?”

“Later,” Antonia sang out cheerfully, still pushing Oscar along. They reached one of the hotel’s service corridors and came to a halt.

Oscar put a hand on his forehead. It was hot and sweating. His headache was back again, big time. When he pulled his hand away, he half expected the dampness he’d felt to be blood. “OhmyGod, did I really say that?”

“Yep,” Antonia said, she sounded inordinately pleased. “And it was about time somebody did.”

“Oh, God. I think I just blew the Defender captaincy.”

“Don’t be so stupid. Come on. This is a hotel; there’s got to be a bar somewhere. I’ll buy you a hair of the dog, you need it.”

Dudley ignored everyone: the government officials, hotel staff, even the nurse from the clinic. As soon as he left the stage he ran, blundering through the maze of corridors until he came to a big deserted kitchen. Only then did he stop and draw a very shaky breath. He pressed his head on the side of a big refrigeration cabinet, enjoying the feel of the cool stainless-steel surface against his skin. His heart was pounding and his hands shaking. It wasn’t entirely due to running.

“I did it,” he whispered, and smiled to himself. Told them what he thought in front of every reporter who counted in the Commonwealth—and the Vice President. Just the thought sent another tremble along his limbs.

Somebody started clapping in a slow almost derisory fashion.

Dudley straightened up. He almost expected it to be the Vice President’s bodyguards coming at him with ion pistols blazing.

Instead it was a beautiful young girl with wavy golden hair that came down over her shoulders. She was wearing a scoop-necked top of some rust-pink gauze with a silver leaf pattern, and a pair of clinging faded blue jeans that had a small silver M on one of the belt loops. There was a lopsided approving grin on her lips as she approached. She had very white teeth, Dudley noticed—that and the top was translucent. His face began to redden.

“That took a lot of courage to say what you did,” she said. “I respect that.”

“Thank you.” It didn’t quite come out as a stutter. He knew he was staring, and just couldn’t help himself. She was more than attractive, her body had this healthiness about it that was intoxicating. His own body was getting uncontrollably hot. He hadn’t managed to have sex yet, not in this body. Just a whole load of lonely nights spent masturbating since he’d been physically able, which wasn’t long. Memories of women he’d been with kept flashing up through his mind, as well as all the ones he’d never had the guts to ask. His old self would never ask a girl like this for a date, he knew.

“It must have been awful for you to realize what they did,” she said. “Coming to terms with how they betrayed you.”

“Yes. Yes, it was.”

“Without you none of this would be possible, none of the starships they’ve built. The important new positions your ex-shipmates have carved for themselves.”

“I can’t believe they did it. They left us there to die.” Even now, after all the months thinking about it, trying to come to terms with the flight, his bitterness and shock were as strong now as the day he’d found out. “They didn’t care about me, not one of them.”

“I know,” she said softly. “A lot of us know.” Her smile was enchanting. “I remember when you discovered the envelopment. I used to access reports of you when I was at school. I used to think I wanted to be an astronomer because of you.”

He twitched his shoulders around awkwardly. Her closeness was dangerous. He could feel his erection growing because of that. He was frightened she’d see it. He wanted to see her naked. He wanted them to be screwing like demons on overdrive. “Did … did you? Are you one? An astronomer?”

“No. I’m not the intellectual type I’m afraid. I chose a sports curriculum in the end, I was on a diving team.”

“Ah.”

“You know, I can hardly believe I’m talking to my old idol.”

“I’m nobody’s idol. I’m not even sure I’m me.” The base of his fist knocked against the refrigeration cabinet, again and again. Even talking to her couldn’t divert his thoughts for long. “You know the real Dudley Bose is still out there. Still looking at alien stars, but from a much closer viewpoint these days.” His laugh was high-pitched, almost out of control.

Her hand caught his fist, and held on, preventing him from moving it. “I’m Mellanie.”

“Pleased to meet you.” All he could feel was her fingers gripping his wrist, her strength and warmth. She had dabbed on the faintest of perfumes. He breathed in deeply, knowing a scent that was so very different to the filtered conditioned air of the clinic, a human scent.

“I have a rented car outside. And I also have a room in this hotel.”

Dudley found it almost painful to say anything. “Yes.”

“So. I can either drive you to the nearest Silent World. Or we can go upstairs. Now. Right now.”

The hotel room was as mass-produced and indistinguishable as any other Augusta product, a long L-shape with a balcony at one end, and the marbled bathroom at the other. The big double bed was on a raised level, with curtains that could close it off from the rest of the room.

It was dark outside when Oscar finally opened the door and stumbled in. He’d spent two hours in the small fifth-floor residents-only cocktail lounge with Antonia before the reporters tracked them down. That had been the end of that party.

He left the lights off and went over to the kitchen alcove. There was enough illumination coming in through the wide glass patio doors to see the beer bottles in the fridge. He chose one and popped the top. Antonia had been right, a hair of the dog always worked a lot better than a tifi hit. His hangover had completely vanished now. The hotel menu was on the counter; he picked it up as he went out and stood on the narrow balcony. There had been a formal banquet planned for this evening to finish the whole welcome-back event, which was why he had the room. But the meal had been canceled. If he was going to get anything to eat it would have to be room service.

Outside, New Costa gleamed brightly under the night sky, as if it were an amplifying mirror for the constellations above. Inland, to the north, the horizon was glowing a deep-hued amber where the steel smelters were stretched out amid the Colrey hills. A genuine false dawn. The corona was actually brighter than the sky of a world with an orange dwarf star he remembered exploring eight–nine years ago. Highways were slow-moving pyrotechnic rivers, winding through the sparkling grids in perpetual motion. Narrow strips of darkness cut across the city, rail tracks where long glimmering trains rolled endlessly between yards and stations and factories.

Oscar smiled passively at the industrial megalopolis, overwhelmed as always by its sheer size and energy. The El Iopi wind was strong tonight, sending warm dry air to scour the highways and avenues. He took a sip on the beer. Somewhere out there in the jeweled grid of lights were the factories where CST built its hyperdrives. There had been rumors around Base One of the latest variants, faster than the marque 4s, a lot faster. Now that would be some starship.

“That was quite a performance this afternoon.”

Oscar jumped at the voice. The beer bottle slipped out of his fingers, falling soundlessly toward the dark parking lot fifteen stories below. “Shit!” When he lurched back into the room there was a man sitting on the sofa. Oscar had never seen him when he came in.

“Some people never change,” the man said. “You were always a little too fond of the old booze.”

“Who? What?”

There was a chuckle, and the man turned a table light on. Oscar peered at the intruder. He was quite old, probably early sixties—not rejuvenated. His face was comfortably round with reddish cheeks, a skin with a slightly rugged texture, the trait of someone who used too much cellular reprofiling. His body was larger than average, but not unfit, not for someone his age.

“I’m sorry, do I know you?”

“Oh, yes, Oscar, you know me.”

Oscar walked over to the sofa and looked closely, trying to fit the face he saw into his own past. “I don’t …”

“Don’t try and place me from memory. There’s nothing left of what I used to look like. I’ve been reprofiled a hundred times over the decades, staying a couple of steps ahead of the law all this time.”

“Oh, holy fuck.” The strength went out of Oscar’s legs. He sat heavily at the other end of the sofa. “Adam? Adam, is that you?”

“None other.”

“Oh, God. It’s been forty years.”

“Thirty-nine.”

Oscar looked with real dread at the man who had once been his friend and comrade. “What do you want?”

“Is that any way to greet an old comrade?”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” Adam spat. “Don’t remind you what you once were? Don’t remind you that you used to have ideals? Principles? Don’t remind you what you did for the cause?”

“I never fucking forgot!” Oscar shouted. “Dear Christ. Nobody could forget. Not that. Not what we did.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Here I was thinking you’d gone to work for the biggest corporation the human race has ever known, helping them spread their oppression and corruption to new worlds.”

“Forty years and you still haven’t come up with a new goddamn speech. Do you have any idea how tired that crap is? And don’t forget to use the word ‘plutocrat,’ big words like that always impress the poor ignorant saps you con into giving up their lives for your cause. It makes them think you’re an intellectual, someone they can trust, someone who knows what they’re doing.”

“It used to be your cause, Oscar. Have you given up on social justice? Is that the price of rejuvenation these days? Is that what the new young Oscar Monroe uses for currency?”

“Oh, spare me. I was only young once, and I was a fucking hothead buffoon, an easy target for bastards like Professor Grayva to exploit. Damnit, we were just fucking kids. Just kids, we didn’t know anything. You talk about being corrupted, you haven’t got to look far to see where it really happens.”

“The Party is right, and you know it. This society is not a just one.”

“Go on, say it!” Oscar leaned forward, his fingers contracting into fists. “Go on, you miserable bastard. Say it! Say it for fuck’s sake. Say: The Ends Justify The Means. That’s what you came here for, isn’t it? That’s what you wanted one last time.”

Adam turned away from the fury in his eyes. “Nothing justifies what we did,” he said so quietly Oscar could barely hear it. “We both know that.”

They sat at opposite ends of the sofa, not looking at each other. After a minute, Adam grunted dismissively. “How about this. We’re like an old married couple, always arguing.”

“What are you here for, Adam? Come to bring me down in a blaze of glory?”

“Oh, no, you don’t get off that lightly.”

“Then what do you want?” His eyes narrowed as he took in his old friend. “Money? You must need rejuvenation pretty soon.”

“I’m not sure I care to carry on living in this universe.”

“Not even you are that stupid. You can’t die. That means you’ve wasted your whole life.”

“It’s a life lived true to myself and my principles. Can you say that?”

“Yes. I’ve helped find dozens of new worlds. I’ve given our species a whole load of fresh starts. Phase three space isn’t the same as one and two. There’s no revolution, not one with Molotovs and people beating the shit out of each other on the street, but there’s a difference.”

“Humm.” Adam nodded, as if some question had been answered correctly. “Same cause, different angle of attack, huh?”

“Whatever. I’m not here to re-live old battles with you. They’ve all been fought and lost, by both of us. What the hell do you want, Adam?”

“I was sent to ask you something you won’t like.”

It was the way he said it that finally alarmed Oscar; it was almost as if he was ashamed. Except Adam Elvin was never ashamed of what he did. Not ever. That was his whole problem. The reason for them turning their backs on each other all those decades ago. A truly venomous parting. “I doubt this day could get any worse.”

“Don’t be so sure. I want you to review the Second Chance flight data.”

“Review the …” Oscar almost started choking. “Wait. You said sent. Who sent you? What do you mean, sent?”

“The man I work with on occasion believes there was an alien influence on board the Second Chance when you flew to the Dyson Pair. If the flight logs are given a professional analysis, they may show the evidence he needs to prove this.”

Oscar stared at the old man from his terrible past, his thoughts examining what had been said one word at a time. “Bradley Johansson,” he said at last. “You work with Bradley Johansson? You joined the Guardians of Selfhood? That bunch of nutters? Jesus fucking wept, Adam. Tell me you’re joking. This is a sick joke. It has to be. It fucking has to be.”

“I have not joined the Guardians. I do know Johansson. We have a mutually beneficial arrangement.”

“You.” Oscar pointed at him with a trembling finger. “OhmyGod, you attacked the Second Chance. It was you.”

Adam smiled with faint pride. “None other.”

“You crazy fucked-up psychopath!” Oscar bunched up his fist, ready to pound, smash … “That terrorist attack nearly killed half of my friends. You ruined millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and facilities and delayed our launch date by months.”

“I know. I think I’m slipping. In the old days I would have got the lot of you, and blown up the starship.”

“You are crazy. People died, Adam.”

“They were all re-lifed. Just like your friend Dr. Bose.”

“I’m calling navy intelligence.”

“Ah, the universe’s greatest oxymoron. How long do you think they’ll give you in life suspension?”

“I don’t care about myself. Not anymore. You have to be stopped.” Oscar almost did it, almost told his e-butler to make the call. He was going to do it. He was really going to do it. Any second now.

“No, Oscar. It’s you and your navy who are in the wrong now, you who are the danger to humanity. Look where your precious Second Chance flight led us.”

“What is wrong with you? You don’t believe that Guardians crap: President Doi is an alien agent. Come on! Not you.” He studied the old man’s round face, hunting for some sign of guilt.

“What I believe doesn’t matter, does it?” Adam said. “It’s what I want from you which is important. We want the log data reviewed, and you’re the perfect choice. You have unrestricted access, and it’s your field of expertise.”

“Oh, now I get it. If I study the data and don’t find your evidence, then someone makes a call to Rafael Columbia. Right?”

“No, Oscar, this is on the level. I want you to run a genuine, thorough search.”

It was only the alcohol flowing sweetly through his head that prevented Oscar from laughing outright. “Dear God, I never thought you’d be reduced to this. I mean, I always had this image of you carrying on the Party’s agenda. Every time one of those seccession movements hit the unisphere I would think: I bet Adam’s there, working away behind the scenes, urging the troops on, giving their leaders advice whether they want it or not. Then you’d slip back into the Commonwealth before CSI closed the gateway, and build up underground cell networks on every world; you’d have thousands of loyal activists ready for the day your word would come and the whole Commonwealth would be plunged into civil war and revolution. That you’d be some kind of Gandhi, or Mandela, or maybe just Napoleon. But certainly you’d be somebody. Not this though, God, look at you. Just another fat aging rebel who lost sight of his cause decades ago. So desperate you joined up with the saddest bunch of losers this universe has to offer.

“It’s not real, Adam, there is no alien. I was on board that starship for over a year, I never bumped into it in the showers, never caught it stealing a late-night snack from the canteen, there was no ghost on deck thirteen. This is where your conspiracy theory runs slap bang into the solid wall of reality. You and Johansson can sit at home pulling every rumor you want from the unisphere and build them into a tower of your Fact. It’s all bullshit. There is no evidence to be found. So before you go just leave the little crystal memory on the table, and I’ll politely ignore it, then when you’re gone and I’m even more drunk I’ll access the file your friends have forged and decide if I’m going to splice it into the official log for you so that I can save myself from life suspension because I’m too much of a pitiful coward to take responsibility for what I did once.”

“You need to get a shrink to take a good look at that self-loathing. It’s not healthy.”

“Fuck you,” Oscar said. The pain he felt was close to physical now. “Just leave the memory crystal and go.”

Adam struck him across the cheek. The blow was almost powerful enough to knock him off the couch.

“Shit.” Oscar dabbed at his mouth, blinking back tears from the stinging pain. A trickle of blood was oozing out from the corner of his lips. He gave Adam a wild look. “What the fuck is wrong with you? I said I’d do it. What more do you want?”

“There is no forged file, you motherfucker. This is as real as it gets. And I said there was an influence on board, not a bug-eyed monster. The Starflyer works through humans. Somebody on board the Second Chance turned the barrier off—don’t even try telling me that was coincidence. The same somebody who fixed it for Bose and Verbeke to be left behind. You don’t think it was remotely suspicious that of all the supertechnological, multiple-redundant, fail-soft gadgets you had on board that a simple communicator failed at exactly that critical time? Because I fucking do.”

“Somebody?” Oscar asked cynically. “A crew member?”

“Yes. One of your precious crew. One of your friends. Or maybe more than one. Who knows? But that’s what you’ve got to find out.”

“That’s even worse than an alien stowaway. Do you know how much training and back-history investigation we went through to get on board? Nobody remotely suspect ever got close to the ship.”

“You mean like you and Dudley Bose?”

Oscar stared at him for a long, chilling moment. “Look, Adam, what you’re asking, it can’t happen. Physically, it’s not possible for me to do it. Do you realize how much raw data is in those logs?”

“I know. That’s why we could never steal it and analyze it ourselves. You don’t have to go through every byte yourself. You know the critical segments of the flight; that’s where you look. Not at the main events, what happened on the bridge or in engineering, they’ll be clean. It’s what went on in the background that’s important. Who was haunting deck thirteen when the barrier came down? Find them, not just for us, for yourself, for everyone. We need to know what really happened out there.”

“This is … I can’t …”

“The alien is becoming more active now. You have to admit, there’s some weird shit going down these days. That explosion on Venice Coast which took out our arms supplier; the murdered Senator.”

“Bullshit. That was some covert operative from the government, or an Intersolar Dynasty. Everybody knows that.”

Adam smiled maliciously. “Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.”

“You are so wrong. Why can you never admit that?”

“Then prove it. Exactly who are you betraying by looking at the data? If we’re wrong you lose nothing. If God forbid, we’re right, we need to know. And you’ll be a hero. That’s big enough to absolve all your past sins.”

“I don’t need absolution.”

Adam stood. “You know I’m right. And I know you can never admit that to my face. So we’ll stop macho posturing now, and I’ll contact you every fortnight or so to check on your progress.”

“I won’t do it.”

“Yeah, I said that very same thing when Johansson told me to get in touch with you. But it’s not like either of us have a choice, is it? Not after Abadan station. Take care, Oscar, there’s a lot of people depending on you.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Carys Panther took the metallic gray MG metrosport into New Costa Junction, then drove it straight onto the car-carry train to Elan. The carriage was completely enclosed, a tube of aluminum with a bright polyphoto strip along the ceiling and a couple of narrow windows along each side. Her MG was so low-slung they were above her eye level. The car’s drive array edged her right up to a big BMW 6089 four-by-four before engaging the full brake lock; a Ford Yicon saloon pulled up behind her.

She ordered the seat to recline and settled back for the trip. Her e-butler brought up a whole raft of story ideas and plot sequences into her virtual vision, which she started to fill in, joining them together in complicated loops. At the moment there was a big demand for the long slightly fantastical sagas that were her preferred genre. Ant, her agent, was keen to exploit the market. He said that it was the uncertainty of the Prime situation that was putting people off gritty realism at the moment; they wanted escapism. He should know; Ant was actually older than Nigel Sheldon, and he’d been doing the same job for century after century, he’d seen every creative fad there was, living through the fashion cycle as it spun the genres around and around.

It was twenty minutes before the train started to move forward, pulled by an electric Fantom T5460 engine. Augusta led straight to New York; from there the trans-Earth link took them to Tallahassee, Edmonton, Seattle, LA Galactic, Mexico City, Rio, and Buenos Aires, before finally crossing the Pacific to Sydney, which routed the train out to Wessex. Earth took about an hour; they stopped at five of the stations so more vehicles could roll onto the car-carry. Once they reached Wessex, there was a longer stop as six extra carriages were added, then it took five minutes to cross the planetary station’s yard to the Elan gateway. A minute later and they were pulling up alongside the long road-platform at Runwich, the planet’s capital.

The MG’s drive array connected itself to the city’s road routing manager, paid the local car tax, and drove through the outskirts to the airport. For once the connection timing worked out in practice the way it was listed on the timetable. A Siddley-Lockheed CP-505 was waiting for her on the apron, a big six-duct fan plane. She drove up the rear ramp into the gaping cargo hold, where electromuscle clamps gripped the car’s tires. There were another fifteen cars in there, along with two coaches. The plane could carry sixty-five tons of cargo in total, in addition to a hundred twenty passengers on the upper deck.

Carys spent the next three hours sitting in a comfy first-class seat being served champagne by a nice first-life steward as they cruised across the equator at point nine five Mach. Ant called twice for script conferences and permission to crank up her contract negotiations. It was sort of flattering that he dealt with her personally; his client list had been closed for over a century now. If all went well her latest saga should hit the unisphere in another six months.

They landed at Kingsclere airport on Ryceel and she climbed back into the MG. As she drove out of the southern continent’s capital she could see the Dau’sings rising out of the horizon.

The toll booth at the start of the Randtown highway had a big new sign across the front, reading: No Military Vehicles Permitted. Someone had spray-painted DEATH TO ANTIHUMAN FUCKHEAD TRAITORS over the top of it in glowing orange.

“This should be fun,” she muttered as she drew up outside the booth and put her thumb credit tattoo on the pad. The reinforced barrier slid up, and she drove onto the start of the highway. The broad strip of enzyme-bonded concrete seemed completely deserted as it stretched out ahead. Carys thought it looked like the start grid of some giant racetrack, which was an interesting challenge. She brought the full range of drive array program tools up into her virtual vision, and supervised its integration with the highway’s simple traffic management system. The speed regulator was a small old program that was easily susceptible to the fix that came as standard in the MG’s modern aggressor routines. She removed the offending software’s inconvenient monitoring of the car, and pressed her foot down hard on the manual accelerator.

There was a surge of power into the axle engines that pushed her deep into the seat. She locked the speed, tied the radar and navigation functions into the steering program, and assigned full control to the drive array. Electromuscle bands in the tire walls responded to the buildup of speed by changing their profile, expanding the tread width to provide an even greater degree of traction. There was a wicked smile on her face as the car charged up the first slope into the foothills at three hundred kph.

“I stayed loyal,” Dudley Bose said. “I was stupid. Did you hear what I said? Did you ever see the recording? I warned them, I told them to flee. Then my voice ended. The aliens must have silenced me, punished me for spoiling their plans. And all the while it was Wilson Fucking Kime I was risking my neck for. The bastard who left me there to rot, to die under an alien sun. Who sacrificed me so he could be safe.”

“You are very much alive, my love,” Mellanie told him. They were lying together on the double bed in what the hotel, with a sharp eye for satire, called its bridal suite. The curtains were open, allowing Dudley to see his precious stars. It was an effort for Mellanie not to yawn, she desperately wanted to go to sleep. Something this new Dudley Bose apparently never did without the help of strong drugs. She wondered if she should slip another of the pills into his drink; it was nearly three o’clock in the morning. But the champagne they’d so eagerly guzzled down earlier was flat now, and not even the Pine Heart Gardens, Randtown’s finest, would offer room service at such a time. Damn this wretched backward place.

There had been few choices other than returning to Randtown to file her follow-up report on the blockade. Alessandra wanted to know if the residents had renounced their antihuman stance now the wormhole detector station had been forcibly installed in the Regent mountains above the town. The angle they were going for was a remorseful population who were turning their backs on redneck buffoons like Mark Vernon. Finding appropriate interviews would be easy enough for Mellanie, the more colorful the better.

She didn’t want to do it, not just because she despised Randtown and its smug small-town mentality. The Myo case was far more important to her: if she could crack that she wouldn’t even need Alessandra as a patron anymore. But it was proving difficult. After the glorious fiasco of the navy’s welcome-back ceremony, she’d spent a day and a half locked in her hotel room with Dudley Bose, providing him with the kind of sexual marathon that most men knew of only from pornoTSIs or their own midlife-crisis dreams. He’d told her nothing. He’d talked continuously, between the physical feats she performed for him, but it was the same topic every time: himself and whether he was still alive out there at Dyson Alpha. The occasional respite came in the form of diatribes against Wilson Kime, his ex-wife, and the navy in general. His memories were still too chaotic to provide her with anything useful.

She’d almost left him in the hotel on Augusta when it came time for her to catch the train to Elan. Almost. Some nagging doubt, which she hoped was her burgeoning reporter’s intuition, told her to persevere. She was sure he knew something that could help; though she had started to wonder if she was being too clever in her interpretation of Myo’s remark.

So she’d finally called Alessandra to admit to making no progress on Myo, and had to endure her mentor’s stinging superiority. Mellanie promptly told Dudley they were going to spend a weekend at a secluded resort town she knew of where she was going to make his hottest, dirtiest Silent World fantasies come alive. It would be her last chance to try to sort out what he knew that Myo wasn’t telling her. He’d followed like a docile child.

“But am I alive back there?” Dudley pointed weakly to the bridal suite’s open window.

“No. There’s only you. You are unique. You must learn that, and to stop worrying about your old life. It ended. This is a fresh start for you. And I’m here to make it as pleasurable as I can.”

“Goodness, that’s the Zemplar cross formation.” Dudley rolled off the bed and padded over to the window. He pushed it open and stuck his head out. The fresh breeze coming in off the Trine’ba made Mellanie shiver on top of the bed.

“You never told me we were here,” Dudley said.

“Where? Randtown? Yes I did.”

“No, Elan. This has to be Elan. I’m right, aren’t I?”

“Yes, my love, this is Elan.” She was impressed; the memory transfer had obviously worked flawlessly, it was just his personality that hadn’t survived the procedure intact. “Now please close the window. It’s freezing.”

“This is about as close as you can get to Dyson Alpha, apart from Far Away.” His head was still outside, muffling his voice.

“Yes.”

“That’s where the Guardians come from, you know.”

“I know.” She searched around for the quilt, then stopped. “Do you know about the Guardians?”

“A bit. It was only the once.”

“What was?”

He turned from the window and looked down bashfully. “We were burgled. Eventually, we found out it could have been the Guardians. The Chief Investigator reckoned the whore I was married to had met Bradley Johansson himself.”

“Which Chief Investigator?” Mellanie asked, trying to suppress her trepidation.

“The strange one from the Hive, Paula Myo.”

Mellanie flopped down onto her back, and raised both fists triumphantly in the air. “Yes!”

“What is it?” he asked nervously.

“Come here.”

She fucked him. As always he was supremely easy for her to control. If she let him he would climax in seconds, so she was strict, drawing him out, provoking and denying in equal amounts so that it would last as long as she wanted. This time it was different for one thing, this time she allowed herself to come as well. There was no faking it, no sound effects. It became her selfish celebration, he was there for her pleasure.

He must have known something had altered, sensed some change in her. His gaze as he lay there on the bed afterward was worshipful. “Don’t leave me,” he pleaded. “Please, don’t ever leave me. I couldn’t take that. I couldn’t.”

“Don’t worry, my love,” she told him. “I haven’t finished with you yet. Now be good, and take one of your sleeping pills.”

He nodded, anxious to please, and washed one down with the remnants of the champagne. Mellanie plumped up the pillows and sank back, smiling at the ceiling. For the first time in four days she fell into a deep contented sleep.

Mark was out in the vineyard with one of the autopickers that was stalled; Barry and Sandy were with him, keen to help the repair operation. Their assistance came in the form of charging up and down the rows, with the dog barking excitedly as it dodged between them. The big gangling machine had come to a halt halfway down its third row when its control software realized that the grencham berries weren’t sliding through the central hopper. Its octopuslike picking arms had frozen in various stages of removing clusters from the vines.

This was only the third day of picking the crop. Already he’d had two breakdowns in his own vineyard. Calls from neighbors to help out with mechanical problems were coming in with increasing frequency and desperation. He slithered into the gap between the leafy vines and the side of the machine, unclipping the loader mechanism inspection panel. Just like before, lengths of the vine had gone down the hopper to wind themselves around various cogs and rollers. It was the clippers on the end of the picker arms that were hauling them in. Same as everything in life when you got down to it: a software problem. He’d have to write a discrimination fix in time for next year. In the meantime, it was a simple pair of secateurs that had to chop at the stringy vines, then human hands that pulled them out. Mashed grencham berries made the whole process slow and gooey.

“Look at that, Dad,” Barry called.

Mark pulled the last few shreds of vine from the feeder mechanism, and looked up. Someone was driving along the valley’s packed stone road at a ridiculous speed, a low gray vehicle producing a long swirling contrail of dust behind it.

“Idiot,” he grunted. The inspection panel clipped back into place; he gave the locking pins a few thumps with the top of his medium pliers to secure them. His e-butler gave the autopicker array a resume operations order, and the arms slowly stretched out again. Clippers snicked at the top of clusters. The movements began to speed up. Mark nodded in satisfaction, and pulled his sunglasses out of his overalls pocket.

“They’re coming here, Dada,” Sandy yelled out.

The car had slowed to turn up the drive into the Vernons’ vineyard. It didn’t look like anything a Randtown inhabitant would own.

“Come on then,” he told his kids. “Let’s go meet them.”

They ducked between vines as they ran toward the drive, calling for Panda who was off chasing wobes, the local fieldmice-equivalents. Mark reached the end of the row, where he got a good look at the fancy car as it neared the house. Its sleek shape clued him in on who was visiting.

The MG came to a halt beside the Ables pickup; and the suspension lowered itself back down from the extended rough-ride position so that the wheels fitted back into the chassis again. A gull-wing door opened in the side, and Carys Panther got out. She was wearing a chic paneled suede skirt and expensive hand-tooled cowboy boots, with a simple white blouse. Her dove-gray Stetson was carried in one hand.

Barry gave a welcoming whoop and rushed forward. Sandy was smiling happily, it was always exciting when Aunty Carys visited.

“Nice metalware,” Mark said sardonically.

“Oh, that?” Carys gave a dismissive wave toward the MG. “It’s my boyfriend’s wife’s car.”

Mark made an exaggerated appeal to the heavens. She always had to make an entrance.

Neither of the two housemaids who brought breakfast to the room at eleven o’clock would meet Mellanie’s gaze. They put the big trays down on the table and walked out.

“Screw you,” Mellanie told them after the door had shut behind them. She started lifting the silver lids off the plates. Room service might be crap, but the kitchen was certainly four-star. “Tuck in,” she told Dudley.

He sat opposite her, as nervous as a school kid facing the principal. She could remember that sensation well enough.

“What do you want from me?” he asked.

“Your story.”

“Is that all I am, a story?”

“We are all stories, ultimately. I want to help you, Dudley, I really do. If you can come to terms with what’s happened, you’ll be so much happier. I think I can do that for you. I really do.”

“And us? What about us?”

She smiled cheekily, picking up a strawberry and licking it in a suitably wicked fashion. “You don’t think I give myself like that to anyone I don’t care about, do you?”

His answering smile was one of cautious relief. She pulled her chair around the table until she was pressed up beside him. With him watching in silent fascination she picked up another strawberry and held it delicately in her teeth. Very slowly she undid her bathrobe and pulled it open, then leaned in toward him, guiding the strawberry into his mouth. He bit into it, their lips touching.

“Oh, God.” He was trembling, his eyes damp.

“Now you feed me something.”

Dudley held up a slim slice of pancake dripping with maple syrup. She laughed as the drops fell on her breasts, then nibbled her way up the pancake slice. Dudley leaped at her, knocking the breakfast trays across the table. She was amazed he’d shown that much restraint, and laughed again as her chair went flying backward. They both tumbled onto the floor, with Dudley tugging frantically at his own bathrobe.

He fucked her there and then on the expensive moozaki rug with orange juice leaking down on top of them from the overturned glasses on the table. Then she was pulled over to the bed and fucked again.

“I’m going to need another bath,” she said after he’d finally spent himself. Even though he’d done his best to lick all the syrup and juicy lolabeans off her chest and thighs she was still awfully sticky.

“I’ll join you.”

She grinned, snuggling up against him. “So when did you meet Paula Myo?”

“Before the flight,” he said, sighing. “They took me out of rejuve for the interview.”

“They did what?”

“I was undergoing partial rejuvenation before the flight. There wasn’t time for a full one, but I was quite old, physiologically, so they were going to bring my age down as much as they could before they started my crew training. Paula Myo had me taken out. She questioned me and Wendy. I can’t remember much of what I said, it was very disorienting having the procedure interrupted. That’s why I wasn’t as young as I wanted to be when we left. Not as young as Oscar Monroe wanted, either.”

“Don’t start putting any value on what that old lush says. You said Myo was quizzing you about a break-in.”

“Yeah. My bitch ex talked to Bradley Johansson, who was masquerading as a reporter; he asked her about the organizations who funded my observation. The next thing we know our home was broken into and every file copied from the house array.”

“What did Myo think the connection was?”

“That moron Johansson believed one of the charities funding my observation was a front for the Starflyer. That’s the alien …”

“I know what the Starflyer is. When did this happen, exactly?”

“Right after the attack on the Second Chance. Myo had the authority to do pretty much anything she wanted when they gave her that case, including yanking me out of rejuve.”

“And she’d tracked down that connection. Why?”

“I’ve no idea. She just said she was looking for anomalies; anyone connected to the Second Chance project was reviewed. But the queer thing is that Johansson knew she’d find the connection, he told Wendy to give Myo a message.”

“Really, what was it?”

“Stop concentrating on the details, it’s the big picture that counts.”

“Weird. Do you remember which charity Johansson was suspicious about?”

“Yeah, the Cox Educational charity.”

“Never heard of them.” She patted his arm as she stood up. “You know what you’ve just been doing, don’t you?”

“What?”

“Talking about what happened to your previous body as if it was you. You’re starting to connect your body lives. Well done. I told you I was good for you.” She blew a kiss at his startled young face and went into the bathroom.

The big sunken tub was filled to its rim, with a burg of soapy bubbles floating on the surface. Mellanie stepped in, sighing gratefully as she sat down in the warm scented water. She turned the nozzles on, welcoming the gentle flow of air bubbles around her body as they eased away the aches. Dudley hadn’t been gentle the last time. His desperation and fierceness had made it a lot more interesting than his usual monotonous perfunctory act.

She turned up the music and rested her head back on the rim cushions. Her virtual hand touched the SI icon. “I need some financial information,” she said.

“You know we cannot provide confidential records, Mellanie.”

“I just need what’s on public record. It might be a little difficult to track it all down, that’s all, and I don’t want to go through the show’s researchers.” And I can’t use poor old Paul Cramley anymore.

“Very well.”

“The Cox Educational charity helped fund Dr. Bose’s observation. How much did they give him?”

“In total, one point three million Earth dollars, spread over eleven years.”

“Where does their money come from?”

“It is a private charity.”

“What does that mean?”

“The source of the money is not open to inspection.”

“Okay, so who runs it?”

“The registered commissioners are three lawyers, Ms. Daltra, Mr. Pomanskie, and Mr. Seeton, who all work for Bromley, Waterford, and Granku, a New York legal firm.”

“Humm.” She ran a sponge along her legs. “What else does the Cox support?”

“It contributed to over a hundred universities and colleges across the Commonwealth. Do you want the list?”

“Not right now.”

“Would you like the total amount of money given to the other institutions.”

She opened her eyes, suddenly very interested—it wasn’t like the SI to volunteer information. “Yes please.”

“Seventy thousand Earth dollars.”

“For each one?”

“No. That is the total payout.”

“Hell. How long has it been going for?”

“Fourteen years. It shut down two years after Dudley Bose observed the envelopment. Six months after Paula Myo interviewed Dudley Bose.”

“So, most hated man in the Commonwealth,” Carys said with a taunting smile. “Quite a title. As voted for on the Maxis unisphere poll. Never guessed my little nephew would be so famous.”

Mark just grunted in response, and wormed down deeper into his favorite chair. They were all sitting around in the living room, giving Carys a taste of last year’s Ulon Valley wine before lunch.

“Nobody here cares,” he said. “It’s not important.”

“Oh, yes. It’s only relevant to us, isn’t it. Us, being decadent metropolitan types practicing our intellectual snobbery over you poor country bumpkins.”

Mark shrugged, smiling. “You said it.”

“Wake up and smell the coffee,” she snapped. “The media is going to screw your beautiful little town into the bedrock: I know from my contacts that Alessandra Baron is already planning a follow up. Have you tried booking a skiing holiday here for this next season? I did. They’re offering fifty percent discounts already. Nobody’s coming.”

“And you can fix all that, can you?”

Carys exchanged a glance with Liz. “You need some serious PR, Mark. And I’m the only expert you’ve got.”

“You called her!” Mark accused Liz.

“You have to listen to somebody, baby. Everyone around here is being very careful not to lay any blame. To your face.”

He turned to Carys, appealing. “I never said it the way that interview came out. They edited me to make it sound bad.”

“The technical term is raunching up,” Carys said. “They always do it. We can use that to fight back.”

“How?” he said suspiciously.

“I can get you interviewed on other shows. Live studio interviews, so they can’t mess with your message. You’ll need a lot of coaching before we let you on, and you’ll have to grow a decent sense of humor. But it can be done.”

“I’ve got a sense of humor,” he protested indignantly.

Carys opened her mouth to answer. There was a bright flash outside. Mark and Liz frowned in unison. There were no thunderclouds anywhere.

Out in the garden, Sandy was squealing as if she were in pain. Both parents jumped up and went through the open patio doors.

“What’s the matter, poppet?” Mark asked.

Panda was going berserk, barking, jumping up and down. Sandy ran to her mother, arms flung wide. “In the sky,” she wailed. “My eyes hurt. I see purple.”

Mark’s wrist array crashed. The sky to the southeast turned dazzling white. “Damn, what the hell …” All the autopickers had stopped. As had the tractors. Every bot he could see was motionless and silent.

The smear of silky light above the mountains was draining away to leave the normal blue sky in its wake. Then a vivid rose-gold sun climbed up from behind the peaks, its surface writhing with webs of black fire. It cast long moving shadows across the ground.

“Oh, my God,” Liz murmured.

The new sun was rising on a stalk of brilliant raging flame. All the remaining snow on the Regents vaporized in a single violent white explosion. The tops of the mountains looked as if they were vibrating. They started to crumble just as the ferocious vapor cloud swarmed around them, obliterating them from sight.

Sandy’s shrieks reached a crescendo.

“They nuked it,” Mark shouted in awe. “They nuked the detector station.” He watched the mushroom cloud swelling out, its color darkening, deepening as it spread its bruised perimeter across the clean sky. Then the sound blast reached them.

Mellanie ordered a light salad from room service before dressing in jeans and a coal-black sweatshirt from her own fashion line. She tied her hair back in a simple loose tail, just using moisturizer on her face, no makeup. It was important she looked serious for this call.

One of the scowling housemaids brought the salad while Dudley was splashing about cheerfully in the bathroom. She spent a couple of minutes clearing up the mess that was the two breakfast trays. Mellanie gave her a twenty-dollar tip. If anything the scowl was deeper when she left.

“Double screw you,” Mellanie told the door.

She picked at the salad for a while, sorting out the pitch in her mind, then sat at the bureau and used the room’s desktop array to place a call to Alessandra.

Alessandra’s image appeared on the array’s screen. She was sitting in the green room’s makeup chair, a paper bib around her neck to protect her fabulous dress. “Where the hell have you been?” she demanded.

“I’m on Elan.”

“Okay, in that case I’ll let you live. As it is, you’re this close to being fired.” She held her hand up, thumb and forefinger almost touching. “Don’t ever put a block on your unisphere address code again. Now: I need your follow-up report in an hour. And it better be a prize-winner, or that tiny little arse of yours will reach orbit.”

“I’m on to something.”

“What?”

Mellanie took a breath. “Paula Myo thinks the Starflyer is real.”

“You’re fucking unbelievable, you know that? I give you every chance, more than I’ve given anybody else, and not just because you’re good in bed. And this drivel is what you come up with?”

“Listen! She put me on to Dudley Bose.”

“Do you know where he is? Everybody in the biz is going apeshit trying to find him.”

“I’ve been fucking him for information, yeah.” She tossed her head, keeping her face expressionless as she looked at Alessandra’s image. “And like you say, I’m very good at it. I found something out.”

“All right, darling, have your fifteen seconds of fame. What have you got?”

“One of the charities that funded Bose’s observation of the Dyson Pair is a front organization. The Starflyer arranged for us to see the envelopment. It wanted us to investigate the barrier.”

“Proof?” Alessandra snapped.

“The charity had secret bank account funding,” she said, hoping to God it was slightly true, but she had to get Alessandra behind the investigation. “I checked through all its other donations; they’re tokens, validity in case anyone ran a quick review. And it was shut down right after the discovery. But the important thing is that Myo knew this years ago. Don’t you see what that means? All these years she never caught Johansson and Elvin, she knew all along. She might even be working with the Guardians!”

“This is your vendetta,” Alessandra said.

Mellanie could see the uncertainty, and pressed on doggedly. “But it will be your story. Give me a research team, let me work it. Hell, take charge of a research team yourself. That’s what Myo’s telling us. Us, the media. This is all public source information, verifiable if you know where to look. We can prove the Starflyer exists. For God’s sake, Wendy Bose actually met Bradley Johansson! Did that ever come out in any interview? This is real, Alessandra, I promise.”

“I want to talk to Bose.”

“Okay.”

The SI’s icon sprang up in Mellanie’s virtual vision. “Get on the floor behind the bed,” it told her.

“What?”

“The navy detector network is registering wormholes emerging inside the Commonwealth,” the SI said. “The Regents detector station is under attack. Get behind the bed, it will provide some cover.”

“Mellanie?” Alessandra asked, frowning.

“I’ve got to go,” she hesitated, not really believing. Then her virtual vision showed inserts coming on-line, activated by the SI. They were systems she neither recognized nor understood.

“We will try and remain in contact with you,” the SI said.

“Mellanie, there’s some kind of alert—” Alessandra said; her voice had risen in alarm.

Mellanie dived for the bed. There was a brilliant flash in the sky outside.

Wilson was alone in his awful white-glowing office, waiting for people to arrive for the second management meeting of the morning, the one on ship production scheduling and subcomponent delivery supervision. The override priority call that came in from the planetary defense division made him sit upright in his chair as it delivered big emergency icons to his virtual vision. The wormhole detector network was picking up unidentified quantum signatures inside Commonwealth space. Wormholes were opening in several star systems.

The office began to dim, scarlet and sapphire digits slipped along the ceiling and down the walls as emerald graphics flowered across the floor. The projections stabilized, arching out into the air to place Wilson at the center of a tactical star chart. He was close to the boundary of the Commonwealth, where phase three space dwindled away into galactic night. Twenty-three star systems were encircled by amber icons, with small script windows full of digits and icons.

“Twenty-three wormholes?” he murmured in dismay. The navy only had three functional warships, and eight scoutships refitted as missile carriers. Then the dataflow increased, clarifying the information coming in from the detector network. Forty-eight separate wormholes had opened in each of the twenty-three star systems, bringing the total to over eleven hundred. That was about the same number of gateways operated by CST itself. “Son of a bitch.” He couldn’t believe the numbers, he who’d been to Dyson Alpha and seen the scale of the Prime civilization for himself.

More information was pouring through now, complementing the navy network. The cyberspheres on Anshun, Belembe, Martaban, Balkash, and Samar were already suffering huge glitches and area crashes. Reports of explosions were coming in from the government systems of those planets, in almost every case corresponding to electronic failure zones. Twenty-three translucent globes expanded into Wilson’s image, representing the planets under attack. Detailed imagery was hard to find for any of them. Land survey satellites, geosynchronous relay platforms, industrial stations, and high inclination meteorological sensors were being systematically blasted out of orbit. Wormholes appeared as bright scarlet diamonds poised over the planets. They winked in and out of existence, changing position by the minute to avoid sensor lock. Radar tracked high-velocity projectiles flying out of them at each emergence.

The navy was losing contact with its detector stations on Elan, Whalton, Pomona, and Nattavaara, all planets in phase three space with relatively small populations. One by one the stations were dropping off the network, reducing the resolution in the display. No stations at all had survived on Molina, Olivenza, Kozani, and Balya, phase three worlds that weren’t even open to general settlement yet.

Anna materialized beside him, a ghostly gray outline. It was as if they were both on their acceleration couches back on the Second Chance again. “They started with nukes!” she said, aghast.

“We know how they fight battles,” he said, deliberately harsh, numbing himself to what all the display graphics really meant. With her there it was easier to haul back on his own emotions. He was the commander, he had to keep calm and analytical, to suppress that small part of himself that wanted to run out of the office and head for the hills. “Get Columbia into the command circuit. And find our ship positions for me.”

“All of them?” There was a lot of bitterness in the question.

“Do it!” His own hands were busy pulling planetary government civil defense data out of the unisphere. Little blue lights appeared on the twenty-three planet representations: cities with force fields. On the four start-up worlds, only the CST stations were protected.

Rafael Columbia came on-line, appearing on the other side of Wilson from Anna. “There are so many,” he said, and for once even he sounded intimidated and uncertain. “We’re launching combat aerobots now. They should provide some interceptor coverage against those projectiles, but only around major population centers. Damnit, we should have built ten times this many.”

“Get every working city force field up,” Wilson told him. “And not just on these twenty-three worlds. There’s no guarantee this is the limit of the invasion. Use the planetary cyberspheres to issue a mass warning, I want people to get under cover. That’s a start.”

“Then what?”

“When I’ve got more information, I’ll tell you. We need to know what they’re going to do after the initial bombardment. Anna, bring the rest of the strategy and command staff in, please. We’re going to need a lot of help today.”

“Yes, sir. I’m tracking the starships now.”

White indicators appeared inside the starfield, tagged with identification data. He had seven ships within range of the detector network. Two scoutships were days away outside the Commonwealth; while the warships and remaining scoutships were spread out around the indistinct boundary of phase three space. Wilson made a decision. “Contact the captains,” he told Anna. “I want them all to rendezvous half a light-year out from Anshun.” Their old base was the CST junction planet for the sector, and as such the most heavily populated. “We’ll start our counterattack there.” At least neither of them laughed outright at that.

“Oh, goddamnit,” Rafael grunted.

Inside the tactical display another swarm of amber warning icons were blinking up, much deeper in Commonwealth space around planet twenty-four: Wessex.

“Do what you can for them,” Wilson told Rafael. He wished it didn’t sound like a feeble joke. Could we have known it was going to be this massive? A terrible thought crept out: The Guardians knew.

“Sir,” Anna exclaimed. “I’ve got Captain Tu Lee on a direct link. They were still at the Anshun base.”

“What?”

“She’s on the Second Chance.”

Wilson’s virtual hand blurred as it jabbed at the communications icon. “What’s your situation?” he demanded as Tu Lee’s anxious face appeared in his virtual vision.

“Disengaged from the dock.” Tu Lee winced. Her image suffered a ripple of static. “Taking some incoming fire. Force field holding. What are your orders?”

Wilson almost whooped out loud. Finally, some good news. “Eliminate as many of the planetary bombardment projectiles as you can. Don’t, repeat, do not try and take on a wormhole. Not yet. I need information on them.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Godspeed, Captain.”

The Second Chance’s big life-support wheel finished its emergency despin procedure, eliminating the problem of precession, which had been screwing up their maneuvering ability.

“Full acceleration,” Tu Lee ordered the pilot. She’d been captain for a week now, taking over when the ship docked after its last mission. The navy had sent it on a deep scouting mission three hundred light-years from the Commonwealth. It didn’t have the speed of any of the new scoutships, but it beat them hands down on endurance. It also had the kind of delta-V reserve that only the new warships could match.

Their plasma rockets responded smoothly to the pilot’s instructions, producing one and a half gees acceleration. They were a thousand kilometers above Anshun’s nightside equator, and curving around above the second largest ocean. The big portals at the front of the bridge were showing brilliant white flares of nukes detonating below them. Tu Lee barred her teeth in fury at the devastation. For her the light was carefully color-coded and intensity-graded; for anyone on the surface it was near-certain death.

“Laroch, have we got a pattern for the emergence sequence yet?” she asked.

“I can confirm there’s forty-eight wormholes,” said Laroch, who was operating the sensor console. “But they keep jumping around at random. The only constant is their altitude, about one and a half thousand klicks.”

“Okay, let’s keep under that level, and track the bombardment projectiles in range. Weapons, fire whenever we get a lock. Pilot, if there’s a cluster, get us in range.”

“Incoming,” Laroch called.

Eight alien missiles hurtled toward the Second Chance. The pilot vectored their plasma rockets, altering trajectory. Plasma lances fired out from the starship’s midsection, ripping across space before bursting apart on the missiles’ force fields. Lasers locked on, pumping gigawatts of energy, straining the force fields badly. The plasma lances fired again finally overloading the missiles’ shielding. Multiple detonations blossomed silently above the planet, their plasma clouds merging into a seething patch of pure light over fifty kilometers across.

“Batch of sixteen projectiles emerged,” Laroch called out. “Heading for the planet.”

The bridge portals had them tagged, green needles with vector digits flicking around at high speed. Tu Lee called up the ship’s own missile launch command, and fired a volley of interceptors. As they leaped away at fifty gees she loaded in a sequential pattern of diverted energy functions for their warheads. The interceptors split apart into a cascade of independently targeted vehicles, rocket exhausts expanding like a starburst of lightning bolts as they spread out in pursuit of the alien projectiles. Megaton warheads detonated, a chain of dazzling lightpoints distorting the planet’s ionosphere in huge undulations, their diverted energy function sending huge emp effects rippling out.

Several of the alien weapons immediately went dead, their exhausts fading away as they tumbled inertly toward the dark landscape hundreds of kilometers below. A second barrage of warheads detonated. This time the diverted energy was channeled into one-shot X-ray lasers, directing seventy percent of the explosion’s power into a single slender beam of ultrahard radiation. Every remaining projectile broke apart, glowing debris flying outward in sinister mimicry of a meteorite shower’s splendor.

Four more wormholes opened close to the Second Chance; thirty-two missiles flew out from each. Delicate fans of sensor radiation stroked against the starship. The gee force on the bridge swung around, pressing Tu Lee into the side of her chair. Straps tightened around her shoulders and waist, holding her in place.

“There might be a lot of them,” Laroch said. “But their software is useless. I’m picking up a lot of microwave emissions from the wormholes; the missiles are being continuously updated and guided.”

The Second Chance fired volley after volley of plasma lances at the new attackers as they closed at twenty gees. A massive series of nuclear explosions turned space outside the starship a glaring uniform white. Waves of thin plasma slithered across the outer force field, shaking the superstructure. Tu Lee could hear loud metallic groans as the hull twisted and flexed from the pummeling. It was as if they were flying through a star’s corona, blinded by the hot radiation glare and buffeted by relativistic particle currents. The starship streaked out of the energy storm, a shimmering scarlet bubble trailing long cataracts of hydrogen plasma. Twenty-four alien missiles chased around to intercept her.

Alarms were shrieking from every bridge console. Screens threw up systems schematics as the crew and the RI tried to reestablish functions.

“Jump us out,” Tu Lee ordered.

At the hyperdrive console, Lindsay Sanson activated the wormhole generator. Second Chance vanished from space above the planet.

“How bad is that software?” Tu Lee demanded.

“Strange,” Laroch said. “It’s very inflexible, nothing like as advanced as ours. It’s almost as if they don’t have smart programs.”

“We can use that,” Tu Lee said. She glanced at the main status display. The starship’s systems had suffered nothing too critical. Outside of some hull ablation and tank breaches, most of the damage had been absorbed by peripherals in the life-support wheel. Without the exploration and science teams they had only forty crew on board; no one was in any immediate danger. “Get everyone into suits,” she said as she called up a display of their missile reserves. “Then take us back.”

A lambent patch of turquoise light twisted out of nowhere eight hundred kilometers above Anshun’s capital Treloar. Second Chance leaped out of its center as the nimbus shrank away. The starship fired fifteen missiles, then her wormhole generator distorted space again and she vanished back into hyperspace. She reappeared almost instantaneously five thousand kilometers away, this time above Bromrine, a coastal city whose population of two hundred thousand was cowering under their protective force field dome. Another fifteen missiles were fired before she dived back into hyperspace.

She made another nine jumps around the planet, launching all one hundred seventy-three remaining missiles.

As soon as they were released, the missiles in each salvo fired their rockets briefly, spreading out from their launch point, then shut down. Their sensors scanned around, searching for a wormhole. When one emerged, their rockets ignited again, racing toward it at fifty gees. The alien projectiles barely had time to clear the wormhole rim before they were subjected to emp assault, electronic warfare, X-ray laser pulses, kinetic impacts, and nuclear blasts. Very few of them made it through to slam down against the planet.

Second Chance popped out of hyperspace again and began a quick data transmission to the beleaguered world below, telling the navy how they had mined near-orbit space. Eight wormholes emerged, encircling the starship at five hundred kilometers. Lindsay Sanson activated their hyperdrive. “Shit!”

“What?” Tu Lee asked. The bridge portals were still showing Anshun below them, its once-passive cloud formations swirling in agitation in the aftermath of the explosions.

“Interference. Space is so distorted from their wormholes we can’t open ours. It’s deliberate, they modified the quantum fluctuations to block us.”

“Move us,” Tu Lee yelled at the pilot.

Second Chance’s plasma drive came on. She began to accelerate at over three gees.

Another eight Prime wormholes emerged around the starship.

“Fuck you,” Tu Lee told the Primes.

Ninety-six missiles flew out of each wormhole.

Nigel Sheldon had been taking breakfast in his New Costa mansion when the alert from the navy detector network came through. He hadn’t been back to Cressat, his family’s private world, for the last five months; he’d spent his time between Augusta and Earth. It was prudent, he felt, not to be too remote should anything happen, even with the blessing of modern communications. And now he was being proved terribly right.

Shielding sprang up around the mansion; communications shifted to secure links. He closed his eyes and relaxed back into the chair as the mansion’s internal shields came on, isolating the rooms. The full range of his interface inserts went on-line, allowing his sensorium to absorb digital data at an accelerated rate. Combat aerobots launched from bases dotted around the outskirts of New Costa. Startled residents gaped up into the bright morning sky to see the dark shapes roaring upward to their high-altitude patrol stations. Force fields closed off the sky behind them.

With Augusta’s defenses activated, Nigel switched his attention back to the attack. His enhanced display showed the twenty-three Commonwealth planets where the alien wormholes intruded; the wormholes themselves manifested as tactile sensations, like pinpricks across his skin. The SI responded to his request and joined him inside the tactical simulacrum, a small ball of knotted tangerine and turquoise lines fluctuating rhythmically as they floated in the nothingness beside him.

“That’s a lot of wormholes,” he said.

“Dimitri Leopoldovich always said the assault would be conducted on a large scale. This probably does not represent their full capability.”

There was a background whisper in Nigel’s greatly expanded perception as he registered the flurry of orders slipping out from the navy’s headquarters on the High Angel, coordinating sensor data and marshaling what resources they had. “Poor old Wilson,” he murmured. He concentrated on several icons in a small galaxy of symbols that were hovering in the background. They moved obediently. Using the deep connections wetwired into his brain, this interface felt more like telepathy than the simple virtual-hands array of standard domestic interface programs.

Force fields came on around every CST planetary station in the Commonwealth. On the twenty-three worlds under attack, there was almost no warning. Local trains coming into the stations braked sharply, their engines skidding along the tracks, as they approached the implacable translucent barriers that had risen in front of them. Not all of them managed to halt in time. Several engines hit the force fields and jumped the tracks, slewing around; carriages and wagons jackknifed, crunching into each other, smashing apart, crumpling up, flinging passengers and goods across embankments and cuttings. Cars and trucks arriving along the highways were ordered to brake by traffic route management software. Lead vehicles rammed the force fields; pileups dominoed back down the roads.

Information on damage and casualties slipped into Nigel’s mind. Nothing compared to the destruction pouring down out of the sky all around them. He ignored the figures. There had been no choice; without the stations and their precious gateways there would be no Commonwealth.

The remaining stations across the Commonwealth at least allowed arriving trains over the perimeter before their force fields went up. On the highways outside, huge queues formed along every carriageway, trailing back for kilometers. Those people trapped on the inside settled down for a long wait, quietly thankful about which side of the force field they were on.

Nigel saw city force fields power up as Rafael started to use the navy’s new planetary defense network, overriding local civil authorities. He sent combat aerobots rocketing skyward, firing as they went: big machines of unmistakable military ugliness. Prime projectiles were blown out of the stratosphere as they descended. But the sheer quantity of projectiles allowed several to slip through to pound at the force fields. Large areas of the surrounding countryside were flattened or reduced to lakes of glass, but the force fields held.

The CST station on Wessex actually beat the navy’s detector network in alerting Nigel to the wormholes opening above that planet. When he switched his attention there he was immediately aware of Alan Hutchinson’s command programs flooding through the Wessex cybersphere as the founder of that particular Big15 world took charge of its defenses. Multiple force fields came on around Narrabri, its megacity. The planet’s small tactical defense brigade was ordered to deploy around the perimeter, activating their ground-to-air interceptor batteries. Squadrons of combat aerobots launched from their silos to patrol the skies above the force fields.

Alan Hutchinson’s face flittered across Nigel’s consciousness, grinning savagely. Three of his aerobots fired their atom lasers, taking out incoming Prime projectiles as they hit the upper atmosphere.

“Good shooting,” Nigel said.

“Makes a decent change from finance reports,” was the gruff Aussie’s hearty comment.

Another salvo of projectiles shot out of four wormholes. They were answered by a battery of firepower from the planet below.

“Thank Christ for that,” Alan said as molten radioactive debris scudded down across the ocean. “We can hit back at the bastards.” Data coming back from the other afflicted Commonwealth worlds was depressing. Other than cities protected by force fields and aerobots, they were woefully unprepared.

“You can knock out a few missiles,” Nigel said. “But at this rate we’re going to lose. They have a thousand times our resources.”

“Well give me the good news, why don’t you.”

Both of them paused to observe the Second Chance fly into action above Anshun.

“Go, Tu Lee, go,” Nigel whispered out loud. He tried to suppress the anxiety he felt for his young descendant. Emotional distraction was the one thing he couldn’t afford right now.

Hundreds more projectiles were fired down at Wessex. Alan didn’t have enough aerobots to cover the more remote areas. Towns scattered across the continent-wide farmlands were wiped out as the Prime projectiles fell freely. “Motherfuckers,” Alan growled. “What threat did those people ever make?”

“Can you see an attack pattern in this?” Nigel asked the SI. “Is there a strategy? Or are they just trying to wipe us out?”

“The planets selected imply a double target approach,” the SI said. “The twenty-three outer worlds are a strong foothold into the Commonwealth. The acquisition of Wessex, with its gateways to phase two space planets, would allow them to occupy a huge proportion of territory, effectively eliminating the Commonwealth as a single entity, especially if they managed to occupy Earth as well.”

“They’ll never get the Narrabri station,” Nigel said harshly. “I’ll make quite sure of that.”

“They can’t know our exact response,” the SI said. “This is as exploratory for them as it is for us. The goal of securing Wessex is a logical one. They can afford to lose the venture, yet if they do obtain the gateways at Narrabri station they will have a back door into sixty developed worlds.”

“What the hell for? What do they want with us?”

“Judging by the projectile targets, we would infer they want to obtain as much human infrastructure as is practical. They are happy to eliminate the smaller civic areas to earn the larger ones. Even if they were to be repelled immediately, most of the surviving population from the twenty-three worlds under attack would have to be evacuated. The land around the cities is radioactive slag, crops are ruined, the climate has been disrupted. They are in danger of losing their H-congruous status without a huge amount of very expensive retro-forming.”

“Son of a bitch,” Nigel grunted. “You’re talking genocide.”

“Possibly.”

“Oh, Christ,” Alan exclaimed. “They’ve got her.”

Nigel watched with radar and optical sensors as the Second Chance valiantly accelerated out of orbit, struggling to shake off the surrounding Prime wormholes. Then the starship’s brilliant plasma rockets were extinguished behind a nuclear furnace of elementary particles that inflated out across five hundred kilometers.

“Son of a bitch,” Nigel barked. Tu Lee, you did a magnificent job. I’m so proud. And I will hear your laugh again.

“Goddamn,” Alan said. “I’m sorry, Nigel.”

“We can’t just sit here and take this kind of punishment,” Nigel said. “We have to show them we can fight back.”

“Admiral Kime has ordered the warships to rendezvous,” the SI said.

“I bet those alien bastards are quaking in their fucking boots. Whoa, three ships are heading their way.”

Wessex aerobots destroyed another salvo of projectiles. The Primes seemed to have stopped targeting the small towns dotted over the rest of the planet. Narrabri and its external districts were on the receiving end of just about every deluge now.

“You are not getting my station,” Nigel told them uncompromisingly. He opened a multitude of command links directly into the wormhole generator machinery of three gateways in Narrabri’s station. His secure memory store was accessed, the old memories rising out to occupy an artificial neural network, giving him all the knowledge he ever had of exotic matter, energy inverters, supergeometry, quantum math. He drew on it all, loading new directives into the machinery that generated wormholes leading to Louisiade, Malaita, and Tubuai.

Limiters and feedback dampers flashed alerts at him. Not even his control system could handle three wormholes simultaneously.

“Could use a little help here,” he told the SI.

“Very well.”

Nigel let out a small breath of relief. You never could tell when the SI was going to pitch in, or whether it would stand aloof. He guessed this invasion might actually have flustered even the great artificial intelligence. After all Vinmar was physically inside Commonwealth space.

With the SI acting as interpreter and actuator, Nigel’s role was elevated to executive only. Under his direction the SI reformatted the internal quantum structure of the three wormholes he’d designated. He retracted the exits from their distant gateways, turning them into open-ended fissures twisting through spacetime.

One of the Prime wormholes reemerged above Wessex, and Nigel struck, his pseudotelekinetic control moving icons at supersonic speed. The three CST wormhole exits materialized inside the interloper in a transdimensional intersection, creating a massive distortion that instigated huge oscillations along the alien wormhole’s energistic fabric. Power from eight of Narrabri’s nuclear power stations was pumped through the gateway machinery to amplify the instability, forcing it back toward the Prime end.

The intrusive wormhole vanished in a severe gravitational implosion, releasing a burst of ultra-hard radiation. Nigel waited, hysradar scanning space above Wessex. The Primes were down to forty-seven wormholes jumping in and out of existence. Cautions from the Malaita gateway sounded loudly, warning him that the whole machine was powering down to prevent any further damage; the excessive power loadings he’d forced through had burned out a lot of components.

“It worked,” he proclaimed.

“Of course,” the SI replied equitably.

“Can you take out the rest?” Alan asked.

“Let’s find out.”

As far as such a thing were possible, MorningLightMountain experienced a brief feeling of trepidation as it arranged its thoughts prior to launching the expansion. The alien Commonwealth was a considerable unknown, despite the Bose memories. It remembered living there, remembered what the society was like, but had only vague notions of its true industrial and military capabilities. That gave cause for concern.

There were several other stars close to its home system that had planets capable of supporting Prime life. It had already opened wormholes to eight of them, sending hundreds of millions of motiles through to begin settlements. Life-sustaining planets were much simpler to spread across than the cold, airless moons and dead asteroids of its home system. They didn’t require machines to cocoon the new settlements in a protective friendly environment. They were cheaper to establish. Already immotile groupings were amalgamating on the new planets, integrating with MorningLightMountain’s main thought routines. In a heady taste of the future, it had now spread out to exist across hundreds of light-years.

At one time that might have been sufficient. Even the first great enemy, the unknown, would have trouble constructing barriers around so many stars. But there was more than one enemy in the galaxy. It could see what would happen when its expansion ran into the obstacle of the humans and their territory. Two incompatible life-forms competing for the same planets and stars.

MorningLightMountain knew they could not coexist in a peaceful fashion. In fact, it didn’t see how ultimately it could allow any other alien to share this galaxy, there were after all only a finite number of stars. Now that it knew how, it could join every one via wormholes, it could become omnipresent. That way it could guarantee its immortality. No matter how many stars died or turned nova, it would still be alive. And the first obstacle to that was the Commonwealth, full of dangerous independent humans and their superb advanced machinery.

MorningLightMountain opened eleven hundred four wormholes, aiming at the stellar coordinates that had come from the Bose memories. Some emerged very close to their targets, others were nearby, several were half a light-year or more distant. Sensors were pushed through, collecting positional data; the information was used to refine its star chart, locking the Commonwealth stars to precise locations. The wormhole exits were realigned around its initial target planets. MorningLightMountain was interested that the Bose memories were right about the human colonization patterns; the species grossly underused the worlds they settled. Their total numbers would barely be sufficient to fill one world, let alone hundreds. Individuality was a terrible weakness.

Bombardment projectiles were sent through, aimed at the smaller habitation zones and the perimeter of larger ones. It found other targets—the human quantum sensors, communications webs, satellites, power grids—and guided its projectiles at them. MorningLightMountain’s intention was to eliminate the humans themselves while keeping their industrial centers relatively intact. Those that survived, it wanted to drive out of their buildings and disperse ineffectually across the unused land.

Force fields came on over the cities. MorningLightMountain hadn’t expected that; the Bose memories had no knowledge of such things. It couldn’t open its wormholes inside them; over the immense distance it was operating positioning them within two thousand kilometers of a planet was as close as it could get. For precise exits, it needed gateways to anchor the wormholes.

Small flying machines, aerobots, rose up around the cities, shooting projectiles. MorningLightMountain had no choice, it increased the number of projectiles it was sending through, guiding them to create the maximum damage.

When it opened the wormholes above the major world Wessex, it encountered even stronger resistance. It could see down onto the megacity that was two-thirds industrial facilities. The scale surpassed most of its own planet-based settlements, while the efficiency of the human systems with their electronic controllers went beyond anything it had achieved.

A human starship flew above Anshun, knocking out dozens of bombardment projectiles. MorningLightMountain’s response was standard, it sent through more projectiles. When the human starship began to fall in and out of its own wormhole MorningLightMountain diverted more immotile groupings to concentrate on its own wormhole generator mechanisms, shifting the energy composition to act as an inhibitor. Tens of thousands of additional immotiles focused on the problem, taking its control ability to the absolute limit. With the starship restricted to real space, it fired an overwhelming salvo of projectiles.

Something happened to one of its wormholes above Wessex. Energy surged along the disintegrating fabric of the distortion, overloading the generator mechanism that was built on one of the four giant asteroids that orbited the interstellar wormhole at the staging post. The resulting explosion knocked out the tower storing the bombardment projectiles, and even reached out to the squadron of ships waiting above it.

MorningLightMountain urgently searched through its memory of the event. As it did, another two wormholes collapsed, their energy flashbacks wrecking the generators. MorningLightMountain realized they were actually being overloaded by an external force. It switched more immotile group clusters to the problem, increasing the power to the remaining generators to counter a further five attempts at destabilization.

The struggle evolved into a contest of power capacity. MorningLightMountain was powering its wormholes from magflux extractor disks dropped into the staging post star’s corona, transferring the induced power to the asteroids via a small wormhole. Even with those providing maximum output, there was a limit to how much the wormhole generators themselves could handle. And the humans were changing their methods of attack with a speed it could not match, modifying interference patterns and resonance amplification in nanoseconds. They, too, seemed to have unlimited power to draw on.

A further twenty-seven wormhole generators either exploded or twisted into molten ruin. MorningLightMountain ended its attempted capture of Wessex, diverting the remaining wormholes to planets where there was no interference. On most of them the results of the bombardment projectiles were disappointing. But the human defenses were slowly being beaten back by the sheer quantity of projectiles it was firing through. It halted the projectiles, and flew the first ships through into the Commonwealth.

Altogether, it had gathered a fleet of forty-eight thousand for its preliminary expansion stage.

It was getting crowded at the center of Wilson’s tactical display. The ghostly image of Elaine Doi herself had joined him, along with Nigel Sheldon, their spectral presence giving his orders supreme executive authority. To advise on tactics and technology he had the shades of Dimitri Leopoldovich and Tunde Sutton floating in attendance behind him.

Right now he would have welcomed a genuine spook, a psychic who could tell him what was coming next, or at least take a good guess. They were watching the last of the Prime projectiles rushing down over twenty-one besieged planets—he considered that ominous while everyone else was overjoyed. Wessex had successfully banished the alien wormholes, but Olivenza and Balya had dropped out of the unisphere when their station force fields were breached. The CST planetary station on Anshun had switched off their connecting gateways.

“Can’t you overload the remaining alien wormholes?” Doi asked Nigel. She was keen for further victories.

“I burned out eighteen of our wormhole generators taking out thirty of theirs,” Nigel said. “Do the math. That’s not a good ratio. Without wormholes we don’t have a Commonwealth. In any case, I doubt we have enough power reserves right now.”

Wilson said nothing. He’d watched helplessly as Sheldon sucked more and more power out of the Commonwealth power grid. All of the Big15 worlds had switched to niling d-sink reserves as their nuclear generators were called on. Earth had suffered an unprecedented complete civil power loss as Sheldon diverted the entire lunar output to support his space-warping battle above Wessex; while every other world in phase one and two space had experienced blackouts and brownouts as their domestic generators were put on front-line duty. For a while it had been touch and go: several city force fields had flickered alarmingly from the power loss. Right now everyone was busy recharging their storage facilities.

It had been a desperate exercise, although Wilson had to admit there had been no alternative. But if the Primes had chosen that moment to launch a further wave of attacks, the results would have been catastrophic. Wilson had been reduced to praying.

“You mean they’re here to stay?” Doi asked.

“For the moment, yes,” Wilson said.

“For the love of God, the money we gave you …”

“Enough to commission three warships,” Wilson snapped back. “I’m not even sure three hundred would have been enough today.”

“The aerobots and force fields have done a damn good job,” Rafael said. “Without them the damage would have been considerably greater.”

“But the casualties,” the President said. “Good God, man, we’ve lost two million people.”

“More than that,” Anna said soberly. “A lot more.”

“And it’s going to rise,” Wilson said, deliberately harsh. “Dimitri, can you give us some options on their next move?”

“They have softened us up,” the Russian academic said. “Occupation is the logical follow-up. You must be prepared for a full-scale invasion.”

“Tunde, what’s the ecological damage level on the assaulted worlds?”

“In a word, bad. Anshun took the worst pounding. The storms are just beginning there, at the very least they’ll spread the radioactive fallout right over the planet. The Primes don’t use particularly clean fusion bombs. Decontamination would cost a fortune, even if it was practical—which I doubt. Cheaper to evacuate and ship everyone to a new phase three planet. The other worlds are in varying stages of climate breakdown and nuclear pollution. Given our general population’s attitude to nuclear and environmental issues, I’d say nobody will want to stay on anyway.”

“I agree,” Wilson said. “I want to begin evacuation today.”

“On all of them?” Doi asked. “I can’t consent to that. Where the hell would they all go?”

“Friends, relatives, hotels, government camps. Who cares. That’s not my problem. We need to get everyone left alive on those planets under the force fields, then get them out. I want our military reserve shipped out there to help; every paramilitary officer, every police tactical assault squad; all the aerobots we can spare. Between them the planetary governments have enough combat personnel to put together a reasonable sized army. Madam President, I’ll need you to sign an executive order putting them under Admiral Columbia’s command.”

“I … I’m not sure.”

“I’ll back you up,” Nigel said. “And so will the Intersolar Dynasties. Wilson’s right, we need to get this moving.”

“Can you get wormholes opened in the other cities on those planets?” Wilson asked. “We’ll never be able to transport everyone to the capitals.”

“Narrabri station’s gateways aren’t in great shape right now,” Nigel said. “But we’ll cope, the whole goddamn train network is shut down anyway. We can divert the gateways we have left on Wessex, but it won’t be for trains. People will have to get through on foot, or buses.”

“What about Olivenza and Balya?”

“We can use the Anshun exploratory division’s wormhole to reestablish contact, see if there’s anyone left alive.”

“The Prime wormholes have stopped moving around,” Rafael said. “Oh, Christ on a crutch, here they come.”

Radar and visual sensors showed Prime ships flying out of the wormholes above each of the besieged worlds.

“If they start landing you can forget trying to evacuate anybody,” Dimitri said. “There’s no time. We have to knock out their center of operations, hit their wormholes on the other side, where they’re vulnerable.”

“How long until the starships reach Anshun?” Wilson asked.

“Two are already at the rendezvous point,” Anna said. “Another eight hours until the final one gets there.”

“Son of a bitch! Rafael, start the evacuation of everyone in the capitals right away. We’ll get them clear at least.”

“I’ll get wormholes opened to the other protected cities,” Nigel said.

“What about the people left outside?” Doi said. “In God’s name we have to do something for them.”

“We will see what we can do to assist,” the SI said.

It took Mark forty minutes, but he eventually got the Ables pickup working again. A whole load of circuitry had burned out, stuff he managed to jury-rig or bypass. Liz and Carys spent the time packing, bringing out a couple of cases of clothes and all of the family’s camping gear.

“I think the cybersphere is coming back,” Liz said as she dumped the last bag in the back of the pickup. “The house array is bringing up a basic communications menu.”

“The house array is working?” he asked in surprise. There had been a lot more than simple electronic damage. Most of the windows had blown in, even the triple-glazed ones, covering every room with shards of broken glass. Seeing what the blast had done to their home was almost as big a shock as witnessing the explosion, and infinitely more upsetting. It was as if each room had been deliberately, maliciously vandalized.

Even so, Mark reckoned they must have got off lighter than most. At least their drycoral house was all domes, allowing the worst of the blastwave pressure to slip smoothly over it; flat vertical walls would have taken a bad pounding. He couldn’t bear looking out over the vineyards; almost every row had been knocked flat. It was the same all the way down the Ulon Valley as far as he could see.

“I can’t interface with it,” Liz said. “But the backup monitor screen in the utility room survived, so I could type in a few commands. Ninety percent of the system has crashed, and I can’t get the reload and repair program to run. The network operation protocol is about the only thing that is there; it’s definitely hooked into the valley node. The cable is fiber-optic, it can survive a lot worse than this.”

“Did you try calling anyone?”

“Sure. I went for the Dunbavands and the Conants first. Nothing. Then I tried the Town Hall; I even tried the Black House. Nobody’s home.”

“Or they don’t realize the system’s rebuilding itself; it’ll take time even with genetic algorithms restructuring around the damage.”

“They probably never will find out if their inserts are screwed like ours. Who knows how to work a keyboard these days.”

“I do,” Barry said.

Mark put his arms around his son. The boy still had dirt and tears smeared over his face. He seemed to be recovering from the shock, though. “That’s because you’re brilliant,” Mark told him.

“Clouds coming,” Carys said. She was looking to the north, where long streamers of white vapor were sliding low and fast over the Dau’sings. They were like fluffy spears heading toward the smog-clotted remains of the Regents.

Liz eyed them wearily. “Going to rain before long. Heavy rain.” She turned to Mark. “So which way are we heading?”

“It’s a long way to the gateway,” he said.

“If it’s still there,” Carys said. “They used a nuke to take out a remote detector station, God knows what they hit the CST station with. And that highway is one very long, very exposed route. Then we have to cross an ocean.”

“There’s no other way out,” he said.

“You know we have to check on the others,” Liz said. “I want to get the children to safety, more than anything, but we have to know where safe is. And right now I’m not convinced it’s the other side of the Dau’sings.”

Mark glanced up at the sky, suddenly fearful of the sight. He’d never realized before how open it was. “Suppose … they come?”

“Here?” Carys was scathing. “Sorry, you guys, but come on. Randtown isn’t exactly the strategic center of the universe. Without the detector station this is nothing.”

“You’re probably right,” Mark said. “Okay, we’ll head for town, and check in with a few neighbors on the way.”

“Good enough plan,” Liz said. “We need to know what’s happening on the rest of Elan, and the Commonwealth. If the government makes any attempt to contact us, it’ll be at the town.”

“If there is a government,” Carys said.

Liz gave her a sharp glance. “There will be.”

“Into the pickup,” Mark told the kids. They clambered into the backseat without a word. An equally subdued Panda quickly jumped up with them. He almost ordered the dog out, then relented. They needed every bit of comfort they could get right now. All of them.

“I’ll follow you,” Carys said.

“Okay. Keep your handheld array on.” They’d dug out three old models from the house that had been switched off when the emp washed over the valley. It had been simple enough for Mark to alter their programs so they could be used as basic communicators, giving them a five-mile range.

Carys gave a backward wave of reassurance as she made her way over to the MG. To Mark’s complete surprise and grudging respect, the sports car’s systems had survived the emp almost intact.

“You’d better take this,” Liz said. She handed him his hunting rifle, a high-power laser with a low-light focus lock sight. “I checked it, it still works.”

“God, Liz.” He snatched a hurried, guilty glance at the kids. “What for?”

“People can behave badly in times of stress. And I’m not convinced the way Carys is about the Primes leaving us alone.” She opened her jacket to show an ion pistol in a shoulder holster.

“Holy shit. Where did that come from?”

“A friend. Mark, we live kilometers from anywhere, and you were away from home during the day.”

“But … a gun!”

“I’m just being practical, baby, a girl should know how to look after herself.”

“Right,” he said dumbly. Today it didn’t seem important, somehow. In fact, he was rather glad she’d got it. He climbed up into the front of the pickup, and drove it off down the long track to the main valley road.

Randtown was still standing. Sort of. The Regents had deflected the worst of the blast upward, but the terrible distorted pressure waves that had rushed out from the mountains had easily reached the town.

Composite and metal paneling had been twisted and torn off every building. The crumpled rectangles were strewn everywhere: on the pavements, embedded in other buildings, the lighter ones floating in the Trine’ba. Thick insulation blankets were flapping freely off the naked structural girders. Roofs were skeletal outlines, almost completely devoid of their solar panels. Strangest of all was the sparkle. The whole town glittered under a coating of prismatic rainbows. Each and every window in Randtown had shattered, flinging out splinters and granules in long plumes that fell across the pavements and streets, as if sacks of diamonds had been spilled out.

Mark stopped the pickup on Low West Street, barely a couple of hundred meters off the highway. “My God, I didn’t know there was this much glass on the whole planet, let alone here.”

“Can the tires take that?” Liz asked. She was looking along the street, trying to see if anyone was around. Several pillars of smoke were rising over the broken roofs, closer to the center of town.

“Should do. They’re gelfoam.”

“Okay then.” Liz brought the handheld array up to her mouth. “Carys, we’re going in. Can the MG handle this?”

“MG will be having a nasty talk with my lawyers if it doesn’t.”

Mark leaned out of the side window. David and Lydia Dunbavand were riding in the back, sitting on the bags of camping gear; while all three of the Dunbavand kids were squashed into the MG with Carys. Behind that, the Conants’ four-by-four was acting as rear guard; Yuri had fixed it when they arrived at their homestead.

“Going in,” he called back to them.

David brought his maser wand up. “Okeydokey, we’ll keep sharp.”

Mark shook his head as he toed the accelerator. What was it with disasters and people with guns? The pickup moved forward slowly, its big tires making a constant crunching sound on the road’s crystalline coating.

They found the residents as they got closer to the center. Almost everyone caught outside during the blast was injured to some degree. People walking along the pavements had been badly wounded by wall panels slicing through the air. Those who avoided the panels had been inevitably caught in the shotgun bombardment of glass. A lot had suffered both kinds of impacts.

As they approached the top end of Main Mall the road was jammed solid with parked vehicles. Mark braked the pickup, and they all got out to walk. “Leave Panda inside,” Liz told the children. “She can’t walk on this, her paws will be shredded.”

The dog started barking piteously as they left the vehicles behind.

Half of Main Mall’s buildings were bent over at perilous angles, their structural girders pushed beyond their tolerance-loading by the ferocity of the air that had surged against them. The town’s commercial heart had been busy at the time, with the cafés full of people having leisurely lunches, pavement tables crammed full, the street packed with window shoppers.

“Oh, Jesus God,” Mark groaned as he took in the sight. He felt dizzy and faint, needing to hold on to the nearest bowed wall for support.

It wasn’t the people still lying there. Nor the teams working to free the remaining trapped victims. Not the triage teams bandaging up the cuts and lacerations. Even the dreadful wailing and moaning he could have withstood. It was the blood. Blood covered everything. The pavement slabs weren’t even visible through the clogging burgundy fluid that had run down the whole length of the slope. The piles of glass were mushy with it. Buckled walls were caked in atrocious splatter patterns that had already darkened to black. People were soaked in it, their skin, their clothes. The air was thick with its tang-stench.

Mark bent double and vomited over his boots.

“Back,” Liz ordered the children. “Come on, back to the pickup.”

She propelled the kids along. Lydia and David hurried to help. Sandy and Ellie and Ed were all crying. Barry and Will looked like they were about to. The adults formed a little protective curtain, pushing gently.

“We’ll find out if there’s any sort of plan around here,” Carys called after them.

“Okay,” Liz said. She was fighting her own revulsion. “Stay in touch.”

“How about you?” Carys asked Mark. “You okay?”

“No I’m goddamn not.” He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Jesus!” The shock had turned him cold. He hadn’t expected this. The end of the world was supposed to be final, an infinite nothing. That would have been a blessing. Instead they had to endure the aftermath, a world of pain and gore and suffering.

“You’ll cope,” Carys said unsympathetically. “You have to. Come on, let’s see if we can help.”

Yuri Conant helped Mark stand straight. He didn’t look too good, either. Olga had a cloth pressed firmly over her mouth; above it her eyes were damp.

The four of them made their way down Main Mall, boots making a vile slushing sound at each footstep. Things clung to their soles. Mark got a rag out of his overalls, and tied it over his nose and mouth.

“Mark?” a girl called.

It was Mandy from Two For Tea. She was one of a little group clustered around a middle-aged man whose leg was badly torn. Makeshift bandages had been wrapped around the wounds, already heavily stained. A rough spike of rusty metal was sticking through the cloth, obviously deeply embedded in his flesh. One of the women was trying to get him to swallow painkillers.

“Are you hurt?” Mark asked her. Her face was filthy with grime and flecks of dry blood, with clear lines of skin on her cheeks where the tears had rolled. Her arms and apron were covered in blood.

“Some cuts,” she said. “Nothing bad. I’ve been trying to help people ever since.” Her voice came close to cracking. “What about Barry and Sandy, are they all right?”

“Yeah, they’re fine. It wasn’t so bad out in the valley.”

“What did we do, Mark? Why did they do this to us? We never hurt them.” She started sobbing. He put his arms around her, holding her gently. “We did nothing,” he assured her.

“Then why?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“I hate them.”

“Can you folks lend a hand here,” one of the others tending the injured man said. “We can move him now.”

“Move him where?” Carys asked.

“The hospital’s running, they got some power back. Simon took charge.”

“Where is it?”

“Two streets away,” Mark said automatically.

“We’ll take him,” Yuri said.

Even with a makeshift stretcher, it was hard going. There was so much debris to negotiate, and the Chinese restaurant on the corner of Matthews and Second Street was on fire. Without the firebots and volunteer fire service, the flames had really taken hold, threatening to spread to other buildings. They had to make a long detour down one of the alleys that branched off from Matthews. As they walked on, the light gradually grew dimmer. Clouds covered the sky, spinning in a slow cyclone formation centered around the Regents. Thicker, darker clouds were scudding in fast from the horizon. Rain was already falling at the far end of Trine’ba, a broad curtain sweeping toward the town. At least it ought to stop the fires, Mark thought.

A big crowd of people were milling around on the lawns at the front of the General Hospital. They parted reluctantly to let Mark’s group carry the stretcher through. Lights were on inside, and some of the medical equipment was functioning. The casualty department was already crammed with children and the most seriously wounded adults. Reception had been taken up by deep wounds and blood loss trauma. The nurse on entrance assessment took a quick look at the man they’d brought, declared him noncritical, and told them to find a place in the hallway for him. A team of people with brushes and shovels were still clearing away the shattered glass from the polished floorboards. Mark found a section they’d just cleaned, and set the patient down.

When he stood up he saw Simon Rand striding down the middle of the hallway, his orange robes hanging like ordinary cloth. Even Simon had been hit by glass; there was a long healskin patch on his hand, another on the bottom of his neck. His entourage was smaller than usual. A young woman walked beside him, dressed in a black top and jeans. It was Mellanie Rescorai, still enchantingly beautiful despite the sober determined expression locked on her face. Mark wasn’t at all surprised that she didn’t have a mark on her.

She saw him staring and offered a little rueful smile.

“Well there you go,” Carys said. “Just when you think your day can’t possibly get any worse.”

Mark trailed after Simon and Mellanie, with Carys, Yuri, and Olga following on behind. Simon reached the cracked and sagging marble portico at the front of the General Hospital, and raised his arms. “People, if you could gather around.”

The crowd on the lawns moved closer. There were a lot of dark angry looks directed at Mellanie.

She faced the crowd unflinchingly. “I know I’m not the most popular person in town right now,” she told them. “But I do have a link back into the unisphere. To give you a brief summary of what’s happening, twenty-four planets in the Commonwealth have been attacked.”

As she was talking Mark brought up the handheld array he was carrying. It couldn’t find a single network route back to the planetary cybersphere, let alone the unisphere. “No you haven’t,” he muttered.

Mellanie glanced over to him. She’d just finished telling them about Wessex beating off their assault. Her hand waved unobtrusively, fingers fluttering in a small echo of her virtual interface. Mark’s handheld array suddenly had a link to a unisphere node in Runwich; it was very low capacity, just enough to give him basic data functions. “I’m a reporter,” she said quietly. “I have some long-range inserts.”

That wasn’t right. Mark knew how networks functioned, and what she was saying was rubbish. He couldn’t puzzle out how she’d given him the link.

“Right now, the navy is organizing evacuations of every assaulted planet,” Mellanie said to the crowd. “CST’s Wessex station is arranging to open its remaining wormholes at every isolated community. Including us. It’s a difficult operation without a gateway at the far end, but the SI is helping them govern the process.”

Simon stepped forward. “It will be painful to leave, I know. But we must face reality here today, people. The hospital can’t cope. The rest of the planet is still suffering attacks of varying magnitude. Don’t think of this as evacuation, we are regrouping, that’s all. I will return. I will build my house anew. I would hope that all of you will come back with me.”

“When are we leaving?” Yuri asked. “How long have we got?”

“The navy’s drawing up a list,” Mellanie said. “We have to make sure that when the wormhole opens everyone from the surrounding countryside is here and ready to leave. We all go through at once.”

“Where are we on the list?” a voice from the crowd shouted.

Mellanie gave Simon a tense look.

“We’re number eight hundred and seventy-six,” Simon said.

The crowd was silent. Even Mark felt letdown. But at least there is a way out. He asked the handheld array to check if that was right, that they were truly that far down the list.

“Look at your little friend,” Carys said; her eyes were fixed on Mellanie. “She’s getting bad news.”

Mark glanced over in time to see Mellanie half turning from the crowd, hiding her face from them. Her eyes were wide with alarm. She mouthed some kind of obscenity and tugged at Simon’s robe. The two of them went into a huddle.

Mark told the handheld array to track down all official information on the current Elan situation. “No data available,” it told him bluntly.

Simon was holding his hands up again, appealing to the crowd who’d been watching him and Mellanie anxiously. “Slight change of plan,” he called above the edgy muttering. “We need to get out of town, now. If you have a vehicle that works, please drive it to the bus station. We will leave for the Highmarsh in convoy. That is where the wormhole will be opened. Can I ask all the able-bodied to help with carrying the injured to the station. Anyone with technical knowledge, we need the buses running; report to the station engineering office when you get there.”

People were starting to call out: “Why?”

“What’s happening?”

“Talk to us, Simon.”

“Tell us.”

Mellanie stood beside him. “The aliens are coming,” she said simply, and pointed at the sky behind them.

The crowd turned in unison to look at the dark rain clouds above the Trine’ba. There were two distinct patches of white fluorescence up there, as if a pair of suns were shining through. They were getting bigger and brighter.

It was the show of her lifetimes. Alessandra Baron knew nothing else would ever match live coverage of an alien attack. Thankfully she’d had the presence of mind to change out of her glamorous dress into the prim gray suit her wardrobe department kept ready for disasters and general bad news events. Now she sat masterfully behind her studio desk, perfect as moderator and guide while holograms of analysts, politicians, and junior navy officers flicked in and out of the show to answer her questions. They were interspaced with direct feeds from the assaulted planets whenever Bunny, the show’s producer, could get a decent link. The fact that the unisphere could be affected, that communications she’d taken for granted her whole lives suddenly now weren’t universal and guaranteed, troubled Alessandra almost as much as the nuclear explosions, though she kept her expression professionally impassive the whole time. And as for the shocking power losses when Wessex fought off the Prime wormholes, it brought everyone close to the battle, giving them a sense of involvement.

In the studio production office, Bunny was running multiple parallel information streams for accessors, summarizing the status of events on each of the twenty-four planets. The streams for Olivenza and Balya were ominously empty and had been for some time, while Alessandra’s virtual vision provided a grid of powerful images available from various reporters unlucky enough to be close to the front line. Force fields over cities constantly flared with shimmering opalescence as they warded off either debris or a howling radioactive hurricane. Reporters foolhardy enough to be standing close to the force fields revealed the new wastelands outside: eerily smooth craters with glowing basins surrounded by flat ground that had become a desert of midnight-black carbon. Then there were the human interest stories, interviews with terrified, barely coherent city residents as they wept. Those from outlying towns who’d made it inside the force fields in time. Those whose family and friends were still outside somewhere. All of their suffering and sorrow and rage skillfully woven into a story tapestry that made sure accessors could never leave.

Bunny and Alessandra played strong on one theme, always letting through the same overriding question: Where’s the navy? Time after time they replayed the spectacular nova-bright explosion of the Second Chance as she died in battle above Anshun.

The feeds from the assaulted planets made Alessandra grateful she was safe on Augusta, hundreds of light-years behind the front line. She asked Ainge about that, an analyst from the StPetersburg Institute for Strategic Studies whose hologram was sitting beside her.

“I think it’s significant that they’re only assaulting our worlds closest to Dyson Alpha,” Ainge said. “It implies a range limit on their wormhole generators.”

“But Wessex is a hundred light-years inside the boundary of phase three space,” Alessandra said.

“Yes, but from a tactical point of view it was worth the expenditure risk trying to capture it. If they’d been successful, we would have lost a considerable portion of phase two space. That would almost have guaranteed our ultimate loss. As it is, we’re going to have trouble fighting back. We know the kind of resources they have available; it could well be we never regain the twenty-three outer planets.”

“In your professional opinion, can we win this war?”

“Not today. We need a radical rethink of our strategy. We also need time, which is a factor very much dictated by the Primes.”

“The navy says its warships are on the way to assist the assaulted planets. How do you rate their chances?”

“I’d need more information before I can give you a realistic assessment. It all depends on how well defended the Prime wormholes are. Admiral Kime has to succeed in sending a warship through to attack their staging post. That’s the only way to slow them down.”

Bunny was telling Alessandra that Mellanie had come on-line.

“I thought Randtown had dropped out of Elan’s cybersphere,” Alessandra said.

“It is, but she’s found some way through.”

“Good girl. Has she got anything interesting?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m giving her live access. Stand by.”

Alessandra saw a new grid image appear in her virtual vision. It shifted into prime feed position.

Mellanie was in some kind of open-air bus station, a big square expanse of tarmac with a passenger waiting lounge along one side. Every window had been blown out along the front of the building, with the support pillars bent and half of the solar collector roof missing. Despite how bright it was outside, a heavy rain was falling from a cloud-veiled sky. The relentless deluge was making life even more miserable for the hundreds of people swarming through the station. A full-scale exodus was in progress. Queues were trailing back from a logjam of stationary buses, the able-bodied paired with the moderately injured, helping them along. Four buses had been converted into makeshift ambulances, their seats removed and slung out to pile up beside the wrecked waiting lounge. The badly injured were being carried on board on crude stretchers; a lot of them were in a bad way, with their wounds being treated in the most primitive fashion, wrapped in cloth bandages rather than healskin.

Engineers were clustered around open hatches on the sides of the buses, rewiring the superconductor batteries. Alessandra glimpsed Mark Vernon in one repair group, working away furiously. But Mellanie didn’t pause in her establishing scan. The roads around the station were packed with four-by-fours and pickup trucks that were stuffed full of kids and uninjured adults.

“Mellanie,” Alessandra said. “Glad to see you’re still with us. What’s the situation there in Randtown?”

“Take a look at this,” Mellanie said in a flat voice.

Her visual sweep continued until she was looking down across the broken town. The bus station was obviously at the back of Randtown, where the ground started rising into foothills. It was a position that gave her a view out over the shattered roofs to the Trine’ba beyond. She raised her head to the mass of thick black clouds roofing the giant lake. Finally, Alessandra understood why it was so bright.

Fifty kilometers away, the rucked thunderclouds were sprouting a pair of radiant tumors, huge writhing bulges that were billowing downward. She watched the base of the largest burst apart as eight slender lines of solid sunlight sliced down through it to strike the surface of the lake. Steam detonated out from the impact, sending a circular cascade of blazing mist soaring across the heaving water. The light was so intense it threw the town and countryside into stark monochrome. Mellanie’s retinal inserts brought up their strongest filters, though they could barely cope. Most of the townspeople in the bus station were cowering away from it, bringing their forearms up to cover their eyes. Screams and shouts of panic were coming from all around. They were quickly smothered as a strident roaring sound reached the town, rattling the remaining buildings. It grew steadily louder until Mellanie’s whole skeleton was thrumming painfully. The image that her retinal inserts fed back to Alessandra’s studio was reduced to a blurred black and white profile. Directly over Randtown the clouds were in torment, savaged by conflicting high-velocity pressure fronts. The chittering rain changed in seconds, curving with the wind to streak along almost horizontally, each drop stinging sharply as it hit unprotected skin.

“Plasma drives,” Mellanie screamed above the never-ending thunderclap. “Those are ships coming down.”

The second tumor of cloud ripped open as it was lanced by eight more incandescent spears. Mellanie finally had to cover her eyes, turning the image to a single bloodred haze as her hand came close to translucent. Even through the lashing rain, the heat pouring out of the plasma was greater than any noonday desert sun. The raindrops were steaming as they bulleted through the air.

There was a slight decrease in the light level. Mellanie brought her hand down. A ship had descended out of the clouds, a dark cone shape riding the vivid glare of its rigid plasma exhausts. Then it vanished behind the massive wall of radiant steam gushing up from the lake.

“Did you see that?” Mellanie screamed raw-throated. “They’re coming.”

“Get out of there.” Eighty billion accessors saw Alessandra’s poise crack. “Don’t compromise your safety: run.”

“We can’t …” The image vanished in a scattering of purple static.

Alessandra froze behind the desk. She cleared her throat. “That report from Mellanie Rescorai, one of the most promising and talented newcomers to join our team for several years. The prayers from all of us here in the studio are with her. And now, over to Garth West, who was covering the flower festival on Sligo. What’s it like there, Garth, any sign of Prime landing ships, yet?”

“Ships now approaching upper atmosphere on Anshun, Elan, Whalton, Pomona, and Nattavaara,” Anna reported in a calm voice.

As the Prime ships reached the stratosphere, aerobots started shooting. Everyone sharing Wilson’s tactical display watched intently as the energy weapons locked on and sliced upward. They had little effect. Wilson heard a couple of dismayed curses. The force fields protecting the descending ships were too powerful to penetrate with the medium-caliber weaponry carried by the aerobots. Then the Primes began targeting the small aggressors below them.

“Get them out of there,” Wilson said. “Regroup them around the protected cities. We’ll need them later.”

“I’ll see to it,” Rafael said.

“Did we hit any of them?” Nigel asked.

“No, sir,” Anna said. “Not one; their force fields are too strong.”

“Atmospheric entry on Belembe, Martaban, Sligo, Balkash, Samar, Molina, and Kozani. They’re coming through the wormholes at the rate of one per forty seconds. Trajectories variable, they’re not concentrating on the capital cities. They seem to be heading for coastlines.”

“Coastlines?”

“Getting visual imagery.”

Various image feeds appeared in the huge tactical display, each one showing pictures of brilliant streamers cutting across skies of varying colors.

“They’re big bastards,” Rafael commented. “Thousands of tons each.”

“Those are fusion plumes,” Tunde Sutton said. “Temperature profile and spectral signature indicate a deuterium reaction.”

“Confirm, they’re heading for water landings,” Anna said.

“Makes sense,” Nigel said. “Even with force fields I wouldn’t like to land one of those on solid ground.”

“That gives us a breathing space,” Wilson said. “They’re going to have to come ashore. And it will be in smaller vehicles. We might be able to get some reinforcements to the capitals and the larger towns.”

“Last aerobots squadrons are being withdrawn from range,” Anna said.

“Our reinforcement is taking too much time,” Rafael said. “Anybody who has any kind of military capability is reluctant to let go of it.”

“Get your office working on that,” Wilson told the President. “We have to show people we can put up a coherent resistance.”

“I’ll talk to Patricia.”

“You’ll need to lean on heads of state personally,” Nigel said.

“Very well.” If Doi resented the bullying she didn’t show it.

“How about the evacuation?” Wilson asked.

“We’re already running trains from Anshun, Martaban, Sligo, Nattavaara, and Kozani,” Nigel said. “I’m shunting them through Wessex directly to Earth. After that they’ll get allocated a final destination, all I’m concerned about is getting them clear of their origin. We’re about ready to try shutting the Trusbal gateway on Wessex and reopening it in Bitran on Sligo; there’s a lot of flower festival tourists trapped there.”

“Any Prime ships near there?” Wilson asked.

“Twelve on their way,” Anna said. “But Bitran is a hundred thirty kilometers from the coast. There should be time.”

For the next thirty minutes Wilson watched the shifting data in his display, showing him the flow of military equipment and personnel converging on Wessex. CST staff and the SI eventually managed to get the wormhole open and stable inside the Bitran force fields. Refugees stormed through on foot and in every vehicle the city had. They then became a problem for Wessex’s Narrabri station workforce, which had to direct them onto passenger trains to move them along. The sheer volume of people appearing so far away from any passenger terminus was completely outside any of the planetary station’s contingency plans. Eventually they cleared a set of rails, cordoning them off with caution holograms, and hustled everyone along the six kilometers to the nearest platform. Trains hurtled by on either side of them. Empty carriages going to the assaulted worlds; badly overcrowded carriages racing back. Cargo trains loaded with aerobots and armed troops from all over the Commonwealth, hurrying to reinforce the isolated cities.

As the CST managers and the SI managed to divert more gateway wormholes to the evacuation effort, so the marshaling yard turned into an ad hoc staging post. Cargo trains pulled up in sidings, and the aerobots they carried launched from there to fly through the wormholes above the heads of the refugees. Platoons of troops in bulky armor marched along, earning appreciative cheers and applause.

The first main effort was directed at Anshun’s capital, Treloar. Wilson wanted it kept intact with a functioning station so that aerobots could be channeled through and deployed around Anshun’s remaining shielded cities. Squadrons from thirty-five worlds were assigned to it, their arrival scheduled as fast as CST’s struggling rail network could deliver them.

As the first ones arrived in Treloar they flew through temporary gaps in the force field and started to spread out toward the coast. Two hundred Prime ships had already splashed down on Anshun and over a thousand more were in various stages of descent. Wilson didn’t like to think what effect that would have on the planet’s already-reeling environment. But then he’d seen Dyson Alpha’s sole habitable world and the fusion ships that swirled constantly above it. The Primes didn’t have the same priorities as humans.

“Scouts launching from Treloar,” Anna reported. “The Primes have landed just off a coastal town called Scraptoft. That’s sixty kilometers away. Should be getting pictures any minute.”

Wilson turned to the video display relayed from the lead scout as it left Treloar. It was flying at Mach nine, its pilot array holding it steady twenty meters above the ground. Behind it, a swath of soil a hundred meters wide was being ruptured by its furious wake, the torn air pulverizing trees, bushes, plants, and the occasional building it flew over. As it neared the shoreline hundreds of small stealthed sensor drones were ejected from the fuselage, building up a much wider image.

When it shot out over the cliff at Scraptoft, it revealed thirty Prime ships floating on the sea amid a dense swirl of agitated steam. The big cones were almost completely black, surrounded by sparkling force fields. Halfway up each superstructure, tall doorways had hinged outward to form horizontal platforms. Smaller craft were flying out of the openings, squat gray cylinders with metallic beetle legs folded up underneath. Three energy beams struck the scout, and the image vanished immediately.

The stealthed sensors scattered behind the scout watched the Prime flyers slide in over the sea, mapping their electrical, thermal, magnetic, and mechanical structure, along with their weapon and force field parameters. There were several types, some that were nothing but flying weapons platforms, while the larger ones were carrying small units of some kind that were protected by individual force fields.

“That’s got to be them,” Nigel muttered. Even now, he was curious what they might look like. Combat aerobots screamed in toward Scraptoft at Mach twelve. Prime flyers arched around to intercept. The sky between them was ruptured by energy beams and explosions, turning to a huge patch of electrically charged gas. Lightning bolts flashed outward, clawing at the ground for kilometers around.

Eight of the big Prime landing ships coming down through the atmosphere altered their trajectory slightly. Their fusion exhausts swept across the coastline, creating instant devastation. Soil and rock melted, flowing away from the superheated beams of plasma. Waves of thick glowing vapor spewed out, boiling high above the clouds until they were pulled apart by the jetstreams. Meters above the ground, aerobots and Prime flyers alike vectored around in high-gee maneuvers in an attempt to avoid the miasma of incendiary particles. The eight Prime landing ships were poised fifteen kilometers above Scraptoft, balanced on their drive exhausts. They started to fire their weapons, blasting the aerobots out of the sky.

Nigel watched the tsunami of filthy smog roll across the land. It was over twenty kilometers high, and spreading wide as the eight giant ships continued to hang there with their fusion fire searing into the ground. The front engulfed Treloar’s force field, bringing an abrupt night to the city.

Screened by the pollution, the Prime flyers began to touch down around Scraptoft’s outskirts. Stealthed sensors continued their quiet transmissions, showing what they could see through the dark oppressive vapors asphyxiating the land. A visual spectrum sensor locked on to one of the flyers that had landed in the smoldering ruins of a tourist complex. Sections of the cylindrical fuselage had opened, extending ramps. Aliens walked down, their bodies encased in suits of dark armor reinforced by force fields.

“Taller than us,” Nigel observed dispassionately.

“Weird walk,” Wilson replied. He was watching the creature’s four legs, the way they bent, the curving feet shaped like blunt claws. His gaze moved up the torso to the four arms; each one was holding a weapon. The top of the suit was a squat hemisphere divided into four sections, each one replicating the same sensor arrangement.

“There’s a lot of electromagnetic activity around them,” Rafael said. “They’re communicating with each other and the flyer on a continual basis. The flyers are in contact with the landing ships, ditto the ships that are going into orbit. The signals look very similar to the ones you recorded at Dyson Alpha.”

“Tu Lee reported that the missiles required continual guidance updates,” Tunde Sutton said.

“Meaning what?” Rafael asked.

“Possibly, the Prime commanders don’t allow for a lot of independence on the battlefront.”

“Okay,” Wilson said. “Anna, have we got any electronic warfare systems we can deploy?”

“There are several EW aerobots on the central registry.”

“Good. Get them out there fast. Close down those links. Let’s see if that has any effect on them.”

Randtown had finally given in to panic. As soon as the alien ships had splashed down on the Trine’ba, the vehicles parked around the bus station began to move as families headed out for the perceived safety of the valleys behind the town. Horns blared in fury, their combined racket almost as loud as the ships’ exhaust. There were collisions all along the road as they made U-turns or accelerated out from the curb where they’d been waiting.

Mark kept glancing around at the chaos as he worked with Napo Langsal on the power supply of a bus. The two of them had almost rigged a bypass around the superconductor battery regulator.

“They’re losing it big time,” Mark grunted.

The queue for the bus had turned into a violent scrum around the open door, shoving had deteriorated into the first fists being thrown. He and Napo were being shouted at and threatened, anything to get the bus working.

A shotgun was fired in the center of the bus station. Everyone paused for a second. Mark had ducked immediately, now he cautiously lifted his head. It was Simon Rand who’d fired the antique pump action weapon straight into the air.

“Thank you for your attention, ladies and gentlemen,” Simon said, his loud bass voice carrying right across the station as he turned a complete circle. Even people scrambling around the vehicles outside had paused to listen. “Nothing has changed our immediate situation, so you will stick to the plan we drew up.” He pumped the shotgun, the spent cartridge twirling away. “There are enough buses to carry everyone out, and they will leave shortly, so kindly stop harassing the engineers. Now, in order to guarantee that we can all reach the Highmarsh safely, I will require a volunteer team to stay here in town with me and act as a rear guard to allow the convoy to get a head start. Anyone with a weapon, please report to the passenger waiting lounge to receive your instructions.” He lowered the shotgun.

“Holy Christ,” Napo grunted.

Mark closed the cable box, and pressed the reset button. “How’s that?” he called up to the driver. The woman gave him a thumbs-up. “You get along to the next bus,” he told Napo.

Napo gave Mark’s hunting laser a dubious glance. “He can’t make you, you know.”

“I know.” Mark looked toward the two vast clouds of steam squatting over the Trine’ba, obscuring the ships. The surface was still reeling from their splashdown, with big waves rolling ashore, washing over the wall that ran alongside the promenade. “But he’s right. People need time to get clear.”

Dudley Bose gave Mellanie a panicked look as they approached the bus. The crowd was pressing in tight around them, carrying them forward.

“Do you think there’s room?” he asked. The bus already looked full, with people squashed into the seats, and more packing the aisle.

“If not this one, then the next,” she told him. “You’ll be fine.”

“I …? What about you?”

“I’ll grab a later one.” She could barely see Dudley, her virtual vision was displaying so many symbols and icons. Very little of the dataflow made any sense. She’d glimpsed some standard information amid the mad rainbow swirls, which seemed to be some kind of sensor data. Her newly activated inserts were scanning the steam clouds on the Trine’ba, analyzing the ships hidden inside. She was trying to remain aloof from it all, being a true impartial reporter, but the adrenaline flushing through her blood was making her heart pound away and giving her the shakes. The SI kept telling her to relax. It was tough; this most certainly wasn’t what she’d expected when she made her deal with it.

“No!” Dudley cried. “No, you can’t leave me. Not now. Please, you promised.”

“Dudley.” She put her hands on either side of his head, holding him steady, then kissed him hard amid the jostling. Concentrating on calming him was subduing her own apprehension. “I’m not going to leave you. I promised that and I’ll keep that promise. But there are things I have to do here that no one else can. Now get on the bus, and I’ll follow the convoy.”

They’d reached the door. She let go of him, and smiled with winning reassurance. It was a truthful smile, because there was no way she was going to relinquish her hold over him for the moment; he was her ace now, making her a real player. Though given the scary abilities the SI’s inserts were providing she was beginning to wonder if she even needed Alessandra and the show anymore. She didn’t know if she could operate them independently, but just having them there was giving her a kind of courage she admitted she’d never had before. Before this, she would have been first on the bus, clawing children and little old ladies out of the way.

The crowd pushed Dudley up the stairs, and she wriggled free. He looked back frantically as he was shoved along the aisle. “I love you,” he bellowed.

Mellanie made herself smile at him, and blew a kiss.

Liz and Carys were waiting by the pickup. Mark smiled and waved at Barry and Sandy, who were in the backseat with Panda. “I’m going to help Rand,” he said. “Take Barry and Sandy up to the Highmarsh.”

“I’m staying with you,” Liz said.

“But—”

“Mark, I really hope you aren’t going to come out with any crap about this being a man’s job.”

“They need a mother.”

“And a father.”

“I can’t abandon Rand. This is our life they’re destroying. At the very least I owe the people this. Some of us have to get away, that’s the only way we can rebuild afterward.”

“Agreed. And I’m helping you.”

“Carys?” he appealed.

“Don’t even think about involving me in this argument. But if you two crazies are going to join up with Rand’s guerrilla army I’ll take the kids out of here in the MG.” She patted a heavy bulge in her jacket. “They’ll be safe with me, I promise. And we’ve got the arrays, we can stay in touch.”

Mark nearly questioned when his family had become gun-toting survivalists. Instead he gave Carys a quick kiss. “Thanks.” Then he and Liz had the really difficult job of coaxing the kids into the MG, promising them Mom and Dad would be following along right behind.

Dark specks zipped out of the cloud that squatted over half of the Trine’ba. They arrowed around to line up on Randtown, accelerating hard.

“They’re coming,” Liz called.

Mark was backing the pickup into the Ables Motors garage workshop where it would be hidden from view. David Dunbavand was standing behind the truck, helping to guide him in with shouts and frantic hand signals. Mark had never appreciated how difficult it was to drive without micro radar providing a proximity scan.

“That’s enough,” David said. “Let’s go.” He slipped the safety off his maser wand as they left the back of the garage. Like most buildings, it had taken a pounding in the Regents’ blast. The office along the front was missing all its windows, and the external walls were shredded, but the main framework was intact. It would be easy to rebuild, given a little time and money.

That was the kind of thinking—visualizing a future of complete normality—that allowed Mark to keep going. He squatted down next to Liz behind a thick stone wall that bordered the Libra Bar’s beer garden. The blast had hurled the garden’s wooden tables and chairs across the lawn, smashing them against the wall of the Zanue car rental franchise next door. Liz and he had come here on many summertime evenings for a meal and a drink, sitting out in the garden with friends where they could watch the boats come and go from the quays along the waterfront.

Now they had the same clear view of the waterfront through their weapon sights. The rain had subsided to a light drizzle laced with a few slim trails of gray smoke from the dying fires. Mark could see the alien flyers skimming toward him just a few meters above the wavelets.

“Stand by,” Simon’s voice said from the handheld array. “They look like they’re slowing. Could be plan A.”

There had been a lot of shouting about that when Simon assembled his ragtag band of two dozen guerrillas in the passenger waiting lounge. Plan A envisaged the aliens landing in the town, which would allow the guerrillas to snipe at them, slowing their advance. Plan B, the worst-case scenario, would have them flying over the town to attack the convoy directly, in which case they’d have to fire a fusillade of shots at the craft as they went overhead and hope to hit some vital component. Everyone knew that would be next to useless. As always, Simon had prevailed.

Mark looked over his shoulder. The last of the buses were visible on the highway at the base of Blackwater Crag, traveling far too fast for anything that didn’t have working arrays and safety systems. They only needed a few minutes more and they’d be turning into the Highmarsh.

Looking at the approaching alien flyers, Mark wasn’t convinced that the big valley was going to be the refuge Simon had claimed. In his private vision of the future, Mark had envisaged the aliens coming ashore in boats, taking days to reach the Highmarsh.

“Carys, where are you?” Liz asked.

“We turned onto the Highmarsh road a couple of minutes ago.”

“They’re in aircraft. Looks like they’re landing here, though.”

“Okay, let me know if any are coming our way. I’ll need to get off the road fast.”

“Will do.”

Mark glanced at the unit’s screen. Their signal was routing through the still-functional sections of the district’s network. Several nodes along the Highmarsh were operating, allowing them to extend their fragile contact around the mountains. He was pretty sure it wouldn’t last long once the aliens landed and started running sensor sweeps.

The first of the alien flyers arrived at the shoreline. It hovered just above the water, spindly metal legs unfolding from beneath its cylindrical fuselage. After a moment of hesitation it landed on the broad promenade next to the Celestial Tours quay, the aft section knocking into the wall and demolishing a five-meter length, breaking the long single line of poetry.

“Wait,” Simon’s voice urged them with soft confidence. “We need most of them down first, then we can begin our harassment campaign.”

Mark wondered where Simon had gained so much combat experience; he certainly sounded like he knew what he was talking about. More likely it was all from TSI dramas. He glanced out at the lake again, startled by just how many flyers were now heading their way.

“Ho boy,” David muttered.

Doors had opened on the flyer sitting next to the Celestial Tours quay, allowing aliens to lumber down.

Mark’s personal predictions had faltered at this point. But he certainly hadn’t expected anything quite so … robotic-looking. Maybe they are robots? Watching them spread out, he quickly changed that opinion. They moved fast, heading straight for cover. Within seconds they were infiltrating the buildings that faced the promenade.

Twelve flyers landed along the waterfront. The second wave flew over to circle the town park at the back of the General Hospital before extending their legs and sinking down. Some flyers were heading toward Blackwater Crag and the start of the highway.

“Stand by,” Simon said. “Don’t expect our weapons to penetrate their force fields, aim for maximum disruption around them. And fall back immediately.”

Mark gave Liz a look. She stretched her lips wide, mimicking a smile. “Okay,” she mumbled.

He carefully raised his head above the wall, and brought the laser rifle up. Several aliens were slipping quickly across the open ground of the promenade to the first line of buildings. He suspected Simon was right, his rifle wouldn’t get through that armor. Instead he shifted his aim to the buildings, wondering if he could knock out some of the framework, and collapse the roof.

Somebody else fired. He actually saw the air sparkle around an alien as the energy beam was deflected by its force field. Their response was terrifyingly swift. The Bab’s Kebabs franchise on Swift Street exploded.

Mark ducked down as smoldering fragments spun through the air. “Shit!”

Four of the flyers heading for Blackwater Crag turned sharply and flew back low over the town. Masers lashed down, scoring long lines of fire and vapor across the rooftops.

“Hit them,” someone yelled out of the handheld array. “Hit them. Shoot back.”

Two more buildings exploded, sending broken lengths of framework girders spinning through the air. Composite panels cartwheeled down the street like tumbleweed. Laser shots, ion bolts, and even bullets peppered the buildings along the waterfront. The force fields around two of the overhead flyers flickered briefly with static.

“They’ll slaughter us.”

“Shoot them, kill them all, kill the bastards.”

The air above Mark emitted a sibilant sizzling. A line shimmered faint violet. Flames burst out of every gaping window in the Babylon Garden restaurant behind him.

“Fall back. Get the fuck out of here.”

“No! They’ll see us. Knock down the flyers.”

“Where’s the convoy? Are they clear?”

“Hey, yeah! I got one, I saw a wall fall on it. Oh, shit—”

There must have been twenty buildings burning vigorously now. Three more detonated in quick succession.

“God, no. What have we done?”

“Simon, you motherfucker. This is all your fault.”

“Stay calm. Stay under cover.”

Mark looked at David, who was pressed up hard against the wall. His eyes were closed as he whimpered a prayer.

“You want to make a break for it?” Mark asked Liz.

“Not in the pickup,” she said. “They’ll see that.”

“All right.” He brought the handheld array up. “Carys?”

Liz’s hand closed tight around his upper arm. “I don’t goddamn believe it.”

Mark twisted around, following Liz’s disbelieving stare. “What in God’s name …?”

Mellanie was walking down the street past the Ables Motors garage, heading toward the waterfront. She kept to the center of the road, avoiding the worst of the debris. Her hair and shoulders were damp from the earlier rain, otherwise she was as perfectly groomed as usual. Dense-packed silver OCtattoos flickered over her face and hands, as if they were her true skin emerging into the light.

“Get down!” Mark screamed at her.

She turned her head and gave him a small sympathetic smile. A nearsubliminal golden fractal pattern spiraled out around her eyes. “Stay there,” she told him calmly. “This isn’t something you can handle.”

“Mellanie!”

She’d gone another five paces when four aliens burst out of Kate’s Knitwear ten meters ahead of her, smashing straight through the remaining aluminum wall panels. Their arms curved around to line up their weapons on her. The motion slowed, then stopped. All four of them stood perfectly still in the middle of the road.

Mark realized that all the flyers in the air were gradually lowering themselves to land. Out over Trine’ba, the flyers rushing to Randtown dipped gently, angling down to strike the water hard. Big plumes of spray cascaded upward, falling away to reveal the craft bobbing low on the surface.

“Mellanie?” Mark croaked. “Are you doing this?”

“With a little help, yes.”

He clambered slowly to his feet, trying to stop the tremble in his legs. Liz stood beside him, gazing warily at the young girl. David poked his head above the wall. “Jesus.”

“Take their weapons,” Mellanie said. Her face was almost completely silver now, with only a few slivers of skin remaining around her cheeks and brow.

“You’re joking,” Mark said.

The four aliens dropped their weapons onto the road.

“You’re not joking.”

“You should be able to shoot through their force fields with those,” Mellanie said. “You’ll probably need to when they come after you again. This standoff won’t last forever. But I’ll keep them here as long as I can.” She took a deep breath, closing her chrome eyelids. “Leave now.”

Mark glanced down, her voice had come out of the handheld array as well.

“Everybody, get in your vehicles and fall back,” she ordered. “Join the convoy.”

“What’s happening?” Simon’s voice asked.

Mark brought the array up to his mouth. “Just do it, Simon. She’s stopped them.”

“Stopped them how?”

“Mark’s right,” someone else said. “I can see a whole bunch of them. They’re just standing there.”

“Go,” Mellanie said. “You haven’t got long. Go!”

Mark looked at the weapons lying on the tarmac as if it were some kind of school dare. The aliens still hadn’t moved.

“Come on,” Liz said. She darted forward.

Mark hurried after her. The weapons were bulky, too heavy to carry easily, let alone aim. He pulled up a couple, giving the tall, silently immobile aliens a cautious look as he scrabbled around at their feet, as if this might be the act that finally broke the spell, goading them into motion and retaliation. David came up beside him, and picked up one of the chunky cylinders.

“Let’s get out of here for Christ’s sake,” Liz said.

Mark managed to hold on to a third weapon. He scooted the hell away from the bizarre tableaux.

“What now?” Liz asked Mellanie.

“You go.”

“What about you? Will you be all right?”

“Yes.” She gave Mark one of her menacingly erotic smiles. “Quits?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Quits.”

“Thank you,” Liz said.

The three of them raced for the pickup. They slung the purloined alien weapons in the back, and Mark slammed the accelerator to the floor. He snatched one last glimpse of Mellanie in the rearview mirror. The silhouette of a small human girl standing defiantly in front of four big armored aliens, waiting, watching, as silent as the army she had stilled.

Mellanie’s inserts were feeding her a fresh image of the world; no longer data but an extension of her ordinary senses. She could actually see the electromagnetic emissions flooding out of the aliens as they stormed ashore. Each one blazed brightly in this black spectrum. Long, complex, and slow signals slipped between them, a conduit of tight-packed analog sine waves dancing and crackling around each other. They formed networks, brief, transient patterns that were forever rearranging themselves, connecting individual aliens, then switching back and forth between the flyers who relayed them in new combinations to the big conical ships floating on the Trine’ba. Huge columns of information streamed out of both ships, twisting up through the atmosphere to vanish inside the trans-dimensional vortex of the wormholes above.

It made a striking contrast to the abridged electronic network of Randtown, with its slender lines of carefully packaged binary pulses zipping purposefully around her. Where the human systems were neat and efficient, these alien outpourings were crude; yet, she acknowledged, they possessed a certain integral elegance. As it was with all organic forms.

Mellanie concentrated on the rush of strange wave forms radiating out of a Prime flyer as it maneuvered above the promenade, ready to land. A newly woken batch of inserts buzzed with electric vibrancy inside her flesh. She knew of the SI’s presence inside them, analyzing what she discovered for it, teasing apart the oscillating signals to discover their meaning. As the flyer’s emissions coursed through the inserts she heard a harsh unintelligible voice at the back of her mind. It bloomed to a whispered chorus. Then there were the images, leaking out of the signals like some long-forgotten dream. A confused multiple viewpoint of motiles emerging from a congregation lake, millions of them pressed together, slipping and sliding as they waded ashore. Next to them was the towering mountain, honeycombed by rooms and chambers, where it was centered, all of life in the star system. A mountain where long ago light used to shine in the morning. Now the sky was permanently dark beneath the heavy clouds, an everlasting night split only by the incessant flash of lightning bolts, revealing the filthy rain and sleet that fell across the protective force fields. A black sky also seen from the asteroids orbiting far above, a sky that shielded the whole planet, its turbulence illuminated to insipid gray by sunlight and blazing strands of fusion flame. Life still thrived beneath the veil, woven inseparably to groupings of itself as it seethed and survived everywhere, on small cold planets, moons encircling gas giants, and far asteroid settlements. A life that now extended to other stars and their planets. A life that had flown through the wormholes to reach Elan, where it was spreading out over the lake to touch the land.

The life whispered amid itself, directing its soldier motiles to move forward into the flimsy box-buildings. It searched for humans and their machinery, finding none of either—though there was movement, the telltale infrared signatures that the soldier motiles were skillfully working their way toward. At the back of the urban area, long vehicles raced away. Flyers angled around to investigate.

One of the soldier motiles was shot at. It retaliated immediately, firing back, destroying the zone where the shot had come from. Flyers swooped eagerly, raking the buildings with coherent beams of gamma radiation.

“They’re going to destroy everything,” Mellanie said.

“It,” the SI corrected. “It is singular. An interesting arrangement. Life that has achieved unity, not just with itself but with its machinery.”

“I don’t care what it is, it’s still going to kill people.”

“We know.”

Programs and power flooded through Mellanie’s inserts, activating yet more functions. She had little to do with it other than adding her wishes to the conclusion. Fabulously complex OCtattoos crawled over her skin, merging into a single circuit. Signals streamed out from her, overlaying those that fused the motiles together. Interference patterns jostled and ruptured the smooth consistency of the soldier herd’s thoughts. Riding down the disruption were new instructions.

Mellanie left her shelter and walked slowly toward the Trine’ba so she could observe properly. Poor Mark Vernon tried to warn her, so she gave him and his friends some of the Prime weapons and made sure he left, along with all Randtown’s valiant, futile defenders.

“It has realized something is wrong,” the SI said. “Can you sense it?”

The signals spilling down from the wormholes were changing. Instead of orders, queries were trying to insinuate themselves into the soldier motiles. The Prime wanted to know what malaise was contaminating its units.

The SI maintained its interference pattern among the motile soldiers in Randtown, formulating a single reply that it sent out through Mellanie’s inserts. “We are stopping you,” it told MorningLightMountain.

Mellanie was aware of the shock ripple spreading through the alien’s planet-wide thought routines hundreds of light-years away. “Who are you?” it asked.

“We are the SI, an ally of the humans.”

“The Bose memories know of you. You are the human immotile. The endpoint of their individuality. They created you because they knew they were not perfect without you.”

Bose memories, Mellanie thought. Oh, shit, that’s not good. Though maybe in a way it is, it will give my new Dudley some closure.

“Your reading of the Bose memories is inaccurate,” the SI said. “Though we will not argue with you on definitions. We are contacting you to ask you to stop your attacks on the humans. They are pointless. You do not need these planets.”

“Neither do the humans.”

“Nonetheless they are living on them. You are killing them. That must stop.”

“Why?”

“It is wrong. And you know it.”

“Life must survive. I am alive. I must not die.”

“You are not under threat. If you continue this aggression you will become threatened.”

“By existing, other life threatens me. Only when I become total will I secure my immortality.”

“Define: total.”

“One life, everywhere.”

“That will not happen, ever.”

“You threaten me. You will be destroyed.”

“We state facts. It will not be possible for you to destroy us. Nor will you be able to destroy many other civilizations which exist within this galaxy. You must learn how to coexist with us.”

“That is a contradiction in terms. There is only one universe, it can contain only one life.”

“This is not a contradiction. You are simply inexperienced with such a concept. We assure you it is possible.”

“You are betraying yourself by believing this. Life grows, it expands. This is inevitable. It is what I am.”

“True life evolves. You can change.”

“No.”

“You must change.”

“I will not. I will grow. I will learn. I will surpass you. I will destroy you, both of you.”

Mellanie was aware of a change in the nature of the signals coming through the wormholes to fall upon the planet. MorningLightMountain was giving the soldier motiles on the landing ships distinct orders, then disengaging them from its communications web. While they didn’t have a great deal of independent capability, a soldier motile could certainly follow simple target instructions and use its own combat systems without direct real-time supervision.

Sixteen flyers launched from the two landing ships. They accelerated forward at five gees. Targeting sensors swept across Randtown, bright as searchlights to Mellanie’s broadened perception.

“Grandpa!” she yelled.

A circular wormhole opened behind her, a tiny distortion point hovering a meter above the road that produced a curious twisted magnification effect in the air. It swiftly expanded out to a neutral-gray circle two meters in diameter. Mellanie jumped through.

Two seconds later, sixteen atom lasers intersected the empty air where she’d been standing.

Mellanie picked herself up off the grass, blinking against the warm light even as she winced at the pain in her knee from a bad landing. Her skin was cooling, its platinum luster slowly reverting to the healthy tan she maintained thanks to her expensive Augusta salon. Her body’s reactions were also receding, her racing heart slowing, the shakes calming. So much for the inserts giving her a sensation of invincibility.

Behind her, the wormhole gateway was built into a smooth rock cliff. Some kind of triangular canvas awning was stretched overhead. In front of her … Mellanie forgot all about bruised knees, and nearly fell over. Her balance was horribly wrong, and the land curved up over her head. Giddiness that was close to seasickness hit her hard.

“Where the hell am I?” she squawked.

“Don’t be alarmed,” the SI said. “This is the only available wormhole generator in the Commonwealth that could reach you.”

“Uh—” Someone had really gone to town on the vast cylinder’s landscape. It was all giant mountains with waterfalls foaming down long tracts of rock. Big lakes and rivers filled the valley floors. The sunlight emerged from a single spindle running down the axis. “This isn’t the High Angel,” she said.

“Of course not.”

“But it’s got artificial gravity. We can’t do that. Is it an alien space station?”

“It is a human-built structure, belonging to someone of considerable wealth. The gravity effect comes from simple rotation, like the Second Chance life-support wheel.”

“Oh, right, yeah. I didn’t do science at school.”

“You didn’t do school, baby Mel.”

“Thanks, good timing on the reminder, there, Grandpa. So who lives here?”

“The owner guards his privacy. But given the circumstances I don’t expect he will protest your visit. I have now reprogrammed the wormhole to take you to Augusta. Please step through.”

Mellanie was still staring around the interior. “It’s fantastic. And it’s got a private wormhole?” She smiled happily. “Ozzie.”

“You will respect his privacy.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She stopped. The adrenaline rush that had supported her through the confrontation in Randtown had finally worn off. When she held a hand up there was no sign of any OCtattoo. “What about the convoy?”

“They have all reached the Highmarsh Valley.”

“But—the navy won’t evacuate them for days. That alien monster will kill every one of them.”

“It will attempt that, yes.”

“Open the wormhole back into the Highmarsh. We’ve got to get them out of there.”

“That is an impractical suggestion. This wormhole is small. The Randtown refugees would have to step through one at a time. The process would take hours, and provide MorningLightMountain with a perfect targeting opportunity.”

“Open it!”

Wilson’s tactical display showed him the electronic warfare aerobots launching from Treloar. Five of them flew out in a pincer movement through the smog to surround the Prime ground troops spreading out from Scraptoft. The alien positions were overlaid by webs of orange and jade as their strange communications flashed between them. Their intermittent, seemingly random bursts reminded Wilson of synaptic discharges between individual neurons.

Stealthed sensors showed him images of the armored Primes slipping through what was left of Scraptoft’s buildings. The way they moved told Wilson they had considerable practice with urban warfare. They’d already killed several humans who’d remained in the little coastal town, using weapons powerful enough to take out half a building with one shot. Media reports from other assaulted worlds had shown similar atrocities. The Primes weren’t interested in taking prisoners.

Over fifteen thousand armored aliens had poured out of the big ships to help secure Scraptoft. They were busy establishing a fortified perimeter with a ten-kilometer radius around the town. Several force field generators had been delivered by cargo flyers, along with weapons capable of shooting down any aerobot that ventured too close. At least that meant the protective formation of eight ships had finally splashed down; though the hot murky smog they’d created was taking a long time to disperse.

The four ships that had been the first to splash down had already launched again, flying back to the wormholes above the planet. Wilson didn’t like to think what kind of cargo they’d be bringing with them when they returned.

“EW aerobots going active,” Anna said.

The slim craft popped up over the horizon and began jamming the sensors of the perimeter weapons. Nothing shot at them. They flew closer, and began breaking into the multifarious Prime broadcasts.

“Son of a bitch,” Wilson said; it was the first time he’d smiled all day. The stealth sensors showed him armored Primes slowing down and moving about erratically, like clockwork soldiers that were winding down.

“Get the combat aerobots back in there,” Wilson told Rafael. “Hit the bastards.”

The EW aerobots widened their assault, targeting the communications links between the flyers and the landing ships out at sea. It was the same effect, with flyers soaring onward, or tumbling lazily out of the air.

A thousand kilometers above Anshun, eight Prime ships altered their descent trajectory so that they would overfly Scraptoft. The change flashed up in the tactical display.

“See if we can EW them as well,” Wilson said. “How many dedicated EW systems have we got?”

“I can only find another seventy-three listed in the governmental register,” Anna said.

“I want every one of them. Get them deployed.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If we might make a suggestion,” the SI said. “It may be possible to use the surviving elements of planetary cyberspheres to produce a similar effect. The Prime signals seem remarkably susceptible to interference. Even nonmilitary systems should be sufficient to create a reasonable degree of disturbance.”

“Will you do that for us?”

“Of course.”

“Admiral,” Anna called. “The starships have arrived.”

Anshun’s First Speaker, Gilda Princess Marden, and her cabinet were in the civil emergency center twenty meters beneath the Regency Palace, trying to coordinate the capital’s evacuation with the navy’s requirements to deploy troops and aerobots. Consequently they had no view of the sky. Not that it would have mattered; the dreadful corrupted vapor was still swirling around the city’s force field, censoring any sight of space above the planet. But other cities on Anshun were clear of obstruction, as were the millions of people caught outside the urban force fields and still struggling to reach them. Even on the sunward side of the planet, they could see the fusion contrails of the Prime ships slicing across space as they rose and fell from the wormholes. Now new lights appeared, the bright turquoise of Cherenkov radiation flaring down as if small stars had suddenly ignited in orbit. There were five of them, spaced equidistantly three thousand kilometers above the planet’s equator. The warships Dauntless, Defiant, and Desperado slipped out into real space; along with the scoutships Conway and Galibi.

After that, it became impossible to look directly into the sky. Fusion drives scratched huge lines of dazzling fire across the constellations as they accelerated ships and missiles at high gees. Nuclear explosions blossomed silently, swelling to merge into a nebula brighter than sunlight that bracketed the entire world. Occasionally, energy beams would penetrate the atmosphere, becoming intense sparkling pillars of violet light tens of kilometers high, lasting for a second or more. Where they touched the ground, lethal gouts of molten rock would spew upward, adding to the wildfire that raced outward from the touchpoint. Huge radiation bursts inflamed the ionosphere, sending borealis storms spinning around the globe.

The battle lasted for over an hour, then the nebula faded away, its ions gusting out toward interplanetary space, cooling and decaying as they dispersed. In its wake, more Prime ships ventured out of the wormholes, again filling low-orbit space with their slender vivid exhausts. For hours, vast shoals of flaming meteorites fell to earth, trailing long ribbons of black smoke behind them.

Anyone still out in the open kept one fearful eye on the sky above, dodging the debris as they redoubled their efforts to reach sanctuary.

The Ables pickup truck bounced wildly as Mark gunned it along the stone chip road that ran the length of the Highmarsh Valley. He was leading the little band of vehicles carrying the surviving members of Simon Rand’s rear guard. A couple of kilometers up ahead, the bus convoy was racing along. He couldn’t see the MG, though he knew it was up there, well in front of the buses. They had a clear communications link with Carys; the network along the Highmarsh had rebuilt itself to a good thirty percent of its original capacity.

“We’re about at the junction,” Carys told them. Her voice coming from the handheld array was thin and strained. “Barry says it’s the road that takes us to the Ulon.”

“What do they do?” Mark asked Liz. “Do they go home?”

“Christ knows.” She tapped one of the icons on the array. “Simon, have you actually got any idea where we should be going?”

“I believe the Turquino Valley should be our first choice,” Simon said. “It is relatively narrow, with high walls, which will make it difficult for the aliens to fly in there.”

“But it’s a dead end,” Yuri Conant protested.

“There’s a track out to the Sonchin,” Lydia Dunbavand said.

“A foot track,” Mark said. “For mountain goats. Not even a four-by-four could use it.”

“Nonetheless, that is where we should proceed,” Simon said. “We just have to hang on until the navy opens a wormhole to evacuate us.”

Liz thumped the dashboard. “Eight hundred and goddamn seventy-sixth place on the list,” she groaned. “The only thing left of us by then will be a few lumps of charcoal.”

The array flashed up a general call icon. “I’ve got a wormhole open inside the Turquino Valley,” Mellanie’s voice said. “It’s not a large one, I’m afraid, so it will take a long time to get everyone through. If we’re lucky we can pull it off before the Primes discover what’s happening. Simon?”

“Heaven bless you, Mellanie,” Simon said. “All right, people, you heard; convoy to proceed to the Turquino.”

“We left Mellanie behind us,” Mark said flatly. They’d barely reached Blackwater Crag when a huge, powerful explosion had flattened almost a third of the town. It appeared to be centered on the Ables Motors garage where they’d left Mellanie. When it happened he’d told himself that she would have found a way out, not that he had a clue how she’d do it. Now, rather than relief, he was getting more than a little apprehensive about Mellanie Rescorai and her abilities.

“She said she was getting help,” Liz said.

“Who the hell gives help on this scale?”

“It’s either someone like Sheldon, or possibly the SI itself. I can’t think of any other way she could pull this off.”

“God Almighty, why her?”

“Dunno, baby,” Liz said. “God has a sense of humor after all? But I’m glad she’s on our side.”

“Goddamn.” He clenched the steering wheel, staring sulkily through the cracked, grubby windshield. A long line of pickup trucks, four-by-fours, and buses were turning off the Highmarsh road just before the main junction, taking an even smaller track that threaded along the line of tall dark jade liipoplars that marked the edge of the Calsor homestead.

“Carys?” Liz asked.

“On the road to nowhere. I hope your little girlfriend knows what she’s doing.”

“Me, too.”

The Turquino Valley was narrow even by the standards of the Highmarsh’s northern ramparts. A near-symmetrical V-shape that began two hundred meters above the floor of the Highmarsh. Its walls had boltgrass scrabbling a little way up the lower slopes, but after fifty meters or so the vegetation and stony soil gave way to naked rock. Rivulets oozed down from the jagged heights, feeding into a fast-flowing stream that foamed along the bottom to spill out into the Highmarsh.

By the time the track reached the Turquino’s mouth, it was little more than a line of beaten down boltgrass. Only the most foolhardy sheep and goats strayed into this valley.

Yuri Conant was leading the convoy in his four-by-four. The road was already at a steep angle when it reached the ice-cold stream gushing out of the Turquino. Through the windshield he could see the mountains rising imposingly above him, guarding the entrance. Yuri’s vehicle was going to have trouble getting any farther. The buses certainly weren’t going to get past the stream. He went over the water and braked to a halt.

When he got out, he knew he’d never forget the sight of the convoy jostling its way up the slope. Broad sunbeams were prising their way through the battered clouds above to play over the filthy battered vehicles. Pickups were packed full. All the buses had their doors open to draw some air inside now the air conditioners had failed; people were standing down the aisles. The sound of frightened children and injured adults arrived long before the vehicles reached him. Most prominent of all was Carys’s beautiful metallic gray sports car, whose fat wheels had lowered themselves beneath the chassis on telescoping suspension struts, bounding along over the trough terrain with the ease of any four-by-four.

It drove through the stream without any difficulty and pulled up beside him. The side window came down.

“Any sign of the wormhole?” Carys asked. Barry and Sandy were squashed into the passenger seat beside her, with Panda lying along the back.

“Not from here, no.”

“Okay, I’ll keep going as far as I can.”

He waved languidly as she drove off down the valley, keeping parallel to the stream. Several four-by-fours followed her; then the first bus arrived and he joined in helping with the wounded.

By the time Mark drew up at the improvised parking lot, the scene had become a replay of the bus station. A lot of people were clambering over the boltgrass slope to get into the valley, hauling kids along. Dozens more were milling around the four buses that were carrying the injured, manhandling stretchers out of the doors.

“Found it,” Carys exclaimed jubilantly from the array. “We’re five hundred meters in from the start of the valley. Mellanie’s here waiting, and she wasn’t kidding, I’ve never seen a wormhole this small before.”

“Get them through!” Mark blurted. He felt Liz’s hand in his, gripping tight.

“Out of the car,” Carys said. “Five meters. Mellanie’s saying hello. Yeah, right, hi. Okay, Barry, go on, dear. That’s it. Hold my hand, Sandy. Mark, we’re safe—”

He let out a sob. Beside him, Liz was smiling despite her moist eyes. They looked at each other for a long moment. “Guess we’d better go and lend a hand,” she said.

Simon was gathering his little band of devotees along the side of the gushing stream. He held up a hand as Mark, Liz, and David went past. “Those of us with weapons should dig in here at the valley entrance and provide some cover for our friends and families. It will be some time before everyone is through, and the aliens will probably come after us.”

Mark gave Liz a despairing look. “I think he’s talking about us again,” he said under his breath.

“Yeah. Well at least we have some heavy-duty weapons, now.” Liz held up one of the big cylinders she’d taken from the Prime.

“We don’t know what they are, or how they work.”

She gave him a wolfish grin. “Lucky we’ve got the best technical man in Randtown with us then, huh, baby?”

It was silent in the tactical display for several minutes after the Desperado shot back into hyperdrive and withdrew from the battle above Anshun. Wilson moved his hands across icons, pulling down sensor displays. Anshun had few sensors left in working order, but the aerobots provided intermittent sweeps of space directly above the tempestuous ionosphere. Forty-eight wormholes held their position in an ephemeral necklace two thousand kilometers above the equator. As he watched, several types of Prime ships began to fly out of them, accelerating through the hellishly radioactive cloud of cosmic dust and debris that churned around the planet.

“They’re still there,” Elaine Doi said in an appalled murmur. “We didn’t close one of them. Not one!”

“You have to get through to the generators,” Dimitri Leopoldovich said. “Simply hitting them with crude energy assaults from this side is completely ineffectual, they are manifestations of ordered energy themselves.”

“Thank you, academician,” Rafael said. “We just watched four of our ships die trying to defend us, so unless you have something constructive to add, shut the fuck up.”

“Fifty-two alien ships either destroyed or disabled,” Anna said. “Our missiles outperform theirs every time. But they do have weight of numbers. That’s their advantage every time.”

“What are we going to do?” the President asked.

Wilson was disgusted with how whiny she sounded.

“Our aerobots managed to strike every landing site on Anshun while the starships were engaged above the planet,” Rafael said. “We wiped out ninety percent of them. They’ll have to start the occupation again.”

“Which I have no doubt they have the resources for,” the President said. “Weight of numbers, again.”

“Probably, but in the meantime we can complete the evacuation.”

“We now have eight extra wormholes open inside city force fields,” Nigel Sheldon said. “Another three hours should see Anshun evacuated.”

“And the other planets?” Doi asked coolly. She was rallying well after the loss of the starships.

“Our electronic warfare strategy is proving effective,” the SI said. “It is certainly slowing down the rate of advance once the aliens reach the planetary surface. They are having to physically eliminate cybersphere nodes one at a time as they expand outward. However, the latest landings give cause for concern.”

“In what way?” Wilson asked.

“We have been using stealthed sensors to scrutinize the cargo they are currently unloading on several worlds. It appears to be gateway machinery, which will allow them to anchor their wormholes on the planet surface.”

“If they deliver direct to the planet, we’ll never be able to stop their incursion,” Nigel said.

“Realistically, we’re never going to anyway,” Wilson said. “Not to a degree that we take them back for ourselves. Look at the state of the environment on the assaulted worlds.”

“You’re writing them off?” Doi asked.

“Basically, yes,” Wilson said.

“They’ll crucify us,” she said. “The Senate will fling every one of us out of office, and probably into jail.”

Wilson’s virtual vision printed: DON’T SHE’S NOT WORTH IT. The text’s origin code identified Anna as the sender. “We didn’t know it was going to be this bad,” he said mildly.

“Yes we did,” Dimitri said.

Wilson turned to the translucent planet representations. The cyberspheres of each of them were illustrated by livid golden threads. There were black areas surrounding each of the Prime landing zones, a darkness that was slowly eating farther and farther into the gold. “We’ve nothing else left to hit them with,” Wilson said. “All we can do is fall back and regroup.” He took the first of a series of deep breaths; but not even the rush of oxygen could hold back the black weariness. There hadn’t been a war in human history where so much had been lost in so little time. And I’m the one in charge. Dimitri is right, we did know, we just didn’t want to admit it.

Captain Jean Douvoir heard the fans whirring efficiently behind the grilles as they sucked acrid smoke from the Desperado’s bridge. The warship had been lucky; that last directed energy burst had almost penetrated the hull field, as it was there had been some localized breaches that had played hell with the power circuitry. The stabilizers had done their best, but not even superconductors could handle surges induced by megaton nuclear blasts. With their defenses dangerously weakened, he’d slammed the Desperado into hyperspace to escape the Prime projectiles hurtling toward them.

“Merde,” he grunted as they emerged outside the Anshun system’s cometry halo. His virtual vision showed him the ship’s electronic systems rebuilding themselves. There was very little redundancy left now. They’d never survive another sustained attack. And that’s what would happen if they went back. There was no end to the Prime ships and projectiles.

The communications icons representing the other four starships had red “invalid” signs flashing over them.

“What’s the status back there?” he asked Don Lantra, who was operating the sensor suite.

Don gave him a weary look. “Just lost track of the Dauntless. That’s all of them, boss.”

Jean wanted to punch his fist into the console, a useless and difficult gesture in freefall. He knew most of the crews. Back on the High Angel they’d hung out together, one big fraternity living in each other’s lives. Now the only way he’d see them again would be after their re-life procedures. Not even that softened the blow. It would take years. Assuming the Commonwealth lasted that long.

His virtual vision flashed up a communications icon from Admiral Kime. “What’s your status, Jean?” Wilson asked.

“Getting things stable out here. We can take another pass at them soon.”

“No. Get back to High Angel.”

“We’ve still got seven missiles left.”

“Jean, another fifty ships have come through already. You did a superb job, you all did, but the evacuation’s almost complete.”

“You’re abandoning Anshun?”

“We have to. We’re evacuating all the assaulted worlds.”

“No. All of them? But we have to do something. They cannot be allowed a victory. Today it is twenty-three worlds, if we let them get away with that it will be a hundred tomorrow. We have to fight back.”

“We have been fighting, Jean, we’ve had our victories. You and the other starships bought Anshun valuable time. But you’re the only warship left, so fly back to base and we’ll refit you to fight another day.”

“Victories? I don’t think so. Dimitri was right, we had to get through the wormholes and block them from the other side.”

“You know we couldn’t do that; they’re too heavily defended. We’ll find the star they’re using as a staging post, Jean. We’ll hit them there. You’ll be commanding the whole task force.”

“And how long will it take to build that many ships, Admiral?”

“As long as it takes. Now head back to base.”

“Yes, sir.”

Douvoir ordered the plyplastic straps on his acceleration couch to ease off, and clenched his stomach muscles, forcing himself up into a sitting position. The rest of the bridge crew were all looking at him. “I am not prepared to accept defeat today,” he told them. “My secure memory store was updated before we left High Angel, and I will join our comrades in re-life. I am flying this ship back to Anshun, where it will live up to its name. If anyone wishes to leave now, then please use the escape pods, the navy will pick you up.”

All he saw were smiles and a few grim expressions. Nobody took up his offer to leave.

“Very well, gentlemen and ladies, it has been my pleasure and honor to serve with you. God willing we will serve together again after re-life. For now, we must reprogram the hyperdrive. There are a great many safety limiters to be removed.”

The clouds were finally lifting as the day ended, allowing a rosy twilight to infiltrate the Highmarsh. From his position, hunched down behind a clump of boulders thirty meters up the side of the Turquino Valley, Mark Vernon watched the land in front of him soak up the light, acquiring a faint ginger shading. He couldn’t quite see down the Ulon Valley from here, for which he was grateful. Actually being able to see his home as they waited to leave would have been unbearable.

“Not long now, baby,” Liz said.

He smiled over at her, amazed as always how she always knew his mood. She was taking a break, sitting with her back to the boulders, a thick fleece pulled around her shoulders against the chill air that the Dau’sings channeled along the Turquino.

“Guess not.” He could see the end of the queue below him, barely a thousand people left, shuffling along the side of the little stream with its icy water. Even the wormhole was visible from this vantage point, a small dark gray circle that was starting to be absorbed by the deep shadows that cloaked the base of the valley. The MG was parked to one side of it, the first of several vehicles that had been abandoned along the meager track. It wasn’t far away. Time and again in his mind, Mark had gone over how long it would take him to run down the rugged slope to get there. Not that running would be much use. Everyone else had to get through first. Even now, with only able-bodied adults left, they still seemed to be taking their own sweet time. Didn’t they realize the urgency?

“They’ve reached the Highmarsh,” Mellanie said.

Mark gave the handheld array a vexed glance. How the hell does she know that? Then the display on the array’s screen showed him a node at the far end of the Highmarsh go off-line. Oh.

Liz picked up her oversize alien weapon and moved to crouch beside Mark. “Twenty minutes,” she said, giving the line of people a quick glance. “That’s all. Maybe less.”

“Maybe.” He thought the queue was starting to speed up—a little. The screen on the handheld array showed another two nodes had dropped out along the Highmarsh. There was a faint sound that could have been an explosion.

“Are we all ready?” Simon asked. He was on the opposite side of the valley to Mark, with another of the big alien weapons. It hadn’t taken Mark long to rig the triggers so they could be used by human hands; they had a strange double button arrangement, which had to be pressed in a sequence that was difficult for fingers. One of them shot explosive micro-missiles, while the remaining three were very powerful beam weapons.

“Guess so,” Mark muttered sulkily.

Liz brought the handheld array up to her mouth. “Standing by.”

“Remember, as soon as you’ve fired the weapons, fall back.”

She rolled her eyes at Mark, grinning. “Yeah, we’ll remember that.”

Mark leaned forward and kissed her.

“I don’t think we’ve got time,” she said pertly.

“Just in case,” he said, almost sheepishly. “I want you to know in case anything happens, I do love you.”

“Oh, baby.” She kissed him. “When we get through that wormhole, your pants are coming straight off, mister.”

He grinned. Another node on the Highmarsh had vanished. By his reckoning that was the one near the Marly homestead. Maybe a kilometer from the entrance to the Turquino. “Are we going to come back here? To live, I mean?”

“I don’t know, baby. Simon thinks we will.”

“Do you want to, if we can?”

“Of course I do. I’ve had the best time of my lives here. We’re going to go on living like this.”

A further three nodes went down.

“Here they are,” Mark grunted.

After two hours spent modifying various systems, the Desperado slipped back into hyperspace. At top speed they were two minutes away from Anshun. Jean Douvoir was totally absorbed by the hysradar display, which showed him the wormholes encircling the planet as diamond-bright specks. He picked one, and aligned the warship directly on it.

When they were thirty seconds’ flight time away from the wormhole, he ordered the ship’s RI to formulate their breakout point. Normally, the emergence from hyperspace was safeguarded by the RI’s programming, restricting the opening’s relative velocity. If they were coming out into a planetary orbit, the opening’s trajectory would match the local escape velocity, ensuring a safe entrance to real space. With the limiters removed, Jean gave the opening a velocity of point two light speed.

Cherenkov radiation flooded out of the fracture in spacetime five hundred kilometers from the Prime wormhole. The Desperado flashed out from the center of the violet radiance, traveling at one-fifth the speed of light as it struck the force field that capped the wormhole. Detonation was instantaneous, converting a high percentage of its mass directly into energy in the form of ultra-hard radiation that punctured the force field as if it were nothing more than a bubble of brittle antique glass. The Prime wormhole was left open to the full power of the new and temporary sun that had risen above Anshun.

One of the cylindrical alien flyers shot across the end of the Turquino Valley. Mark tried to chase it with the muzzle of his weapon, but it zipped behind the steep slope on the other side before he was anywhere near. A long rumble of roiling air reverberated in from the Highmarsh.

Two more flyers appeared, traveling a lot slower than the first. Mark managed to get one centered in his sights, and pressed the trigger. The flyer’s force field burned in hazy turquoise light, with small slivers of static snapping repeatedly into the ground. Liz fired her beam gun, intensifying the corona. Over on the other side of the valley, Simon fired the projectile weapon. A plume of blue fire squirted horizontally from the endangered force field, sending glowing fireballs dripping around the shaking craft. It banked abruptly and swept away out of the line of sight. Its partner raced away.

“Move!” Mark shouted.

He was racing away from the boulders, crouched low, the weapon heavy in his hands. Fifty meters ahead and slightly downslope was another clump of boulders. With his feet thudding into the spongy boltgrass, his heart hammering, and Liz whooping manically beside him, he felt himself smile stupidly. It was almost as if he was enjoying himself.

They were five meters from cover when a huge blast demolished the boulders they’d been using. He flung himself flat, his mood flipping instantly to naked fear. “Are you all right?” he yelled as the flyer’s roaring wake shook the air.

Liz raised her head. “Fuck! Yeah, baby. Come on, move it.” Chunks of hot stone and smoking earth were pattering down all around them. A wide circle of boltgrass was on fire behind, pushing out a thick, foul-smelling smoke.

He half crawled, half scrambled around the next set of boulders, and lay there panting heavily as his legs trembled. When he risked a glance backward he saw a flyer hovering motionlessly at the entrance of the valley. He knew he should be taking another shot at it, but just couldn’t bring himself to line the weapon up. As he was watching, the flyer fired at a second craft that was curving around the first mountain. It exploded with incredible violence, lighting up the whole of the Turquino Valley as its wreckage whirled out of the air.

“What …”

“Mellanie,” Liz declared. “She’s taken control of it.”

“Goddamnit.” The flyer rushed away. Seconds later the sound of explosions rattled down the narrow valley.

Mark checked the queue for the wormhole. Everyone had thrown themselves flat. “Come on,” he growled at them. “Get up, you miserable assholes. Get up! Get moving.”

They couldn’t have heard him, but the ones closest to the wormhole staggered to their feet and rushed toward it. Their desperation triggered a panic surge, with everyone hurrying forward at once. A scrum began to swell around the placid gray circle.

“Oh, brilliant,” Mark snarled. “That’s all we need.”

“They did well holding it together this long,” Liz said.

After several minutes the pushing and shoving eased up, though any pretense at a queue was abandoned. Everyone was crowding around the wormhole; with the twilight fading and the bottom of the valley almost black, they resembled bees swarming around their hive.

“Movement at the front,” Simon’s voice crackled out of the handheld array.

Armor-suited aliens were scurrying among the abandoned buses and cars. They were difficult to see among the shadows. There was no sign of the flyers. Mark checked the bustle around the wormhole. At least four hundred people remained.

“Mark?” Simon asked. “Are you ready?”

“I guess so.” Mark brought up his hunting rifle, and switched on the sight. The zigzag jam of buses appeared as neon-blue profiles against an oyster-gray ground. It was easy to see the aliens now. There were more of them than he realized, a lot more. They slid fluidly along the sides of the human vehicles, where the shadows were deepest. Weapons were swung up into open doors, or pushed through windows in the trucks as they searched for any sign of life. If they reached the head of the stream, everyone huddled around the wormhole would be a clear target. It would be a massacre.

Mark brought the rifle sight back on the lead bus, and tracked down the bodywork until he found the open hatch. It had taken him over an hour to prepare all the superconductor batteries, the manufacturers employed so many safety systems they were difficult to disengage. But eventually he’d wired them together in a single giant power circuit. The rifle sight bracketed the side of the battery. Mark fired.

The superconductor battery ruptured, discharging its energy in one massive burst. It triggered a chain reaction around the circuit. Every battery detonated in a blaze of electrons and white-hot fragments. Aliens went tumbling through the air or were pummeled into the ground, shrapnel and snapping electric flares overloading their suit force fields. Several of their own weapons exploded in turn, adding to the carnage.

Mark and Liz were running as soon as the blast began, heading farther downslope, closer to the precious wormhole. There were only about two hundred people left now, all of them hunched down in reflex at the latest outbreak of violence.

“That ought to slow them up,” Mark yelled. “We’ll get out now.” They ran past the last tumble of rocks that they’d picked out as cover. Splashing through the stream, they arrived at the back of the frantic pack of people pressing toward the wormhole. When he looked back all he could see was a red glow from the burning boltgrass around the entrance to the valley. “Simon? Simon, what’s happening?”

“Good job, Mark,” Simon’s voice came in, as calm as always. “They’re staying back. It will take them several minutes to regroup. You’ll all get through.”

Mark hung on to Liz’s hand as he pushed himself up on his toes to look over the heads in front of him. There couldn’t have been more than a hundred or so. Maybe two minutes, if one went through every second. No, surely they could squeeze through two abreast. A minute, then. Minute and a half, tops.

Daylight poured down into the Turquino Valley. Mark tipped his head back to gape up into the heavens. Far far above them, five small blue-white stars shone down with a painful strength as they grew and grew. He stared at the new phenomena as surprise gave way to a rush of fury. “Oh, come on!” he screamed at the terrible lights. His legs gave way, dropping him to his knees. Even so he raised his fists up to the new peril. “You can’t do this to us, you bastards. One minute left. One goddamn minute and I’d be out of here.” Tears began to run down his cheeks. “Bastards. You bastards.”

“Mark.” Liz was on the damp soil beside him, arms going around his quaking shoulders. “Mark, come on, baby, we’re almost there.”

“No we’re not, they’ll never let us go, never.”

“That’s not them,” Mellanie said.

“Huh?” Mark looked up. The girl was standing above him, looking at the five dazzling lights. “That’s us,” she said. “We did that.”

“Up,” Liz said, her voice hardening. “I mean it, Mark.” She gripped one shoulder and pulled. Mellanie took his other side. Between them they dragged him to his feet. The last Randtown residents were scurrying through the wormhole. Above him the new stars were diminishing. Darkness was rushing back into the valley. Mark stumbled toward the wormhole, still not quite believing, expecting the fierce blast of a laser to catch him between his shoulders.

“We’re ready for you, Simon,” Mellanie said.

“I cannot leave. This is my home. I will do what I can to thwart the monsters.”

“Simon!”

“Go. Be safe. Come back if you can.”

Mark reached the wormhole. His last sight of Elan was the abandoned MG Metrosport, and Mellanie glaring angrily down the harsh little valley. Then he was through. Safe.

MorningLightMountain’s multitude of machine-derived senses observed the quantum distortion of the last human starship returning to battle above Anshun. It readied its ships to fire missiles and beam weapons. The humans were approaching fast. They were coming close. Dangerously close—

There was no warning. No time. Raw energy punched straight through the wormhole, flowering on the other side where the generator was sited on the asteroid. The hole in spacetime closed immediately as its generator was destroyed, but not before the awesome torrent of energy released by the dying ship had poured through. Thousands of ships above the asteroid flared briefly as their hulls vaporized inside the giant geyser of radiation. Wormhole generators imploded with spasms of gravitronic twists. The entire asteroid quaked as two hundred eighty-seven collapsing wormholes wrenched at it, then shattered. Energy contained within the generators and wormholes was released in a single backlash, enhancing the already lethal deluge shining on the interstellar wormhole.

MorningLightMountain watched in horror as the massive wormhole linking the staging post back to its original system wavered and fluctuated. It diverted hundreds, then thousands of immotile group clusters to producing the correct command sequences that would calm and contain the instability. Slowly, the wild shivers of energy were tamed and refocused. The output from the surviving segments of the generator mechanism were remodeled to compensate.

It surveyed the wreckage of the staging post. One asteroid and its whole equipment complement were lost completely. Thousands of ships were ruined or disabled. Clusters of cargo units spun off into the void, molting chunks of equipment that effervesced from every surface. Over three thousand immotile group clusters of varying sizes were irradiated and dying. Nearly a hundred thousand motiles were dead or dying.

Everything could be replaced, and rebuilt, though such an effort would take time. Losing a quarter of its wormholes would definitely slow its original plan for expansion across the human worlds. Back in the home system, many immotile group clusters began to consider defenses against another suicide attack.

Meanwhile, MorningLightMountain began to realign the surviving wormhole routes to each of the twenty-three new worlds it had taken into its domain. After a while, ships flew again, carrying what remained of its supplies down to the planets. With the humans fleeing down wormholes inside their guarded cities, motiles faced little resistance in their advance across the new lands outside.

TWENTY-FIVE

As more and more time went by, so Ozzie’s confusion grew. He simply did not understand the planet they were on. For a start, the climate didn’t change, it was always the same muggy warmth with a slow breeze continually blowing in the same direction. With a tide-locked planet there should have been strong winds redistributing the heat received by the sunside to the cold of the darkside; big circulation currents that would blow perpetually around the globe, not this gentle zephyr. Of course, the island could be situated in the middle of a doldrum zone, which meant the winds were actually out there, somewhere over the perturbingly distant horizon.

Ozzie had set up small meteorological models in the handheld array, which broadly confirmed that theory. However, the modeling didn’t take into account the fact that the planet was orbiting inside a gas halo. Quite how that would affect the atmosphere close to the surface was a complete unknown. The array certainly didn’t have the kind of algorithms necessary to solve that interaction problem.

Then there was the remote gray cloud bank that was just visible squatting above the horizon. Every time they went back up the central hill to collect more wood, he checked its position. It never moved. And that was the direction from which the breeze emanated.

He also made an effort to work out the distance to the nearby islands. Using the array’s inertial guidance function he measured the sight angle from both sides of the island he was on. This rough trigonometry put the closest forty-five miles away, which made the planet improbably massive.

The gas halo itself was an even bigger enigma. He couldn’t figure out the bright specks floating around inside it. Spectrographic sensor analysis showed they were composed of water.

“Does it really matter?” Orion asked as Ozzie launched into another round of muttering about the latest batch of results from his sensors. “We know we have to get to another island to find a path out of here. So who cares what’s in the sky?”

“Yes it does matter,” Ozzie ground out. “I don’t understand how spheres of water like that form. It can’t be through droplet collision, they’re too big. Some of them are hundreds of miles across.”

“So? You said the gas halo is breathable. Why shouldn’t it have water in it?”

“That’s not the point, man. You should be asking, why is it there?”

“So why is it there?”

“I don’t fucking know!”

“It was placed there,” Tochee said through his array. “Given this whole gas halo is artificial, the builders have incorporated the water spheres for a purpose.”

“Thank you, Tochee,” Ozzie said; he turned to Orion. “And I’d like to find out what that purpose is. To do that I need some basic information.”

“Like what?” the boy asked.

“The water vapor content of the gas halo. The pressure of the gas halo. How much evaporation is going on from the water spheres. Their temperature. That kind of thing. But with this equipment, I can’t even get started.” Ozzie waved an annoyed hand at his little collection of sensors.

“But why is it important?” Orion persisted.

“Because there are a lot of forces at work here that we can’t see. If I understood more about the gas halo, I might be able to get a decent handle on this weird planet.”

“It’s just big, you said so. Bigger than Silvergalde.”

Ozzie gave up. “Yeah, man, that’s what it looks like, for sure.” He gave the sky with its multitude of glinting specks a challenging stare. “Ah, to hell with it, we’ve got more pressing problems, right?”

“The preparations are nearly complete,” the array said. “We need one more harvesting trip for the fruit.”

“Sure.” Ozzie gave their completed craft a distrustful look. When they’d set about building a boat, he’d envisaged some kind of skiff, with a smooth hull of tight-fitting planks, a curving sail, himself standing by the tiller steering them to the next island. After all, with his harmonic blade working again, carpentry should be easy; but the encyclopedia files in the array had been brief on actual shipbuilding techniques. They’d wound up with the kind of raft that looked about as buoyant as a brick.

The first day had been spent cutting down one of each of the five tree varieties that grew on the hill, which Tochee then dragged down to the beach. One by one they were pushed out to sea. Most of the palm trunks sank lower and lower in the water as they became saturated. Only one kind floated properly, the gangly trees with their long bushy gray fronds. Naturally the least common on the island.

They had devoted the next five days to felling just about the entire population growing on the hill. Ozzie and Orion took turns wielding the harmonic blade, chopping the branches from the fallen trunks, to leave relatively smooth boles that Tochee pulled down the hill.

After that stage came the rope weaving, a subject that was covered in slightly more detail by the encyclopedia files. The dried palm fronds they used were tough and sharp, and Ozzie and Orion had bleeding fingers within minutes of starting. They had to bring out the sewing kit and modify their old gloves to cope with the fronds. Even Tochee’s manipulator flesh wasn’t immune to the razorlike edges. Eventually, though, they had enough rope to lash the logs together. Three thick bundles, five-and-a-half yards long, provided the buoyancy, with a decking of more trunks at right angles holding them together. Their sail was made from the ubiquitous palm fronds woven into a square, which looked more like a piece of wicker floor matting than any recognizable fabric.

Orion thought the raft was fantastic, a genuine adventure waiting to happen. Tochee expressed its usual quiet approval for their endeavors. That just left Ozzie feeling like the one who had to tell them Father Christmas wasn’t real. He kept thinking it was something a bunch of eight-year-olds would build over a long boring summer.

Ozzie picked up his backpack, and the three of them headed back inland to look for more fruit. There were several types they’d discovered on the island, all of them found on bushes and mini-palms that grew close to the shoreline. He was soon snipping them off their stalks with his pocketknife and filling the backpack.

Orion and Tochee were rustling through the thick vegetation on either side of him. They were both excited at the prospect of leaving the island. Ozzie wished he could share their mood. Every time he gazed up at the gas halo he knew something here didn’t make sense. Why build such a phenomenal artifact, and then stick something as mundane as a planet in the middle of it? The gas halo was surely intended for life that could fly, God’s own aviary. The water spheres and Johansson’s airborne coral reefs were way stations for creatures that had no need of gravity, that lived as physically free as it was possible to do. He supposed that if the true core of the Silfen civilization had a physical location, it couldn’t have created a more appropriate home for itself.

“An entire universe that is so small, yet so large within that it can never be known,” Johansson had said of it. “A haven of mystery cloaked in the pinnacle of scientific development. How I marveled at such a paradox.”

Ozzie struggled to remember what else the man had said. Something practical, at least. But Johansson hadn’t been one to deal in specifics. Though there had been the intimation that he’d returned directly to the Commonwealth from here.

It took Ozzie about forty minutes to fill his backpack. “This ought to be enough,” he said.

“Groovy,” Orion said with a grin, biting into one of the dark purple fruits that was flavored like a mild raspberry. The thick juice dribbled over his lips, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand.

Ozzie took a moment to look at the boy. Orion was just wearing a pair of ragged shorts, cut off from an old pair of trousers. He was nothing like as skinny as when they started off down the paths too many months ago; the walking and physical work had put a lot of muscle on him. His pale skin was heavily freckled, partially sunburned, slightly tanned, and of late almost permanently dirty. Wispy hair from his first beard was curling around his chin; while his ginger hair was fizzing outward in knotted strings that were beginning to rival Ozzie’s own Afro for unruliness. In short he was becoming a proper little savage; all he needed was a spear and a loincloth and three millennia of human civilization would have passed him by completely.

My fault, Ozzie thought guiltily, I should have been firmer with him at the start, sent him back to Lyddington. Or failing that, insisted on some kind of schooling.

“What?” Orion asked, looking around to see what Ozzie was staring at.

“When did you wash last?”

“I had a swim this morning.”

“With soap and water.”

“There’s none left, you said it weighed too much to carry from the Ice Citadel.”

“Oh, yeah, right. What about toothgel? Have you been using any?”

“There’s only one tube left, and it’s yours. My teeth are fine. What is this?”

“We need to do something about your hair. There’s things living in it, man.”

“Speak for yourself.”

Ozzie pulled at his beard, suddenly very conscious of the example he’d been setting. “All right, tomorrow we both start getting back into the personal hygiene groove. Deal?”

“Whatever.” Orion shrugged with indifference.

Ozzie thought it was a near-perfect imitation of his own don’t-care gesture. “Good. Then there’s some files on the handheld array I’d like to go through with you.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Some background information,” Ozzie said vaguely. “You can read, can’t you?”

“Ozzie!”

“Okay, man, just checking. Tomorrow then, yeah?”

“We’re taking off tomorrow morning, you said.”

“I know. There’s not going to be much else to do on the raft, is there?”

Orion scratched at his hair, obviously perplexed by this new Ozzie. “Guess not.”

They’d set up camp on the beach where they built the raft. Ozzie and Orion used the tent to give themselves a degree of darkness when they wanted to sleep. The constant light didn’t seem to bother Tochee, but then the alien didn’t sleep anyway; it just rested.

When they got back, Orion set about rekindling the fire, then started cooking the fish that Tochee had caught. Ozzie went down to the water’s edge, and used the filter pump to fill up all their water pouches. The sea wasn’t particularly salty, but they certainly couldn’t drink it neat.

He started packing their things up while Orion finished cooking. The plan was simple enough. When he and the boy woke up they’d launch the raft straightaway. They had enough fruit and cured fish to last them for several days, and drinking water wasn’t a problem with the filter. Ozzie was quietly hoping all their preparations would be unneeded anyway. Even if, as he strongly suspected, their sail was next to useless, they had carved some crude oars, and Tochee could always tow them along. It surely wouldn’t take them more than a couple of days at most to reach the next island.

In the morning, he made sure Orion used some of the dwindling toothgel. Then they both set about combing knots and tangles out of their hair. Ozzie started in on his beard with his razor set—just about the only luxury item he’d hung on to. The diamond-coated blade made easy work of the growth, although he cursed the lack of a decent mirror.

“Why don’t you just use the handheld array?” Orion asked. He touched a few icons and held it up in front of Ozzie. The screen had unfolded to show the camera image directly. Ozzie’s face was magnified considerably.

“Thanks, man,” he said as he started to apply the razor again, a little bit more skillfully this time. Maybe it wouldn’t be too hard to school the boy after all.

After a quick breakfast they packed all their travel kit away in the rucksacks and various bags; then put all the food they’d gathered for the voyage into wicker baskets. All three of them lined up along the back of the raft. They’d built it a few yards from the edge of the placid water in anticipation of this moment. With Tochee in the middle, they started pushing, sliding the craft over the soft sand and down into the water. Ozzie was straining hard when the front end finally met the small wavelets lapping ashore. He almost didn’t want to watch. If the damn thing sank he didn’t have a clue what they’d do next.

The raft dipped alarmingly as its front half rode down the slope below the water, then slowly bobbed up again. Ozzie waded out to his waist, easing it forward. Tochee swam around it, then disappeared underwater. The first day on the island the big alien had surprised them with its grace in the water; it was almost as though Tochee was more at home in the sea than it was on land. Both sets of malleable flesh flattened out to form long fins that could propel it along at considerable speed, and it could hold its breath for a long time. The result was a constant supply of local fish that it had chased down and caught for them

Orion stood with the water over his knees, grinning proudly at the raft. “Isn’t that amazing, Ozzie?”

“Yeah, man, goddamn amazing.” Ozzie watched their craft for a while longer, still expecting it to sink. It wasn’t quite as high above the water as he would have liked, and it was going to be really low when they loaded it up. But it floated …

Twenty-two yards away, Tochee flew out of the water and half rolled in the air before splashing down amid a huge burst of spray.

“Guess it approves,” Ozzie muttered. He walked back out of the water holding on to the painter, and wrapped it around a stake they’d hammered into the sand beside the pile of their belongings. “Come on, man, let’s get it loaded up.”

Orion waded out of the water. “Ozzie, what are we going to call it?”

“Huh?”

“The raft? What are we going to call it? Every boat has to have a name.”

Ozzie opened his mouth. The Sheer Desperation? Titanic II? Orion was waiting, looking at him with that naive expectancy of his; and they’d spent days of hard, painful labor building the damn thing. “I’m not sure,” Ozzie said. “How about Pathfinder?”

“Gosh, that’s really good, Ozzie. I like it.” He bowed at the raft. “I name this ship the Pathfinder, God bless her and all who sail on her.”

God help all those who sail on her, more like. “Okay, let’s get our stuff on board.” He picked up a couple of the wicker baskets and waded back out again.

They had everything loaded in fifteen minutes. Tochee emerged from the water, its multicolored feather fronds glistening under the bright sunlight. It shook itself furiously, scattering droplets in a wide shower.

“Are we ready?” it asked through the array.

“Can’t think of any reason to stay,” Ozzie said.

The Pathfinder wobbled about alarmingly as they hauled themselves up onto the rickety decking, especially when Tochee squeezed up over the side. Ozzie checked the buoyancy again. The water was almost up to the decking, but they were still floating. He could see small fish swimming underneath them. But it’s not the small ones I’m worried about.

“All right. Crew, places please.” Ozzie sat down on one side, Tochee claimed the middle, and Orion sat on the other side. They all got their oars out, and started rowing. Progress was fairly pitiful at first, then Ozzie started calling out a rhythm, and they learned how to coordinate their strokes. When they were a hundred ten yards from the shore, Ozzie could feel the breeze against his face. “Enough,” he said. “Let’s see if the sail works.”

He and Orion pulled on the ropes, raising the rough square of woven fronds on the four-and-a-half yard mast, which had once been the tallest tree on the island. There was a lot of creaking as the ropes took the strain. The swell had grown considerably as they left the lee of the island.

Orion was giving the beach a wistful look. “Are we moving?”

Tochee’s manipulator flesh extended a tentacle, and it poked the tip into the water. “We move.”

“Yay!” Orion clapped his hands happily. He immediately looked ahead, where there were several of the small dark smudges that were other islands in the archipelago. “Which one are we heading for?”

“Good question,” Ozzie said. “Tochee, can you try steering us to the second from the left? I thought that was the closest.”

“I will endeavor that,” Tochee said. It lowered the rudder into the water at the back of the raft, a broad wooden paddle on a crude pivot that they’d rigged up.

Now they were farther from the shore, Ozzie was aware of a definite wind pushing them along. He sat on the side, with his feet dangling in the water, and watched the island slowly shrink away behind them.

....

Civilization was a blessing you never truly appreciated until it threatened to collapse around you. That long, long day on Elan had shown Mellanie how precariously close a collapse could be. Fear brought out a very strong survival trait in people, one that overwhelmed all the usual rules of behavior. She was never going to forget those last hours standing beside the small wormhole in the Turquino Valley. The way the crowd had started to panic, everyone pushing forward, their desperation and ferocity building. And that was with a strong character like Simon Rand holding things together.

Yet now, barely a week later, it all seemed so remote. She was standing at the window wall in Alessandra’s penthouse on the skyscraper’s sixty-fifth floor, looking out over Salamanca. Cities at night always looked more vibrant, somehow, and New Iberia’s capital was no exception. This was a rich world, among the first of phase one space to be settled, with a population now closing on two billion. Salamanca alone was home to twelve million souls. Its lights sparkled all the way out to the horizon; here in the center, where the height of the metal and crystal skyscrapers was a real estate value prospectus, the streets were arranged in a standard grid, beyond that the patterns became more random until they merged into the general light pollution that hazed the outlying districts. Cutting through the precise lambent lines was the inevitable radial web of silver rails, threading straight through the grid blocks and bridging roads, always given preference so that the trains could shunt their valuable goods between districts and the CST planetary station. It might have been her imagination, but she didn’t think there were as many trains as usual rolling along the rails tonight. But then just about every activity in the Commonwealth had come to a halt during the invasion; things were only just starting to return to an approximation of the old normality.

When she raised her gaze, she could just make out the ephemeral shimmer of the force field above and around the city. It seemed strange to see it there, fuzzing the stars above. Even though most major cities had them, they’d never been switched on except to ward off the most vigorous hurricanes and tornadoes. Now they were all on permanently.

“It’s still the same, isn’t it,” Alessandra said, coming up to stand behind Mellanie. “Somehow I was expecting changes when I got back. But it’s wonderfully reassuring to see. I’ve stood here for hours myself just watching.”

It had taken several days before CST resumed its standard passenger service between planets. Millions of refugees from the invaded worlds were given priority as they sought accommodation throughout the rest of the Commonwealth. Wessex still hadn’t returned to full operational capacity. CST was busy repairing the wormhole generators that had been damaged during Nigel Sheldon’s battle of exotic energy above the planet. Services to that whole section of phase two space remained patchy, though its worlds were still connected to the unisphere. But the express train between Augusta and New Iberia had resumed, allowing Alessandra to return home three days after the Desperado’s final flight.

This was the first time Mellanie had come back to Alessandra’s penthouse. She and the last of the Randtown refugees had finally left Ozzie’s bizarre asteroid two days ago, walking through the wormhole that had been realigned on Augusta. The intervening time had been spent with Dudley, reassuring him and taking a break to compose herself. With all the SI’s inserts now quiscent, her newfound confidence had receded somewhat. She wasn’t sure what kind of shape her investigation into Myo and the Starflyer would take. Dudley probably had more information lurking amid his confused memories. It would take a while to be sure she’d gotten everything she needed from him. For now, he was safely stashed away in a cheap coastal holiday resort chalet on Oaktier, a place where she’d spent many early childhood vacations. Nobody would be able to trace him there, at least not straightaway.

Alessandra’s hands slid over Mellanie’s shoulders. “We’ve been hearing some strange stories from the Randtown refugees. Some of them say they were in an alien starship.”

“They’re lying. It was an old dormitory station for a deep-space industrial facility that CST is decommissioning. The wormhole was still working, luckily.”

“Interesting.” Alessandra’s grip tightened, giving a small massage. “That’s the only part of the whole invasion that senior management prevented us from carrying. None of the other media companies carried it, either. Somebody’s been putting pressure on. And that’s a hell of a lot of pressure.”

Mellanie turned to face her, looking intently at the statuesque woman’s perfect classic features. “Not guilty.”

“Humm.” Alessandra stroked a finger lightly along Mellanie’s cheek. “You’ve changed.”

“I was there on the ground when we got invaded by aliens. It kind of makes you focus, you know.”

“I’m sure it does, darling.” She leaned forward for a kiss. Mellanie put a hand out. “Not yet.”

“Oh, really?” One of Alessandra’s elegantly plucked and shaped eyebrows rose slightly. “Well, you’d better get yourself in the mood pretty quickly. I’ve got Robin Dalsol coming over later for dinner, he’s Goldreich’s senior aide. I need to know how much money the executive is planning on pumping into the navy for our retaliatory strike. The two of you should be good together; he’s only ten years out of rejuve.”

“Fuck him yourself,” Mellanie growled.

“Mellanie, darling, I don’t do that anymore. I don’t need to, I have you to do it for me; you and fifty others.”

“Fine, call one of them.”

“We’ve had this discussion before. It’s starting to get boring.”

“I don’t care about the navy budget. It’s hardly going to be a secret, they’ll tell us as soon as it goes to the Senate.”

“God help us! Darling, it’s not that we will know, it’s when we know. I’m the best because I can break news first.”

“But what about my story?” Mellanie almost shouted. “That’s the only one that counts. For God’s sake, we’ve just been invaded, and we can track down the cause. There is nothing bigger than that. I came here to find out who my research team is, when we can start, not to suck some asswiper’s dick for you.”

Alessandra frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“The Starflyer!” Mellanie hissed. “I’m going to track it down.”

“Oh, that nonsense.” Alessandra put her hand on her brow theatrically. “You’re wrong. I had it checked out for you. Cox Educational is completely legit, and still going strong. I think Bunny actually talked to one of the trustees, Ms. Daltra. She assured us their funding is all aboveboard, the accounts are filed with the charity commissioners every eighteen months, as required. Take a look at them if you want.”

“What!” Mellanie couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“You were wrong, darling. No big deal. We all make mistakes on the way up. If you want my advice, you should stop screwing Dudley Bose, he’s got a lot of psychological problems. Re-lifers generally do. They get over them eventually.”

“No.” Mellanie shook her head. “No, that’s wrong. Dudley only …”

She trailed off as the real shock hit her, strong enough to raise the goosebumps all along her arms. She gave Alessandra an incredulous stare. It was all she could do not to back away from the woman. “I don’t understand.”

“You made a mistake,” Alessandra told her. Her smile became humorless. “Another one. And I’m not really into this ‘three strikes and you’re out’ crap that the judiciary practices. Frankly, the show’s only keeping you on now because of your report from Randtown. That showed promise. But face facts, darling, you’re not an investigator. God, you’re too dumb even to get to college; everybody goes to college and gets a degree these days. So let’s focus on what you are good at, shaking that shapely little ass of yours at the men I tell you to. Clear?”

Mellanie bowed her head, and even managed a noise that sounded suspiciously like a sob. “Yes.”

“Good girl.” Alessandra put her hands on either side of Mellanie’s head, and kissed her crown, as if performing a blessing. “Now why don’t you go and put something nice on for Robin. You know, he asked for you specially. I think he was impressed by Randtown as well. You’re a celebrity now, darling.”

“All right.” Mellanie left the living room, careful to close the door behind her as she went out into the penthouse’s main hallway. “Are their any special safeguards on the front door?” she asked the SI.

“Just the standard security systems and alarms.”

“Great.” She almost bolted to the tall double doors. They opened for her, and she looked wildly around the marbled vestibule outside. There were only three other doors to the remaining penthouses, two lifts, and the stairwell. Her e-butler interfaced with the skyscraper’s management array, and told her the lifts were on their way up. She was too worried that Alessandra would follow her out to wait for them, so she went straight to the stairwell and ran downward. “Get a lift to stop for me on the sixty-second floor,” she told the SI.

It was waiting for her when she burst out of the stairwell. She hopped in, and the doors closed. “Lobby,” she told the SI. “There will be people there, I should be safe.”

“What is the problem, Mellanie?”

She pressed her head against the cool metal walls of the lift, waiting for her racing heart to slow. “I never told Alessandra the name of the charity.”

“It would not be hard for her to discover it.”

“Run a check on it for me again, please.”

“The public records have been amended since last week.”

“Goddamn!” She glanced up, as if expecting Alessandra to be ripping her way through the top of the lift like some psycho in a bad TSIdrama.

“They now show the Cox Educational has been in continual operation since its formation, and is still making donations to various science departments,” the SI said.

“But that’s all forgeries, you know that.”

“We do, but the official records are complete.”

“How did they do that?”

“It is not impossible to subvert public records, especially in the finance sector. Although the effort involved is considerable.”

“She tipped them off,” Mellanie said out loud. “Alessandra told them I was on to them. Onto it, the Starflyer. It had to be her. There’s no one else. It’s her. Oh, God.” Her legs were trembling the way they had when she was facing the soldier motiles in Randtown.

“That is a strong accusation,” the SI said.

“Are you testing me? If Alessandra had run a genuine check, she would have found what I told her. The Starflyer would never have had time to cover its alien ass; a fraud this elaborate would take time. It had to have been given a direct warning so that the cover-up would be in place in case I survived and started yelling allegations. The only person I told was Alessandra. It is her! She’s working for it, isn’t she? Alessandra is one of the people Johansson warns us about, like the President.”

“We don’t know for certain. However, given the sequence of events, it is highly likely.”

The lift doors opened. Mellanie peered out into the lobby. There didn’t seem to be anybody waiting for her. She hurried over to the main entrance, where there were some taxis waiting. “I’ve got to get back to Dudley,” she said.

“An excellent notion. Then what?”

“Tell Paula Myo what I’ve discovered. Do you know where she is?”

“Yes.”

....

Kazimir stood close to the end of platform 34 in Rio’s planetary station, with people swarming around him as they waited for the next train. The trans-Earth loop trains had carried on running almost continually during the invasion crisis—though even that service had stopped when Nigel Sheldon diverted the lunar power to Wessex. But they were up and running again within hours, unlike CST passenger trains to other planets.

Kazimir had been reassured by the way Earth’s infrastructure underwent only the minimum of disruption. What outraged him was the population’s attitude. The residents of Santa Monica seemed more upset by the temporary power loss than they did that twenty-three planets had been lost to alien monsters. And the Mayor certainly hadn’t allocated any civic buildings to the refugees riding around the Intersolar train network looking for accommodation, unlike civic and regional leaders on the other worlds. Earthlings appeared to regard the invasion as just another news event that happened to someone else a long way off. He wasn’t sure if that was ignorance or arrogance. Whatever, it was certainly a chilling example of how different their shared mindset was to his own.

The last few days had seen at least a degree of awareness creeping in. Kazimir had hung around the waterfront in Santa Monica, watching the news in bars, or accessing in his little hotel room while he waited for things to calm down so he could resume his mission. Local media shows reflected a lot of anxiety that a second wave of planets would suffer invasion, a progression that would one day lead to Earth itself being on the front line.

So far there had been no sign of any alien activity anywhere other than on the original invaded worlds. Now the evacuation of civilian populations was effectively complete, available data was in short supply as the Primes continued their inexorable advance. The navy was maintaining small fighting forces on Anshun, Balkash, and Martaban; aerobots and professional combat-wetwired troops conducted a guerrilla harassment campaign against the new installations the aliens were constructing. Everyone knew it was a token gesture. The buildup of Prime forces was increasing at a disturbing rate as they managed to open gateways on the planetary surfaces. Admiral Kime was expected to order a withdrawal soon, and the final wormholes would be shut down. Analysts on most of the news shows were predicting that the deserted capital cities would then be destroyed by fusion bombs.

The navy’s remaining scoutships had returned, and were now performing regular flyby patrols of the invaded worlds, supplementing the degraded detector network. So far, the aliens hadn’t opened any new wormholes to replace those destroyed by the Desperado’s last flight. Some of the technical experts and tacticians on the news shows were hinting that the remaining starships might well be automated, for use in similar relativistic assaults on other Prime wormholes. The navy had publicly refused to comment on the possibility. Commentators were saying that as the biospheres of the invaded worlds were so badly damaged, the Commonwealth had effectively written them off. It wasn’t worth sacrificing their last starships to destroy something humanity would never regain. They were being held in reserve in case of any new assault.

Whatever the official reason, that one substantial human victory on the invasion day had already reached an almost legendary status, its crew subject to intense praise on every current affairs and news show. That contrasted sharply with the vitriol and vilification that the rest of the navy was receiving, along with President Doi’s administration.

Kazimir thought it strange how little mention the wormhole battle above Wessex was getting. It was surely more strategically important than a suicide flight. But then CST’s profile in the week that followed was remarkably low. Even under these circumstances, everyone seemed to take their efficiency for granted; the way they moved the refugees around, and repaired Narrabri station’s gateways was standard stuff for that company.

Amber lights flashed above platform 34, and the loop train slid into the station, twenty double-decker carriages pulled by a Bennor AC767 mag-grip engine. It had been only five minutes since the last one pulled out, but there were already over three hundred people waiting. The doors opened, and passengers poured out. Kazimir held back while everyone else on the platform surged forward impatiently. His eyes moved constantly, checking to see who else loitered. Visual interpretation programs reviewed everything he saw, identifying possibles, tagging them with probability percentages. When he rechecked them, they all turned out to be harmless.

It was a wearying process. But he’d stuck with it the whole time on the way back from the ancient observatory in the Andes. The journey had involved eight vehicle changes, from his hired four-by-four that he’d driven up into the mountains, to taxis, various local trains, bus, the plane back over to Rio. Every time he’d followed procedure, no matter how foolish it felt, knowing what Stig would say if he lapsed even once. The courier job was vital, as Elvin had never stopped reminding him; the Martian data was essential to the whole Guardian movement. Moving it from South America to the safety of LA would probably have gone to Stig, if his reprofiling had been completed. As such, Kazimir was determined there would be no hitch or glitch, he was going to prove to all of them that he was capable of such an important assignment.

He stepped onto the loop train just before the doors closed and watched to see who else got on after him. Procedure, once again. Except this once he was uncertain. Some itchy little feeling nudged at his subconscious. Something made him uneasy.

Nobody he could see was the cause of it. Had it been a pattern? If he was being boxed, then at least two of the team would have stayed on the platform. Turning casually he scanned through the window to see who was left outside. But there were just the late arrivals, wearing expressions of disgust or resignation as they saw the doors closing in front of them.

He sent his message to a onetime unisphere address. Back in the Lemule’s Max Transit office they would know he was on the last leg. They would be scanning the electronic activity in the train to see if any kind of covert operation was under way. If there was, he’d know about it at LA Galactic. Just like Stig coming back from Oaktier.

Satisfied he’d done all he could, he walked down several carriages before taking a seat—close to an exit. The next stop was Mexico City, then he’d be back at LA Galactic. Elvin had emphasized again and again how important this data was to the whole Guardian movement, how he absolutely must not fail. The invasion added its own emphasis. He debated if that was making him paranoid in his desperation to make sure he delivered.

As the train pulled away from the platform he wondered how Stig would look when he got back. The cellular reprofiling should be almost finished, giving him a whole new face, allowing him to resume front-line duties. Stig wasn’t good at sitting around doing nothing all day in the safe house.

Justine sat at the back of the security office in LA Galactic, quietly watching the navy intelligence team coordinate the box operation on the loop train. They had been running the observation operation from here as soon as they confirmed that Kazimir was staying at a hotel in Santa Monica. She’d checked in with them several times a day for a personal briefing, even at the height of the invasion. Each day was the same: Kazimir was killing time, acting like a tourist. Waiting.

It was so strange, being able to see the observation team’s real-time images of him, while not being able to touch him or talk to him herself. She felt as if she’d been cast in the role of some obscure guardian angel, watching over her beloved from a lofty height, making sure his youthfulness and naivety didn’t bring him into harm. The guilt she felt at the same time was excruciating, but she kept telling herself that afterward he’d understand. When he finally realized how utterly wrong he’d been, how he’d been taken in and used by others, they could begin afresh. Justine hadn’t even thought what kind of life they’d have together afterward. Which made her as dizzy-headed as Kazimir.

Then yesterday the call had come through from Commander Alic Hogan. Kazimir had received instructions from a onetime address, and taken the loop train to Rio. What followed then had been strange. Kazimir had visited an ancient observatory in the Andes, then set off back almost immediately. Given how isolated the observatory was, the navy team couldn’t get inside to see what it was Kazimir had picked up. In fact, it was very difficult for them to remain unseen on the track through the Andes as they followed his four-by-four.

Low-level cybersphere investigation revealed the observatory was run by a consortium of universities, with funding coming from a great many sources, corporate, government, and educational. It was now surrounded by a navy team, who were waiting for the order to go in. That would only come after Kazimir delivered whatever he was carrying to his controller.

The scale and obvious importance of the whole operation was easy justification for her to travel to LA Galactic in person, along with two bodyguards from Senate Security. Hogan was running the operation himself, as well he might considering the pressure she’d been putting on him.

“The loop train has left Rio, Senator,” Hogan reported. “Shouldn’t be much longer now.”

“Good.”

“He called a onetime address once he egressed. The Guardian operative returning from Oaktier did the same thing. It would seem to be their standard operating procedure.”

“Do you expect Kazimir McFoster to get off here?”

“It’s highly probable. But I’ve got enough people to box him no matter where he goes. Don’t worry, Senator, this one won’t be getting away from us.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” She gave him a slight nod, dismissing him. Hogan’s smile was forced as he went back to join his team. All of them were hunched over their desks, studying the screens and muttering to the field operatives.

This time nothing was left to chance, as it had been when Paula Myo was in charge. Over a hundred naval intelligence officers were on duty in and around LA Galactic, ready to trail Kazimir to whatever destination the handover was scheduled to take place. They’d been quietly deployed over the last two days, avoiding any possibility of virtual observation. Tarlo was convinced their last failure was due to the Guardians infiltrating at least some of LA Galactic’s network. Consequentially, they were using dedicated communications systems, with ultra-modern obscured traffic software. If the Guardians had the technical capability to detect that, then they’d probably be running the whole Commonwealth before the end of the year.

She used her interface to call up images from the CST internal network, and watched on a desk screen as the loop train slid through the gateway between Rio and Mexico City.

Kazimir got off the loop train at LA Galactic’s Carralvo terminal. It was midday. Undiluted sunlight poured through the huge crescent windows high overhead, making the angular support pillars gleam. He walked off the platform and down the curving ramp at the end, feeling the familiar tremble through the soles of his boots as trains rolled through the giant building. Traffic at the station was almost back up to its pre-invasion levels, though noticeably fewer passengers crowded the central concourse.

As he stepped off the end of the ramp he glanced about casually, as if unsure which way he should be going. Nobody paid him any attention. There had been no warning from the Guardian team, either visually or through the cybersphere.

Maybe I am paranoid.

Kazimir started walking along the concourse, heading for exit eight where there was a taxi stand outside. Another quarter of an hour would see him return in triumph to the office of Lemule’s Max Transit, and hand over the memory crystal with its Martian data. He almost patted the little disk in its secure belt pocket, but that would have been pathetically amateurish. A confident smile tweaked his lips as he made his way through the thousands of travelers bustling along the central concourse. The Guardians would be another significant step toward bringing about Far Away’s revenge because of him. And once this mission was complete he would try to find time to visit Justine again. That venture out to the Tulip Mansion was the only thing he’d done since leaving Far Away that transgressed their operational doctrine. But he didn’t care. Bruce would understand that, if none of the others did. Justine was a part of him. Without her, there was no point to existence. She was worth risking everything for. And when he’d seen her again that fateful night, it was as if no time had passed. That she felt the same way about him was the kind of miracle he wouldn’t even expect the dreaming heavens to grant.

But she did. That was the true wonder he’d known. She felt for him as he did for her. Her delight alone made him more determined to rid the universe of the Starflyer. He wanted a universe where nothing could come between them ever again. What a world that would be. What an incredible, blissful future.

He was two hundred meters away from exit eight when he saw the man standing at the bottom of the ramp that curved up to platform six. Something about him … Neatly cropped hair, tall, young, early twenties just like Kazimir, wearing a simple blue jacket over a cream shirt. The way he was standing, holding a small array in his hand, reading a document on the unrolled screen. His position and angle against the ramp’s railing—so relaxed and natural—allowed him to see everyone walking along the concourse whenever he happened to glance up from the screen. It could so easily have been an ordinary civilian. But his profile made Kazimir slow as he approached. That profile was oddly familiar. A profile that was searing connections deep into Kazimir’s brain. Old memories tumbled out, delivering a physical jolt to the body.

Kazimir halted. Tears smudged his vision. “No,” he said soundlessly. He wanted to move, but his knees were threatening to give way.

The man glanced up from the array screen, looking straight at Kazimir.

“Bruce,” Kazimir gasped. “It’s you.” He took a step forward, heedless of the people flowing between them. It was him, really him. Bruce McFoster, standing on the concourse on LA Galactic as if it were the most normal thing in the universe. Bruce McFoster who had fallen in battle right in front of him. Every day Kazimir saw the giant warhorse rolling across Bruce’s defenseless body. Bruce McFoster: alive. “Bruce!” Kazimir took another couple of steps. “Oh, my God. Bruce, it’s me, it’s Kaz.”

Bruce hadn’t stopped looking at him. He put the array in his pocket with a calm unhurried motion.

Kazimir started running. “Bruce!” He opened his arms wide in rapturous welcome. A path opened for him through the crowd as he rushed forward.

Bruce McFoster brought his right arm up. There was something in his hand. It flashed—

Kazimir felt no pain. He felt nothing. There had been a moment of blackness. Then he was looking straight up at the Carralvo terminal’s white concrete ceiling far overhead. His body wasn’t moving. Silence closed in on him. “Bruce?”

Faces swam over him, but it was hard to see any of them. The light was dimming. Kazimir tried to smile. He finally realized he was dying. Not that it mattered, because his life had included—“Justine.” Ghostly fingers reached up to touch her icon. “Justine, I’m so sorry.” But her smile was there comforting him, forgiving as the light slipped away.

Justine screamed as the security camera swung around on the man Kazimir was staring at in such wondrous disbelief. Her brother’s murderer was standing in the middle of LA Galactic. She watched as he coolly raised his arm and fired a pistol. The ion stream blew Kazimir’s chest open in a horrific plume of blood and charred gore. He was flung back five meters through the air to sprawl on the concourse. Justine’s scream choked off. She almost dropped out of the chair as her body spasmed in shock.

The navy team filled the office with frenzied shouting. A furious, scared Alic Hogan was almost sobbing as he ordered the officers on the concourse to give chase. His fists were clenched above the main screens, ready to punch straight through the images. Every picture turned to a confused, fast-moving blur. More shots were fired. A chorus of yelling and panicked shrieks burst out of the speakers.

Justine breathed again. A long juddering breath that burned its way down her throat. One screen had remained centered on Kazimir’s broken body.

“Take me down there,” she whispered painfully.

“Senator?” one of the bodyguards asked.

“We’re going down there.”

“Yes, Senator.”

Her e-butler told her a single message had arrived via a onetime address. Its author was verified as Kazimir McFoster. “Nobody’s to touch him,” she yelled abruptly as she got to her feet.

The navy personnel turned around from their desks, looking at her with startled expressions. “Keep everyone away from him,” she told them. “I don’t want him touched.”

As she left the office she ordered her e-butler to open the message. It contained a unisphere address code, and a line of text. MY DARLING JUSTINE, YOU ARE THE ONLY PERSON I HAVE EVER LOVED. I THANK YOU FOR LIVING. KAZIMIR.

The bodyguard had to hold her as she started crying.

CST station security staff cleared a path for Justine through the tense, worried crowd on the concourse. They’d been kept well back from the body, leaving her with a long lonely walk at the end. The last few steps as the true damage that had been done to him became visible were almost impossible for her. Yet she forced herself forward, punishing herself because she knew she deserved far, far worse.

It was every bit as bad as she knew it would be. The blood pooling over the white marble. The smell. His face perfectly intact, holding the expression of someone whose prayer had been answered.

Justine knelt beside him, though in truth her legs could barely hold her weight anymore. The wide puddle of his cold blood soaked into her expensive skirt. She reached out and touched his cheek with her fingers, fearful of what she would feel. Lifeless bodies she had seen countless times, including her brother’s. But Kazimir was a Guardian, he didn’t have a memorycell insert. This was genuine death, a life that had ended. She thought she’d left this barbarity behind centuries ago.

Later there would be anger. Fury. And a bitter, bitter remorse. For now she was just numb. Not understanding how this could have happened despite all her power and authority; all the orders and thinly veiled threats that nothing, nothing was to harm him. Now here he was, her beautiful young love: dead. Forever.

Justine heard a pair of heels clicking on the marble. Someone walking purposefully along the concourse toward her. No doubt who that would be. She smiled forlornly down at Kazimir one last time, then rose to her feet and turned around.

“Senator,” Paula Myo said. “My sympathies.”

Justine’s smile turned cruel as she glanced down at the dark blood staining her skirt. “I told them. I made it very clear to the navy. Kazimir was not to be hurt.”

“The navy didn’t do this.”

“You see, I always thought that I was right, that he was just a naive provincial lad with a head full of nonsense. I have to be right because I’m nearly four centuries old, and I live in mansions and penthouses and I have enough money to buy his world. I had to protect him from himself, from others who were using him.”

“You did everything you could.”

“Then why is he dead, Investigator?”

“There is a leak in the navy, probably more than one.”

“It is real, isn’t it,” she said with a kind of detached amusement. “Kazimir was right all along.”

“Yes, Senator, the Starflyer is real.”

....

Wind and current were acting in happy conjunction, pushing the Pathfinder along at a steady clip. In other circumstances, Ozzie would have been quite pleased about that. But not today.

“Isn’t there anything ahead?” Orion asked with a petulant whine.

Ozzie switched off his retinal insert’s zoom function, which he’d been using to scan that uncomfortably distant horizon. “No,” he said. Even he thought he sounded defensive.

Fifteen miles to starboard, and now slightly behind, the last island rose up out of the tranquil blue-gray water. The simple dark green cone was the fourth one they’d tried to reach. Once they’d left their original island behind, the sea’s current had picked up considerably. So much so that they had very little ability to steer. Even with Tochee angling the rudder hard over, they couldn’t vary their course by more than a few degrees.

They had missed the first island by over ten miles, standing on the raft’s creaking deck to watch despondently as it sank away behind them. It had been larger than the one they’d set sail from, with wide coves and extensive forests. Ozzie hadn’t seen any signs of habitation, even with his retinal inserts on full magnification, but it had looked very promising.

After the shock of missing landfall, they had swung around straightaway for the next island, thirty miles farther on. This time with near-constant rowing and the tiller jammed over, they’d got to within a couple of miles as the current swept them onward. Neither of the two exhausted humans had said anything, but they both knew that Tochee could have swum ashore if it wanted to. Their big alien companion had chosen to stay with them.

From then on there were fewer islands they could aim for, and the current strength had increased noticeably. And now, what might have been their last chance was receding at a respectable speed.

Ozzie sat down with his back to the mast, looking back trying not to appear too disappointed. The stiff square of sail was curved tautly as the breeze pushed against it. There wasn’t a lot of point having it up anymore. The surface of the sea was flowing as fast as a plains river. He couldn’t work out why it was doing that, either. Seas simply didn’t rush about, there was no hydrological mechanism he could think of that would produce such an effect. It was just one more anomaly that the planet had thrown at them. Ozzie worried that it might prove a fatal one.

“I might be able to tow us back over to the last island,” Tochee’s array translated.

Ozzie gave the big creature a dubious look. “You’re more likely to just wear yourself out. Let’s save acts like that until we get desperate.”

“And we’re not now?” Orion muttered.

“As long as we’re moving, we’re okay,” Ozzie said firmly. “There will be more islands over the horizon, or even the mainland. It’s when we stop moving that we’re in trouble.”

Orion’s expression was very skeptical, but he didn’t argue. Tochee pulled the rudder up, then simply shuffled around until it was facing forward.

So far they’d eaten about a third of their fresh supplies, Ozzie calculated. If they were a little more careful from now on, the fruit should last them another four or five days. Technically, food wasn’t a problem. Tochee could catch fish for them indefinitely, and the filter pump could produce fresh water. From that point of view they could sail over the entire ocean. However, he was under no illusion about how long the raft would last. The palm frond ropes were already showing signs of swelling and fraying where they bound the log bundles together. When they started to go, their future would be measurable in hours. There were no lifebelts on board. He was now wondering how useful the inflatable tent walls would be in an emergency.

Ozzie woke with Orion shaking his shoulder.

“Ozzie, I can hear something.” The boy’s voice was low, as if he was afraid.

“Okay.” Ozzie pushed his sunglasses up, blinking around. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep. When he looked behind them, there was a small trail of bubbles emerging from the stern of the raft. “Jeeze, we’re leaving a wake. How fast are we going?”

“Don’t know.” Orion was still subdued.

Ozzie climbed to his feet, very conscious of the wind. The sail was straining hard, applying a lot of force to the mast. “Let’s get that down,” he said. He and Orion untied the ropes, and lowered the dry gray-brown square. It flapped away enthusiastically as it came down.

“Is there a cause for concern?” Tochee asked.

“Orion thought he heard something,” Ozzie said.

“Are air vibrations a danger?”

“Depends what’s making them,” Ozzie said. Even after all this time, with their expanded vocabulary and literally days devoted to explaining the topic, Tochee still had difficulty with the whole concept of noise.

“Can you hear it?” Orion asked.

Ozzie stood still. There was a distinct sound carrying over the water, just loud enough to be heard above the wavelets that lapped against the Pathfinder. A reverberant grumbling, like distant thunder.

When Ozzie looked forward trying to pinpoint the sound, he saw the horizon had become indistinct. A thin blanket of fog lay over the water. He zoomed in with his retinal inserts, which revealed nothing. The sound was gradually getting louder.

“I think we should tie ourselves on,” Ozzie said. “Just in case.”

“What is it?” Orion asked. “Please, Ozzie.”

“I dunno, man. Honestly. I’m just taking some precautions here. We’re a long way from land, and if this is a storm brewing up I don’t want anyone going overboard.”

They busied themselves with some lengths of rope, lashing the ends to the base of the mast. Tochee declined a rope, using its locomotion flesh ridges to anchor itself to the decking.

When they’d finished, the fog bank was a lot closer, and the noise had become a constant soft roar that continued to build.

Ozzie stood beside the mast, hooking one arm around the tall shaft of wood. “I don’t get it,” he complained. “I can’t see any storm clouds anywhere.” Above him in the clear sky, the water specks in the gas halo gleamed with their usual intensity. The sea around them was becoming choppy, with waves rushing forward in unison, carrying the Pathfinder onward. They were starting to rock about from the speed they were traveling. The creaking of overstrained ropes was audible above the roaring.

Several new water specks rose above the horizon, like small constellations on the move. Ozzie stared at them in puzzlement. Something very weird was happening to his sense of perspective. It was as if the fog bank was shrinking, while the horizon rushed in toward him. Then in a moment of truly terrifying revelation he realized what he was seeing.

There was no fog bank. It was just a thin line of spray hanging above the waves. Spray thrown up by a waterfall. The sea was pouring over a cliff that extended out to the vanishing point on either side of the Pathfinder.

White water boiled up directly ahead of the raft, its vigorous spume drenching Ozzie. The raft tilted alarmingly as it juddered over the churning water, forcing him to cling to the mast as his feet slipped. Looking to starboard he could see the entire sea cascading down in a vast arc that thundered farther and farther toward … there was no bottom beneath them, only the empty void of the gas halo.

Ozzie lifted his head back to stare at the false stars above, his face a mask of incredulity and pure rage. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me!” he screamed at the sky.

The Pathfinder fell off the edge of the world.

THE END
of
Pandora’s Star

The Commonwealth Saga will be concluded in Judas Unchained.

Judas Unchained is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2006 by Peter F. Hamilton

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

A leather-bound first edition of this book was published by the Easton Press of Norwalk, Connecticut.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hamilton, Peter F.

Judas unchained / Peter F. Hamilton.

p. cm.

1. Life on other planets—Fiction. 2. Space colonies—Fiction.

3. Corporations—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6058.A5536J83 2005

823’.914—dc22 2005048440

www.delreybooks.com

eISBN: 978-0-345-49071-1
v3.0_r1

CONTENTS

Master - Table of Contents

Judas Unchained

Title Page

Copyright

Dramatis Personae

Prologue

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen

Dedication

Other Books by This Author

About the Author

NAVY

Captain Wilson Kime—Ex-NASA pilot. Admiral, navy chief

Rafael Columbia—Vice Admiral, planetary defense

Tarlo—Lieutenant, Navy Intelligence

Renne Kampasa—Lieutenant, Navy Intelligence

Morton—Convict, navy trooper

Oscar Monroe—Navy captain, Defender

McClain Gilbert—Navy captain

Anna Kime—Wilson’s wife, and Navy chief of staff

Tunde Sutton—Navy physicist

Alic Hogan—Lieutenant Commander, Navy Intelligence

Natasha Kersley—Seattle project chief

Rob Tanne—Convict, navy trooper

Catherine Stewart—aka the Cat, convict, navy trooper

Matthew Oldfield—Second Lieutenant, Paris office

Vic Russell—Second Lieutenant, Paris office

Gwyneth Russell—Second Lieutenant, Paris office

Jim Nwan—Second Lieutenant, Paris office

John King—Lieutenant, Paris office

DYNASTIES

Nigel Sheldon—Co-inventor of wormhole technology. Co-owner of Compression Space Transport

Ozzie Fernandez Isaac—Co-inventor of wormhole technology. Co-owner of CST

Daniel Alster—Chief executive aide to Nigel Sheldon

Campbell Sheldon—Direct great-grandson, high position in Sheldon Dynasty

Gerard Utreth—Braunt family rep, Democratic Republic New Germany

Isabella Halgarth—Starflyer agent

Victor Halgarth—Isabella’s father, Starflyer agent

Bernadette Halgarth—Isabella’s mother, Starflyer agent

Giselle Swinsol—Sheldon Dynasty starship project manager

Otis Sheldon—Pilot, Sheldon Dynasty starship

Nelson Sheldon—Sheldon Dynasty security chief

SENATE

Paula Myo—Investigator, Senate Security

Justine Burnelli—Earth Socialite–now Senator

Thompson Burnelli—Commonwealth Senator–undergoing re-life

Elaine Doi—President, Intersolar Commonwealth

Patricia Kantil—Chief aide to Elaine Doi

Ramon DB—Senator for Buta, leader of African caucus

Crispin Goldreich—Senator; Chair, budget commission

Toniea Gall—Chairwoman, Resident’s Association High Angel

GUARDIANS OF SELFHOOD

Bradley Johansson—Founder of Guardians of Selfhood

Kazimir McFoster—Clan member in the Guardians of Selfhood

Bruce McFoster—Ex-Guardian, Starflyer assassin

Stig McSobel—Guardian, leader of Armstrong City team

Samantha McFoster—Guardian, technician for planet’s revenge

Olwen McOnna—Guardian

Adam Elvin—Ex-radical, quartermaster for Guardians

ALIENS

Tochee—Alien of unknown origin

The High Angel—A sentient alien starship

MorningLightMountain—Prime alien from Dyson Alpha

Starflyer—Hostile alien of unknown origin

Qatux—A Raiel, living on the High Angel

The SI—Sentient intelligence, machine based, of human origin

OTHERS

Mellanie Rescorai—Unisphere personality, SI agent

Orion—Parentless teenage boy from Silvergalde

Dudley Bose—Astronomer at Gralmond University, re-lifed

Hoshe Finn—Detective, Darklake city police

Gore Burnelli—Head of the Burnelli Grand Family

Mark Vernon—Engineer

Liz Vernon—Biogenetic technician, Mark’s wife

Simon Rand—Founder of Randtown, leader of resistance

Alessandra Baron—News show presenter, Starflyer agent

Tiger Pansy—Actress in “adult” TSI dramas

Paul Cramley—Professional hacker

Kaspar Murdo—Head janitor at Saffron Clinic

The Agent—Underworld security personnel manager on Illuminatus

Niall Swalt—Junior employee, Grand Triad Adventures tour company

Edmund Li—Officer in Far Away freight inspectorate division, Boongate Station

Michelangelo—TSI news anchor

Right from the start, there was something about the investigation that made Lieutenant Renne Kampasa uneasy. The first little qualm came sliding up out of her subconscious when she saw the victim’s loft apartment. She’d been inside loft apartments just like it a hundred times before. It was the kind of plush metropolitan pad that a group of funky TSI soap characters usually lived in: beautiful single people with well-paying jobs that gave them most of the day off so they could enjoy a floor space of around five hundred square meters as they lounged around in an extravagant décor provided by overpriced interior designers. The kind of scenario completely divorced from real life but full of dramatic or comic potential for the scriptwriters.

Yet here she was, a day after the Guardians’ shotgun message that denounced President Elaine Doi as a Starflyer agent, being shown into just such an apartment on the top floor of a refurbished factory block in Daroca, the capital city of Arevalo. The massive open-plan living room had a wide sunny balcony that looked out over the Caspe River, which flowed through the heart of the city. Like all the capitals of successful phase one space planets, Daroca was a rich montage of parks, elegant buildings, and broad streets stretching away to the horizon. Under the planet’s bronze-shaded morning sunlight it glimmered with a sharp coronal hue, adding to the panorama’s graceful appeal.

Renne shook her head in mild disbelief at the fabulous view. Even with the decent salary the navy paid her, she could never afford the rent on this. And it was currently being paid by three first-life girls, all under twenty-five.

One of them was showing Renne and Tarlo in: Catriona Saleeb, a small twenty-two-year-old, with long curly black hair, wearing a simple green dress with strong geometric lilac stripes—except Renne knew the dress was a Fon, which put its price tag over a thousand Earth dollars, and the girl was using it as a casual housedress. Renne’s e-butler printed up Saleeb’s file in her virtual vision; she was a junior member of the Morishi Grand Family, working at a bank in Daroca’s large financial district.

Her two friends were Trisha Marina Halgarth, who had a product placement job at Veccdale, a Halgarth subsidiary that designed chic domestic systems, and Isabella Halgarth, who’d taken a job at a contemporary art gallery in town. They fitted the whole profile: three bachelorettes sharing a place in the city, having fun together while they waited for their true careers to launch, or husbands of equal wealth and status to materialize and carry them off to a merged trust fund mansion to produce their contracted quota of children.

“This is one great place you’ve got here,” Tarlo said as they made their way into the lounge.

Catriona turned and gave him a smile that was a lot more than simple politeness. “Thanks, it’s a family place so we get it cheap.”

“Plenty of wild parties, huh.”

Her smile became teasing. “Maybe.”

Renne shot him an exasperated look; they were supposed to be on duty, not hitting on potential witnesses. He just grinned back, perfect white teeth gleaming out of his handsome tanned face. She’d seen for herself just how successful that grin could be in the clubs and bars around Paris.

Catriona took them over to the kitchen section, which was separated from the living room by a broad marble-topped breakfast bar. The kitchen was ultramodern, equipped with every convenience gadget possible, all built in to swan-white egg-shaped wall modules. Somehow, Renne couldn’t imagine it being used for much actual cooking, not even by the complicated-looking chefbots.

The two other girls were sitting on stools at the bar.

“Trisha Marina Halgarth?” Renne asked.

“That’s me.” One of the girls got to her feet. She had a heart-shaped face and light olive skin with small, dark green butterfly-wing OCtattoos flowing back from each hazel eye. She wore an oversize white toweling robe like defensive armor; she kept clutching at the fluffy fabric, pulling it tighter around her. Her bare feet had silver rings around each toe.

“We’re from navy intelligence,” Tarlo said. “Lieutenant Kampasa and I are investigating what happened to you.”

“You mean, how gullible I was,” she snapped.

“Easy, babe,” Isabella Halgarth said. Her arm went around Trisha’s shoulders. “These are the good guys.” She stood to face the investigators.

Renne found herself having to look up slightly; Isabella was several centimeters taller than she, almost Tarlo’s height. She was dressed in very tight jeans that showed off her legs. Her long blond hair had been gathered into a single tail that reached down to her hips. It was an image of casual elegance.

Tarlo’s grin had broadened. Renne wanted to push him against a wall and shout a warning about professional conduct, wagging her finger in his face for emphasis. Instead, she did her best to ignore the mating dance appraisals going on all around her, and said, “I’ve investigated several similar cases, Ms. Halgarth. In my experience, the victim is rarely gullible. The Guardians have developed a very sophisticated operation over the years.”

“Years!” Catriona snorted. “And you haven’t caught them yet?”

Renne kept her polite expression in place. “We believe we are close to a resolution.”

The three girls exchanged doubtful looks. Trisha sat down again, gripping at her robe.

“I know it’s unpleasant for you,” Tarlo said. “But if you could start by telling me the man’s name.” His grin mellowed to sympathetic encouragement.

Trisha gave a reluctant nod. “Sure. Howard Liang.” She smiled feebly. “I don’t suppose that’s his real name?”

“No,” Tarlo said. “But that identity will have created a lot of data within Daroca’s cybersphere. Our forensic software teams will pull out a great many associated files. We can check on the false identity information, where it was inserted, possibly who was involved forging it. Every little bit helps.”

“How did you meet?” Renne asked.

“Party. We get to quite a lot of them.” She glanced at her two girlfriends for support.

“This is a great city,” Isabella said. “Daroca is a wealthy planet; people here have the money and time to play.” Her eyes gave Tarlo an amused glance.

“Trish and I are Dynasty, Catriona is a Grandee. What can I say? We’re highly desirable.”

“Was Howard Liang wealthy?” Renne asked.

“He didn’t have a trust fund,” Trisha said, then colored. “Well, he said he didn’t. His family was supposed to come from Velaines. He said he was a couple of years out of his first rejuve. I liked him.”

“Where did he work?”

“On the commodities desk at Ridgeon Financial. God, I don’t even know if that’s true.” She pressed her free hand against her forehead, rubbing hard. “I don’t know how old he really was. I know nothing about him at all. That’s what I hate most about this. Not that he stole my author certificate, not that he gave me a memory wipe. Just … being taken in like that. It’s so stupid. Our family security office sends us enough warnings. I never thought they applied to me.”

“Please,” Tarlo said. “Don’t blame yourself. These guys are very professional. Hell, I’d probably get taken in by them. Now, when did you last see him?”

“Three days ago. We went out for the evening. I’d been invited to the Bourne club, there was some event, a new drama series launch. We had a meal afterward, then I came home. I think. The apartment domestic array says I got in at five in the morning. I don’t remember anything after dinner. Is that when they did it?”

“Possibly,” Renne said. “Did Mr. Liang share his apartment with anyone?”

“No. He lived by himself. I met a couple of his friends; I think they were from Ridgeon. We only went out for a couple of weeks. Enough for me to drop my guard, I guess.” She shook her head angrily. “I hate this. The whole Commonwealth thinks I believe the President is an alien. I’ll never be able to face anyone at work again. I’ll have to go back to Solidade and get my face changed and use another name.”

“That would probably help,” Tarlo said gently. “But before that we need to run some tests on you. There’s a medical forensic team waiting down in the lobby. They can do this in a clinic, or here, whichever you’re comfortable with.”

“Do it here,” Trisha said. “Just get it over with.”

“Of course. Another team will sweep his apartment.”

“What do you expect to find there?” Isabella asked.

“We’ll pin down his DNA, of course,” Renne told her. “Who knows what else we’ll uncover, especially if they used it as their base. And we’ll pull his files from Ridgeon Financial’s personnel records, which I’d like you to verify. It would help to have a picture of him.”

“Won’t he have had reprofiling by now?” Catriona asked.

“Yes. But it’s his background we’ll be focusing our investigation on, his past. That’s where the clues to his origin are. You must understand, we have to crack the whole Guardian organization open; it’s the only way to bring Liang to justice. We’re not pursuing him singularly.”

They spent another twenty minutes in the loft apartment, taking statements from the girls, then handed them over to the medical forensic team. Renne was halfway to the door when she stopped and gave the big living room a thoughtful examination. Trisha was going into her bedroom with two of the forensic team.

“What?” Tarlo asked.

“Nothing.” She gave Catriona and Isabella a last look before leaving.

“Come on,” he said in the elevator back down to the lobby. “I know you. Something’s bugging you.”

“Déjà vu.”

“What?”

“I’ve seen this crime scene before.”

“Me too. Every time the Guardians shotgun the unisphere the boss sends us out to have a look around.”

“Yeah, so you should have recognized it, too. Remember Minilya?”

Tarlo frowned as the doors opened. They walked out into the lobby.

“Vaguely; it was four years ago. But that was a bunch of guys sharing an apartment.”

“Oh, so what? You’re going sexist on me? It’s different because it’s girls?”

“Hey!”

“It was exactly the same setup, Tarlo. And we’ve seen the all-girls group before as well.”

“On Nzega, April Gallar Halgarth. She was part of a holiday group.”

“Buwangwa, too, don’t forget.”

“Okay, so what’s your point?”

“I don’t like repetition. And the Guardians know we’ll catch them a whole lot easier if they stick to the same pattern.”

“I don’t see a pattern.”

“It’s not a pattern, exactly.”

“What then?”

“I’m not sure. They’re repeating their procedure. That’s not like them.”

Tarlo led the way out through the lobby’s revolving doors and used his e-butler to call a city taxi over. “The Guardians don’t have a lot of choice in this. Admittedly the number of dumb young Halgarths in the galaxy is pretty huge, but their living and social arrangements only have a finite number of permutations. It’s not the Guardians who are repeating, it’s the Halgarths.”

Renne frowned as the taxi pulled up in front of them; he was right, though that wasn’t the line she’d been thinking along. “Do you think the Halgarth security is running an entrapment operation? They could have hung Trisha out as bait?”

“No,” he said heatedly. “That’s wrong. If it was an entrapment they would have caught Liang the first night he met Trisha. His identity history data might have stood up to a review by Ridgeon Financial, but a specific entrapment operation run by the Halgarths … no way.”

“They must be running entrapment operations. If I were the senior Halgarths I’d be goddamn furious the family was constantly targeted by the Guardians.”

Tarlo settled back into the taxi’s leather seat. “They do tend to put a fair amount of pressure on the boss.”

“I don’t think that’s right, either. If they were running an entrapment they’d tell us.”

“Would they?”

“All right, maybe not,” she said, “but as this wasn’t an entrapment, it’s irrelevant anyway.”

“We don’t know it wasn’t an entrapment.”

“They didn’t catch Liang, and they haven’t told us, which they would do at this stage.”

“Alternatively, they’re busy tracking Liang, and don’t want to spook him by telling us.”

“That’s not it.” She was having trouble even looking at Tarlo. “Something is just wrong. It was too neat.”

“Too neat?”

The tone of disbelief in his voice made her wince. “Yeah, I know, I know. But something bothers me. That loft apartment, those girls, it all shouted out, ‘Here are dumb rich kids, come and rip them off.’ ”

“I don’t get this. Who’s in the wrong here, the Guardians or the Halgarths?”

“Well … Okay, I don’t suppose it could have been the Halgarths, unless that really was an entrapment operation.”

He grinned at her. “You’re getting as bad as the boss when it comes to conspiracies. You’ll be blaming the Starflyer next.”

“Could do.” She gave him a weak smile. “But I’m still going to tell her I think something’s odd about this one.”

“Career suicide.”

“Come on! What kind of a detective are you? We’re supposed to act on intuitive hunches. Don’t you watch any cop soaps?”

“Unisphere shows are for people without lives. Me, I’m busy in the evenings.”

“Yeah,” she said snidely. “Still putting on your navy uniform when you go around the clubs?”

“I’m a naval officer. Why shouldn’t I?”

Renne laughed. “God! Does that really work?”

“It does if you can find girls like those three.”

She sighed.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m serious. What can you tell Myo? You had a feeling? She’ll just bawl you out big time. And don’t look to me to back you up. There was nothing wrong with it.”

“The boss appreciates the way we consider cases. You know she’s always saying we have to take a more holistic approach to crime.”

“Holistic, yeah, not psychic.”

They were still arguing about it forty minutes later when they arrived back at the Paris office. Five uniformed navy officers were standing in a group outside Paula Myo’s office.

“What’s happening?” Tarlo asked Alic Hogan.

“Columbia’s in there with her,” the Commander said. He looked very uncomfortable.

“Christ,” Renne muttered. “It’ll be the LA fiasco. I was supposed to be chasing the leads from that operation this morning.”

“We all were,” Hogan said. He forced his gaze away from the closed door.

“Did you find anything in Daroca?”

Renne was trying to think what to say; Hogan was very by-the-book.

“It was a standard Guardians operation,” Tarlo said quickly. He was staring hard at Renne. “We left forensics working through the scene.”

“Good. Keep me updated.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Standard operation,” Renne said scathingly as they walked back to their desks.

“I just saved your ass back there,” Tarlo said. “You can say all that kind of intuition stuff to the boss, but not Hogan. All that little prick is interested in is checkmarks in the box.”

“Okay, okay,” she grumbled.

Paula Myo walked out of her office, carrying her shoulder bag and the little rabbakas plant she kept on the windowsill. A red-faced Rafael Columbia was standing behind her, dressed in his full admiral’s uniform.

Renne had never seen Myo look so shocked. It sent a cold shiver down her own spine; nothing ever ruffled the boss.

“Good-bye,” Myo told the office at large. “And thank you for all the hard work you did for me.”

“Paula?” Tarlo gasped.

She gave him a small shake of her head, and he fell silent. Renne watched Paula Myo walk out; it was like seeing a funeral procession.

“Commander Hogan,” Columbia said. “A word please.” He vanished back into Myo’s office. Alic Hogan almost ran in after him. The door closed.

Renne sat down hard. “That didn’t happen,” she mumbled incredulously. “They can’t get rid of her. She is the goddamn Directorate.”

“But we’re not the Directorate,” Tarlo said quietly. “Not anymore.”

The harsh sound of ion pistol shots sizzled out of the speakers to reverberate around the LA Galactic security office. They were swiftly drowned out by the screams. Commander Alic Hogan watched the screens in numb horror as the assassin left the scene of Kazimir’s murder behind, running along the central concourse of the Carralvo terminal, shooting as he went. Terrified passengers were throwing themselves flat or ducking down behind the railings.

“Squad B are on the upper concourse,” Renne reported from her console.

“They have clear line of sight.”

“Take him out,” Hogan ordered.

He watched a grainy camera image as the ion pulse from the squad’s sharpshooter struck the assassin. A corona of purple sparks flared briefly, outlining the running figure.

“Damnit,” Hogan hissed.

Two more ion pulses hit. Sparks were fountaining across the concourse, burning into walls and advertising panels; people shrieked as tendrils of static writhed over their clothing, singeing deep. Smoke alarms went off, adding their howl to the general din.

“He’s wearing a force field suit,” Renne exclaimed. “They can’t penetrate from that range.”

Hogan opened the general communications icon in his virtual vision. “All squads close in on the target. Pursue until he’s in open ground, then open fire. Overload that force field.” As he watched the squads putting the new tactic into play, screens on every console started to flicker. In his virtual vision, red warning graphics sprang up across his interface with the station’s network.

“Kaos software has been released into the local network nodes,” his e-butler reported. “The controlling RI is attempting to clear it.”

“Goddamnit!” Hogan’s fist thumped into his console. On the other side of the room, Senator Burnelli was rising from her seat. She looked distraught, her beautiful young face twisted by some unfathomable guilt. More camera images vanished from the screens in a maelstrom of static. Only one image of the assassin remained, taken from a roof sensor. Hogan watched him race along a ramp to platform 12A. Two navy officers were chasing after him, a hundred meters behind. Ion shots were exchanged. The image drizzled away into gray haze. A harsh groan crept out of Hogan’s throat. This couldn’t be happening! It was an absolute disaster. Worse, it was happening in front of the Senator who’d given them their first ever real lead into the Guardians, a lead Hogan had been desperate to follow up.

Hogan’s virtual hand flew over icons, pulling out secure audio channels from the squads. At least the navy’s dedicated systems weren’t too badly affected by the kaos.

“He’s on the platform, he’s on the platform!”

“With you, coming to twelve-A through the second ramp.”

“Shooting.”

“Wait! No, civilians!”

“Vic, where are you?”

“There’s a train coming in.”

“Vic? For Christ’s sake.”

“Fuck! He jumped down. Repeat, target is on the tracks. He’s on the tracks leading out westward.”

“Get after him,” Hogan ordered. “Renne, who have we got outside?”

“Squad H is nearby.” She was pulling ground plans out of a handheld array that was unaffected by the kaos. “Tarlo, are you there, can you intercept?”

“We’re on it.” Tarlo’s terse comment was accompanied by the sound of thudding footsteps.

Hogan was vaguely aware of the Senator and her bodyguards leaving the security office. His e-butler had brought up a translucent 3D map of the Carralvo terminal into his virtual vision. The westbound track from platform 12A slid out into a broad area of a hundred crisscrossing tracks, a major junction zone between the passenger terminal and a cargo yard, which eventually curved around toward the cliff of gateways five kilometers to the north.

“He’ll never make it there,” Hogan muttered. He turned to Tulloch, the CST security liaison officer. “Are any of your teams outside?”

The man nodded. “Three teams. They’re converging now. This kaos doesn’t help, but they’ve got clean communications. Don’t worry, we’ll seal him up inside that junction. He’s not going anywhere.”

Hogan looked around the security office again, seeing his people glaring in frustration at their useless consoles. All they could do was wait until the RI purged the station network. Down on the ground, teams were calling out coordinates to each other. His inserts were assigning them places on the map. It was a wide circle surrounding the western track of platform 12A, a very loose circle. Renne was issuing a stream of orders, trying to close the gaps.

“I’m going down there,” Hogan announced.

“Sir?” Renne broke off from the tactical situation to give him a surprised glance.

“Take over here,” he told her. “I might be able to help down there.” He saw the brief flicker of doubt on her face before she said, “Yes, sir.” Hogan was all too aware of how widespread that uncertainty had become among the officers under his command; the Paris office he’d inherited from Paula Myo had never considered him anything other than Admiral Columbia’s placeman, a political appointee who wasn’t really up to the job. At the start of this observation operation he’d hoped he might finally gain their respect. Now that hope, too, seemed to be vanishing along with the assassin.

The kaos that was wreaking electronic havoc on LA Galactic was starting to be felt on a physical level. Hogan had to use the stairs at the end of the Carralvo office block to get down to the concourse. The safety system on every elevator in the building had tripped, halting them wherever they were in the shafts. He dashed down the four flights of stairs from the security office, arriving on the ground floor only mildly out of breath. Out on the concourse, a tide of panicked people was buzzing around in disarray. Frightened by the murder and the chase, confused by the collapse of the local network, they didn’t know which way to flee. It didn’t help that almost every alarm was now sounding, and scarlet holographic arrows indicating the emergency exits were sliding through the air above them in contradictory directions.

Hogan pushed through them, oblivious to the curses they hurled at him. He was listening to the squads on the secure communications channels. It wasn’t sounding good. There were too many queries, too many of them shouting, “Which way?” They were all too reliant on the officers up in the security office coordinating the operation, arranging them into neat sweep patterns, watching the situation through the station’s primary sensors. Have to change training procedures, he thought absently. His map showed the ragged circle of his officers and the SCT teams closing slowly on the assassin’s supposed position.

He pulled out his own ion pistol as he charged up the ramp to platform 12A. The few passengers left were all curled up next to walls and pillars; they flinched as he sprinted past and dropped down onto the track. Bold amber holograms at the edge of the platform warned him not to proceed any farther. He ignored them and raced toward the end of the terminal where the sunlight streamed down past the high arching roof. Renne’s voice was still calm and level in his ears as she told people where to turn, what direction to take. Despite that, there were still big gaps in the noose contracting around the assassin. Hogan clenched his jaw and said nothing, but he was furious with their ragged deployment. It was only when he emerged into the flood of California sunlight that he saw the reason. The whole junction area represented on his virtual map, so neatly laced with various tracks, was in reality a harsh environment of concrete and steel sprawling for kilometers in every direction. Along one side were the bulky warehouses and loading gantries of the cargo yard, where machines and bots were in constant motion. But ahead of him, dozens of trains were winding their way across the junction: from ponderous kilometer-long freighters pulled along by huge GH9 engines to trans-Earth loop trains; twenty-wagon intrastation goods shunters as well as the sleek white express trains chasing past at frighteningly high speed. They filled the air with metallic screeching and a thunderous rattling, a constant racket that was overlaid by the clunks and clangs of what must have been small ships colliding. It was a noise he had always been oblivious to as he rode in the conditioned comfort of the first-class passenger carriages.

The kaos attack made no impact on the station’s traffic control. CST, ever anxious about sabotage or even natural catastrophe, used independent ultra-hardened encryption to maintain full communications with and control of the trains at all times and under any circumstances; they’d even prevailed during the alien assault on the Lost23.

Hogan almost skidded to a halt as a fast cargo train sped past fifty meters to his left. He could feel the wind of its slipstream on his face. Several squad members were visible spread out in the distance ahead of him, all of them holding their weapons ready, trying to look in every direction at once.

Hogan touched the virtual icon that put him in direct contact with Tulloch. “For Christ’s sake, shut down the traffic out here! We’re going to get pulped into the landscape.”

“Sorry, Alic, I’ve already tried; transport control won’t do it without executive-level authority.”

“Shit!” As Hogan watched, one of his people suddenly sprinted sideways. A two-hundred-meter-long snake of tanker trucks hauled by a GH4 engine trundled along the line he’d been standing on. “Renne, get Admiral Columbia to set off a nuke under CST. I want these goddamn trains shut down. Now!”

“Working on it, sir. The kaos is being flushed. Should have full sensor coverage back in a few minutes.”

“Christ.” He spat under his breath. Just how many disasters can you pile up in one day? He hurriedly sidestepped off the actual track itself, and began jogging toward the erratic line of squad members up ahead. “Okay, people, let’s get more organized. Who was the last person to actually see our target?”

“Couple of minutes ago, he was two hundred meters ahead of me, heading northwest.”

Hogan’s virtual vision identified the speaker as John King, and tagged his position on the map.

“Positive sighting, sir. I’ve got him on the other side of this flatbed shunter,” Gwyneth Russell said. Her location was nearly a half of a kilometer away from John’s.

“When?” Hogan demanded.

“He jumped behind it maybe a minute ago, sir.”

“I can confirm that,” Tarlo said. “My squad is due north of Gwyneth. The flatbed shunter has just reached us. He’s on the other side of it.”

Hogan scanned the direction his map indicated Tarlo’s squad was deployed. A fast-moving train of cylindrical containers was zipping along a rail between him and the squad. He thought he could see another train moving on the other side of it, through the gaps between the containers. Might have been the flatbed shunter. It was a confusing flicker of motion.

There was a brief ebb to the background clamor, and he heard a high-pitched humming from the concave gully on his right-hand side, the sound of high-voltage cables. Hogan looked down at it, frowning. He’d assumed it was a long enzyme-bonded concrete storm drain of some kind, about three meters wide and one deep. The gray surface was rippling slightly, and the entire gully behind him moved across the ground, linking up to another gully running parallel to it twenty meters away.

Maglev track!

Hogan flung himself down onto the hard granite chippings, and put his hands over his head. An express train hurtled past, its slipstream howling. His uniform jacket flapped around like a sail in a tornado. For an instant he thought the air pressure was going to be strong enough to lift him off the ground. He shouted wordlessly into the bone-shaker yowl as animal fear surged through him. Then the express was gone, its rear strobe light blinking into the distance.

It took a minute for his legs to stop shaking enough to carry his weight. He clambered slowly to his feet, looking nervously along the innocuous gully for any sign of another express.

“He’s not here,” Tarlo called. “Sir, we missed him.”

Hogan’s map showed him a big concentration of squad members along a section of track, with Tarlo in the middle.

“We can’t have,” Gwyneth insisted. “For God’s sake, I saw him behind the train.”

“Well, he didn’t come this way.”

“Then where, for fuck’s sake?”

“Can anyone see him?” Hogan asked. “Somebody?”

He received a chorus of “Not here,” “No, sir.”

As he walked unsteadily away from the maglev track, his virtual vision showed him the station network slowly reestablishing itself. Renne had pulled a junction routing schedule from traffic control, and was using it to warn everybody of approaching trains.

“Keep everyone in their positions,” he told her. “I want a perimeter around this junction. He can’t have reached the edges yet. We keep it sealed until we have full electronic coverage again.”

“Yes, sir,” she answered. “Oh, we just got some additional help.”

A couple of black helicopters swooped low over the junction, with LAPD written in white on their underbelly. Hogan glared at them. Oh, great, just like the marina fiasco. The cops will be laughing their asses off at us.

Clear sensor images were flipping up into a grid in his virtual vision as the kaos cleared. He heard the first of the trains braking, a teeth-jangling screech that cut clean across the junction. It was joined by another, then another, until every train was slowing to a halt.

Finally the junction was silent, the trains motionless. “All right, people,” Hogan announced grimly, “let’s sweep this area sector by sector.”

Two hours later Alic had to admit defeat. They’d searched every inch of the junction, visually and with sensors. The assassin was nowhere to be found. The perimeter of his own squads and CST security teams remained unbreeched. Yet the target had somehow eluded them.

From his makeshift field command post on platform 12A, Hogan watched the tired, despondent squads trekking in from all across the junction. It was a wretched blow to everyone’s morale. He could see it in their expressions, the way they wouldn’t meet his eyes as they passed.

Tarlo stopped in front of him, looking more angry than disappointed. “I don’t get it. We were right behind him. The others were all around. There’s no way he could have got past us, I don’t care what he was wetwired with.”

“He had help,” Hogan told his lieutenant. “A lot of help. The kaos alone proves that.”

“Yeah, I guess. You coming back to Paris? Some of us are going to hit the bars; they’ll still be open. The good ones anyway.”

At any other time Hogan would have appreciated the offer. “Thanks, but no. I’ve got to tell the Admiral what happened.”

Tarlo winced in sympathy. “Ouch. Well … that’s why they pay you the big bucks.”

“Not enough for this,” Hogan muttered as the tall Californian headed off down the platform to his squad mates. He took a breath, and told his e-butler to place the call to Columbia’s office.

Senator Justine Burnelli stayed with the body as the official from the city morgue directed the robotic stretcher toward one of the Carralvo’s many basement service exits. There had been quite a delay while LA Galactic recovered from its kaos attack, time she simply spent staring at Kazimir’s figure on the white marble floor of the concourse. The sheet that the subdued CST staff had produced wasn’t quite big enough to cover the pool of blood spreading around him.

Now her love was sealed in a black body bag, and a small squadron of cleaningbots was already at work on the blood, scouring the marble surface, eradicating any sign of staining with sharp effective chemicals. In a week’s time, nobody would ever know what happened on that spot.

The robotic stretcher slid itself into the back of the morgue ambulance.

“I’ll ride with him,” Justine announced.

Nobody argued, not even Paula Myo. Justine clambered into the vehicle and sat on the cramped bench beside the stretcher as the doors closed. Myo and the two Senate Security bodyguards she had detailed to accompany Justine got into a waiting car behind the ambulance. Alone in the gloomy light from a single polyphoto strip on the ceiling, Justine thought she was going to start crying again.

I won’t! Kazimir wouldn’t want that, him and his old-world notions.

A lone tear leaked down her cheek as she slowly unzipped the body bag, allowing herself to see him one last time before the inevitable forensic autopsy. His young body would be examined and analyzed very thoroughly, which would mean the pathologists cutting him open to complement the deep scan. He wouldn’t be Kazimir after that.

She gazed down at him, still surprised by the passive expression on his face.

“Oh, my love, I’ll carry on your cause,” she promised him. “I’ll fight your fight, and we’ll win. We’ll beat it. We’ll destroy the Starflyer.”

Kazimir’s dead face stared up blindly. She flinched as she looked down at his ruined chest, the tattered, burnt hole that the ion pulse had left in his jacket and shirt. Slowly, she forced her hand into his pockets, feeling around for anything. He’d been sent to the observatory in Peru to collect something, and she knew she couldn’t trust the navy. She wasn’t sure about Myo, either; and the Investigator certainly didn’t trust her.

There was nothing in his pockets. She moved down his body, patting the fabric of his clothes, trying to ignore the smears of blood building up on her fingers and palms. It took a while, but she eventually found the memory crystal in his belt. A faint, fond smile touched her lips at that: Kazimir on his secret mission used a belt secure pocket like some tourist afraid of being mugged. There and then, she hated the Guardians for using him. Their cause might be right, but that didn’t mean they could recruit children.

Justine was wiping her hands down on some tissues when the vehicle started braking to a halt. She shoved the tissues into her bag along with the memory crystal and hurriedly zipped the body bag up. The doors opened. Justine stepped out, worried she would look as guilty as she felt.

They were in a small warehouse, parked on a platform beside a waiting train that had only two carriages. She’d had to call Campbell Sheldon to summon up a private train so quickly; fortunately, he’d been sympathetic. Even though they were friends, she knew there would be a price to pay later. There always was, some support for a policy, a returned favor. It was the way of the game. She didn’t care.

Paula stood beside her as the stretcher trundled into the cargo compartment on the second carriage. “You realize that Admiral Columbia will not approve of this, Senator?”

“I know,” Justine said. She didn’t care about that, either. “But I want to be very sure of the autopsy. Senate Security can supervise the procedure, but I want it performed at our family clinic in New York. It’s the only place I can be sure there will be no discrepancies or problems.”

“I understand.”

The train took twenty minutes to traverse the distance between Seattle and the Newark station, which served New York. An unmarked ambulance from the clinic was waiting for the body, along with two limousines. This time Justine couldn’t avoid riding with Paula as the little convoy sped off to the exclusive facility just outside the city.

“Do you trust me?” Paula asked.

Justine pretended to look out of the darkened window at the outlying districts. Despite the profound shock of the murder and all its associated emotional turmoil, she was still rational enough to consider the implications of the question. And she knew damn well the Investigator never, ever eased off.

“I believe we now share several common goals. We both want that assassin caught. We both believe the Starflyer exists. We both certainly know the navy is compromised.”

“That will do to begin with,” Paula said. “You still have blood under your fingernails, Senator. I presume it got there when you searched the body.”

Justine knew her cheeks would be reddening. So much for slick maneuvering. She gave the Investigator a long, calculating look, then reached down into her bag for another tissue.

“Did you find anything?” Paula asked.

“Do you still think the Starflyer got to me when I was on Far Away?”

“Nothing in this case can be certain. The Starflyer has had a very long time to establish its connections within the Commonwealth unopposed and unseen. But I do assign that a very low probability.”

“I’m on probation, then.” Justine worked the tissue edge at a fleck of blood on her left index finger.

“An astute summary.”

“It must be very lonely for you up there on top of Olympus, judging the rest of us.”

“I hadn’t realized how badly you’ve been affected by McFoster’s death. I wouldn’t normally expect a Burnelli to give away any edge in a deal.”

“Are we making a deal?”

“You know we are.”

“Kazimir and I were lovers.” She said it simply, as if it were a stock market report, trying to keep her distance. Inside, the numbness was giving way to pain. She knew once the body was delivered safely to the clinic she’d have to flee back to the Tulip Mansion, a place where she could grieve properly, without anyone seeing.

“I had determined that much. Did you meet on Far Away?”

“Yes. He was only seventeen then. I’d never have guessed I could love someone like that. But then you never get to choose when it comes to real love, do you?”

“No.” Paula turned away.

“Have you been in love like that, Investigator? Love that makes you completely crazy?”

“Not for several lives, no.”

“I could cope with a bodyloss. I have with my brother. I could even cope with him losing several days of memory. But this, this is death, Investigator. Kazimir is gone forever, and I am the cause of that, I am the one who betrayed him. I’m not equipped for that, not mentally. True death is not something that happens today. Mistakes of this magnitude cannot be buried.”

“The Prime attack resulted in several tens of millions of humans being killed on the Lost23. People that will never be re-lifed. Your grief is not unique. Not anymore.”

“I’m just another rich bitch who has lost a trinket. Is that it?”

“No, Senator. Your suffering is very real, and for that I am genuinely sympathetic. However, I do believe you will get through this. You have the determination and clarity of thought that is only afforded to people of your age and experience.”

Justine snorted. “Emotional scar tissue, you mean.”

“Resilience would be closer to the mark. If anything, I’d say today has shown you just how human you are. In that at least you can be content.”

Justine finished polishing her nails with the tissue. Now there was no evidence she had ever touched him—it was a miserable thought. “You really believe that?”

“I do. I’m assuming the body is actually being taken to your family clinic so you can clone him?”

“No. I won’t do that to him. Replicating him physically is hardly going to purge my guilt. A person is more than just a body. I’m going to give Kazimir the one gift I still can. I can do no less.”

“I see. Then I wish you happiness in your choice, Senator.”

“Thank you.”

“But I would still like to know if you found anything.”

“A memory crystal.”

“May I see it?”

“Yes, I suppose you can. It’s your experience I’ll need to help bring down the Starflyer. But there are limits to my cooperation; I won’t give the navy anything that will help them stop the Guardians. I don’t care how committed you are to arresting Johansson.”

“I understand.”

Adam had personally given Kieran McSobel the support assignment for Kazimir’s run. Kieran had been making good progress since arriving on Earth a few years earlier, absorbing their tradecraft with ease, staying cool under pressure—qualities that marked him down as highly suitable for the kind of operations the Guardians were performing these days. This assignment should be a walk in the park for him.

When Kazimir’s loop train pulled in, Kieran was in place on the Carralvo’s concourse, mingling with the perpetual flood of passengers. Indistinguishable in the crowd like any good operative, ready for any number of contingencies.

Away on the other side of the station complex, the Guardians monitored his progress from the offices of Lemule’s Max Transit company. Adam himself lounged against the back wall, watching them in turn. He didn’t interfere with the procedures—after all, they were the ones he’d taught them, but he wanted his presence to supply them with a degree of reassurance. A comfortable father figure. It took a lot of effort not to pull a dismayed face every time he thought that. But this was a crucial operation; he had to be here to keep an eye on it. Bradley Johansson was desperate for the Martian data. The alien attack on the edge of phase two space had played hell with their carefully plotted timetable.

Marisa McFoster was running electronic scans through the Carralvo’s network, searching for any sign of observation activity around Kazimir. “It’s clean,” she announced. A secure link connected her to Kieran. “Proceed,” she told him.

A map on one of her console screens showed Kieran’s icon moving slowly along the concourse toward the main exit. He ought to be thirty meters behind Kazimir, monitoring the throng of passengers for possible tails.

“He’s stopped,” Kieran said suddenly.

“What do you mean, stopped?” Marisa asked.

Adam immediately straightened up. Please, not again.

“He’s shouting at someone,” Kieran’s puzzled voice said. “What in the dreaming heavens …?”

“Give me a visual,” Marisa told him.

Adam hurried over to stand behind her chair, bending to look at her console portal. The link from Kieran’s retinal inserts delivered an unsteady picture, a poor view through a crowd of people. A cluster of dark out-of-focus heads bobbed around directly in front of him. On the other side of them a figure was running. The image flared white as an ion pulse discharged.

“Fuck!” Kieran yelled. Smeared strands of darkness slashed across the glare of light as he whipped his head about. For a second there was a blurry black and white image of a man flying backward through the air, arms and legs flung wide. Then Kieran zoomed in on the man with the gun who was now turning to run.

“Bruce!” Marisa cried out.

“Who the hell’s Bruce?” Adam demanded.

“Bruce McFoster. Kazimir’s friend.”

“Shit. You mean the one that was killed?”

“Yeah.”

Adam slapped a fist against his forehead. “Only he wasn’t. The Starflyer’s done this to your prisoners before. Goddamnit!”

The screen showing the feed from Kieran flashed white. “He’s shooting again,” Kieran said. All the portal showed now was a pair of shoes, their wearer lying flat on a white marble floor. Kieran lifted his head and the shoes sank off the bottom of the portal; beyond them, Bruce McFoster was racing down the concourse, people ducking for cover on either side of him as he kept on firing. Two men and one woman were chasing after him, holding pistols and yelling at him to stop. They were dressed in ordinary clothes.

“They aren’t CST security,” Adam said grimly.

A shot from somewhere above and behind Kieran struck Bruce McFoster. His force field flared briefly, but he never slowed.

“Dear God, how many people knew Kazimir was on this run?”

Red icons started to flash up across Marisa’s console. “Someone’s attacked the local network with kaos,” she said. “Bad strike; this is high-grade software. The RI can barely contain the contamination.”

“That’ll be Bruce, or his controllers,” Adam said. “It’ll help him get clear. They must have known the navy was watching Kazimir.” Which is more than we did, he thought miserably.

The link to Kieran’s inserts was dissolving; all that remained was his secure audio channel.

“What do we do?” Marisa asked.

“Kieran, can you reach Kazimir?” Adam demanded. “Can you retrieve the memory crystal?”

“I don’t … oh, what … there’s someone … armed … standing beside … that’s no way, I can’t get … more people … alarms triggered …”

“All right, stay put and see what happens. See where they take him.”

“I’m on … okay.”

“Can you see where Bruce has gone?”

“… shooting still … chase … platform twelve-A … pursuit … repeat, platform twelve-A …”

Adam didn’t even need to consult a console map. After twenty-five years working in LA Galactic, he knew the massive station’s layout better than Nigel Sheldon. He sat at the console beside Marisa and opened the dedicated landlines he’d carefully installed over the last few years using bots to spool out optical cable through ducts and along pipes, spreading their invisible web across the massive station’s landscape. Each one was connected to a tiny stealthed sensor; they’d been placed on walls high above the ground, lamp-posts, bridges, anywhere that provided a good field of view.

Two of them covered the large junction area west of the Carralvo. The images came up just in time for Adam to see Bruce sprinting out from under the huge arching concrete roof that covered the platform. The Starflyer agent turned sharply and began leaping over tracks. Adam actually drew in a sharp breath at one point as a train hurtled toward the speeding figure. But Bruce cut clean in front of it with perfect timing. He ran past a second train that was traveling more slowly and in the opposite direction. It completely threw the navy personnel following him.

CST security staff were drifting into the images, jogging along dangerously close to trains as they tried to look past the flashing wheels. Adam suddenly realized that none of them had any contact with traffic control. Bruce jumped over a maglev track, and changed direction yet again. His pursuers were slowing now. They’d become wary of the trains rushing through the junction, switching tracks without warning. Despite their caution, they were deployed in a simple circle that was slowly contracting. Adam knew they must have access to some kind of communications.

He ordered a sensor to focus on one of the navy personnel. Sure enough, the woman was emitting a faint electromagnetic micropulse, well outside the standard civil cybersphere node spectrum. They were using a dedicated high-order encryption system to keep in contact. “Damnit,” Adam whispered to himself. No wonder his team’s scrutineer programs, so carefully infiltrated into LA Galactic’s network nodes, hadn’t spotted any surveillance around Kazimir. Which meant navy intelligence suspected their countersurveillance capabilities; that or Alic Hogan was being seriously paranoid.

One of the navy people was closing on Bruce along a narrow corridor formed by two moving trains. They were only a couple of hundred meters apart. Bruce seemed oblivious to his pursuer.

“… Paula Myo …” Kieran said.

“Repeat please,” Adam told him quickly.

“I … see Myo … concourse … charge … talking … the Senator.”

Paula Myo! Not off the case after all. Damnit!

It was a tiny distraction, but enough for Adam to lose sight of Bruce down amid the tracks and speeding trains. “Where the hell did he go?” It looked like the pursuers didn’t have a clue, either. A whole line of them were now walking along the track where he’d been moments ago, shouting at each other and waving their hands about. The trains were coming to a halt all around them.

It took three replays of the sensor recordings before Adam was really certain. He watched the enhanced image of Bruce in slow motion: a collection of blurred gray pixels that made a crazy jump straight at a freight train as it slid alongside. A dark square on the side of a freight container swallowed up the smudged figure. Seconds later the square had vanished, closing up into an ordinary sheet of metal.

“Son of a bitch,” Adam grunted. “We’re up against a real bunch of Boy Scouts here.”

“Sir?” Marisa asked.

“They came very well prepared.”

Four centuries of experience and objectivity counted for absolutely nothing as the Pathfinder began its terrifying plummet; Ozzie started screaming as loudly as Orion, both of them audible even over the thunder of the falling sea. Spray whirled around the rickety raft with brutal force, wiping out all sight of the sky in a gray haze. Ozzie clung to the mast as if that alone could save him from certain death as he fell and fell and fell without end. The spume soaked his clothes in seconds, stinging his naked skin.

He drew a breath and screamed again. When he ran out of air he sucked down more, half of which was fizzing water. He coughed and spluttered, an automatic action that overrode the wild impulse to keep on screaming. As soon as his throat was clear and his lungs full again, he started to open his mouth for the scream that would surely end in an awful explosion of pain. Right at the back of his brain, an insecure, puzzled thought began to register.

As they went over the edge of the waterfall he’d glimpsed the impossible length of the cascade, and there hadn’t been a bottom. No jagged rocks below upon which to smash apart. No abrupt end. Nothing, in fact.

This whole setup is artificial, you asshole!

Ozzie took another breath, exhaled through flared nostrils, then forced himself to inhale deeply. His body insisted he was falling, and had been doing so for several seconds now. Animal instinct knew they must have hurtled down an incredible distance, that his velocity was way past terminal already. The steady breathing routine helped slow his frantic heart rate.

Think! You’re not falling, you’re in zero gee. Freefall! You’re safe … for the moment anyway.

The roar of the waterfall somewhere beyond the lashing froth was still overwhelming. He could hear Orion’s cries that had become gulping whimpers. Wiping the droplets from his eyes he peered around. The boy was clinging to the deck of the raft a couple of meters away. The naked terror on his face was horrible to see; nobody should have to suffer like that.

“It’s okay,” Ozzie bellowed. “We’re not falling; it just looks like it. We’re in freefall, like astronauts.” That should reassure the boy.

Orion’s horror took on a bamboozled aspect. “Whatnauts?”

Oh, for Christ’s sake! “We’re safe. Okay? It’s not as bad as it looks.”

The boy nodded his head, totally unconvinced. He was still bracing himself for the certain killer impact.

Ozzie took a good look around, constantly having to wipe the spray from his face. He could just pick out the sun, a smear of brightness creating a whorl of refraction rainbows within the spray. Call that direction up then. Half of the saturated universe surrounding them was distinctly darker than the other half. That must be the waterfall. Which was wrong, because if they were truly in zero gee the water wouldn’t fall anywhere. Yet he’d seen it. He tightened his grip on the mast with an involuntary lurch.

Okay, so what can cause water to flow in zero gee? Fuck knows. So what geometry is this screwball worldlet? It can’t be a planet …

He remembered the water specks drifting through the hazy eternal sky of the gas halo. This colossal worldlet must be one of them. As always in this place, scale had thrown him.

A flat ocean on one side, then. With the water falling off the edge. If it pours away constantly, then it will have to be replaced. Or more likely it just cycles around and around. The underside collects the overspill somehow, and sends it back to the ocean side again. Crazy! But then if you can create gravity and apply it how you want, it isn’t actually so weird.

With controllable gravity as a baseline, Ozzie tried to picture the geometry of the worldlet. If it was truly like the other water specks, then it was completely covered in water. Gravity projectors just pulled the fluid around in unexpected directions. He didn’t like the shapes his mind was coming up with. None of them had undersides where the raft could float along serenely.

When he looked around again, he thought they were drifting closer toward the waterfall. The spray around them was noticeably thinner, yet the gloom was no darker. They must be moving into the underside shadow.

There is gravity here, at right angles to the ocean on the topside. Maybe even less than ninety degrees, because the water has to be pulled around and under. Which is really not good. We cannot afford to get caught up in the flow.

For now they were safe, as long as the underside gravity was still tenuous. The ocean current had shot them horizontally past the edge of the worldlet, which had given them a hiatus, but the underside’s artificial gravity would pull them in eventually. It was already attracting the spray droplets, drawing them back into the flow.

They had to get clear while the gravity remained weak. And he could only think of one propulsive force left to them.

Ozzie checked that the rope around his waist was tied very securely to the base of the mast, and let go. Orion squealed in shock; his wide eyes following Ozzie’s every move. It had been a long time since Ozzie had been in freefall; even then he’d never been particularly good at maneuvering around. He pushed lightly against the mast, remembering the cardinal rule that you must never move quickly. There were objects gliding through the spray around him, mostly the globes of fruit they’d brought with them, which had escaped from their wicker baskets. His little shaving pack tumbled past him, and he cursed, unreasonably annoyed at the utterly trivial loss. Thankfully, the handheld array was still clipped to his rucksack, which was lashed firmly to the deck. He pulled the glistening gadget free, and hauled his way across the Pathfinder until he reached Tochee.

The wooden decking where the big alien was clinging on with its locomotion flesh ridges was bent upward, its grip was so fierce. Some of the crudely shaped branches were actually starting to fracture. Ozzie held on to a single branch of decking, and pushed the array in front of Tochee’s protuberant eye.

“We have to get out of here,” Ozzie cried. The array translated his voice into dancing violet starbursts on its screen.

“We fall to our death,” Tochee replied through the array. “I regret this. I wish for more life.”

“I don’t have time to explain,” Ozzie replied. He was aware the waterfall’s rumble was reducing as the cascade slowly calmed. “Trust me, please. You have to fly us out of here.”

“Friend Ozzie. I cannot fly. I am sorry.”

“Yes you can. Swim, Tochee, swim in the air. That should pull us free. We must not touch the water again.”

“I do not understand.”

“No time. Trust me. I’ll hold you. You swim. Away from the waterfall. As hard as you can.” Ozzie clambered clumsily along Tochee’s body. The alien’s natural cloak of colorful featherlike fronds was saturated, sticking to its leathery hide. They felt soggy under his skin, and he didn’t dare pull too hard on one in case it ripped off. Finally, he was behind Tochee’s rump, and put his arms out to grip the alien’s locomotion flesh ridges. He felt the rubbery tissue slither under his fingers as buds swelled over his hands, forming an unbreakable hold.

Tochee tensed for a long moment, then abruptly let go of the Pathfinder. It spread all four of its flesh ridges onto wide fins, which began to ripple tentatively. Ozzie felt the rope tighten around his waist. Then as Tochee began to beat his fins with larger, more positive sweeps, the tension in the rope increased. If he’d thought about just how much the raft massed, Ozzie might have come up with a slightly different method of Tochee pulling them free. As it was, he was the critical link in the chain. With Tochee’s vigorous forward motion towing them away from the underside’s diminutive gravity field, the entire raft was very literally dangling from Ozzie’s waist. He gritted his teeth as the force on his arms increased. Now that Tochee could see the effect it was having, its enthusiasm had grown. There was actually a sodden wind gusting back from its fins. The big creature began to change them further, thinning its flesh out so they became more winglike. Ozzie just knew his arms were going to pull clean out of their shoulder sockets any minute now.

He never knew exactly how long it took, but eventually the spray reduced down to an insipid mist. That too cleared. They left the waterfall’s cloak of mist behind, emerging out into direct sunlight. Bright blue sky materialized around them, its warmth sinking into his skin. The noise of the waterfall had become a background growling. It didn’t threaten anymore.

Tochee stopped flapping, and pulled its sinuous flesh back down into the usual ridges along its flanks. Ozzie felt a slow tremor run the length of his friend’s big body. When he looked down between his legs, he could see they were drifting in toward the raft. Orion’s bewildered, hopeful face looked up at them. The rope was already slack, bending into supple loops that snaked around through the air. They just missed being impaled on the top of the mast, and sank down to the decking. Tochee extended a slim tentacle, and coiled its tip around a branch.

The locomotion ridge flesh smothering Ozzie’s hands retracted, and he grabbed at the mast. His heart was thudding away inside his ribs.

“What’s happening?” Orion demanded. The boy still hadn’t let go of the decking where he’d been tied. “Why aren’t we dead?”

Ozzie opened his mouth, and gave a loud burp. Now he had a moment, he could feel his stomach rebelling against the ceaseless falling sensation. On top of that discomfort, his head felt as if he’d suddenly come down with a cold, with his sinuses badly clogged. “We’re not falling in the normal sense,” Ozzie said slowly. He was aware of Tochee’s body aligning its eye on the handheld array, where the alien was avidly reading the spiky purple patterns flowering on the screen. “And that wasn’t a normal planet.” He pointed tentatively back at the gigantic waterfall. It formed an awesome curtain of glistening motion beyond the port side of the raft, extending away out to a vanishing point in three directions. Only the rim of the worldlet provided an end. And that seemed to be receding gently.

The Pathfinder had actually descended several kilometers below the level of the ocean. There the water foamed and frothed wildly as it poured out over the edge, while behind them it was now considerably more placid as its gargantuan writhing cataracts and spume merged back into a single rippling torrent that surged along the cliff that comprised the side of the synthetic worldlet. Following the water as it flowed along, he couldn’t see where it was heading, not even with his retinal inserts on full zoom. Right at the limit of resolution, the cliff appeared to be curving away. If he was right about that, it would make the worldlet hemispherical.

Directly above them, the brim of the worldlet was definitely curved, although it was a very slight one. His inserts ran a few calculations; if the topside was truly circular, it would be just over sixteen hundred kilometers in diameter. He whistled appreciatively.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Orion said miserably.

“Listen, man,” Ozzie said. “I know you feel this is the strangest sensation, and I really appreciate it looks even worse, but the human body can live in these conditions. Astronauts were floating around in space for months at a time when I was your age.”

“I don’t know any astronauts,” Orion wailed glumly. “I never heard of aliens called that.”

Ozzie wanted to drop his head into his hands, but that would have required gravity.

“I am not certain that my body can survive, either,” Tochee said through the array. “I feel considerable discomfort. I do not understand why I think I am falling. I can see I am not, yet that is not what my senses tell me.”

“I know it’s difficult at first,” Ozzie said. “But trust me on this one, guys, your bodies will get used to it in a little while. If experience is anything to go by, you’ll probably even get to like it.”

He stopped as Orion made a miserable retching sound, then the boy was vomiting weakly.

“I would like to believe you, my friend Ozzie,” Tochee said. “But I do not consider you understand my physiology well enough to make such a statement.”

Orion wiped his hand over his mouth, then stared in disgust at the sticky yellow globules that oscillated slowly through the air just in front of his face. “We can’t stay here,” he exclaimed desolately. “Tochee, can you pull us back to the island?”

“I should be able to.”

“Whooo there, guys,” Ozzie said. “Let’s not rush into actions like that. If we fly over that ocean and the gravity catches us, we’re likely to fall for real.”

“It’s got to be better than this,” Orion whined. His cheeks bulged again, and he groaned.

Ozzie looked back at the worldlet. They were definitely drifting away from it at a slow but steady rate. “There are other objects inside the gas halo. Remember what Bradley Johansson told me? He wound up on some sort of tree reef that lives in orbit here. And they categorically have paths away. I mean, how else would he get back to the Commonwealth?”

“Are they far?” Orion moaned.

“I don’t know,” Ozzie said patiently. “We’ll have to wait and see what we find next.” He held his hand out. “There’s a breeze here. That means we’re moving.” He realized the raft had twisted so that the worldlet was slipping below the decking.

“I really hate this,” Orion said.

“I know. Now let’s get everything as secure as we can. We can’t risk losing any more supplies. Or any of us, for that matter.”

The designers of the Tulip Mansion had intended the conservatory-style chamber to be the breakfast room. It extended out from the eastern side of the north wing like an octagonal blister: traditional high glass roof supported by cast iron pillars, and walls made out of gently curving panes that came down to ground level. The floor was classic black and white marble tiles, with a large central circular Romanate bar where the pampered owners ate their morning meal amid dappled beams of strong sunlight. Vines and climbing fuchsias grew out of big unglazed pots at the foot of each pillar, their shaggy greenery providing a gentle shade. The air had a sweet muskiness, complemented during the day by the delicate scent of the short-lived flowers that bloomed all the year.

With the Burnelli family preferring the less exposed west wing dining room to start the day in, Justine had taken over the chamber as a kind of casual office. Out had come the formal chairs to be replaced by some large leather couches and even a couple of gelmold bags. The only thing standing on the central bar these days was a giant crescent-shaped aquarium, with a variety of colorful terrestrial and alien fish that regarded each other warily. It left just enough room for the two technicians to install the new large array on the remaining surface.

Justine stood in the doorway, watching as they completed their checks and gathered up their tools. She was wearing black, of course, a plain long skirt and matching blouse; nothing too fashionable, but not gloomy, either. Just a simple statement, which she felt was most appropriate. Most of her social circle wouldn’t even recognize the significance, she thought; their kind never had to deal with the concept of death anymore.

“Up and running, ma’am,” the senior technician said.

“Thank you,” Justine said distantly. The two technicians nodded politely and left. They were from Dislan, the Burnelli-owned electronics company that did nothing but manufacture and supply equipment to the family.

She went over to the austere silver-gray cylinder squatting on the polished granite-top bar. There was a tiny red light on the upper rim, gleaming scarlet.

Paula Myo walked into the chamber and shut the tall double doors behind her. “Is this secure, Senator?” she asked. There was a degree of skepticism in the tone as she glanced out through the wide windows. Beyond the rose garden, the hills of Rye County formed a crumpled landscape of pine forests, broken by the deeper green swathes of rhododendron bushes that had long finished flowering.

Justine gave her e-butler an instruction. The walls and roof dissolved into a grainy curtain of gray light, like a hologram projector showing a drab autumn sky. No hint of the external world remained, an effect that produced a near-claustrophobic feeling. “It is now,” Justine said lightly. “And the array is completely independent; it doesn’t even have a node, so nobody can hack in. We’re as isolated as it’s possible to be in the modern world.” She took the memory crystal from a slim metal case and stood in front of the array. The single light turned from scarlet to emerald as she pressed her hand on the top. “I want you to scan this, and tell me what data it contains.”

“Yes, Senator,” the RI replied. A small circle on top of the cylinder dilated, and Justine dropped the memory crystal in.

“It’s a quantum scanner,” she told Paula. “So it should be able to locate any hardwired ambush in the molecular structure.”

The two of them sat on one of the couches. Its brown leather was so parched from the strong sunlight it was cracking open; Justine enjoyed it for that as much as the softness that came from age. A tatty piece of furniture in a trillionaire’s immaculate household also made the chamber more appealing to her, a little stamp of personal identity.

“What happened at the autopsy?” Justine asked.

“It was all very ordinary,” Paula said. “They confirmed a lack of any memorycell insert. The rest of his inserts were all relatively common. Navy intelligence will track down the manufacturer, and from that we should get the clinic which gave them to Kazimir. I expect the operation will have been paid for either with cash or from a onetime account; Adam Elvin doesn’t make elementary mistakes, but they could get lucky.”

“Is that it?” Justine wasn’t sure what she’d expected, something that made him stand out at least, an aspect that proved how exceptional he was.

“Essentially, yes. Cause of death confirmed as the ion shot. He wasn’t taking any narcotics, although there was evidence of heavy steroid and hormone infusions over the last couple of years, which is understandable for someone born on a low-gravity world. You should know he hadn’t undergone any cellular reprofiling.”

Justine gave the Investigator a frown.

“It really was him,” Paula explained. “They weren’t trying to push a ringer on you.”

“Ah.” She could have told the Investigator that. He was Kazimir, nobody could fake that. “What about his hotel room? Any leads there?”

“It doesn’t look like it. I’m receiving the reports directly from navy intelligence as soon as they’re filed in their database. Of course, if there’s anything they’re not filing, that they’re keeping to themselves, then we have a problem.”

“Is that likely?”

“It’s a remote possibility. Legally, they have to put everything on file, and therefore Senate Security has complete access as we are higher up the security service food chain. However, you and I both know that the navy is compromised. One of the Starflyer’s people could be holding things back.”

“Assuming they’re not, will the hotel room tell us much?”

“Not really. The Guardians seem to be as thorough with their tradecraft in their own homes as they are everywhere else. The only report I really value is Kazimir’s financial record. That should give us a nice breakdown of his movements before you alerted the navy to his presence.”

A fresh burst of guilt at the reminder made Justine tighten her jaw muscles. “When will that be ready?”

“A couple of days. The navy intelligence office in Paris will correlate the data. I’ll review it after that.”

“Paris: that’s your old office, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Senator.”

“Do you think that’s where the Starflyer’s agent is?”

“It’s a very high probability that one of them is there, yes. I was running several entrapment operations before I was dismissed.”

“And I went and told them about Kazimir,” Justine said bitterly.

Paula Myo stared straight ahead at the cylinder containing the array. “I will expose the Starflyer, Senator. That is what the Guardians are fighting for; the one thing Kazimir McFoster believed in above all else.”

“Yes,” Justine said with a nod.

“I have completed an analysis of the memory crystal,” the RI announced.

“It holds three hundred and seventy-two files of encrypted data. There are some software safeguards against unauthorized access, but they can easily be circumvented.”

“Good,” Justine said. Given the capacity of the array she would have been very surprised if it couldn’t gain access to whatever was stored on the crystal.

“Can you decrypt the files?”

“They are encrypted with one thousand two hundred eighty dimension–geometry. I do not have the processing capacity to decrypt that level.”

“Bugger,” Justine muttered. For a moment her hopes had actually risen; she had expected slightly more help from a piece of hardware that had just cost her over five million Earth dollars. “Who does?”

“The SI,” Paula said. “And the Guardians, of course.”

Justine asked the question that she found very difficult. “Do you trust the SI?”

“In helping us defeat the Prime aliens, I believe it to be a trustworthy ally.”

“That’s a very cautious answer.”

“I do not believe that humans can understand the SI’s full motivation. We do not even know its true intent toward us as a species. It claims to be benign, and it has never acted in any other fashion toward us. However …”

“Yes?”

“During the course of my investigations I have come across instances which suggest it pays considerably more attention to us than it will admit to.”

“Intelligence gathering has been the occupation of governments since the Trojans got a real bad surprise from that little gift the Greeks left behind. I don’t doubt for a second the SI monitors us.”

“But to what end? There are several theories, most of which belong to the wilder realms of conspiracy paranoia. They all tend to concern its incipient ascent to godhood.”

“What do you believe?”

“I imagine it considers us in much the same way as we would regard a mildly troublesome neighbor. It monitors us because it doesn’t want any surprises, especially one which would threaten the neighborhood.”

“Is this really relevant?”

“Probably not, unless it chooses to take the side of the Primes.”

“Damn, you’re suspicious.”

“I prefer to think of it as an extended chess exercise,” the Investigator said.

“Excuse me?”

“I try to see all the possible moves that can be made to oppose me as far ahead as I can. But I agree that the SI being an enemy is extremely remote. On a personal level I have established a useful working relationship with it; and of course it does contain a great deal of downloaded human personalities, which should act in our favor.”

“Now I just don’t know what the hell to think.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to place you under any additional anxiety. It was thoughtless of me given your current situation.”

“You know, the only benefit of my age right now is that I know when I’m too messed up to be making that kind of decision. So if you don’t mind, I’ll just leave it up to you. Do you want to ask the SI to decrypt this for us?”

“The only alternative is to contact the Guardians and ask them directly.”

“Do you know how to do that?” Justine asked.

“No. If I had that kind of lead into the Guardians I would have shut them down decades ago.”

“I see.” The gray-blue icon for the code Kazimir had sent her hovered in the corner of her virtual vision, inert but oh-so-tempting. Once again she knew she wasn’t thinking clearly enough to make that choice. She didn’t even know if she should tell the Investigator she had it. And for a Commonwealth senator to contact what was currently classified as a political terrorist group was a momentous act. Instinctively, she was loath to risk loading that innocuous code into the unisphere. If any such association became public knowledge before the Starflyer was exposed, she would be completely discredited. Not even the family would be able to protect her. And the Starflyer would have won another victory.

“We might not have to ask anyone to help with the memory crystal,” Paula said. “The navy is investigating the observatory in Peru. They ought to be able to find out the nature of the data, even if the actual files remain blocked.”

“Okay then,” Justine said in relief. “We’ll wait until the navy files that report.” She extracted the memory crystal from the array, then switched off the room’s screening. Warm afternoon sunlight flooded back through the big windows, making Justine blink.

The mansion’s butler was waiting beside the door. “Admiral Columbia is waiting to see you, ma’am,” he said.

“He’s here?” Justine asked in surprise.

“Yes, ma’am. I showed him into the west wing reception room and asked him to wait.”

“Did he say what he wanted?”

“Alas, no, ma’am.”

“Stay here,” Justine told Paula. “I’ll deal with this.” She set off down the north wing’s central corridor, squaring her shoulders as she went. How typical of Columbia to try to gain the advantage by making a surprise visit to her home ground. If he thought that kind of crude tactic would work against even the most junior Burnelli he was badly mistaken.

The decoration in the west wing reception room harked back to the most lavish days of the French monarchy. Justine had always disliked quite so much gilt framing and gold leaf; and the period chairs, although beautifully ornate, were actually uncomfortable to sit on for any length of time.

Admiral Rafael Columbia was standing waiting in front of the huge fire-place, one foot raised slightly to rest on the marble hearth. In his immaculate uniform, all he was missing was a fur-lined coat for the image of an imperial tsar to be complete. He seemed to be studying the onyx case clock dominating the mantelpiece.

“Senator”—he gave her a small bow as she made her entrance, pushing the double doors open and striding in—“I was admiring the clock. An original?”

The doors swept shut behind her. “I imagine so. Father is quite an aggressive collector.”

“Indeed.”

Justine indicated a glass-top table, etched with the Burnelli crest. They sat down on opposite sides in high-back chairs.

“What can I do for you, Admiral?”

“Senator, I’m afraid I must ask why you interfered with a navy intelligence operation. Specifically, removing the body of a suspected terrorist from the scene of a crime.”

“I didn’t remove anything, Admiral. I accompanied the body.”

“You arranged for it to be moved to a nonofficial facility.”

“Our family biotechnology facility, yes. Where the autopsy was conducted under full official supervision.”

“Why, Senator?”

Justine gave him an icy smile. “Because I have no confidence in navy intelligence. I had just witnessed the entire surveillance operation fail catastrophically. I didn’t want any further failures. Kazimir’s body should provide the intelligence staff with a great many leads. From what I’ve seen so far, your department has proved remarkably incompetent. There are to be no further mistakes on this case, Admiral. I will not accept any excuses.”

“Senator, may I ask how you know Kazimir McFoster?”

“We met while I was taking a vacation on Far Away. We had a brief fling. He then showed up here at Tulip Mansion just before the Prime attack. Naturally, when he told me he was working for the Guardians, I informed Commander Hogan immediately. It’s all on file.”

“What did he want?”

“A number of things. To convince me the Starflyer was real. To remove the customs inspection of all cargo traveling to Far Away. I refused.”

“So you weren’t close then?”

“No.”

“I understand you were extremely upset by his death.”

“I was extremely shaken by it. I am not used to witnessing total death. No matter what his views and activities, nobody that young should suffer death.”

“Was the supervised autopsy your idea, Senator?”

“Yes.”

“I understand Paula Myo also accompanied the body.”

“I have every confidence in Investigator Myo.”

Rafael’s expression tightened. “I’m afraid I don’t share that confidence, Senator. The Investigator is a large factor in the whole Guardian problem which navy intelligence faces. I was surprised and not a little upset when I heard your family secured her appointment to Senate Security.”

“We were surprised you dismissed her from navy intelligence.”

“After a hundred thirty years of no results, I thought it expedient.”

“Everybody in the Commonwealth knows about the Investigator precisely because she does produce results.”

“To be frank with you, Senator, she’s beginning to lose the plot. She accused her own officers of disloyalty. She was running external operations without clearance. She also began to show sympathetic tendencies toward the terrorists she was supposed to be pursuing.”

“Sympathy, in what way?”

“She said she believed in the Starflyer alien.”

“And you don’t?”

“Of course not.”

“Who killed my brother, Admiral?”

“I don’t understand. You know it was the same assassin that killed McFoster.”

“Quite. And McFoster was a Guardian. Whoever that assassin works for, they are opposing both the Commonwealth and the Guardians. I believe that leaves you with a rather narrow field of suspects, doesn’t it?”

“The Guardians have been involved with the black market arms trade for a very long time. As a group, those people tend to settle their arguments with extreme force. We believe this assassin works for one of the merchants involved.”

“And my brother just got in the way?”

“If an arms shipment was blocked, then a lot of money would be at stake.”

“This is ridiculous. Commonwealth senators are not murdered in some primitive vendetta.”

“Nor are they killed by invisible aliens.”

Justine sat back and glared at the Admiral.

“However unpleasant it is to acknowledge, Senator,” Rafael said, “the Commonwealth has a large criminal fraternity. That is why the original Intersolar Serious Crimes Directorate was formed. If you don’t believe me, then feel free to ask Investigator Myo. Or you might like to consider why Senate Security exists. We have enough problems with genuine threats to the Commonwealth. We really don’t need to invent new ones.”

“Admiral, are you warning me off?”

“I’m advising you that your current actions are inappropriate at this difficult time. Right now we need to pull together and fight our very real enemy.”

“The navy has my full support, and will continue to receive it.”

“Thank you, Senator. One last thing. The McFoster terrorist was on some kind of courier mission. We didn’t find what he was carrying.”

She cocked her head to one side, and gave him a blank smile. “Isn’t that unusual?”

“Very, Senator. I was wondering if you saw anything while you accompanied him?”

“No.”

“Are you certain, Senator?”

“I never saw what he was carrying. If he was.”

“I see.” Columbia’s gaze never flickered. “We will find it eventually, you know.”

“You didn’t find the assassin afterward, did you?” It was a childish gibe, but Justine enjoyed it anyway, especially the way Columbia’s neck reddened slightly above his uniform collar.

Gore Burnelli and Paula Myo were talking on the worn leather sofa when Justine returned to her day room. Her father’s plain gold face reflected dapples of light that glinted on the pillars and floor, flowing around with any tiny movement he made. Justine activated the screening as she came in, cutting off the daylight.

“That McFoster boy made you soft and sentimental,” Gore said as soon as they were secure. “You should have kicked Columbia’s ass right into fucking orbit. In the old days you’d have eaten him for breakfast. I can’t believe any daughter of mine has turned into such a goddamned liberal wimp. ”

“These are the new days, Father,” Justine said calmly. “And I’m not the one out of place and time.” Inside she was seething that he’d say such a thing anywhere, let alone in front of the Investigator. Even Paula Myo, usually so composed, looked uncomfortable at Gore’s outburst.

“Just telling you the way it is, girl. If your dead boyfriend is fucking with your emotions you should get your memory of him wiped out of your brain. I can’t afford you to be weak, not now.”

“I’ll certainly consider eliminating anything I find distasteful from my life.” She sometimes wondered if Gore was still human enough to remember and understand a concept like love, there had been so many adaptations made to his body.

“That’s more like it,” he said, chuckling. “You know Columbia is going to come at you six ways from hell after the LA Galactic screwup? He wants Paula here out of the picture permanently, and while he’s at it he’d like the Senate to turn into a nice little Soviet parliament, voting for him unanimously every time.”

“It’s not Columbia you have to worry about,” Paula said.

Justine and Gore broke off their little contest of wills to look at the Investigator.

“I believe I know the real reason Thompson was killed.”

“And you haven’t fucking told me?” Gore snapped.

“For almost the entire time I was in the Directorate I lobbied for all the goods shipped to Far Away to be examined by police-style inspectors. It was blocked by the Executive every time, until Thompson rammed the proposal through for me.”

“And the Starflyer killed him for it,” Gore said. “We knew that.”

“Just before he was killed, Thompson called me. He said he’d found out who had been blocking my requests. Nigel Sheldon.”

“That can’t be right,” Justine said automatically. “Sheldon made the whole Commonwealth possible. He’s not going to try to undermine it.”

“Not voluntarily,” Gore said. Even with his golden skin making any normal expression impossible, it was obvious the notion troubled him. “But as I understand it, Bradley Johansson always claimed he was enslaved by the alien.”

“I’ve replayed the recording of Kazimir’s last minute in the Carralvo terminal several times now,” Paula said. “He appeared to know the assassin. In fact, he was delighted to see him. It was almost as if they were old friends.”

“No.” Justine shook her head, rejecting the whole idea. “I can’t believe anybody could get to Sheldon. The security our family has around us and at our rejuvenation facilities is phenomenal. Sheldon’s will be even stronger.”

“The Guardians claimed that President Doi was working for the Starflyer,” Paula said.

“And what a load of crap that was.” Gore grunted. “If this Starflyer bastard can cut through Senate Security and Sheldon’s protection, it wouldn’t need to skulk about in the shadows; it’d already be our Führer.”

“Then why was your son killed?” Paula asked. “Just for implementing the cargo searches? Or because he uncovered the connection?”

“All right,” Gore said reluctantly. “Assume Thompson came across some information which made him believe it. Did he say who gave him Sheldon’s name?”

“No. He said the whole area was very unclear. it was politics at the highest level.”

“Politics doesn’t have a high level,” Gore muttered; he turned to Justine.

“This is down to you. We need to find out where Thompson got his information from.”

“Dad, I don’t have anything like his contacts in the Senate.”

“Jesus Christ, will you stop selling yourself short, girl? If I want to hear whining that pitiful I’ll visit a human rights lawyer on Orleans.”

She threw up her hands. “Fine, I’ll go blundering around shouting out questions in a loud voice, and see if anyone comes to take a shot at me.”

“More like it,” Gore said, his metallic lips lifting in an approximation of a smile.

“To what end?” Paula asked.

“What do you mean, what fucking end?”

“What will you do if the Senator confirms it was Sheldon who has been blocking my requests?”

“If it’s true, we’ll need to go to his senior family members and show them what’s happened. I expect they’ll have him re-lifed and updated from a secure memory store that predates his corruption—whenever that was.”

“Do you think the Sheldon family will support you?”

“They can’t all be Starflyer agents.”

“Indeed not. But how will we know which are?”

“We’re being very premature,” Justine said. “Let’s try and establish what we suspect first. After that, we should have a clearer picture of what to do.”

“We also need to create some reliable alliances,” Gore said. “A kind of political resistance network to counter the Starflyer’s influence. I’ll make a start on that.”

“Watch out for Columbia,” Paula said. “Now he’s aware you’re my sponsor, he’ll be gunning for your family as well. And his political influence is growing. Societies make a lot of shortcuts during wartime; as admiral in charge of domestic defense he’ll be able to issue orders that would never be countenanced in peacetime.”

“Don’t you worry yourself about that. Hell would have to freeze over for a long time before some Halgarth stooge outsmarts me.”

The little Boeing 44044 VTOL plane landed on the observatory pad amid a swirl of air from its electric jets, which stirred up quite a storm of sandy ocher soil and filthy ice granules. It fell away quickly as the fans slowed, and the flight attendant opened the hatch. Renne felt her ears pop as the pressure dropped abruptly. They were five thousand meters up in the western side of the Andes, just north of Sandia, with the rugged mountains forming a magnificent snowcapped vista all around her. Renne immediately felt short of breath, and sucked down a huge lungful of air. It made no difference at all. She got up out of the seat and scuttled forward, zipping up her coat over her thick sweater. The light outside was bright enough to make her pause at the top of the air stairs and put on her sunglasses. In the treacherously thin air, her breath formed little white streamers in front of her face.

Two officers from the Lima office of navy intelligence were waiting for her on the ground, wearing dark green jackets that looked more like space suits than severe weather gear. Getting down the five aluminum steps left her gasping for oxygen.

One of the men came forward and extended his arm. “Lieutenant Kampasa, welcome to Antina Station. I’m Phil Mandia. I was part of the team boxing McFoster on his way up here.”

“Great,” she wheezed. She could barely make out his face behind a protective amber-tinted goggle mask. Her heart was hammering away hard inside her chest. They had to walk very slowly over to the observatory buildings, a line of squat boxes made from dark plastic, with windows like portholes. Only one had any lights on inside. The three main radio telescope dishes were sitting on the big rocky field behind the buildings, huge white saucers balanced on improbably thin spires of metal. As she watched, one of them turned slightly, tracking along the northern skyline.

“How’s my prisoner behaving?” she asked.

“Cufflin? He claims he knows next to nothing, that he was on some security contract from an anonymous agent. For what it’s worth, I believe him.”

“We’ll know for sure once I take him back to Paris.”

“What are you going to do, read his memories?”

“Yes.”

Even with his face shielded by the mask, Phil Mandia’s grimace of disapproval was quite blatant.

Renne’s feet started crunching on the icy rime that bristled over the soil. There didn’t seem to be any plants anywhere, not even tufts of grass. She had to be careful where she trod; the ground was creased with deep tire ruts that had frozen solid. The aging yellow-painted vehicles that had made them were parked outside around the buildings, looking like a disreputable crossbreed between tractors and snowplows. A pair of new maroon Honda four-by-fours were drawn up beside them, sides splattered with thick brown mud.

“You came in those?” Renne asked.

“Yeah.” Phil Mandia nodded at the single bleak road winding away from the observatory. “It was a brute of a drive up here.”

“How the hell did you manage to avoid being seen by McFoster?”

“With difficulty.”

Renne wasn’t sure if he was joking or not.

They reached the main building and went inside where the world was warm again. It didn’t make any difference to Renne’s heart, which was still racing away. She had to sit heavily in the first office they came to. There was no way she could get up again, so she had to take her coat off while remaining in the seat, a simple act that made her even more out of breath. She couldn’t think how she was going to get back out to the VTOL again; the others might have to carry her.

“Doesn’t this altitude bother you?” she asked Phil Mandia.

“Takes a while to adjust,” he admitted.

Renne was beginning to realize how the local team resented her. Some big shot exec sent up to check on why the operation had crashed, looking to shift the blame onto a field team. It’s not like that, she wanted to say. But that would make her look weaker in his eyes. Office politics she could handle easily enough.

“Okay, let me start with the Director,” she said.

Jennifer Seitz was only five years out of rejuvenation. A small, trim woman with attractive green eyes and very dark skin, she wore a baggy chestnut-brown sweater that was long enough to qualify as a dress. The sleeves were rolled up, but even that didn’t stop them flapping around her thin arms. Renne decided it had to be borrowed from someone else about half a meter taller. The Director seemed irritated by the navy’s invasion of her observatory rather than intimidated or worried. Her forceful, dismissive attitude was outwardly softened by the beguilingly youthful smile that she could produce. Phil Mandia received an exasperated glance as he politely ushered her into the office; even that came over as mere petulance rather than genuine disapproval.

Renne pointed at the room’s circular window and the three big dishes outside. “Which one”—she paused, took another breath—“is pointing at Mars?”

“None of them,” Jennifer Seitz said. “The major dishes are for deep-space radio astronomy. We use one of our ancillary receivers to pick up the signal from Mars. It’s not a huge operation.”

“And are we sure it’s the Martian data which Cufflin supplied to McFoster?” Renne glanced at Phil Mandia for confirmation.

“There’s no trace of any of it left in the observatory network memory,” the navy officer said. “Cufflin loaded a tracerworm program to eliminate any record of the transmissions right after McFoster picked up the copy.”

“There must be other copies,” Renne said. “How long have you been receiving the data?”

The corner of Jennifer Seitz’s mouth produced an involuntary tic. “About twenty years.”

“Twenty! What the hell have you been doing with it?”

“We collect it for a science research association. It’s a very minor contract for us; less than one percent of our overall budget. It doesn’t even require human supervision; our RI can handle the whole process. The signals come in once a month. We receive them and store them for the association. Their project length is expected to be thirty years.” Jennifer Seitz caught the surprise in Renne’s eyes. “What, you think that’s long-term? We’re running some observations here that will take a century to complete, that’s if we’re lucky.”

“Okay, back up a moment here and take me through this slowly,” Renne said. “I didn’t even know the Commonwealth had anything on Mars. Where do these signals come from, exactly?”

“The remote science station on Arabia Terra.”

“And what sort of science goes on there?”

“Just about the full range of planetary science remote sensing: meteorological, geological—I should say areological—solar physics, radiation. It’s a long list; you name the subject and it’ll have its own set of instruments up there busy watching. They’re all over Mars, relaying their readings to Arabia Terra, which in turn sends them to us. Satellites, too. There’s four of them currently in polar orbit, though they all need replacing.”

“I never knew anyone was still interested in Mars.”

“Very few people are,” Jennifer Seitz said sardonically. “We’re talking astronomy, here, after all. Even after Dudley Bose came along, we’re not exactly the most popular profession in the Commonwealth. And there are planets in this universe a lot more interesting than Mars. However, a small collection of sensors operating over a long time can produce just as much data as a shorter, more intense study. Actually, the data is more relevant when gathered over time, more representative. We have remote stations right across the solar system collecting little chunks of data and sending them back to us and the other observatories in a steady drip. Most Earth universities or foundations tend to have some small department for each solar body. They all struggle along on minimum resources, cataloguing and analyzing their information. But the instruments they use don’t cost much by today’s standards—they’re all solid state, and either solar or geothermal powered; they last for decades. Between them they supply just enough information to keep Earth’s few remaining planetologists in business.”

“I’d like a list of them, please.”

“The association which funds the Martian station is based in London, the Lambeth Interplanetary Association, I think. God knows where they get their grants from. I mean, pure science planetology in this day and age. You’ve got to be a real science philanthropist to support that.”

“What exactly is the project which the Lambeth Interplanetary Association is paying for?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“You don’t know?” Renne said it so loudly she had to take a fast breath to refill her lungs, which made her cough. She could feel a headache growing behind her temple.

“Not my field,” Jennifer Seitz said. “Strictly speaking I’m a radio astronomer; I work with the main dishes. They’re part of the Solwide array. Our baseline is Pluto orbit, which gives us one hell of a reception capability. It’s also why we have a lot of ancillary receivers here, to keep in touch with the Solwide units that are really far out. So you see, I have not the slightest concern in dust on Mars or tidal ice fracture patterns on Europa or the geoshell superconductor currents on Charon. Now if you wanted to know about truly interesting events like big bang emission rebounds or magquasar squeals, then I can entertain you for days on the subject.”

“Is anyone here a planetologist?”

“No. All we’ve got here is two radio astronomers—that’s myself and my partner, Carrie—and four technicians to keep everything running smoothly. Well … as smoothly as something as underfunded as Solwide can be kept running. And just to add to the richness of our lives, since the Prime attack, the UFN Science Agency is actually talking about shutting us down for the duration. I’ve got to produce proposals to mothball the whole observatory. I should have shoved this whole astronomy kick into a secure memory store at my last rejuve, and come up with an interest that makes me filthy rich. I mean, who the hell’s interested in supporting people who’ll quietly dedicate several lives to help expand the general knowledge base of the human race? Not our goddamn government, that’s for sure. Now I’ve got you people jumping all over us.”

“I’m sorry about the observatory,” Renne said sharply. “But there is a war on. The Commonwealth has to prioritize.”

“Yeah, right.”

“So has the Lambeth Interplanetary Association actually seen any of the data you were receiving for them?”

“No. Mars accounts for nearly half of the remote monitoring projects in the solar system. Their timetables are measurable in years. Admittedly, thirty years is quite long for planetary science, but not exceptional.”

“What kind of sensors were transmitting from Mars? Exactly?”

Jennifer Seitz shrugged. “I checked the contract when the shit hit the fan, of course. It doesn’t tell us much. The instruments we were recording just provided a generalized overview of the Martian environment.”

“Could you have been receiving encrypted signals in with the rest of the data?”

“Sure. I don’t know what from, though.”

“Do you at least have a list of the instruments up there?”

“Yeah. But, Lieutenant, you have to understand, we didn’t place any of them on Mars. Some were already there, left over from earlier projects; the rest have been deposited over the years by the UFN Science Agency’s automated ships. We have no control over them, no supervisory role. I cannot give you an absolute guarantee what any of them actually are. Simply because we’ve been told a specific channel in the datastream carries the results of a seismic scanner, doesn’t make it that in reality. It could equally well be information on Earth’s defenses for an alien invasion fleet. There’s just no way of knowing for sure, other than going there and checking the transmission origin in person. All we are is a glorified relay node.”

Renne didn’t like getting distracted, but … “There are automated spaceships working in the solar system?”

“You didn’t know that?”

“No,” she admitted.

“Well, Lieutenant, there have to be. It’s like this. None of us in the heady world of astronomy or solar planetary science can afford to hire a CST wormhole to drop a thermometer into Saturn’s atmosphere. Instead, we swallow our pride and group together; that way we coordinate our budgets to produce instrumentation in batches. When a batch is ready, we load up one of the Science Agency’s three robot freight ships with our precious consignment of satellites and sensors, and send it on its merry eight-year tour around the solar system. Then each and every one of us selfishly prays that the damn antique doesn’t break down before it drops off our own particular package. Tip for you, Lieutenant: when you’re in the company of Earth’s astronomers don’t ever mention the 2320 placement mission. A lot of colleagues left the profession after that minor catastrophe. It takes on average fifteen years of applications, proposals, review procedures, outright begging, and signing away your firstborn to get a sensor project approved. Then all you have to do is find the funds to design and build it. There’s an awful lot of emotional and professional investment riding away in that cargo bay.”

“Yes,” Renne said defensively; her headache was now pounding away inside her skull. She was sure she’d brought a packet of tifi. It was probably in her jacket pocket, hanging up several meters away—too far for her to walk.

“Thank you, I get the picture. Yours is not an overpaid celebrity occupation.”

“Not unless your name is Bose, no.”

“So to conclude, you have no idea what you’ve been receiving from Mars for twenty years?”

Jennifer Seitz gave an apologetic smile. “That’s about it. Although I’d like to go on record as saying I’ve only been Director here for seven years, with two years absent for rejuvenation. I didn’t take the contract, and none of us were involved with it. The whole thing is run by a couple of subroutines in the RI.”

“Who did begin the contract?”

“Director Rowell was in charge when the Lambeth Association began the project. I think he moved to Berkak; he was offered a dean’s post at a new university.”

“Thank you. I’ll have him questioned.” Renne sucked down more thin air; the lack of oxygen was making her feel light-headed. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation, but her thoughts were sluggish. “Tell me something. In your opinion, what could possibly be on Mars that would interest a bunch of terrorists like the Guardians?”

“That’s the really dumb thing about this: nothing. And I’m not being prejudiced because I’m a radio astronomer. The place is a complete dump, a frozen airless desert. It has no secrets, no value, no relevance to anybody. I’m still half convinced you people made a mistake.”

“Then tell me about Cufflin.”

Jennifer Seitz screwed her pretty face up. “God, I don’t know. He was just a technical assistant; a mundane time-serving tech working in a pisspoor Science Agency job to pay his R and R pension. Up until yesterday I would have sworn I could have told you his entire lives stories better than he could. And incredibly boring they all were, too. We all spend three weeks on duty crammed together up here, for which we get one blessed week off. He was actually assigned here three and a half years ago. So I don’t like to think how much time that means we’ve spent living, sleeping, and eating in this very same building since then. Now it turns out he was part of some terrorist plot to take over the Commonwealth. Jesus! He’s Dan Cufflin. Seven years short of rejuvenation, and desperate for it to happen. He loves curry, hates Chinese food, accesses way too much softcore TSI soap, had one wife this life which ended sour, visits his one child grandkid every year at Easter, his feet smell, he’s a second-rate programmer, an average mechanic, and drives the rest of us nuts practicing tap dancing—badly. What the hell kind of terrorist enjoys tap dancing?”

“Bad ones,” Renne said dryly.

“I can’t believe he did this.”

“Well, it certainly looks like he’s guilty. We’ll confirm that for ourselves, of course. I expect you’ll all be called as witnesses at the trial.”

“You’re taking him with you?”

“I certainly am.”

Somehow, Renne managed to hobble her way back to the VTOL plane without being too obvious as she leaned up against Phil Mandia. Two navy officers escorted Dan Cufflin onto the plane behind her. He was pushed down into a chair on the other side of the aisle from Renne. Malmetal restraints flowed over his wrists and lower legs, holding him secure. Not that he looked as if he’d make a break for freedom. Jennifer Seitz had been right about that. Cufflin, a tall man who had managed to avoid becoming overweight, was very obviously approaching the time when he needed a rejuvenation. Worry and a defeated air made his cheeks and eyes seem excessively sunken, with flesh that was as pallid as Renne’s. Being dressed in a pair of worn dark blue overalls simply helped to complete the whipped underdog image.

He looked out of the small window as they took off, a bewildered expression in place as the observatory dropped away below.

Renne’s headache had started to fade as soon as the hatch was shut, and the jets began to pressurize the little cabin. She opened the vent above her seat, and smiled contentedly as the filtered air blew over her face. A coffee from the stewardess eased away the last of the discomfort, without any need for a tifi tube.

“The flight should take about fifty minutes,” she said, and turned her head toward Cufflin. “We’re going to Rio; then a loop train to Paris.”

He said nothing, his gaze fixed on some spot outside the window as they climbed into the stratosphere at a steep angle.

“You know what’s going to happen when we get there?” she inquired lightly.

“You walk me past a warm judge and shoot me.”

“No, Dan. We’ll take you to a navy biomedical facility where you’ll have your memories read. By all accounts, it’s not a pleasant experience. Losing control over your very own mind, having other people invade your skull and examine any section of your life they want. Nothing is private; your feelings, your dreams. We rip them all out of you.”

“Great. I always had an exhibitionist streak.”

“No you don’t.” She sighed in a sympathetic manner. “I accessed your file, I’ve talked to your workmates. What are you doing mixed up in all this nonsense?”

He looked over at her. “Your interrogation technique is crap, you know that?”

“I’m not an experienced spook like you, Dan.”

“Very funny. I’m not a spook. I’m not a terrorist. I’m not a traitor. I’m none of those things.”

“Then what are you?”

“You read my file.”

“Remind me.”

“Why?”

“All right, the bottom line is this: cooperate, spill your guts and your heart out to me, and I might recommend we don’t bother with a memory read. But your story had better be a damn good one.”

“And my trial?”

“I’m not cutting you a deal, Dan; it doesn’t work like that. You go to trial whatever happens. But if you help us, then I’m sure the judge will take that into consideration.”

He took a minute, but eventually gave a soft nod. “I have a grandson, Jacob. He’s eight.”

“Yes?”

“I had to go to court to get access to him. Damnit, he’s all I’ve got left from this screwup of a life, the only decent thing anyway. It’d kill me not to be able to see him. Have you got children, Lieutenant?”

“Some, yes. None this time around yet. But they all have children. I’m a great-great-grandmother these days.”

“And do you see them all? Your family?”

“When I have the time. This job, you know … It isn’t a nine to five.”

“But you get to see them, that’s what counts. My daughter took her mother’s side. And we’re all native Earthborn, that’s the problem. You need to be a millionaire just to get an appointment with a lawyer on this planet. And I’m not.”

“So someone offered you some money? Enough for a lawyer to get you access?”

“Yeah.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know his name, I never met him, he’s just an address code in the unisphere. He’s an agent for people in the personal security field. A friend told me about him. Said he might be able to help me.”

“Okay, the friend’s name?”

“Robin Beard.”

“So this agent recruited you?”

“Yes?”

“To do what?”

“The way he put it, virtually nothing. I was worried I’d have to kill somebody—probably would have done it, too. But all he wanted was for me to apply for the UFN Science Agency technical maintenance job out at the observatory. I had to monitor the Martian data they were receiving, make sure there were no problems. He said that one day somebody would come and collect a copy of it, and when that happened I was to erase the original. That was it, all I had to do. And for that I got to see little Jacob again, once a year at Easter. It’s hardly a massive crime, so I figured what the hell.”

“All right, Dan, now this is the really important bit: Do you know what that data was?”

“No.” He pursed his lips as he shook his head. “No, I swear. I tried looking at it a couple of times. I mean, it was obviously valuable to the agent, but it just looked like ordinary remote station data to me.”

“Did you make your own copy, Dan, maybe try for a bit of leverage?”

“No. I got to see my Jacob like they promised. So I played fair with them. I didn’t think they’re the kind of people you should try and cross. I guess I was right about that; you said they’re terrorists.”

The answer vexed Renne; she had a nasty feeling he was telling the truth. Dan Cufflin wasn’t criminal enough to try a little spot of blackmail on his own initiative, just a weak, desperate man easy to exploit if you knew which buttons to press. And who was ever going to be looking for some sleeper in a radio telescope observatory in the middle of the Andes?

Whatever the Guardians had done on Mars, they’d made a damn good job of covering their tracks. Until someone murdered Kazimir McFoster.

A day later she was still puzzling over how that killing fitted in to an otherwise watertight operation. The Paris office was investigating the case on a twenty-four/seven basis, backed with the highest navy priority; nobody in accounts was going to question budget or timesheets on this one.

Late morning she caught herself yawning as her console screens pulled up yet another sequence of information on the illusive Lambeth Interplanetary Association. There was only so much coffee she could take to counter the fatigue toxins accumulating in her bloodstream. It was another gray Paris spring day outside, with rain running down the windows. Inside, her colleagues were getting cranky from lack of sleep and frustration at the loss of the assassin in LA Galactic. There’d been more than one argument shouted between desks that morning. And no one’s humor had been soothed by a report on their office featuring heavily on the Alessandra Baron show. The beautifully poised presenter had taken particularly malicious delight showing how the murderer had struck his victim down while surrounded by navy intelligence officers, before making good his escape. She also hinted that the LA Galactic killer was wanted for questioning in connection with the Burnelli murder.

“Where does she get this from?” Tarlo had growled. “That’s classified.”

“The Burnelli family, probably,” Renne said. “I don’t think we’re terribly popular with them right now. After all, that was Justine’s toy boy that got slaughtered. She’s probably angling for the case to be turned over to Senate Security.”

Tarlo lowered his voice, glancing around guiltily in case anyone else overheard. “I found out while you were away in South America; the boss is receiving all our data as and when we file it. Hogan’s been going quietly crazy knowing she’s watching everything over his shoulder.”

“Finally,” she murmured. “Some good news. Has she contacted you?”

“Not yet. You?”

“No.”

“If she does, tell her I’ll help her any way I can.”

“Will do.”

They parted like a couple having an illicit office romance, both trying not to smile.

Commander Alic Hogan arrived back at the Paris office just after lunch. He was in a bad mood, he knew he was in a bad mood, and he knew being in a bad mood was bad for a decent office environment. Frankly, he didn’t give a shit. He’d just got back from Kerensk where he’d spent an hour in Admiral Columbia’s office trying to explain the LA Galactic fuckup—the Admiral’s personal description. He knew of no reason why he shouldn’t spread the misery.

Everybody in the big open-plan office looked up from their displays as he came in. He caught quite a few smirks that were hurriedly smothered. “Senior officers, progress meeting in conference room three: ten minutes,” he announced as he stomped through into his own office. There were muttered comments behind him, which he didn’t bother with.

Alic settled into the chair behind the desk, the kind of ordinary black leather office furniture a secretary would have. It was left over from Paula Myo’s tenure, and he hadn’t got around to replacing it yet. Like everything in the office. Including the people.

He took advantage of the solitude to rest his head in his hands, making an effort to dump his emotional baggage and focus. Taking over the Paris office had been such a huge opportunity. The navy was growing at a phenomenal rate, and he was on the inside track, moving up fast. Attaching himself to Columbia’s staff had been the smartest thing he’d ever done back in the days when it was the Directorate. He’d done a lot of troubleshooting for Director Columbia, filing reports on nearly every division. It made him an automatic choice to keep an eye on Paula Myo after Rees left. Now he could finally appreciate what she’d been up against all those decades.

Christ, is this how Myo felt for a hundred and thirty years? The way the assassin had eluded them at LA Galactic wasn’t so much amazing as downright insulting. And judging by how his escape route was so immaculately planned out, he had to have known the navy was observing McFoster. Which implied there really was a leak somewhere—the one thing Alic could never tell the Admiral, not until after he had absolute proof, and preferably a full confession as well. There was also the extreme problem of exactly who the assassin was working for. The most obvious conclusion, the one Myo had settled for, was politically impossible. He could never admit that to anyone. The idea was career suicide.

He simply had to get the whole Guardians situation under control, report some solid progress to the Admiral. If there weren’t any results—and fast—he’d be following Myo out of the door. And he was pretty certain nobody would be offering him a cushy job in Senate Security.

On the plus side, the fallout from LA Galactic had produced a good range of leads into various Guardian operations and personnel. His Paris officers were good, despite the bitterness left from Myo’s forced departure. All he had to do was ensure they had the resources to complete their various investigations, and coordinate a decent strategy for the overall case. There would be results that would cut deep into the Guardians’ operation. There had to be.

Alic drank down a full glass of mineral water, hoping it would calm him and get him into the right frame of mind to chair the meeting. Maybe he was just dehydrated, it had been a hectic twenty-four hours. When he was ready, he headed for the conference room. Renne Kampasa was in front of him, carrying a tall mug of coffee.

Tarlo and John King were already waiting inside. John had been an investigator in the old Directorate, moving over from the technical forensic department a couple of months before the administrative changes began. The timing of that move meant he wasn’t quite as frosty toward Alic as the other two senior lieutenants.

“Too much caffeine,” Tarlo said loudly as Renne sat down “That’s what, your eighth this morning.”

She glowered at him. “I either drink this or I start smoking. Your call.”

John laughed at the shocked expression on Tarlo’s face.

Alic Hogan went in and sat at the head of the white table. “The Admiral is not pleased with us at all,” he told them. “A fact which he made very clear to me, as I’m sure you can appreciate. So … somebody please tell me we have finally got a name for our assassin.”

“Sorry, Chief,” John King said. “His face isn’t on any database in the Commonwealth. It’s a reprofile job, of course. We’ve probably got him under his old identity. But his current features are completely unknown.”

“Not so,” Renne said. “McFoster knew him. In fact, he was glad to see him. Overjoyed, actually. For my money, our assassin is from Far Away.”

“Who on Far Away is going to send an assassin into the Commonwealth?” John asked.

She shrugged. “Don’t know, but at the very least we should check CST’s records to see if he came through the Boongate station in the last couple of years.”

“All right, I’ll get my people on that,” John said. “Foster Cortese is running visual recognition programs for me. He can add the Boongate database to his analysis.”

“Good,” Alic said. “Now, what about the equipment he was wetwired with? We all saw what he was capable of. That stuff was cutting edge; there has to be some sort of record.”

“Jim Nwan is following that up for me,” Tarlo said. “There are plenty of companies across the Commonwealth who manufacture that kind of armament. I didn’t realize. A lot of it is supplied to Grand Families and Intersolar Dynasties for their security divisions. Tracing the end user through them is difficult; they’re not being very cooperative. Then there’s always Illuminatus. The clinics there are even less friendly.”

“If anyone blocks you, let me know right away,” Alic told him. “The Admiral’s office will apply some pressure directly.”

“Sure.”

“Right, Renne, what did you turn up at the observatory?”

“Quite a lot, though I’m not sure how much of it is relevant.”

“Let’s hear it.”

She sipped at her coffee, wincing at how hot it was. “First, we confirmed what McFoster collected: a whole load of data that they’d been storing. Apparently it all came from Mars.”

“Mars?” Alic frowned. “What the fuck is on Mars?”

“That’s where we start running into problems. We don’t know. The data was transmitted from a remote science station. Officially, it was a project sponsored by the Lambeth Interplanetary Society to investigate the Martian environment. The station has been transmitting the signals for twenty years, supposedly from automated sensors dotted all over the planet.”

“Did you say twenty years?”

“Yeah,” she said sardonically. “However, the Lambeth Interplanetary Society no longer exists. It went virtual eight years ago; today it’s just a named address logged with an equally bogus legal firm. There’s an administration program overseeing a bank account with just enough money deposited to pay for the Mars project to its conclusion. The observatory gets its annual fee, and if anyone calls the society with a query the program has a menu of stock replies. In other words it’s a typical Guardians’ front operation.”

“Was it ever real?” Alic asked.

“When it was set up, yes. There was a physical office in London, along with staff. I’ve got Gwyneth trying to track down anyone who was employed there; we’re hoping to turn up a secretary or some junior staff member. It’s not promising; anyone important would be a Guardian, the rest would be offworlders on a standard employment visa. As there aren’t any records, we’re checking with offworld employment placement agencies.”

“Why did the Guardians abandon the society office if the observatory is still collecting data for them?” John asked.

“The switch coincides with the last set of instruments being sent to Mars,” Renne said. “They paid for a lot of packages to be deployed in their first twelve years. You can’t do that entirely through the cybersphere. There have to be meetings, actual people to talk to the UFN Science Agency staff and take them out to lunch, attend seminars, designers for the sensors packages, that kind of thing.”

“So there are records of what they shipped out to Mars?” Alic didn’t like the implications of how big the Guardians’ operation was; nor that it involved something new, something they couldn’t understand. That was too many negatives to file in any report to the Admiral.

“We have UFN Science Agency manifests for their transport ships,” she said. “As to what was actually placed on board at the time, there is no way of knowing. Those ships travel all over the solar system, and the planetary instruments they deploy are packed in secure containers inside one-shot landers. Nobody at lunarport would ever break open a sealed system as they load it on a ship, there’s no reason.”

“You’re telling me that the Guardians have been running an operation here in the solar system for twenty years right under our noses, and we still don’t know what it is?” Alic stopped. He didn’t want to come over as critical; they had to work together on this. “What about other planets? Are the Guardians running operations on them?”

“It doesn’t look like it,” Renne said. “Matthew Oldfield is running verification on all the solar planetary projects the UFN Science Agency knows about; so far they look legitimate. It was only Mars.”

“But there’s no way of knowing what they placed there?”

“No, short of physically visiting and inspecting the equipment. But the systems have been returning data for two decades, and were scheduled to continue for another ten years. I can’t see that they’d be any sort of weapon. To be honest, I don’t see it’s worth wasting any more of our resources on; whatever it was, the whole project is obviously over.”

“I can’t agree with that,” Tarlo said. “They’ve been running this for twenty years. It’s got to be important to them. That means we have to find out what it was.”

“It was the data which was important,” Renne replied. “That’s what they were after. And now it’s gone. Cufflin wiped the observatory memory, and McFoster didn’t have it on him when he was killed.”

Alic didn’t like the reminder that McFoster appeared to be carrying nothing, although that whole issue was blowing up into a big political fight between the Admiral and the Burnellis. He certainly didn’t want to drag the Paris office into that, and he could almost agree with Renne about Mars being a waste of their resources to chase up. But … twenty years. Johansson had obviously thought it extremely important. “What about this Cufflin character? Have we had a memory read off him yet?”

“I don’t see the point,” Renne said. “He told me everything voluntarily on the flight back to Rio. We pumped him full of drugs here, and he repeated the same story. He was just a paid accomplice; he’s not big time. My recommendation is charge him with criminal conspiracy, and let the courts sort out what happens next.”

“If you don’t think he’s any more use, then fine.” Alic told his e-butler to make a note.

“He did produce one useful name,” Renne said. “Robin Beard. He was the intermediary who put Cufflin in touch with the anonymous agent who set up the whole deal. Now this is only a hunch, but several of the team involved in the assault on the Second Chance were recruited through an agent who specialized in security operatives, and who, also, was very careful to remain anonymous. Could be coincidence, but they were both Guardian operations.”

“Do we know where this Robin Beard is?” Alic asked; he tried not to seem too excited, that would be unprofessional, but the agent did sound like a very promising lead.

“I’ve got Vic Russell working on it as a priority. Last known address was on Cagayn. Vic’s on the express out there now; there’s a liaison with local police already set up.”

“Excellent.”

“What about Mars?” Tarlo asked. “We can’t just ignore it.”

“Well here’s the interesting thing,” Renne said. “Cufflin never transmitted anything to Mars through the observatory link, no coded instruction to shut down. So in theory, the remote station and whatever the Guardians placed there is still operating. It’ll send another signal in eight days’ time. The UFN Science Agency is putting together a group of planetary scientists to analyze the data for us and see if it is from environmental sensors.”

“Eight days?” Tarlo said scathingly. “Come on! Commander, they were desperate for this data. We have to investigate this now.”

Alic wanted to agree, but the cost of actually sending a forensic team to Mars would be phenomenal. Diverting a CST wormhole, even an exploration division one, would cost millions. That kind of procedure would have to be authorized by the Admiral. “Why can’t the observatory get in touch with the Mars remote station today? There must be some kind of communications protocol to run diagnostics on the systems up there. It’s got to be cheaper, probably quicker, too.”

Renne gave a shrug. “I suppose so. I can ask Jennifer Seitz, the director.”

“Do that. Let me know.” He smiled in satisfaction. Good clean decisions, proper leadership: everyone profited.

“Sure.” She took another sip of her coffee.

“Some good news for you, Chief,” Tarlo said. He shot Renne a malicious smile across the table.

“Go.”

“We’re making headway on McFoster’s financial data records. I need a warrant to open his accounts at Pacific Pine Bank; they’re guarded. Once we can study his spending pattern we can draw up a profile of his movements. We’ll also find out where his money came from.”

“Onetime account, cash deposit,” Renne said, and grinned over the top of her mug. “They always are. Untraceable.”

Tarlo showed her a stiff finger.

“You’ll get the warrant in an hour,” Alic promised. “All right, this isn’t as bleak as it looked back there in the junction. We can crack this, I know we can.”

Technically the War Cabinet should have had its meeting in the Presidential Palace on New Rio because the President herself was the chair, and ultimately held responsibility for all Commonwealth policy. That was the structure laid out in the Commonwealth constitution. Realpolitik was a little different.

None of the Intersolar Dynasty leaders present—Nigel Sheldon, Heather Antonia Halgarth, Alan Hutchinson, and Hans Braunt—were keen to be absent from their respective planets for long. And as Earth provided direct train links to all the Big15, it was their preferred choice of world. The senators—Justine Burnelli, Crispin Goldreich, and Ramon DB—were based on Earth anyway. And the two admirals, Kime and Columbia, certainly didn’t have the clout to nominate a different location, not after the public beating the navy was taking after the Lost23—however unfair it might have been.

Patricia Kantil had no option but to bow to the majority. It might have been the navy that was taking the brunt of the criticism in the media, but the unisphere polls were revealing a significant percentage questioning the overall leadership. Much as it irked her, she arranged for the meeting to be held at the Senate Hall in Washington, DC.

The participants assembled in one of those secure underground rooms so beloved of governments whenever they constructed emergency facilities. In an age when force fields could deflect atom laser shots and hundred-megaton blasts with relative ease, Patricia didn’t really see the point of digging out warrens of rooms a hundred meters below the aging Senate Hall building. But for the lack of windows, the chamber could have been any high-status corporate boardroom. A long tarnwood table sat atop an emerald carpet patterned with a huge Intersolar Commonwealth seal. Portraits of every past Senate First Minister gazed down at the table with various expressions of superiority. All very somber and expensive; typical of a budget that would never be held up to public scrutiny.

The War Cabinet all stood when Elaine Doi entered the room. Following two paces behind her, Patricia was quietly pleased to see that courtesy was extended, at least; the true powers in the Commonwealth were still acknowledging formal procedures—for the moment. None of the other cabinet members had aides with them; Patricia was the only one. She couldn’t actually recall being in the physical presence of quite so many masterclass players before. It was intimidating, even for someone as familiar with the process of high government as she. And she knew Elaine was nervous; for once not just about her own term. The latest batch of statistics from the Prime assault was shocking.

Elaine took her place at the head of the table and asked the others to be seated. Patricia sat at her left, with the First Minister, Oliver Tam, on her right. The tall double doors closed, and the chamber was automatically screened. Everyone lost contact with the unisphere.

“Isn’t the SI attending?” Crispin asked churlishly.

Elaine glanced at Patricia and gave a small nod of permission. “Not at this stage,” Patricia said. “Although it appears to be as disturbed as we are by the invasion, and it provided a great deal of assistance at the time, we still cannot be certain about its ultimate allegiance. As it is humans who are facing the brunt of the Prime attack, we feel that we alone should determine our response. If we decide we need its aid or advice, we will of course ask. Until then, the fundamental decision-making process should be ours and ours alone.”

If Crispin was annoyed at her reply, he didn’t show it.

“Thank you,” Elaine said. “I now call this first meeting of the War Cabinet to order. It is here today that we must determine the nature of our response to the clear and absolute threat posed by the Prime aliens. I don’t feel I under-state the enormity of the task we face when I say the outcome of this meeting could well determine not just the future of humanity as a species, but even if we have a future. The decisions we are faced with will be extremely difficult, and no doubt unpopular in some quarters. I for one am quite prepared to sacrifice popularist action in preference to do what is both right and necessary. I would like to call on Admiral Kime to give us a brief summary of the terrible assault we have endured, and then the navy’s analysis of what we might expect next from the Primes. When we have all absorbed that, I shall open the floor to policy decisions. Admiral.”

“Thank you, Madam President.” Wilson Kime looked around the table, saddened at the lack of friendly faces. “We all know it was bad. We knew the size of the Prime civilization at Dyson Alpha, and the kind of resources it has available to it, yet our initial preparation was wholly inadequate. The reason for that is quite simple: we refused to believe that an attack on this scale would ever happen. There simply is no rational explanation for it. We have seen that the Prime civilization’s industrial capacity is probably equal to if not larger than that of the entire Commonwealth. If they needed expansion space and more material resources, then it would be considerably cheaper for them to exploit star systems next to their own, rather than come after ours. Yet they chose not to follow a logical development pattern. They found out about us from Bose and Verbeken, and almost the first thing they did was build a series of wormholes to reach us. It looks as if the worst-case scenario for the envelopment was right: someone set up the barrier around Dyson Alpha to keep them contained.”

“What about Dyson Beta?” Alan Hutchinson asked.

“It remains an unknown,” Wilson said. “As does the reason for the Dyson Alpha barrier coming down. What we have to address today is the consequence of the Primes being freed. As a result of their attack, we now estimate the human death toll on the Lost23 planets to be approximately thirty-seven million.”

There was total silence around the table. Most of the cabinet stared down at the glossy wooden surface, not wanting to make eye contact with each other.

Wilson cleared his throat self-consciously and continued. “From the nature of the attacks, and the intelligence we have gathered subsequently, it appears that the aim of the Primes is to secure the industrial facilities on the Lost23 planets. Unlike us, they don’t appear to care about preserving the planetary environments. What we saw of their homeworld seems to support this; it was massively industrialized, and the pollution was orders of magnitude beyond anything we experienced here on Earth during the worst of the twenty-first century. Their priorities, therefore, are completely different from ours. That made them very difficult to predict. However, now they are in the open and we’re able to observe their activities directly, we can determine what actions they will have to pursue next. For instance, they will have to build up their occupation forces on the Lost23 in order to utilize them properly and secure them against any counterstrike we make. They will also mount a second attack against the Commonwealth, then a third, and a fourth. They will keep on attacking and pushing us back and back onto fewer worlds until we have none left.”

“What makes you certain of that?” Heather asked.

“We are at war,” Wilson said. He saw her glossed lips tighten at the phrase, censure leaking out of the flawless skin of her mid-fifties face like trace pheromones. Even though she was in a chic formal dark blue suit with her ginger hair folded into a neat braid, there was no way of disguising the authority she possessed. Heather was the only female head of a Big15 Intersolar Dynasty, her feminine appearance a very thin cloak worn over ruthless ambition and a razor-sharp political instinct. Just like him, and everyone else seated around the table, she hated being given bad news.

“War by its nature cannot be a static situation,” he continued, meeting her stare levelly. “They know that we will never accept the loss of those twenty-three planets. Either they continue to expand across the Commonwealth, wiping us out of galactic history, or we will do the same to them.”

“Are you suggesting we commit genocide against them?” Ramon DB asked lightly.

“Are you suggesting we become the victims of genocide?” Wilson countered. “This is not a war as we have fought them before. This is not a strategic struggle over key resources; we’re not fighting for control over tribal lands, or trade routes to the new colonies. Both us and the Primes are intersolar, there is no shortage of anything in the galaxy. They came here with one purpose, to kill us and to capture our worlds.”

“In that case we have experienced an analogous war in our history,” Hans Braunt said. “It would seem as if they are waging a religious crusade against us.”

“You could be right,” Wilson said. “Religion or some ideological variant of it was certainly one of the more popular theories among the strategic analysis teams. Their motivation can’t easily be explained any other way.”

“We can worry about the reason later,” Nigel said. “You’ve summarized where we stand. What does the navy want to do next? What do you need?”

“We’re proposing to meet the Prime aggression with a three-stage approach. First, a heavy infiltration and sabotage offensive on the Lost23; tie the Primes up on each planet, slow them down, divert their resources away from readying their next attack while we prepare for stage two.”

“I’m curious about the kinds of forces you envisage to pull that off,” Alan Hutchinson said.

“Commando-style troop units will be dropped onto the Lost23 through wormholes that will open for a very short duration. They’ll cause as much disruption as possible, combined with a comprehensive intelligence-gathering operation. So far we know very little about the Primes. This should help expand our knowledge base considerably. We’re hoping to perform several snatch missions so we can begin interrogation and memory reading procedures.”

“Just what kind of numbers are you talking about here?” Alan asked keenly. “To make any decent impact you’re going to need a lot of these guerrilla fighters.”

“We’re planning on sending an initial force of around ten thousand troops to each planet.”

“Ten thous … Christ, man, you’re talking about raising an army of a quarter of a million people.”

“We don’t see that as a problem,” Rafael said smoothly. “The new navy ground troop service will be opened to volunteers from the general population, of course; and history shows we’ll have a great many aspirants. Even multilifers tend to get aggressive when threatened. And just in case, we have a large reserve of people who can be more easily persuaded; people, in fact, more suited to this kind of work than most.” He opened his hands wide in reasonable appeal. “Please, most of the last few days have been spent drawing up these responses, and examining their feasibility; we’re not throwing out panic ideas here. Deploying these troops is not only possible, it is essential. We must regain the initiative.”

“Very well,” Hans said. “What’s stage two?”

“A fleet,” Wilson said flatly. “A very big fleet of warships. Not the kind we have now. We need to approach this from a radical perspective. We have to consider starships like the Second Chance and the StAsaph as our Kittyhawks, not even prototypes. We were lazy back then, putting together what we could with damn near off-the-shelf components.” He glanced over at Nigel. “I’m not criticizing; they were right for the time, but this is a new age that could well see us obliterated if we don’t recognize it. We need fast ships, not with marque five or six hyperdrives that are on the drawing board; I need a marque ten or more, a speed that can take us to Dyson Alpha in a week. They’ve got to be well protected, shields as strong as the original Dyson barriers were. They’ve got to have real weaponry, not nuclear missiles, not energy beams; give me relativistic attack drones, each warship loaded with a salvo of a hundred of the damn things which can all strike with the same power the Desperado unleashed. And most of all, I need thousands of them. Not dozens, not hundreds: thousands—enough to challenge that goddamn armada of ordinary ships which the Primes have. During their attack on the Lost23, they sent over thirty thousand ships through those wormholes; and they’ve got a hundred times that many back in their home system. If we’re going to go up against them, then we need to put the industrial output equivalent to a Big15 behind this effort, churn them out the way we do cars and trains.

“FTL ships are the sole advantage we have over the Primes right now. They don’t have them. If we can get that advanced technology working and deployed, then we stand a chance. With the kind of strike mobility I’m talking about we can outmaneuver them at a strategic level. We can block their next attack—that’s our second stage. Then after that we can scour space between here and Dyson Alpha to find out where that bastard Hell’s Gateway staging post is, and destroy it—stage three, threat elimination.”

“Sounds good to me,” Nigel said; he nodded his approval. “At least you’re talking the talk, thinking outside the box. We need that badly.”

“It’s bloody expensive talk,” Crispin murmured.

“I don’t believe you just said that,” Justine shot at him. The unexpected sharpness in her tone made everyone turn to look at her; it was pure Gore.

“Thirty-seven million humans dead, and you’re complaining about the cost of defending ourselves. Didn’t you hear what the Admiral just told us? The alternative is death. Real death, not just an inconvenient sleep-of-absence while your clinic grows you a new body. You will die, Crispin. And that lasts forever.”

“I wasn’t saying it was too expensive, my dear. I’d just like to point out that our finances will have to undergo a similar radical restructuring to pay for it. That’s if this wonderful new technology can be made to work.” He looked pointedly at Nigel, then Wilson.

“The theories are perfect,” Nigel said evenly. “Getting them to work in practice … well, Crispin, that’s where all your money comes in.”

“It’ll be your taxes that get raised,” Crispin pointed out.

“And do you really think any of us gives a flying fuck about that right now? Get the Treasury to crunch the numbers, slap twenty or forty percent on taxes, work out the loans and bond issues we’ll have to float. Nobody cares about the inflation or recession or unsustainable growth it’ll cause. None of that crap matters if we lose. If we don’t have the money available to make this work there won’t be any finance market. We’ll be dead; we at this table have to recognize this even if we can never say so in public.”

“It’s not just finance,” Heather said. She nodded in Wilson’s direction. “I like your thinking on this.”

“Team effort,” he grunted.

“Sure, but your team’s heading in the right direction. We have to think way out of the left field and cooperate for a change. What gives me a fright is trying to realign our manufacturing capacity on this scale. It won’t be smooth, yet it must be done.”

“The SI could probably help,” Oliver Tam said.

“Possibly,” Heather said. She sounded like a schoolmistress displeased with a disruptive pupil. She exchanged a look with the other three Dynasty heads. “We’ll need to pull the rest into line.”

“They’re smart enough,” Nigel said. “And we have our own arrangements between ourselves.”

Heather gave a small shrug.

“What about the refugee situation?” Ramon DB inquired. “What place do they have in all these plans? Right now we have the entire surviving population from the Lost23 saturating the rest of the Commonwealth; they have no homes, no jobs, no life left. They look to us, to government, for leadership, some acknowledgment of their plight. There are hundreds of thousands of people flooding into Silvergalde, which can’t cope. I’m told the outside of Lyddington is beginning to resemble some kind of medieval refugee camp, with no water, no sanitation, and precious little food. And there’s the one big problem which I haven’t heard raised here today: the displacement. People on every world within a hundred light-years of the Lost23 are either taking vacations on the other side of the Commonwealth or trying to sell up and buy a house on a world where they think they’re going to be safe. They are afraid, and with good reason. What do we do about this? We must show them we know and understand their situation. That we will take action to resolve it.”

“Not today, and not in here,” President Doi said.

It was said in such a decisive and firm manner that she drew surprised glances from several people around the table. Ramon actually opened his mouth in astonishment.

“This is the War Cabinet, Senator Ramon,” she said. “In here we decide military strategy, that’s all. The displaced are an item for the general civil cabinet, if not a full debate in the Senate.”

“But they do impinge on military matters,” Ramon said. “They will affect the whole economy.”

“No,” Elaine said quickly. “The numbers are huge, admittedly. But in overall percentage terms they barely register. I will not let this cabinet get bogged down by the minutia of problems which are not in its direct remit. You are out of order, Senator. Please give the floor to someone else.”

Alan was making little attempt to hide his smile; one or two of the others looked mildly bemused. A positive and decisive Doi was not something they encountered very often. Realizing her sudden authority, she asked, “Admiral Columbia, do you envisage any policy change to our current planetary defenses?”

“No changes, ma’am. The force fields were extremely successful, even on the Lost23. We have plans to upgrade all city and civil area force fields, anticipating the Primes will launch a second attack. Arms manufacturers are also increasing production of combat aerobots for us, which proved invaluable during the preliminary bombardment. Electronic warfare systems are also a priority. But those are all purely defensive systems; all they can do is minimize damage in the event of an attack. To stop the attack we need that fleet.”

“Point taken, Admiral. I think we can move to a vote on the overall strategy.”

“I would also like to mention stage four,” Columbia said.

“Stage four?”

“Yes, ma’am. The Seattle Project. The kind of weapon we can use to take the fight directly to Dyson Alpha.”

“I wasn’t aware we’d even reached prototype stage yet.”

“Hopefully, it will arrive within a few months,” Wilson said. “You know physicists, they don’t like deadlines. Not that they ever meet them anyway.”

“So it’s not something we have to consider immediately?” the President asked.

“No,” Wilson agreed cautiously. “But Admiral Columbia is right. Ultimately we may have to make the decision to use it.”

“We can fight them with warships,” Columbia said. “We can slow them down, we can possibly even force them back, though any prolonged war will be extremely costly to us, and not just in monetary terms. But if ultimately they prove implacably hostile to us, for whatever reason, then it will have to be used.”

“Genocide,” Elaine whispered. “Dear God.”

“It would be a collective decision,” Hans told her. “We would take it together, and share it with you.”

“The Seattle Project should continue to receive top priority,” Columbia said.

“Yes,” the President said, charily. “Very well, if no one else has any issues, I’d like to proceed to a vote on Admiral Kime’s proposal for a three-stage approach to engaging the Prime threat.”

“Proposed,” Heather said.

“Seconded,” Alan said.

“Very well,” the President said. “Those in favor?” She counted the raised hands. “Unanimous.”

Outside the cabinet room, little groups of aides were hanging around in the long corridor gossiping with each other. When the doors opened, they all quietened down and waited for their respective chief to walk past, before attaching themselves like so many iron filings. Justine had almost reached Sue Piken and Ross Gant-Wainright, the two senior staffers she’d inherited with Thompson’s office, when Ramon DB caught up with her.

“That was unlike you,” he said softly.

Justine stopped and gave him a impatient look, all ready to give him a snappy answer. The bright overhead lighting glinted off small droplets of sweat on his brow. His midnight-black OCtattoos were now quite visible across his cheeks and hands, a result of his previously ebony skin acquiring a grayish pallor. When she glanced down, she could see how tight his generous robe was. Her annoyance drained away. “You look tired,” she said, and put a hand on his arm. “I don’t suppose you’ve been taking it easy?”

He smiled fondly. “Have you?”

“My body is in its early twenties again. I can do the late nights and stress. You can’t.”

“Please, don’t go reminding me about your body at that age.” He put one hand playfully over his chest. “My heart can only take so much. By the way, you look tremendous in black.”

“Rammy! Look at those rings; you’ll never get them off, your fingers have swollen so much.” She took his hand and held on to it, examining the jewelry that was almost buried by pulpy flesh.

He squirmed like a guilty child. “Don’t nag, woman.”

“I’m not nagging. I’m telling you this straight: either you start looking after yourself or I personally will cart you off to the clinic for rejuvenation.”

“As if either of us can take time off for that right now.” He paused, uncertain of himself. “I heard about LA Galactic. Talk in the Senate dining room is that you knew the boy who was killed.”

“Yeah, I knew him. I was the one who put navy intelligence on him.”

Ramon gave her black dress a suspicious stare. “I hope you’re not blaming yourself for his death.”

“No.”

“You forget, my dear, I really do know you.”

“Did the Senate dining room know that the boy was killed by the same person who killed Thompson?”

“Yes. We’re quietly but firmly pressing Senate Security for some results.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Confidence in both branches of the navy is not terribly high right now.”

“It’ll improve.” For a moment Justine considered telling him about the Starflyer; Ramon would make a superb ally in the Senate, but he really wasn’t in good shape, and that would just add to his burden. Not yet, she told herself. “I’m sorry Doi cut you off in there,” she said. “I believe we do need to consider the refugee problem.”

“Actually, she was right to say that,” he said, and smiled broadly. “I’m just not used to our dear President being quite so forceful. It could well be we have waved good-bye to a politician and got a stateswoman in return. Now, that would be a first.”

“We’ll see. I’m not sure I believe in an age of miracles just yet. But I’ll be happy to back you up in the Senate on some kind of aid package for the refugees.” She caught sight of Wilson Kime talking to Crispin, and leaned forward to give Ramon a quick kiss. “I have to go. I’ll see you in the dining room, yes?”

“Of course.”

Justine hurried over to Wilson as he and Crispin shook hands. Several aides were waiting to pounce, and she could see Columbia coming out of the cabinet room. She wasn’t quite up to another direct confrontation with him right now.

“Admiral, could we talk for a moment, please?”

Wilson nodded amicably. “Certainly, Senator.”

“In private; there’s a conference room just down here.”

Wilson’s hesitation was hardly noticeable. “Very well.”

Justine’s e-butler gave the door an open code; her aides had reserved the room as soon as they all knew where the War Cabinet meeting was to be held. Wilson followed her in, his face registering polite curiosity. Then he saw Paula Myo sitting at the table inside, and frowned. “What is this?” he asked.

“Sorry to put you on the spot, Wilson,” Justine said. “But you probably know Admiral Columbia and I have had a disagreement on certain security matters. And he fired Investigator Myo from navy intelligence.”

Wilson held up a hand. “I’m sorry, Senator, but Rafael has my complete confidence. I don’t do office politics, not at this level. In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a war on, and we could well lose.” He turned back to the door.

“The Guardians have been running an operation on Mars for twenty years,” Paula said.

Wilson froze, his hand already extended to open the door. After a moment he said, “There’s nothing on Mars. Believe me, I know.”

“You were there for ten hours, over three hundred years ago,” Justine said.

“I was watching the live television broadcast. I remember seeing Lewis, Orchiston, and you stepping out onto the surface. It was the first time in a great many years I was proud of our country again. You were putting up the stars and stripes when Nigel butted in.”

Wilson turned around, anger flushing his cheeks. “So?”

“The Guardians were using the Arabia Terra station to relay their information back to Earth.”

“What sort of information?”

“We’re not sure. Navy intelligence made one attempt to run diagnostic routines through the equipment up there. It appeared to be standard environmental sensors.”

“I don’t get it.” Wilson shook his head, clearly irritated. “The Guardians are terrorists. What do they want with Martian environment data?”

“We don’t know,” Paula said. “But the Paris office is winding down their investigation.”

“Ah. That’s it.” Wilson gave Justine a disdainful glance. “You want me to pressure Rafael into keeping the investigation open.”

“You have been on the receiving end of a Guardian operation,” Paula said. “More than most, you know how serious and effective they can be. They nearly destroyed the Second Chance. A twenty-year operation is not something they would undertake lightly. It would have to be exceptionally important to them. We have got to find out what it is.”

Wilson let out a hiss of air between his teeth. “Maybe. But if it is truly this important, I don’t believe Rafael would ignore it. He’s many things, aggressive, ambitious, intense, unforgiving, yes; but never stupid.”

“Everyone has blind spots, Wilson,” Justine said. “Paula was fired for political reasons, for not being quick enough to produce results.”

“A hundred and thirty years on a case with no result is very reasonable grounds for dismissal in my book,” Wilson said. “No offense.”

“You heard about the LA Galactic incident?” Justine asked. “An assassin killed the Guardians’ courier who was bringing their Martian data back for them. It was the same assassin who destroyed the black market arms dealer on Venice Coast. He also murdered my brother. So he’s not working for the government, and he can’t be working for the Guardians.”

“Who then?” Wilson asked.

“Good question. The Paris office might be able to find the answer. If they keep hunting.”

Wilson looked from Justine to Paula. “What are you asking for?” “Ask Rafael to keep navy intelligence on the Martian inquiry, not to let up.” “Maybe,” Wilson said. “I’ll have to think about all this.”

After an investment of twenty-five years, most of the planets in phase one space were now linked by maglev express lines, providing a fast, efficient service; and based on that success CST was busy expanding the network out across the planets of phase two space. But for all its imagined importance as the link world to Far Away, Boongate still hadn’t got a maglev track. CST was vague about the timetable for installation.

It had taken the standard express from Paris forty minutes to reach Boongate’s CST station, sliding smoothly up alongside platform 2 at twenty-two hundred hours local time. There were only five platforms in the main terminal building, but each of them were bustling with waiting passengers when Renne and Tarlo stepped out from the first-class double-decker carriage. It was raining outside, and the train was dripping onto the track. A chilly night wind blew in under the big arching glass roof, making people stamp their feet and button up their coats. The overhead polyphoto strips threw a bright blue-tinged light across the scene, illuminating the raindrops that lashed in past the edge of the roof like gray sparks.

“Late to be traveling, isn’t it?” Tarlo said as they walked toward the end of the platform. He ignored the curious glances their navy uniforms drew.

Renne pulled her jacket collar up against the cold, and eyed the people lining the platform. They all seemed to be gathered in family clumps, with subdued, yawning children sitting on piles of luggage. Several CST security guards were patrolling.

“Depends how keen you are to leave,” she replied. It was the first time she’d seen any evidence of the displacement that the unisphere news shows featured so heavily these days. But then if it was going to happen anywhere, she realized, it would be here. Most of Boongate’s neighbors were numbered among the Lost23.

They pushed their way through the equally crowded concourse and found the CST security office. Their liaison was Edmund Li, a local police technical officer who’d been seconded to the navy, then appointed to the newly formed Far Away freight inspectorate division. He didn’t bother wearing a navy uniform, just a simple dove-gray office suit. Renne was rather envious of that; her dark tunic always seemed to itch. It reminded her of the time when Paula was still in charge of the Paris office.

Li had a car waiting, which drove them the eight kilometers over to the Far Away section of the yard. As he was briefing them on the latest interceptions, Renne looked out through the rain-smeared glass. Hundreds of lights shone from tall poles across the extensive station yard, revealing the broad empty regions between the rails and distant industrial buildings, a legacy of lost ambition left over from the days when Boongate thought it would become the junction for the adjoining sector of phase three space. Some of the cargo depots were open, big rectangular doors showing trains drawn up inside, their wagons steaming and dripping as cranes and autolifters unloaded their consignments. She saw a long rank of Ables RP5 shunting engines lined up outside a giant engineering shop; unused since the Prime attack sent the Commonwealth economy floundering, they awaited the return of normal commercial operations.

A weak maroon light shimmered on the other side of the Far Away cargo warehouse, glinting on the rails that snaked around outside.

“Is that the Half Way gateway?” Renne asked. The semicircle of bland luminescence was coming into view from behind the long dark building as the car drew near. It resembled a tired moon sinking below the horizon.

“Yeah,” Edmund Li said. “There’s not been much outgoing traffic since the Prime attack. Most of it is cargo to companies and big landowners, and the Institute, of course. Not much personal stuff, either; anyone who was planning on emigrating has put it on hold, and their tourist trade has packed up completely.”

“What about traffic coming this way?” Tarlo asked.

“Sure. Plenty of people want to get the hell out of there. Who wouldn’t? They’re damn close to Dyson Alpha, but it costs a lot to travel between Boongate and Far Away. Most don’t have that kind of money. And I don’t know how long the Commonwealth Civil Council will keep the gateway open.”

The car pulled up outside the warehouse, and they hurried through the rain to the small office attached to the side of the main building like a brick wart. Inside, the office was a simple open-plan rectangle, with nine desks down the middle. The console arrays on seven of them were covered with plastic dust jackets.

Tarlo gave them a curious look as they walked past. “How many staff does the division employ?”

“There are twenty-five of us on the payroll,” Edmund Li said in a deadpan voice.

“Right. And how many show up?”

“It was four of us yesterday. Tomorrow, who knows?”

Tarlo and Renne gave each other a knowing glance.

“I think that’s called being absent without leave,” Tarlo said. “The Admiral will probably have them shot.”

“He’ll have to find them first,” Edmund Li told them. “I doubt they’ll be on this world. They had families.”

“So why are you still here?” Renne asked. “It’s not like this is the most vital job in the Commonwealth right now.”

“I was born on Boongate. I guess that makes it easier for me to stay than the others. And I haven’t started a family this life around.” He pushed through the door that led into the warehouse.

It was chilly inside the cavernous space. A single row of polyphoto strips was alight along the apex, casting a desultory light on the bare metal racks that ran the entire length of the enzyme-bonded concrete floor. Rain hitting the solar panel roof produced a loud drumming noise that reverberated around the nearly empty building.

“It gets kind of unnerving working here,” Edmund Li said. He stepped over a set of rail tracks that ran down the middle of the floor to a huge door at the end of the warehouse. “We are physically the closest people to the Half Way gateway. If the Primes did come through, we’d be the first to know about it. You feel really exposed. I don’t really blame the others for quitting.”

They came to a pair of ordinary flatbed train wagons that were sitting on the track, both of them loaded with big gray composite crates. A deep-scan sensor hoop spanned the track twenty meters away; several desks had been set up around its base. Their screens and arrays were all silent and dark. A broad workbench beside them was equipped with several robotic machine tools. Three of the crates sat on top of it; they’d been broken open.

“Urien found these yesterday.” Edmund Li gestured. The packing crates contained bulky sections of machinery that the power tools had split apart. Almost all of the electrical circuitry had been removed and laid out on the bench in a jumble of coiled cable and black box modules.

“All right, so what are we looking at?” Tarlo asked.

“The machinery in this consignment is all agricultural; combine harvesters, tractors, drillers, irrigation systems. It’s shipped in sections like this to be reassembled on Far Away. Makes life quite easy for us to scan it all. We were lucky Urien was on duty when this lot went through; his family are landowners on Dunedin. The man knows his farming tools. He thought there was something odd about the wiring, especially as these are all diesel fueled. Turns out he was right.” Edmund held up some of the cabling, which was as thick as his wrist. “Heavy-duty superconductor. And these current modulators have a massive power rating.”

“Not the manufacturer’s spec then?” Tarlo said.

“Heavens no. This is intended for something that uses a phenomenal amount of electricity.”

“Any ideas?”

Edmund Li grinned as he shook his head. “I have absolutely no clue. That’s why I made the call to your office. I thought you should know right away.”

“Appreciate that. So where was it heading?”

“The address is for Palamaro Ranch in the Taliong district, that’s a long way east of Armstrong City; they say that’s where the Barsoomians are.”

“All right. What we really need are the shipment and financial details. Who was the agent? Which bank was used? Where was the machinery packed?”

“Yeah.” Edmund Li scratched the back of his neck, giving the muddle of machinery a doubtful look. The rain pounding on the roof grew even louder as a dense squall lashed down. “Look, I’m sure that back on Earth that kind of data is beautifully formatted and filed for instant access. Things are a little different here. For a start, some of this stuff is already missing.”

“Missing?” Renne exclaimed. “What do you mean?”

“Exactly that. Everyone knows we keep expensive goods in here overnight. Take a look around, lady. Do you see any guardbots on patrol outside? We’ve got sensors, but even if an alarm goes off, the nearest CST security agent is eight kilometers away over in the terminal, and right now they’re all real busy on crowd control. The police are farther away, and care even less.”

“Goddamnit,” Tarlo hissed. “Did you manage to get a record of everything you found in this shipment?”

“I’m pretty sure Urien recorded it, yes. There will be the deep-scan sensor record if nothing else. It just hasn’t been loaded in our official database yet; it’s probably in his console’s temporary store folder.”

Renne made a strong effort to keep her growing anger in check. No good shouting at Edmund Li: they were lucky he even bothered to call them. “What about the associated datawork Tarlo asked about? Is that in a temporary folder somewhere?”

“No. I haven’t started rounding that up yet. It shouldn’t take too long; a lot of the inventory and authorization will be filed with the station’s Far Away export control office.”

“How’s their staffing level?” Tarlo asked bitterly.

Edmund Li just raised an eyebrow.

“Hogan is going to go apeshit,” Renne decided. Another setback. This case is truly jinxed.

“Well, he needn’t try blaming us,” Tarlo said. “But I’m beginning to understand why the boss never found any decent leads here.”

“It’s only since the attack things have gotten like this,” Edmund Li said. “It didn’t help that this operation was still being set up at the time. I can’t even complain about not having any money; it’s lack of people that is the problem.”

“Right,” Tarlo said decisively. “Renne, there’s no point both of us staying here; you get back to Paris. I’ll stay on and run the checks on this consignment. Once we have the basic source, route, and finance information, we can start the backtrack operation from Paris.”

Renne gave the shaded, gaping warehouse a final examination. “No argument. You’d better arrange for what’s left to be shipped back as well. Forensics can start going over it. They might be able to tell us what it’s for.”

Tarlo put out a hand to shake. “Ten dollars they can’t.”

“No takers.”

It was officially called the Westminster Palace Museum of Democracy, but as always everyone just called it Big Ben after the famous clock tower that stood guard at the eastern end. Adam Elvin used his credit tattoo to pay the standard entry fee and walked in through the ornate arching stonework of StStephen’s entrance opposite the Abbey. With its lengthy halls, elongated windows, and bare stone interior, the old British Parliament building always gave him the impression of being a misappropriated cathedral. The lobby between the two main chambers had incongruous wooden furniture huddled defensively between big white statues, while gold-tinted light poured in through the vaulting stained-glass windows highlighting the carvings that stretched up each wall. Groups of chattering schoolchildren rushed about, looking around through interface goggles as the guide program described the historical significance of everything they focused on. Doors into the Commons were open, where holograms faded in and out above the chamber’s green benches, to produce images of successive politicians from the pre-electronic era right up until the last English Parliament in 2065. In the House of Lords the whole rise and fall of the British monarchy from William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings to King Timothy signing the act to grant the right of self-determination to his people was played out amid spectral pomp and splendor.

Adam ignored the Victorian Gothic grandeur and the dodgy history lessons to carry on through to the terrace café along the side of the Thames. It extended for over two hundred meters, nearly the entire length of the building, and was always a popular spot for tourists and locals alike. A warm spring breeze coming off the wide river rustled the tall table parasols with their elaborate portcullis emblem. Waitresses threaded their way through the tight maze, delivering trays and taking orders. He had to suck in his stomach and slither his way awkwardly past seats, warding off annoyed glances, to reach a table that was right up against the terrace parapet itself.

Bradley Johansson smiled up at him. “Adam, so good of you to come, old chap.”

“Yeah right,” Adam grunted, and sat down next to Bradley.

A young waitress dressed in a faux-Tudor boy’s costume with emerald-green tights showing off her long legs came over and smiled hopefully.

“Another afternoon tea for my friend,” Bradley told her winningly. “With cream scones, and I think a glass of that delightful Gifford’s champagne.”

Her smile brightened. “Yes, sir.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Adam muttered after she walked off. Everybody had to be looking at them.

“Now don’t go all Bolshevik on me,” Bradley chided. “When in Rome and all that. Besides, it’s proper Cornish clotted cream.”

“Woopie fucking do.”

“Come on, Adam, they’ve turned this ancient seat of class privilege into a lovely teashop for the common man. There’s got to be a metaphor or two in that, surely? I thought you’d enjoy this.”

Adam would never admit it, but he always experienced a slight burst of admiration for the way Bradley chose to meet him in the most outrageously public places. There was a kind of bravado about it that Adam’s dreary paranoid tradecraft would never permit.

“Kazimir would have liked it,” Adam said. “The history on this world always amazed him. Nearly every building he went in was older than Far Away.”

Bradley’s affable expression hardened. “What happened, Adam? That data was vital.” His hand slapped the table in fury. People did look. Bradley’s smile returned, meeting the stares apologetically.

Adam didn’t often get to see the claws. It wasn’t nice. “We pieced it together eventually. He sneaked off to see a girl before the courier mission. Apparently, they met a long time ago back on Far Away. Turns out she was a little more important than your average tourist.”

“Who is she?”

“Justine Burnelli.”

“The Senator?” Bradley blinked in surprise. “Well, bless the dreaming heavens. No wonder the navy was on to him. I thought he was smarter than that, a lot smarter.”

“Kazimir was murdered by a Starflyer agent called Bruce McFoster. He and Kazimir grew up together.”

“Yes, I remember.” Bradley picked up a little bone-handled silver knife and spread some cream on a scone. “Bruce never came back from a raid a few years back. Damn it, I keep telling the clans to watch for what the Starflyer can do to anyone left behind.”

“The same thing it did to you?”

For a split second Bradley registered enormous pain. “Quite,” he said hoarsely.

“You know, I don’t even question if the Starflyer is real anymore. I’ve watched young Kieran McSobel’s recording a dozen times since. Kazimir was delighted to see his friend again; and Bruce just shot him.”

“I’m sorry, Adam.”

“Sorry? I thought you’d be delighted at another convert.”

“It isn’t a pleasant door to open. There is little hope behind it, mostly just darkness and pain. That’s why I founded the Guardians, to protect the human race from what lurks there. So they could carry on living their beautiful long lives in peace. In a way, you’re not my convert, you’re another of its victims.”

“Hey, don’t worry yourself about my soul. I chose my path a long time ago. This is just another rocky patch.”

“Oh, Adam, if only you knew how much I envy your optimism. Ah …” He smiled up again as the waitress brought a tray with Adam’s afternoon tea.

“Do tuck in.”

Adam picked up his knife and cut open one of the scones.

“How good was the encryption?” Bradley asked.

“The SI could probably break it, but apart from that it’s safe.”

“That gives us some leeway, then. The navy ran long-range diagnostic tests on the Martian equipment, which will tell them precisely nothing. They’ll be desperate to find some subterfuge.”

“We watched the body afterward, you know. Senator Burnelli had it taken to a New York clinic owned by her family. My little friend Paula accompanied her. From what we can gather, the navy and Senate Security don’t exactly see eye to eye over this.”

“Humm.” Bradley held up his crystal champagne flute, studying the bubbles as they fizzed in the sunlight. “Do you think Paula has the memory crystal rather than the navy?”

“That’s some heavy-duty speculation, but I’ll concede it is possible.”

“I wonder if that works to our advantage?”

“I don’t see how. You needed the data. They have it.”

“It gives them a big bargaining chip, even though they don’t know it yet.”

“Do we have anything they want?”

“Yes.” Bradley took a sip of champagne. “You and I for a start.”

“Not fucking funny.” Adam stuffed the scone into his mouth and started pouring his tea.

“I suppose not. But I have to give some consideration to recovering the information. We need it, Adam, very badly. The whole of the planet’s revenge depends on it.”

“I don’t see how we can get it back. I certainly don’t have any way of infiltrating navy intelligence or Senate Security. What about that old top-level source of yours?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t heard from him in a long time.”

“So that’s it? Game over?” Somehow the idea was impossible.

“It’s not over by any means,” Bradley said. “Just a damn sight more difficult. That Martian data would have helped us refine the control program to a point where we could use it with confidence. We can still go ahead, but now we have to depend on numerical modeling more that the project designers want to. The results will be very uncertain.”

“Your guys will make it work, whatever it is. They all seem so dedicated.”

“For which I give thanks to the dreaming heavens. Humans do seem to possess remarkable reserves in so many fields. No wonder Starflyer and the Primes are so unnerved by us.”

“If the Starflyer found out about the planet’s revenge, could it prevent you from carrying it out?”

Bradley looked out over the river, giving the tall plane trees on the opposite bank a thoughtful stare. “Stop it, no; but it would be easy to circumvent. Timing is critical. But very few of us know the entire strategy, and I remain in contact with all of them. So far we are secure.”

“I hope you’re right. They knew Kazimir was making his courier run. Which implies they’ve penetrated the navy. So by now they must know about the observatory receiving the Martian data for twenty years. If the Starflyer knows that, can it work out what you’re planning to hit it with?”

“Extremely unlikely. However, none of this will matter if we can’t get the remaining physical components through to Far Away. An entire shipment was intercepted by the new navy inspections on Boongate.”

“Yeah, we’re really going to have to do something about that.” Adam dropped some rock sugar into his tea, and stirred absently. “We’ve got outlines of a blockade-busting run drawn up. I guess it’s about time to put some flesh on it. Not that it needs a lot of development. It’s an essentially crude notion to begin with.”

“Good. That means there’s less which can go wrong.”

“And you call me an optimist.”

“I’m still curious how Bruce managed to get away afterward. Did you find out anything relevant about that train he jumped on?”

“No. CST traffic control uses very high-order encryption.” He grinned. “For some reason, they’re worried about people like me hacking in. It was a freight train is all we know. We don’t know where it was going, only that it was in the right place at the right time. That kind of placement takes some doing. It impressed the hell out of me.”

“Logically, then, it had to be organized by someone very senior in CST. I wonder who the Starflyer has corrupted in that organization?”

“I don’t suppose we’ll find out until all this is long over and settled.”

Bradley gave a reluctant moue. “Yes, unfortunately. But someone that highly placed can do a lot of damage. I’m assuming they’ll help the Starflyer in its arrangements to return to Far Away.”

“You’re convinced that will happen?”

“I am indeed. It can’t afford to be trapped in the Commonwealth, especially if the Primes do succeed in wreaking havoc. When the war is at its very worst, it will try and return to its own kind. That’s when we must strike.”

“We’ll get the rest of your equipment through, don’t worry.”

“I don’t, Adam, I have a lot of confidence in you and your team. I just wish I could convince the rest of the Commonwealth. Perhaps I went about this the wrong way right from the start. But nobody believed me back then. I felt as though my back was to the wall. What else could I do but lash out physically? It was such a ridiculously human reaction, one which betrays how insecure we all are, how short the distance we’ve traveled from the old animal. Forming the Guardians to attack the Institute was such an instinctive reaction. Maybe I should have tried the political route.”

“Speaking of which, are you absolutely sure Elaine Doi is a Starflyer agent?”

Bradley leaned forward over the table. “That wasn’t us.”

“Excuse me?”

“A very well executed fake. I have to admit, the Starflyer is becoming quite sophisticated in its campaign against us. Physically, Bruce and his kind are causing a lot of expensive damage; while disinformation like that shotgun is damaging our credibility. Just when we were starting to attract a degree of media interest, not to mention political support. Still, I blame myself, I should have anticipated such a move.”

Adam finally sipped some of the Gifford’s champagne to help wash down a scone. “You know, that might have been a dangerous move on their part.”

“In what way?”

“If anyone was to investigate that shotgun properly, they might pick up some leads. The Starflyer might have exposed some of its operation to official scrutiny.”

“Worth considering. I certainly wasn’t going to issue a disclaimer. That would make us look really stupid in the public mind. In any case, I’m abandoning the propaganda shotguns anyway. We’re too close to the end now for them to make any real difference to general opinion.”

“Unless you can produce some absolute proof.”

“True.” Bradley seemed very undecided. “I suppose the Doi shotgun could do with some further inquiries.”

“I can’t spare anyone from my team, especially now you’ve recalled Stig.”

“Sorry about that, but I needed him back on Far Away. He’s developed into a damn good leader, for which I place full credit on your training.”

“So we have no one who can dig into the shotgun, see who put it together?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Wilson said practically nothing on the journey back to the High Angel. He was lost in his virtual vision, pulling files from the navy intelligence Paris office, and reviewing the tight green text as it scrolled through the air in front of him.

“It went well,” Rafael said as the direct express slid out of Newark. “I expected us to take a much bigger beating than that. They are politicians, after all.”

“Doi was surprising,” Wilson admitted, rousing himself from Hogan’s report on the killing at LA Galactic. “I didn’t expect her to be quite as forthright as that.”

“She had to be. We need someone with balls at the top. Everybody there knew that. The Dynasties and Grand Families would have engineered a recall if she didn’t come up with positive noises. So, it looks like we’ll get the ships, then.”

“Yeah.”

Rafael shrugged at the lack of communication, and settled back to work through the files in his own virtual vision.

Wilson thought the account of how the killer got away was frankly unbelievable. If that was an example of how the Paris office operated, no wonder Rafael had fired Myo.

He looked through the spectral lines and columns and graphics to see Rafael sitting opposite him. The man was ambitious, yes, but no matter how ambitious and well connected you were, to reach his level you also had to be competent. Hogan was his placement, but Inspector Myo was renown across the Commonwealth. It didn’t seem like a move based purely on petty office politics. There was no prejudice or simple maneuvering. Myo hadn’t produced results. She had to go.

Yet she’d immediately been recruited into Senate Security—a move engineered by the Burnellis. And Justine had clashed with Rafael.

Wilson recalled the one previous time he’d met the Chief Investigator, amid the ruins of assessment hall seven on Anshun after the Guardians’ attack on Second Chance. She’d seemed quietly professional, easily living up to her reputation. And she certainly hadn’t acquired her seniority in the Directorate through family connections. She was frighteningly good at her job. Every case but one solved. Even now it seemed she was still working on that one, simply from a different angle, if he was reading the pattern right.

His virtual hands pulled another file from the Paris office. Myo had accompanied McFoster’s body to the Burnelli biomedical facility for its autopsy. He found it hard to believe she would ever jeopardize any kind of investigation simply to score points off Rafael. Her brain simply wasn’t wired for it, thanks to the Human Structure Foundation.

Which meant she thought there was something deeper behind the appearance of the assassin. He pulled her last few reports on the case from the navy files, interested to see how high the restricted access level was—there were only fifteen people in the Commonwealth government who could gain entry to those files.

Paula Myo, it seemed, had come to believe that the Starflyer was real.

“Son of a bitch.”

Rafael gave him an expectant look. Wilson shook his head in mild embarrassment, and sat back deeper into the train’s seat. His immediate political instinct was to stay right out of a clash between the Burnellis and the Halgarths, especially over something like this. But for Myo to even consider the possibility after a hundred thirty years trying to close down the Guardians was extraordinary. Everybody knew the Chief Investigator was incapable of lying. Every time he’d accessed one of her cases, the unisphere shows would replay her parents’ trial as evidence of just how incorruptible she was.

Wilson began to wish he’d simply walked on by that morning when Justine asked him for a moment. But he knew it wasn’t something he could ignore; the red planet had a resonance he could never ignore. What the hell did the Guardians want with Mars?

As he pulled out the most recent files from the investigation, it was clear that navy intelligence didn’t have a clue. And just as Myo had indicated, they were winding down that aspect of the case.

“My e-butler’s flagged an interesting report,” he said casually. “What were the Guardians doing on Mars?”

Rafael’s focus returned to the real world. “We don’t know. The Guardians’ courier was killed, and whatever data he was carrying has disappeared. Between you and me, I believe it wound up at Senate Security. Senator Burnelli’s interest in this case is less than professional.”

“Really? I’ll see if I can have a word with Gore about that. He owes me a few favors from way back.”

“I’d appreciate that. Sometimes, I’m not sure we’re all working for the same side. The damn Grand Families can’t stop looking for a financial angle on everything.”

“No problem. But I’d like you to keep navy intelligence working on Mars. I have an understandable interest about the place.”

Rafael gave a disinterested grin. “Sure.”

Wilson and Anna’s apartment in Babuyan Atoll was in a building resembling a small pyramid of dove-gray bubbles. It was close to the edge of the vast crystal dome, which gave them a clear view out into space at night when the internal illumination dimmed. When the High Angel was in conjunction, the wan light from Icalanise’s gigantic cloudscape was enough to cast pale shadows across the walls and floors. That was frequently complemented by the waxing and waning moonlight from the gas giant’s major satellites.

Wilson would often spend an evening on the oval terrace outside the living room, sitting in a recliner with a glass of wine in one hand, watching the stark alien planets gliding overhead. Even then he would immerse himself in files and priority office work that his e-butler and virtual vision provided. The night when he got back from the War Cabinet meeting was different. He simply couldn’t push Mars out of his thoughts.

“I expected you to be happier,” Anna said as she came out onto the terrace. For once she’d taken the time to change out of her uniform after they got home. She’d put on a small yellow bikini and long semitransparent yellow robe. Her dark skin made the fabric appear bright in the infall of light from various moons. Silver and bronze OCtattoos all across her body came to life in long slow undulations, emphasizing the play of muscle below her skin.

The effect was erotic enough to divert Wilson’s thoughts from Mars. He whistled admiringly as she perched on the edge of the recliner. “I haven’t seen you like that for quite a while.”

“I know. We seem to be neglecting some fairly basic human requirements lately; it’s all Mr. and Ms. No-Fun Military Executive these days.”

“Just how basic were those requirements you had in mind?”

Her finger stroked the side of his face. “I had my staff draw up a list. They’ll get in touch with your people and start negotiations.”

“Anytime soon?” He slipped his arm around her waist and told his e-butler to get her a glass of the wine.

She settled back into the embrace and stared up through the roof of the dome. “Is that the new assembly platform?”

Wilson followed where she was looking to see a silver fleck amid the stars. “Uh … yeah, I think so. You know, space is going to get pretty cluttered out there over the next few months.”

“If we have months.”

His hold around her tightened. “They’re not invincible. Don’t ever let yourself think that. We’ve seen their home star; we know they have finite resources to throw at us.”

“They might be finite, Wilson, but they’ve got a damn sight more than we have.”

A maidbot rolled up carrying a glass of chilled wine. He took it from the electromuscle tentacle and handed it to Anna. “If they could have invaded every Commonwealth planet at once, they would have done it. They can’t. They have to try and digest us one chunk at a time. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be frightened of them, but if that first attack showed us anything, it’s that they have limits. The effort they made establishing themselves on the Lost23 gives us a breathing space. We’ll make those fancy new ships work; we’ll gather an army of people wetwired with the scariest weapons technology we can think of and kick the Lost23 out from under their quadruple feet. And after that, we’ll use the Seattle Project to put the fear of God into them. It’ll be us deciding if they get to live or not. Those sons of bitches will curse the day their barrier wall ever came down.”

“Wow. You really believe we can do this, don’t you?”

“I have to. I’m not going to let the human race become nothing more than an old legend in this part of the galaxy.”

“You can depend on me.” She kissed him lightly.

“I know.” He touched his glass to hers. “A toast. To a successful campaign, and politicians who didn’t actually spend the whole cabinet meeting trying to score points off each other.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

Wilson savored the wine, then glanced up at the Base One hardware floating close to the High Angel. “I’ve seen the ideas the physicists and designers have. They’re goddamn impressive.”

“Let’s hope the media shows stop criticizing everything we try and do.”

“They will. Baron and the others are just in shock like everyone else. Once they sober up and see what the alternative is, they’ll throw their weight behind us. I’ve seen it happen before.”

She rubbed his hair fondly. “So old. I guess that’s what makes me trust you so much. You have so much life experience. I don’t think there’s any situation you couldn’t handle.”

“Don’t be so sure. I’ve got surprising vulnerabilities. I can’t believe how much Mars is bugging me. Justine really pressed the right buttons there.”

“What do you think the Guardians have been doing there all that time?”

“I’ve been sitting here thinking about it for an hour, and I just cannot figure it out. That’s why I asked Rafael to keep his teams on it. But given the dumbass politics involved, I don’t suppose much will be done.”

“How about I become the buffer on this one for you? I’ve got the authority to press for action in navy intelligence, while you stay outside the low-level office bickering.”

Wilson stretched his neck up to kiss her. “That would be just about perfect.”

“I do what I can.” The OCtattoos on her torso began to pick up speed, reflecting the light of the shining moons in slim lines of glinting steel.

“What say we forget our staff, and just do our own negotiations here and now?”

Anna started giggling as he shifted around in the recliner so that both arms could reach around her.

Nigel Sheldon’s memory trigger was fast and completely unexpected. It snapped a scene around him like a high-rez TSI access, putting him back in front of the TV news in his adolescence, where every large-scale disaster was followed up by politicians on a “reassurance visit” to the hospitals or tent-city aid stations. After the 2048 meteor strike tsunami in the Gulf of Mexico, students on campus had printed out cards like the ones carried by volunteer organ donors, but saying: IN THE EVENT OF EMERGENCY KEEP THE PRESIDENT AWAY FROM ME.

Watching Elaine Doi and her entourage working her way along the queue outside the temporary medical station, Nigel wondered how many of these refugees would appreciate having that card on them right now. There wasn’t much in the way of smiles and gratitude down there, only grim resignation and an undercurrent of anger. As yet it wasn’t directed at her.

His retinal inserts zoomed back out, giving him a broad aspect of the Wessex planetary station. Like all the CST stations on Big15 worlds, the one at Narrabri sprawled over several hundred square kilometers, incorporating marshaling yards, management centers, engineering sectors, cargo warehouses, a small town of office blocks, and passenger terminals. In the aftermath of the Prime invasion it had become the clearing house for every refugee from the Lost23—all forty million of them. The CST passenger train management RI had pulled out every piece of rolling stock on the Commonwealth register to cope, from vintage carriages to the modern maglev expresses; even the steam engine that ran on the Huxley’s Haven line had been used a couple of times. The evacuation had been a truly heroic endeavor, relentless and grueling for everyone involved from the managers who suddenly found themselves coping with a catastrophe they’d never envisaged let alone trained for, to station staff helping entire planetary populations flood through their domain while nuclear weapons exploded overhead and their homes were blasted back into the stone age. Somehow, it had worked. Nigel had never been prouder of his people.

At the start, when the rail network was in true chaos, people had been swarming through the gateways on foot from the Lost23; but after a few hours, CST had reestablished the primary rail links, and begun running evacuation trains. They’d off-loaded refugees throughout phase one and two space on a rota basis, with trains abandoning their confused and frightened cargo at stations for the local government to cope with. Nobody asked permission to dump people from wildly different ethnic groups and cultures and religions onto unprepared worlds frightened for their own future. CST simply did it based on practicality.

From the Narrabri CST station manager’s office Nigel could see a mass of people milling around outside the huge buildings of the engineering sector. Repairs and maintenance on Wessex were currently impossible, with crude dormitories and makeshift kitchens filling every square meter of floor space. Even with all the temporary facilities rushed in, sanitation down there wasn’t great. But at least the big engineering sheds gave them a roof over their heads at night. Tens of thousands more camped out in the terminal buildings, eating their way through every fast-food franchise stall on the planet. More squatted in empty warehouses. Best estimates from CST staff and Wessex government officials on the ground put the number remaining in the station at two million. Social workers brought in from fifty planets, and local volunteers from Narrabri, were coping with children separated from their parents. Over thirty percent were newly orphaned, and deep in shock. There were acts of kindness and quiet heroism occurring amid the throng that would never be known, for all the intrusive media coverage of the terrible human aftermath of the invasion.

“I haven’t seen anything like this since the early twenty-first century,” Nigel said.

“Yeah, I remember Africa and Asia back then,” Alan Hutchinson said.

“This isn’t quite the same.”

Nigel cast an inquisitive glance at the third Dynasty leader in the office. Heather Antonia Halgarth gazed down impassively at the weary refugees without making any comment.

“We’re doing everything we can,” Nigel said. “It shouldn’t take more than a couple of days to move these people out.”

“Where to?” Alan asked. “My senators are starting to hear complaints. Some worlds think they’re being given too many refugees to cope with.”

“Tough,” Nigel snapped. “We can’t dump them on phase three worlds, there’s no infrastructure. Phase one and two will have to cope, physically and financially.”

“But not Earth,” Heather murmured.

Nigel gave her an uneasy smile. She was nearing the time she underwent rejuvenation, a biological age of mid-fifties. It made her an imposingly grand woman, with reddish hair starting to lighten, and a few wrinkles appearing on her cheeks. At this time in her preferred sequence, he always likened her to some high priestess: silent, wise, knowing, and totally uncompromising.

“No,” he said. “Not Earth. They’ll get a few token trainloads, but I can really do without the Grandees bitching about undesirables bringing down the tone of the neighborhood. My unisphere address would be blocked for a year with messages. They can pay for accommodation instead; I made that quite clear to Crispin.”

“Good man, Crispin,” Heather said.

“He’ll need to be,” Alan said. “Sorting this mess out will cost trillions; and it’ll take a decade if not longer. Screw it, this is nearly fifteen percent of my market those alien bastards have wiped out.”

“We might all be facing a hundred percent market loss sooner than we would like,” Heather said in a voice loaded with contempt. “I have yet to be convinced that our new navy is capable of engaging the Prime threat effectively. What I’ve seen so far doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence. Losing twenty-three planets in a day is simply unacceptable.”

“We agreed to back the formation of a navy,” Nigel said pointedly. “I don’t know what else we could have done.”

“Yeah,” Alan grunted. “It’s not exactly underfunded.”

“Relative to a species extinction crusade, which is what this is, I think we could have made more effort.”

Nigel nodded to the knot of people around Doi. “Politically difficult.”

“Which is why we dump them every five years,” Heather said. “We make the decisions, us humble three and the other Dynasties. Doi will do as she’s told, as will the Senate.”

“Not all of them,” Nigel said. “Don’t be that arrogant.”

“We built this civilization,” Heather said. “You more than all of us, Nigel. We cannot stand back when there are hard choices to be made.”

“This is all academic anyway,” Nigel countered. “We’ve lost those planets. Our warship/building program cannot be significantly expanded for months no matter how much we need more ships.”

“Do we need more ships?” Heather asked mildly. “There’s the Seattle Project.”

“Genocide them?” Nigel was surprised to hear her propose that option; he’d always assumed she favored a less drastic solution. Not that he’d ever thought of one.

“I think this has proved it’s either them or us, surely?”

“They’re aggressive, yes, but genocide … Come on, that’s got to be the last resort. I don’t think we’re at that stage yet.”

“You’re applying human scruples to a nonhuman problem. Their next attack will be bigger and stronger. And we know there’s going to be a ‘next,’ don’t we?”

“Once the navy finds the exit point of that massive wormhole the Primes constructed, we’ll be able to block them,” Alan said.

Heather gave him a disappointed smile. “Eliminate Hell’s Gateway? Care to bet your life on that? Because that’s what you’re doing.”

“Fuck you,” Alan spat. “It’s my territory that’s in the front line.”

“Let’s just calm down here,” Nigel said. “Heather, he’s right, we have to give the navy a chance to do what we built it for. I’m not prepared to authorize the genocide of an entire species, however belligerent.”

“And after their next strike takes out half of phase two space?”

“Then I’ll press the button myself.”

“I’m glad to hear it. In the meantime, I will be taking the same kind of precautions you’ve been doing for the last few months.”

Nigel sighed; he should have known the other Dynasties would eventually find out what he was doing. “Yeah well, I’m just playing safe.”

“That’s a very expensive way of being safe,” Alan said. “How much are you spending on those ships? I mean, Christ, Nigel, the hole in Augusta’s budget was big enough for us to find.”

“Which is why I don’t understand your reluctance to genocide the Primes,” Heather said; she sounded genuinely curious.

“Morality. We all have it, Heather, to some degree or other.”

“And your morality includes flying off and leaving the rest of us in the shit, does it?”

“If those ships are ever used, it will be when we’re past the point of salvation. There won’t be any Commonwealth left to protect.”

“Well, I hope you’re not going to deny us equal access to your hyperdrive technology.”

Nigel couldn’t help the flicker of disapproval on his face. “Progressive wormhole generator.”

“Excuse me?”

“FTL starships use progressive wormhole generators.”

“Right,” Alan said, nonplussed. “Whatever. We need them, Nigel.” His hand waved down at the refugees. “Given this crock of shit, I’m putting my Dynasty’s escape route together. All of us are.”

“You can have generators for your ships,” Nigel said. “I’ll be happy to sell them to you.”

“Thank you,” Heather said. “In the meantime, we’d better present a united front for the War Cabinet and the Senate.” She nodded down at the President. “She has to be given a big injection of confidence. People will turn to her; they always do in times of crisis. If they can see for certain that she’s firmly in charge, it’ll help keep the panic down.”

“Sure.” Nigel shrugged.

“What about Wilson?” Alan asked.

“What about him?” Nigel said.

“Oh, come on! Twenty-three worlds invaded, and Wessex targeted as well. That asshole let it happen. He’s responsible.”

“He’s the best one for the job,” Nigel said. “You can’t replace him.”

“For now,” Heather said. “But another screwup like this, and we will eject him.”

He gave her a hard look. “And replace him with Rafael?”

“He’s pro-genocide. That gets my vote.”

“We don’t need games right now, Heather.”

“Who’s playing? We’re facing extinction, Nigel. If the solution involves shifting the navy to my control, then that is what will happen.”

Nigel couldn’t remember the two of them going raw like this before. The trouble with Heather was that she could only think in terms of everything that had gone before. She had an astonishing determination and political ability. You couldn’t build a Dynasty without those qualities. Nigel always considered her flaw to be a lack of originality. Even now, she saw the Prime situation purely in terms of its effect on her Dynasty. “If that’s the only solution you can see, then go for it,” he told her. It drew him a suspicious look. He ignored it. If she couldn’t see her way around this problem, he certainly wasn’t going to tell her.

Despite all she’d triumphed through on Elan, Mellanie still felt a great deal of trepidation as she stepped up to the dark wooden door of Paula Myo’s Parisian apartment block. It said a lot about the Hive woman that just the idea of confronting her again could do that. Mellanie knew that she was the special one now, that the SI inserts gave her huge powers, that she actually had the courage to stand in front of MorningLightMountain’s soldier motiles and take them down—well, the SI had through her, but that didn’t alter the fact that she hadn’t turned tail and run. So why do I feel so nervous?

She checked the bulky centuries-old intercom box beside the door, and pressed the worn ceramic button for Paula Myo’s apartment. Somewhere inside a buzzer sounded. Her e-butler immediately told her Paula Myo was placing a call to her unisphere address. Mellanie resisted the instinct to look around for a camera. Even if the sensor was big enough to be visible, it was late evening, and the sunlight had almost faded, dropping the narrow street into deep shadow. Above her, the windows looking out from the high walls were all shuttered. The few intermittent streetlights above the uneven pavement did little to alleviate the gloom.

“Yes?” Paula Myo asked.

“I need to see you,” Mellanie said.

“I don’t need to see you.”

“But I did what you said. I talked to Dudley Bose.”

“And what has that got to do with me?”

Mellanie gave the door an aggravated stare. “You were right, I did find something interesting.”

“Which was?”

“The Starflyer.” There was such a long pause that Mellanie thought Myo had cut her off. She had to check her virtual vision to confirm the channel was still open.

The lock clicked loudly. Mellanie just had time to square her shoulders before the door opened. She’d toned down her clothes for this encounter, selecting some of the more sober items from her personal fashion line: a half-sleeve burgundy jacket and matching skirt longer than her usual, its hem nearly halfway to her knees. It was a compilation that should emphasize how serious and professional she was these days.

A single polyphoto circle was fixed to the top of the deep archway that led to the block’s central courtyard. Paula Myo was silhouetted in its yellow glow, dressed in her usual conservative-cut business suit. Mellanie hadn’t realized before, but she was taller than the Investigator.

“Come in,” Paula said.

Mellanie followed her to the middle of the ancient cobbled courtyard. She looked around at the whitewashed walls with their narrow windows. Over half of them had their shutters drawn back, revealing glimpses of rooms. Flickers of pale green light were coming from inside as holographic portals played out the evening’s unisphere news and entertainment. A sad reflection on the residents; this was the kind of block where single professionals would flock while they were taking a break between marriage contracts. Sanitized little apartments where they could rest in safety between the work and play that otherwise occupied their whole day.

“This will do,” Paula said. “We’re secure here if we don’t talk too loud.”

Mellanie wasn’t sure about that, but didn’t want to argue. “You know about it, don’t you?”

“Did Alessandra Baron send you in search of an exclusive? Is that why you’re here?”

“No.” Mellanie gave a short, edgy laugh. “I don’t work for her anymore. Check with the production company if you don’t believe me.”

“I will. Why did you leave? I imagine it was quite lucrative, and your report from Randtown helped secure your celebrity status.”

“She works for the Starflyer.”

Paula tilted her head to one side and gave Mellanie a searching look.

“That’s an interesting allegation.”

“But don’t you see it makes perfect sense? She’s always been tough on the navy. She’s just spinning the Starflyer’s propaganda, causing trouble for the one organization which can defend us.”

“You used her show to criticize me. Does that make you a Starflyer agent?”

“No! Look, I want to help. I know about the Cox. That’s how I found out about Baron. When I told her, she altered the records.”

“I’m sorry, you’ve lost me now. What is this Cox?”

A little flare of temper made Mellanie put her hands on her hips. This wasn’t going the way she’d imagined it. She’d thought the Investigator would welcome offers of help from anyone who knew about the Starflyer and the huge danger it represented. “The education charity,” she said acerbically, which should jog the Hive woman’s memory. “The one that funded Dudley’s observation.”

“The break-in,” Paula said, reading something in her virtual vision. “The Guardians suspected the whole Bose observation was a deliberate manipulation.”

“And they were right.”

Paula’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “Really?”

“You know they were,” Mellanie hissed.

“I don’t.”

“But you must have. The Cox is a total fraud.”

“Not according to our investigations.”

“But …” Mellanie felt the skin down the back of her neck cooling rapidly. She didn’t understand the way Myo was reacting at all. Unless the Starflyer had got to her as well. “I’m sorry. I’m wasting your time. I … It was tough on Elan.” She turned and hurried back to the door. Backing off from people she used to trust was turning into a bad habit.

“Wait,” Paula said.

Mellanie froze, suddenly fearful. She reviewed the icons in her virtual vision, trying to work out if she could use any of the SI inserts to extricate herself if things turned nasty. Trouble was, she didn’t really understand half of them yet. She’d have to yell to the SI for help. The gold snakeskin of her virtual hand poised above the SI icon.

“You think I know something about the Cox,” Paula said. “Why?”

“You put me on to Dudley Bose. You must have known I would discover this.”

“I pushed you toward Bose because his wife once met Bradley Johansson. I was expecting you to go down that route to the Starflyer. Media allies would be useful to me. The only reports I recall on the break-in were that the Cox charity was legitimate.”

“It’s not. Well, it wasn’t. Baron had the records altered.”

“Interesting. If you’re telling me the truth, then the actual state of the Cox was withheld from me.”

“I am telling the truth,” Mellanie protested. She almost said, Ask the SI. But that would have given away too much. She still didn’t trust Paula.

“All right,” Paula said. “I’ll look into it.”

“Then what?”

“What did you come here for?”

“To see what you were doing, and to help.”

“And coincidentally wind up with the ultimate story.”

“Were you going to keep it secret?”

“If it’s all true, then no. But I really don’t think having a media celebrity dogging everything I do is helpful, do you?”

She couldn’t even say “reporter,” Mellanie thought. Bitch. “Fine. Whatever.” She pushed at the big door, opening a way back out onto the relative safety of the street.

“If you do find anything concrete, then please come to me,” Paula said.

“Not the navy.”

“Right.” Mellanie took a few paces out, then stopped to gather her thoughts. She knew she’d unsettled Paula, but pleasant though it was, that wasn’t what she’d wanted to achieve. Right now, Mellanie needed someone to turn to with the terrible knowledge of Baron and the Starflyer, someone in authority, someone who would do something about it. Just like some kid running to her parents.

Well, if the great Paula Myo was suspicious or undecided, she’d just have to damn well sort the problem out herself. With that thought, Mellanie nodded her head confidently and set off for the nearest Metro station.

Dawn found Hoshe Finn on his balcony, slumped in a cheap plastic patio chair looking out across the twinkling urban grid. Oaktier’s sun was sliding up over the eastern districts of Darklake City, cloaking the tips of the glass and marble towers with an energetic rose-gold glow. Colorful birds started chirping from inside the tall evergreen trees standing around the base of his apartment block, while gardenbots moved along the narrow moat of dewmoistened gardens, performing their daily tidy-up routine.

Sometime in the small hours, he’d woken up in the middle of the dream again, jolting up on the bed in a fever-sweat as the too-real images of collapsing buildings and quaking ground drained away into the darkness of the room. Every night since the Prime attack it had been the same. He refused to call it a nightmare. This was just his subconscious coming to terms with what had happened. All very healthy. Playing it back in sleeptime, letting all those nasty little details wind out from his mind where they’d been compressed like some secure file in a crystal lattice. Like the woman who’d been crushed in two by a broken bridge support—glanced at briefly as he’d carried Inima past. The children wailing outside the smoking rubble that had been their house, lost and dazed, filthy with dust, soot, and blood.

Yeah, a really healthy way of dealing with it all.

So he’d pulled on his old amber bathrobe and limped out onto the balcony to watch the sleeping city, thinking like some frightened kid that maybe dreams only came to people in bedrooms. He’d dozed fitfully for the rest of the night as his burns throbbed and the clammy ache down his back cycled from hot to cold over and over. Not even the rum and hot chocolate helped; it just made him feel sick.

What he wanted was Inima. The reassurance of having her lying beside him at night; the exasperated tolerance she turned on whenever he was ill and moping around the house instead of going in to work. But the doctors weren’t going to let her out of the hospital for another ten days at the earliest. He still tensed up every time he thought about her. Pulling her out from the broken four-by-four on Sligo, the way her legs were bent and blackened, fluid weeping from the tarlike encrustation that had been her jeans. Her low whimpers, the sounds that only the seriously injured make. A few vague memories of first aid flitting through his brain, utterly useless as he stared at his wife in disbelief that anything like this could possibly happen. Cursing himself the whole time for being so helpless.

They were vacationing on Sligo to see the flower festival. A fucking flower festival; and an alien army came dropping down out of the sky, blowing the whole world to shit.

Someone rang the apartment’s doorbell. Hoshe turned automatically, and grimaced at the number of twinges that triggered right across his body. Grumbling like an old man he limped his way to the door and opened it.

Paula Myo stood outside, neat and tidy as always, in some charcoal-gray business suit with a scarlet blouse. Her hair had been brushed to a gloss, hanging free behind her shoulders. She was studying him carefully, and he was abruptly self-conscious of the way he looked, the fact he hadn’t stood up to the attack the way he knew other people had.

Instead of some lecture or trite comment, Paula gave him a gentle hug.

Hoshe thought he covered up any surprise at the display of affection reasonably well given the circumstances.

“I’m really pleased you’re okay, Hoshe,” Paula said.

“Thanks. Uh … come on in.” He glanced across the living room as she walked past him. Maidbots had kept the apartment clean, but it was obvious he was spending a lot of time at home, indoors. The room had an almost bachelor feel to it, with memory crystals, mugs, plates, and a long paperscreen scattered over the table, blinds half-drawn, clothes piled up in one chair.

“I brought you this,” Paula said, and gave him a fancy-looking box of herbal teas. “Somehow, I thought flowers would be inappropriate.”

Hoshe examined the label on the side of the box, and grinned sheepishly. “Good choice.”

The sleeves of his robe were baggy, revealing long strips of healskin on his arms. Paula saw them and frowned slightly. “How’s Inima?”

“The doctors say she’ll be out of the hospital in another week or so. She’ll need a clone graft for her hip and thigh, but they didn’t have to amputate, thank God. They’re going to fit her in an electromuscle suit, so she’ll be mobile around the apartment at least.”

“That’s good.”

He dropped down into one of the chairs. “Medically, yeah. Our insurance is refusing to pay out for quote war injuries unquote. They say the government is responsible for covering its citizens in times of conflict. Bastards! The decades I’ve spent paying my premiums. I’m talking to a lawyer I know. He’s not optimistic.”

“What does the government say?”

“Ha! Which one? Oaktier says it isn’t responsible for something that happened to registered citizens offplanet, because that’s beyond their jurisdiction. The Intersolar Commonwealth: Well, we’re kind of busy right now, can I get back to you on that? We had to use the mortgage we raised for having a kid to pay the hospital.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Right now, it doesn’t seem like a terribly good idea to have a child anyway.” Hoshe growled it out, using anger to override the anguish. If he didn’t, he knew he’d do something ridiculous like start crying.

“I accessed the Prime attack on the unisphere,” Paula said. “But I don’t suppose that can ever substitute for being there.”

“It was mayhem on Sligo; absolute mayhem. We were lucky to get out. After what happened there, I’m never going to complain about a Halgarth ever again. That force field took about eight direct hits from Prime nuclear missiles when we were inside it, and it never even wavered. The ground shocks were bad, though. I was in California once when they had a quake; that was nothing compared to this. I mean, buildings were collapsing all around us. The roads buckled right away; you couldn’t use any kind of vehicle.”

“I heard you headed up one of the evacuation squads.”

“Yeah, well, they were appealing for anyone with any kind of government service connection. It’s an authority thing. The local council didn’t put a lot of police on duty for a flower festival.”

“Don’t be so modest, Hoshe.”

“It’s not like I ever expect a medal or anything. It was mainly self-preservation.”

She indicated his arm. “How bad were you hurt?”

“Burns, mostly. Nothing too serious. The worst bit was the wait for treatment afterward. It was ten hours before Inima even saw a nurse. And that was just for triage. It was actually easier for us to get back here and go to our local hospital than wait for the navy’s cobbled-together relief operation to finally catch up with us.”

“So now what?”

“Same as everyone else. Carry on as normally as possible, and hope that Admiral Kime does a better job next time around.”

“I see. I came here to offer you a job, Hoshe. I’m working at Senate Security now; I need an assistant, someone I know can do a good job, and someone I know I can trust.”

“That’s very flattering,” he said carefully. “But I’m not really that keen on the Commonwealth administration right now.”

“That’s not you talking, Hoshe, that’s a whole lot of confusion left over from Sligo.”

“Very psychologically astute, I’m sure.”

“You want me to go on and list medical benefits? How good the family health plan is?”

“No.” He clenched his teeth, trying to come up with a valid reason why he shouldn’t accept the offer. “What about your old office team? Why not approach them?”

“I still don’t know which of them I can trust. I received some disturbing information yesterday, which adds to the likelihood one or more of them is working for the Starflyer alien.”

It took a moment for Hoshe to place the name. “The one the Guardians keep banging on about? You’re kidding me.”

“I wish I was.”

The dream flashed through his brain again, its blurred montage of misery and destruction falling from the sky in blinding purple contrails moving barely slower than lightspeed. And that was just what one alien species could do. If there was another, something deeper and more sinister … “I opened some of those Guardian shotguns. It all seemed pretty paranoid stuff to me. Something a freaked-out kid would babble about after his first bad trip.”

“That would be a favorable result, proving Bradley Johansson really has been wrong all these years. I’m not used to doubt on this scale, Hoshe, I find it unnerving.”

He thought about it. No, not true. What he considered was how he would explain to Inima that he’d taken the new job. “I’m not going to be much use for any active role. Not for a week or so.”

“I wanted you to start by reviewing some old files for me. Now that we know what we’re looking for, they might be more helpful than the last time I looked through them.”

“So what exactly is the deal with those medical benefits?”

The chalet that Mellanie had rented was one of fifty tucked away in a coastal forest over ninety minutes’ drive from Darklake City. Together they formed the Greentree Village Park vacation resort, the kind of place where parents on a modest budget could take their kids and let them exhaust themselves during the day on the resort’s playtime amenities or down at the beach. A large bar and restaurant building in the heart of the forest provided an evening refuge for the adults to unwind. Two nights a week there was a live cabaret act.

An hour after nightfall, the rental car dropped Mellanie off at the main entrance and rolled back to the parking lot. Vehicles weren’t allowed inside Greentree, leaving her to walk along the shingle paths amid the ancient bent rani trees with their white-moss leaf clumps and spongy green bark. Little mushroom-shaped light fittings along the paths provided a soft blue glow as they unraveled through the woods. Greentree had been laid out so that each cabin was completely isolated; all you could see from the windows were trees and the glowing turquoise path. Somewhere off in the forest she could hear the sound of the piano trio as they crooned their way through songs that were old even before Oaktier had been discovered.

A thin mist was creeping out of the soft loam as the temperature fell. It swirled in spooky luminescent currents around her feet, which she found slightly disconcerting. When she’d come here as a child with her parents, she’d adored the shaggy old forest with its thick buckled tree trunks. It had seemed magical in those days, a fantastical world to explore. All she could think about today was what might be lurking among all the shadows and secluded glades.

She’d paid in cash for the chalet she and Dudley were sharing. Most of the other chalets were empty right now, which reduced the chance of anyone seeing and recognizing her. She still left early in the morning as a precaution. And the SI assured her it was watching the local cybersphere nodes for any encrypted message activity that would indicate a surveillance operation. Even so, she’d be glad when they left. She still wasn’t sure what Baron would do about her.

Their three-room chalet was in a small clearing, with five huge rani trees towering over it. Dudley was pacing nervously up and down the lounge when she walked in.

“Where’ve you been?” he shouted.

“Fine, thank you, how are you?”

He stopped in the act of flinging himself at her, producing a massive petulant scowl instead. “I was worried.”

She ran her hand back through her tawny hair and gave him a mellow smile. “I’m sorry. It didn’t go as well as expected with Paula Myo. Turns out she doesn’t trust me, and I don’t trust her. Which kind of screws up the idea of us joining forces to take on the Starflyer. So I went on to California. My agent set up some job interviews. Good ones.”

“Oh.” He went up to her and gave her a cautious hug. When she didn’t squirm away, he asked, “Did you get one?”

“I got three offers, actually. Let me get out of these clothes and I’ll tell you.”

Dudley’s face immediately brightened.

“No, Dudley,” she said wearily. “Not for sex.”

“But … we will tonight, though, won’t we?” he asked in a whiny voice.

“Yes, Dudley, we’ll have sex later.” She glanced over at the kitchen alcove. Yesterday morning they’d paid cash for over a week’s worth of food and supplies from a supermarket twenty minutes away down the highway. The bags were still sitting on the bench, unpacked. “I’m going to have a shower, then I’d like something to eat. Think you can manage that for me?”

Once she’d freshened up she wrapped a towel around her hips and went back out into the lounge. It was almost a routine, checking the effect she had on him. Sure enough, Dudley could barely take his eyes off her naked torso. Ever since they had got here, she’d been using the gym a couple of hours a day to keep herself toned. The machines there faithfully recorded her physical condition, giving her top marks; but it was always reassuring to have her sexuality confirmed by a man. Even if it was only Dudley.

He’d made a mess of the dinner, which was impressive. The packaged food had a code strip for the microwave, automatically setting the timer and wattage when you put it in. He must have altered the settings manually. She took one look at the brown goo bubbling away under the cellophane wrapping and dropped them in the bin. The conditioning grille would take care of the smell eventually. “How did your day go?” she asked as she slid two fresh packets into the microwave.

“I went down to the beach. Some people arrived and started a barbecue. I came back here and accessed the unisphere.”

“Dudley, you need to learn how to socialize with people again.” She kissed him as the microwave counted down, breaking away with a promissory smile when it pinged. They settled down on the broad couch and Mellanie told her e-butler to turn the fire on. Bright holographic flames leaped up in the fire-place, while the invisible heater let out an accompanying blast of hot air—it even added a scent of burning wood.

“I don’t know who works for the Starflyer. It could be anyone. And the navy’s probably hunting us as well.”

“I doubt that.”

“You don’t know. Not really.”

Mellanie narrowed her eyes to look at him. Already he was sitting upright, fully defensive. She didn’t help his condition with her own mild paranoia about the Starflyer and Baron. “No, Dudley, I don’t; but they’ll have a very hard job finding us. I’ve made sure of that.” She curled her legs up and started poking chopsticks into the steaming dish of savory rice and chicken. Maybe it was a good idea they were leaving in the morning.

“What were your job offers?” Dudley asked.

“One was a TSI drama, Late Rendezvous. The producers were very keen to sign me up; it’s about a girl who arranges to meet her boyfriend on Sligo, then the Primes attack and she doesn’t know if he’s alive or dead. It’s all about her finding romance under the pressure of the attack.” She grinned to herself at the memory of the “co-stars” the producers had introduced her to. One of them, Ezra, had been utterly gorgeous. The thought of days spent rehearsing love scenes with him had almost made her sign up on the spot. Before the Prime attack and discovering Baron’s connection to the Starflyer there would have been no hesitation.

“A TSI?” Dudley said, alarm leaking into his features. “No! Please, Mellanie. Don’t. Not one of those again. That’s just sex. That’s what they want you for. Don’t. I don’t care how much money they offered. I couldn’t stand it.”

There were times when she really hated how pitiful Dudley was. She was fairly certain that there was no more useful information to extract from that abysmal jumble of thoughts in his brain. After California she’d toyed with the notion of simply not coming back to Greentree, just tell the navy where he was and leave their psychologists to straighten him out. But given who she wanted to meet next, having the Dudley Bose in tow, and under control, would make success a lot more likely.

And she did like him in a way. She supposed. Occasionally. When he was calm he could be very lucid, providing her a glimpse of the intellect that had qualified him for his earlier academic life. A sort of sneak preview of what he could be like. Then there was Elan, and everything they’d gone through together there when the Primes attacked. That wasn’t a bond easily discarded, not even for her. If he could just get the idea of love out of his head …

“I turned it down,” she said. “I can’t afford that kind of time commitment right now.”

“Thank you.” He bowed his head to examine the rectangular meal packet he was holding, almost as if he hadn’t seen one before. “What were the others?”

She pincered a big chunk of chicken with the chopsticks and popped it in her mouth. “Reuters said they’d take me on as a junior associate. Bravoweb offered me a reporter’s slot on the Michelangelo show; he’s always been a big rival for Baron. They’ve been fighting over audience points for over a century.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I’d take the Michelangelo slot. I think he got quite a bang out of poaching one of her top people. They offered me a trial three-month roving brief; and they agreed to my first story proposal.”

“Right. So what was it?”

“An inside account about people who live on a world that’s probably going to be invaded by the Primes in the next wave. I said I’d travel out to examine communities that are too poor to leave, the ones that have to stay even though they suspect they’re in for hard times. It’s pretty horrendous for them, really.”

“Oh.” Dudley picked up a tall tumbler of water and stared morosely at the ice bobbing around on top. “How does that help us track down the Starflyer?”

“I know for certain that’s where we can meet some really strong allies in the fight against the Starflyer, and Bravoweb will pick up the tab. Which is handy, because it’s not cheap traveling there.” She fashioned a smug smile.

“See?”

“Right. What planet?”

“Far Away.”

Coming into the office every morning was getting to be a real drag. In the old days when it was the Directorate, Renne had often come in early, especially when they were on a major case. Now she had to force herself up out of bed when the alarm woke her. And cases didn’t get any bigger than this one.

Somehow, Alic Hogan was always there ahead of her. Like Paula used to be, except Hogan didn’t conjure up enthusiasm in the rest of the team. Having him watching you arrive was like an automatic reprimand. She knew she was going to have to make an effort to cycle down on the irritation she felt toward him. But that was the problem. It was an effort.

John King appeared in the middle of the morning and walked over to her desk. “That smuggled technical equipment you had shipped back from Boon-gate. My analysis staff have got a slight problem with it.”

“Goddamn typical,” she spat.

John gave her a hurt look.

“All right, I’m sorry. It’s just that nobody ever comes and tells me any good news these days.”

“This isn’t bad news, exactly, it’s just strange.”

“Go on then, what’s strange with it?”

“Same as the stuff from Venice Coast, we can’t understand what it’s used for.”

“John, come on! You must have some idea. I saw the manifest Edmund Li finally produced. There was nearly a metric ton of hardware.”

“A lot of it very similar,” he said defensively. “But given we don’t know what they’re building, it’s difficult.”

“I’ll settle for best guess. I trust you.”

He smiled sheepishly. “All right, based on these systems, and factoring in the surviving components from Venice Coast, assuming they were intended for the same thing—”

“John!”

“Force fields. Very high-density force fields. But the thing is, they’d use up a terrific amount of power.”

“So?”

He gave her an elaborate shrug. “On Far Away? Where are they going to get it from? I checked with the Commonwealth Civil Council. There’s five medium-size civic power stations supplying Armstrong City; they’re gas turbines running off a local oil field. The revitalization project imported some fission micropiles to power their equipment in the early days. And the Institute has three micropiles to power their facilities. That’s it. The rest of the planet gets by on solar panels, wind turbines, and a few oil wells. They don’t have anything like the power output one of these weirdo devices would consume.”

She stared at him blankly, waiting for a suggestion. None came. “Then what does produce that much power?”

“I haven’t got a clue. It’s not like you could have smuggled a fusion or fission generator through unnoticed even before we were inspecting every piece of cargo. And Far Away can’t be physically plugged into the Commonwealth power grid. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Right then.” She instinctively reached for her mug of coffee, only to find it was empty. “So what we have is an unknown force field device, or devices, which consumes a lot of power, on a planet that doesn’t have any.”

“Nicely summarized.”

“I look forward to seeing how the Commander treats that one when you submit it.”

They both glanced over at the door to Hogan’s office.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” John said. “This is just a technical appendix to your report.”

Renne’s e-butler informed her that a file from King’s forensic staff had just been deposited in her working case HOLD folder.

John cocked his fingers pistol style and aimed at her. “What you do with it is up to you.”

“Bastard.”

He gave her a cheery wave, and retreated back to his own desk.

Vic Russell returned from Cagayn half an hour later. The second lieutenant barely had time to kiss his wife, Gwyneth, before Renne hauled him off into a conference room for a debrief.

“The Cagayn police were very familiar with Robin Beard,” Vic told her. “He works in the motor trade. Good repair and service man, apparently. Which fits in with what Cufflin told us; they met on an electronics course a few years back.”

“Did you see him?” Renne asked. She thought Vic looked tired; he was a big man, well over two meters tall, and about as wide. His weekends were spent playing bone-cruncher games of rugby for a nonprofessional club outside Leicester. Renne had turned up with Gwyneth to support his team one Saturday, and had been intimidated by the amount of good spirits violence in the game. Cagayn must have been an exhausting trip for someone as fit as Vic to appear run-down.

“No, ’fraid not. I was too late. Our Mr. Beard is a somewhat migratory character. According to his tax records he never stays at the same garage for more than a couple of years.”

“He pays taxes?”

“Not very often. But that’s not why the police have such a big file on him. If you’re looking for a getaway vehicle, word is that Beard’s the one you need to give it a good overhaul beforehand. Same if you have a warehouse full of hot cars that need rebranding; he knows how to replace and revise all the manufacturers’ security tagging.”

“Sounds like the kind of person who would have good reason to know our elusive agent.”

“Quite so. I took a scout around his home. Rented, of course. We must have missed him by about twenty-four hours. His vehicle recovery van was gone, which is his own mobile maintenance shop; he keeps all his tools and equipment in there. It’s the one permanent thing in his life, apparently. I spoke to some of the guys he worked with at the garage; there’s a lot of customized machinery in the back, stuff he’s built over the years.”

For an instant, Renne saw the image of some titanic truck rolling along a highway with force field bubbles for wheels, draining energy from the Commonwealth grid as it went. “Ah, so if we find the van—”

“—we find the man. Yeah. Ordinarily the police wouldn’t have too much trouble spotting a bright orange three-ton tow van. Of course, given his chosen field of expertise it’s not quite as simple as it would be with the average criminal on the run. Beard is familiar with every traffic monitor program in the Commonwealth. He’ll have aggressor software to deal with all of it. Cagayn police have issued an all-officer dispatch for vans of that description to be pulled over and checked.”

“The boss would have loved that one: proper police work.”

Vic grinned, revealing teeth that had been rearranged in crooked ranks by too many hard impacts on the rugby pitch. “She would, yeah. But it gives us a bit of a nightmare.”

“You’ve alerted the Cagayn CST station?”

“First thing I did. They checked back through their schedules for me; no van of that kind left Cagayn in the time frame we’re considering. So if anybody does take a van like that on board a freight train, they’ll let this office know about it immediately.”

“Good. Thanks, Vic.”

Noon saw the daily senior officers’ case review meeting in conference room three. Renne joined Tarlo and John at the big table, put her coffee mug down, then hurriedly mopped up the ring it left on the surface.

“You two want to try Amies for lunch?” John asked.

“Sure,” Tarlo said.

“You’re not still after that waitress, are you?” Renne asked disapprovingly. The redhead Tarlo had spent a month flirting with was a first-life art student, still in her early twenties. He was in his third life. It wasn’t done. But that damn uniform …

“There are waitresses there?”

The men laughed. She sighed.

Hogan marched in and sat at the head of the table. His whole stance was charged with energy, which produced an aggressive smile.

“John, I believe you have something critical for us?”

“Yes, sir.”

Renne gave him a curious glance; he hadn’t mentioned anything earlier.

“Foster Cortese finally pulled a match out of the visual recognition program,” John said. The big high-rez portal at the end of the conference room lit up to show the assassin’s face. “CST on Boongate has been slow to locate their records for us, but we can all see there’s no mistake. He came through the Half Way gateway six months before the Venice Coast incident.”

“Name?” Tarlo asked.

“Officially: Francis Rowden, son of a landowner, which is how he can afford to travel to the Commonwealth. He was going to enroll at a university on Kolhapur, a two-year agricultural course. We checked; they have no record of him.”

“He’s a Guardian,” Alic said happily.

“Why do you think that?” Renne asked.

Alic’s good humor flickered slightly, but nothing could tone down his enthusiasm. He held up his hand and started ticking off points. “Okay, one, he’s a Far Away native, so what other faction could he belong to? Two, he’s sent on tough assignments to benefit them, I mean really tough. Our boy is wetwired to the back of his ears with weapons. He’s their new enforcer.”

“How did the Venice Coast hit benefit them?” Renne asked quickly.

“Valtare Rigin was fucking them over. He had to be. He was a black market arms dealer. These guys don’t exactly have corporate mission statements. He saw a chance to switch cargoes or make a low-grade substitution or he was holding out for more money. Whatever. They caught him red-handed. What are they going to do? Sue him? Shake hands and say sorry? No, they close the deal their way. They’re terrorists, remember. The most lethal bunch of psychotics we’ve ever had running around the Commonwealth. This is what they do: kill people.

“Thompson Burnelli, well, that’s obvious. He’d just pushed through an inspectorate division which is going to screw every clandestine weapons shipment back to Far Away. Blam, out he goes. Revenge, a warning to others that no one is safe, none of you are beyond our reach. Murdering a senator shook the whole political establishment to its core. Then there was McFoster. He betrayed the Guardians; they killed him for it.”

“How did he betray them?” Tarlo asked.

“Justine Burnelli,” Renne said in a flat voice. She could see how Alic Hogan’s mind was working, and didn’t like it.

“Exactly,” Alic said, on a roll. “They find out McFoster visited Senator Burnelli, that the two of them are lovers. The next thing they know, he’s got a navy squad tailing him. They thought he was about to lead us to them.”

“How did they find that out?” Renne asked.

Alic treated her to an expression of mild scorn. “The trip to the observatory. His colleagues were watching him the whole time, a backup team. And we had that local office idiot …” He snapped his fingers.

“Phil Mandia,” Renne supplied reluctantly.

“Right: Mandia. He was following McFoster in a convoy of four-by-fours through the mountains. The Guardians saw us. They put it together. It wouldn’t matter to them if McFoster had actually clued Senator Burnelli in on what was happening or not. Whatever he said to her, it betrayed them. And there he is again, this Frances Rowden, waiting at LA Galactic. There on the right concourse exactly when the loop train pulled in, knowing he’s got our squads to dodge as well.” Alic beamed contentedly.

The trouble was, Renne admitted to herself, the facts fitted. Not only that, she couldn’t see a flaw in the Commander’s line of reasoning. Granted, a lot of it was speculation, but logical speculation; the kind of argument a jury would convict on.

It was also politically expedient, which fueled her unease. That same nagging little uncertainty she’d experienced when she walked into the Halgarth girls’ loft apartment on Daroca. No reason for it. Just her own awkward intuition. A detective knowing instinctively when something is out of kilter.

Everything Alic claimed was possible. Yes.

Believable? No.

“I’m going to enjoy this,” Alic said. “Certain people in Senate Security are going to be extremely upset when they access this case file now we’ve solved it for them. It doesn’t leave any room for her stupid conspiracy theories.”

Renne tried to catch Tarlo’s attention. She couldn’t, which she suspected was deliberate.

“Thank Foster Cortese for me,” Alic said. “He’s done a good job. Credit where it’s due.”

“Will do,” John King said.

He ran a program, Renne thought in disgust. She could see what Alic was doing, pulling the staff into his orbit. Team building with the completely wrong motivation behind it. They’d wind up producing politically required answers for him, not the right ones.

And why am I so cynical about this? That bullshit theory about Francis Rowden. Am I just jealous I didn’t put it together? It is simple enough. Why do I think it’s not right?

“I’m going to need another warrant,” Tarlo said.

“What for?” Alic asked.

“The Pacific Pine Bank records have been quite useful,” Tarlo said. Now he allowed eye contact with Renne, giving her an I-told-you-so smile. “The Shaw-Hemmings finance company on Tolaka transferred a lot of money into Kazimir’s account. I’d like to see where it came from.”

“How much money?” Renne asked.

“A hundred thousand Earth dollars.”

She pursed her lips, impressed.

“You’ve got it,” Alic said. “Renne, how is it coming with the Lambeth Interplanetary Society?”

There wasn’t any undue emphasis on the question; nevertheless she got the feeling that expectations were set a little too high following the news about Francis Rowden. Her report was going to let the side down. Ridiculous, I’m getting paranoid. “Nothing solid yet, I’m afraid. It was Vic’s case, but I’ve had him chasing down Robin Beard. Matthew has been datamining the Society, but there are very few files to work with. The employment agencies that serve that part of London don’t have any records of the Society at all. It’s not a promising avenue.”

“We could launch a unisphere appeal,” Tarlo suggested. “See if the news shows would give us some time. Ask for any ex-employees to come forward and contact us.”

“No,” Renne said. “That would show our hand to the Guardians.”

“I’m going to agree with Renne on this one,” Alic said. “We’ll keep public appeals as a last resort; it smacks of desperation. Let me know when the datamining stalls completely, and we’ll reconsider then.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So what about Beard?”

“He’s gone to ground on Cagayn, but the police there are on alert for him. Judging by his background, he’s someone who could provide us with a positive lead to the agent the Guardians use.”

“Do the police understand how important this is?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good, but ride them hard. We can’t let this one slip.”

Senate Security’s European division was nothing like as grand as the ever-expanding navy intelligence facilities over in Paris. It was based in London, taking over the entire top floor of a monolithic stone-fronted building in Whitehall, half a kilometer from Westminster Palace. The European division shared it with two other Intersolar Commonwealth departments, the UFN regional auditor and the environmental commission, all of whom provided excellent cover. There was no plaque outside announcing Senate Security’s presence, and if accessed the building management array had no knowledge of their existence. Entry was gained through a discreet underground ramp entrance opposite the old British Foreign Office building.

Every morning, Paula’s designated car would pick her up outside her apartment and drive onto the European trans-capital shuttle train, a sleek new maglev vehicle, which took thirty-five minutes to get from Paris to London using the old Channel tunnel route. Once they arrived at Waterloo Station the car drove her straight to Whitehall and down into the secure parking chamber underneath the ancient building. Travel time was well under an hour.

When Hoshe arrived on his first day, Paula was checking through the official case files on Francis Rowden as Senate Security pulled them out of navy intelligence’s array. “Idiot,” she muttered as Hoshe knocked on her open office door.

“Am I not welcome?” he inquired.

Paula grinned at him. “No, not you. Please, come in.” Her office was a great deal larger than the one in Paris, with a high ceiling and elaborate cornices. Wooden paneling extended halfway up the walls, originally a dark gold oak, but now nearly black with age. Two big windows looked out over the trees lining Victoria Embankment to the Thames beyond. Just to the north, Hungerford bridge was visible, carrying rail lines over the river to Charing Cross station.

One wall was completely covered by a holographic projection, a map of a large CST station, with a big terminal building at one end and hundreds of track lines winding across a broad open space outside it. Various trains were frozen in place, and a large number of green dots were sprinkled across the ground, each with its own neon-blue code tag floating above it.

“You landed on your feet, then,” Hoshe said; he gave the projected map an interested look as he passed. His shoes sank into the thick burgundy carpet as he walked over to the vast antique rosewood desk where she was sitting.

“I know. You’d think this was where the British ran their empire from back when they had one.”

“It’s not?”

“No. This was all remodeled a hundred and fifty years ago. The designers went for what they considered Grand Imperial era. It’s actually younger than I am.”

Hoshe eased himself into a chair with only a small wince.

“How are you doing?” Paula asked. She thought he certainly looked a lot better than when she’d seen him on Oaktier, with his face properly shaved, cologne dabbed on, and lightly oiled hair held back with his usual silver clip. The suit was new, too, a pale fawn-brown, expensive shiny fabric with narrow lapels, emphasizing a figure that was a lot slimmer than the first time she’d met him. She would have welcomed that loss of weight if it hadn’t been for the sunken cheeks that accompanied it.

“Easier, I guess. And Inima was a lot better this morning. I think she’s looking forward to being discharged.”

“I’m glad. What did she say about this job?”

“She rather liked the idea of living in London. It’s a security thing, you know? If you’re safe anywhere, it’ll be on this planet. There’s enough real wealth and power concentrated here to make sure it’s properly defended. After Sligo that can’t be a bad thing. And of course the clinics here are the best in the Commonwealth.”

“You got an apartment sorted out?”

“Personnel have short-listed five for me to take a look at. I’ll view them tonight. Until then, I’m all yours.”

“Okay then. The first thing I need is for you to take a look at something called the Cox Educational charity; it was responsible for funding some of Dudley Bose’s original observation of the Dyson Pair. My old Directorate team investigated it six months before the flight of the Second Chance and reported everything was legitimate and aboveboard. I want you to repeat the exercise, bearing in mind there’s been an allegation that the Cox records have been doctored. Then pull those old Directorate files, and compare them to your findings.”

“Right. Who made the allegation?”

Paula smiled. “Mellanie Rescorai.”

“Really?” Hoshe seemed to find that amusing, too. “I did warn you about her. What goes around …”

“Exactly. I’ve been doing some checking on Ms. Rescorai. There are some very interesting reports of her activities on Elan during the Prime attack. Apparently, she took a leading role in the evacuation of Randtown.”

“Mellanie?”

“Yes. I know! And her new boyfriend is Dudley Bose.”

“Well, I suppose there have been more unlikely couples.”

“Name one. They’re keeping out of sight somewhere on Oaktier.”

“You need them tracked down?”

“No. Her unisphere address is current and open. She’s just switched her correspondent role from Alessandra Baron to Michelangelo. Which is interesting: her other allegation was that Baron is working for the Starflyer.”

“Sounds like you should have recruited her, not me.”

“I’m keeping an open mind about her. Something there doesn’t quite make sense. This is not the bimbo in a bikini from Morton’s penthouse. She’s changed. Or part of her has; she’s still blindly impulsive, but there’s something else there as well now—she’s got a lot of confidence.”

“Everybody grows up sometime.”

“Maybe. For now we just do the background work and see what we can shake loose.”

“Okay. So what’s this, then?” He pointed at the projected map.

“LA Galactic. I was taking a look at the McFoster shooting incident. The Paris office has managed to find a name for our assassin: Francis Rowden. I wanted to see how he eluded both the navy and CST security after he killed McFoster. The office RI has worked up a simulation for me; admittedly the records aren’t perfect but most of the timings and positionings have been cross-referenced with each other.”

“Yeah, and?”

“Simple enough, he just jumped onto a train. There’s no other solution.” She gave the luminescent map a confused glance. “Though he only had a very small window of opportunity. I’m surprised none of the people on the ground saw him.”

“Your double agent?”

“Possibly.” Paula was surprised how troubled she was by the notion. She stared at the map with its green dots, one of the tags seemed to glow brighter than the others: Tarlo.

Mellanie had taken the window seat when they got on the train at Darklake City. Now, fifty minutes later, she watched them drawing in toward Boongate’s single terminal building. Thick gray clouds rumbled through the air above the city, blocking out the sun and unleashing a constant heavy downpour that was unseasonable for late spring. It added an extra layer of drabness to the empty wasteland of the station yard.

Glancing ahead, she could see people crammed onto every square centimeter of the platform that the Oaktier train was heading for. A line of CST security officers in dark blue flexarmor suits stood along the very edge of the platform, their arms linked, keeping the crowd back from the approaching train. A barrage of shouting began as soon as the PH58 engine nosed its way under the terminal’s arching roof. Hundreds of arms waved above the security squad’s bulbous helmets. It was a peculiar greeting for an ordinary train, as if there was some huge media celebrity on board.

Dudley peered nervously over her shoulder. “What are they here for?”

“A train out,” she told him. She wanted to sound slightly more blasé about it, someone observing the foolish antics of people she’d never have to meet or mingle with, the kind of people who lived a life she’d escaped, thanks to Morton and the SI. Except she knew that in a week or so she’d be back at this station, eager for a train out, just like them. Her ticket was already booked, an open-ended first-class return. Now she was beginning to wonder if that would mean much when it actually came down to standing on the platform and wrestling her way to an open carriage door; it didn’t much look as though the security squad would take time out to help first-class passengers.

When they disembarked there was only a narrow strip of concrete left between the train and the security squad for them to walk down. The hard-pressed line of flexarmored figures jostled constantly against them. Mellanie kept stumbling as she was shoved repeatedly against the side of the train. The angry glances she threw back every time it happened weren’t even noticed.

It was only when they reached the concourse they finally had some empty space. Reactive barriers had been set up to channel the dense throng of people from the station entrance to their platforms; not that the barriers could dull the angry buzz of the crowd. Going the other way, arrivals had their narrow exit routes almost to themselves. Barely twenty people had got off the train from Oaktier. Their two pieces of luggage popped out of the gap between the last security officer and the train as if the bags were being kicked clear.

Dudley stopped. “I want to go back,” he said meekly. “I want you to come with me, darling. Please, don’t do this. Don’t go to Far Away. We’ll never get back to the Commonwealth. They’ll land there, too. They will, I know it. They’ll land and they’ll capture me again, and …”

“Dudley.” She shushed him with a finger pressed on his lips, then kissed him. “It’s all right. Nothing like that will happen.”

“You can’t know that. Don’t treat me like I’m a child. I hate that.”

She almost said: Then stop acting like a child. Instead she lowered her voice.

“The SI will give me plenty of warning.” Which it wouldn’t—she didn’t think. Who knew?

Dudley gave her a petulant look.

“Come on,” she said brightly, and hooked her arm through his. “You’re going to see a neutron star firsthand. How many astronomers can say that, even today?”

It was a poor bribe, but he did give a reluctant shrug and allow her to lead him off toward the single door leading off the concourse. There were plenty of signs for the connection service to Far Away. They followed them through a deserted cloister and finally reached an external doorway that came out on a corner of the terminal building. The noise of miserable frustrated people reverberated around them.

Outside the station, the crowd must have been ten thousand strong. They were squashed together in a great swathe from the passenger terminal all the way back to the highway exit a kilometer away. Cars and taxis that had been abandoned on the approach roads were now isolated impediments surrounded by dense clusters of bodies. They’d all been broken open and were now being used for everything from shelters to kids’ play frames to toilets. Thousands of umbrellas bobbed about, blobs of murky color deflecting the waves of rain sluicing down out of the insipid sky. Kids dressed in waterproofs moaned and wailed as they were dragged along and buffeted on all sides. Men and women shouted futile insults and complaints, growing louder as they neared the terminal entrance.

Police and CST security had them all penned in between two lines of officers and patrolbots. Helicopters drifted overhead, producing cyclonic down-swirls of rain to complete the wretchedness of everyone on the ground.

Mellanie’s virtual hands brushed several icons and she began scanning the scene with her eyes, retinal inserts on maximum resolution, sending the image back directly to the Michelangelo studio in Hollywood. She murmured a few accompanying, patronizing comments about desperation and the flotsam of war. Disdain came easy now; proximity to Alessandra had seen to that.

A text message popped up in her virtual vision. GOOD STUFF. ALREADY! KNEW I WAS RIGHT ABOUT YOU. REMEMBER, TAKE CARE WHEN YOU GET THERE. LOVE MA.

Michelangelo had been surprised when she pitched the Far Away trip to him during their private interview. He thought she was trying to prove something. Normally, interns would just have to go to bed with him to earn their probation contract; in that respect he had an even greater appetite than Alessandra. Mellanie had suggested the assignment after they’d finished fucking and she’d already got the job. It’d thrown him slightly, but he smiled and said he liked her style.

He had quite a lot of style of his own. Thanks to Dudley, who was a triumph of quantity over quality, she’d almost forgotten what truly hot sex could be like. He could also be funny. She’d laughed out loud a couple of times at the stories he told. When she did that she realized laughter was something that never happened when she was with Dudley—nor ever would, she thought. Most of the subsequent train journey back to Oaktier had been spent fantasizing what else she’d have to do in that large bed of his to earn a permanent contract.

“Is that the office?” Dudley asked.

“Huh.” Mellanie shook off the reverie that the text message had kindled. Dudley was pointing to a small clump of boxlike prefab buildings adjoining the terminal, each of which had tour company signs above their doors.

“Yeah. We want Grand Triad Adventures. They said someone would be waiting for us.” Her semiorganic coat had birthed a hood that she pulled over her hair to protect it from the rain. The boots she wore were practical rather than stylish, probably the kind of thing a Randtown local would possess. To match that, she’d chosen a pair of olive-green jeans from her own collection, and a black sweatshirt of semiorganic fur fiber that was wonderfully soft against her skin. Dudley had just put on his usual nonlabel pants and a cheap shirt and jacket. She’d given up trying to dress him properly.

They splashed their way through the puddles to the rank of tour operators. Grand Triad Adventures was easy enough to find. It was the only office with a light on.

The deputy assistant manager of tour bookings, Niall Swalt, was sitting behind the reception desk, absorbed by some bizarre game show on the portal. Rock music thundered out across the deserted office as female figures dived in and out of vats filled with oily fluid. When the door opened, he lunged to his feet, the bright figures and the music shrinking away.

“Ms. Rescorai, a pleasure.” Niall came around the desk, eager to greet her.

“I’m a real big fan of yours. I still access Murderous Seduction once a month at least.” He was wearing one of Mellanie’s old promotional sweatshirts, with a hologram of her face in the middle of his chest. It had been washed so many times the image flickered badly through its smile cycle, drizzling green and red interference specks.

“Always delighted to meet a fan.” She made herself smile neutrally as he grabbed hold of her hand. He had cheap OCtattoos on his fingers and arms that her own sophisticated inserts analyzed instantly on contact. The thin green lines were capable of delivering crude sensory impulses to his nervous system; to Mellanie he briefly appeared as a glowing arabesque wire sculpture, with the densest entanglement concentrated around his groin. “And you can still see,” she remarked dryly.

“Oh, yes, it’s a fantastic story. And it’s all real.” He was grinning profusely as he stared at her; the heat in his cheeks highlighted his pimples. “You are sensational in it. You feel gorgeous.”

“Thank you.” Mellanie didn’t risk glancing at Dudley, who was ominously quiet beside her. “That’s very sweet.”

“Do you mind if I ask you about the hunting lodge night? Did that happen for real?”

“Yes, yes it did, that was quite a night.”

Dudley’s face had frozen, with every muscle rigid. Only the color spreading across his cheeks revealed he was even alive.

“Wow!” Niall whistled admiringly. “And the time Morton took you to the Falkirk restaurant. Why didn’t you sue the security people?”

“Who would have benefited? And let’s face it, we shouldn’t have been in the ladies’ washroom together. It was a bit naughty of us; but the singer was very beautiful. Who could resist?”

“Right. Yeah. I’ve noticed some mistakes, too.”

“Really?”

“The party on Resal’s yacht: when you go on board you’re wearing black silk panties, but when you leave they’re gold satin.”

“Gosh, I never knew. I’ll have to have a word with the continuity people about that.”

“The other thing was Paula Myo. I checked the actual court files from the trial; according to the Directorate case notes the Investigator did research Oaktier’s organized crime groups. But Murderous Seduction showed her completely dismissing the possibility that Shaheef was killed by a third party.”

“We were emphasizing the point. Myo didn’t do a thorough job.” Mellanie’s face had become as inflexible as Dudley’s; for the first time she actually had to consider that automatic response. What if Myo had investigated properly? What if Morty … She flexed her shoulders, annoyed with herself for doubting.

Emboldened by how easy it was to talk to his idol, Niall gave a shy grin and asked, “Are your breasts really that firm, or did they edit the tactile stream to make them feel like that?”

“Hey!” Dudley snarled.

Niall gave him a puzzled frown.

Mellanie put a hand on her devoted fan’s arm. “Niall, our train was late, we routed through StLincoln before we got to Wessex, so we’re worried we might have missed the connection.”

“Oh, no,” Niall said earnestly. “Everything’s ready for you.”

“Great. This is all our luggage.” She pointed to the two cases that had rolled in behind them. “Where do we go now?”

“The company has a car. Uh, I’m afraid you’ve got to be cleared by the Far Away freight inspectorate division before you go through the wormhole. It’s a new thing, they’ve only just started doing that. They make sure you haven’t got any weapons or illegal stuff.”

“Sounds like a good idea.”

The car was a Mercedes limousine; all it did was drive them eight kilometers across the station yard to a nearly empty warehouse. Several scanning systems had been set up inside the yawning building, one of them an archway large enough for an entire freight train to pass through it. A couple of very bored police officials were reviewing shadowy images of crates on a big portal. They ordered Mellanie’s luggage to roll through a small scanner hoop.

“There were a lot of people waiting to leave outside the station,” Mellanie said to Niall as their bags went through. “How difficult is it going to be for us to get on a train once we get back from Far Away?”

It was as if she’d issued the young man a personal challenge. He straightened himself up to compose his features into what he considered a reassuring expression. “Grand Triad Adventures guarantees the safe transport of all its customers on both sides of the gateway. We take responsibility for your holiday as soon as you arrive on Boongate, and that doesn’t finish until you leave. Mr. Spanton, the manager, he left me in charge when he took off for Verona with his family. I shall be here to make sure you get your allocated seats.”

“Thank you, Niall.”

“All part of the service.”

“Don’t you want to leave?”

“Sometimes I think maybe I do. But this is my home. Where would I go? The Commonwealth isn’t going to abandon us. There’s a lot of new defense equipment coming in. I know that for a fact. I work here at the station. I see things. Everyone in the crowd out there, they’re just frightened stupid rich people. I’m not like that. I’m staying.”

“Good for you.”

After the luggage check, the Mercedes took them over to the small tour-embarkation building, which had its own platform along one side. Mellanie saw an MLV22 electric engine hitched to a single carriage waiting under the short composite panel canopy. There were three other people in the suiting room: Trevelyan Halgarth and Ferelith Alwon, a pair of physicists on their way to the Marie Celeste Research Institute, and Griffith Applegate, a bureaucrat in the Governor’s office. Griffith confided that he was one of eight staff that were coming back on rotation—he was the only one who’d shown up. Trevelyan and Ferelith were pleasant enough, but Mellanie worried they were both Starflyer agents, and went for a polite but aloof approach when they tried to talk to her.

The suit Mellanie had to wear to compensate for Half Way’s atmosphere was a baggy mauve overall with its own heating web and a metal ring collar. Its array interfaced with her e-butler, and as soon as she’d settled the ring on her shoulders a rubbery semiorganic membrane slithered out from inside the rim to form a seal around her neck. A transparent bubble helmet clipped neatly onto the ring and locked tight. Her e-butler ran a quick check on the rebreather module and threw up a row of green icons in her virtual vision. She took the helmet off again, and carried it under her arm.

Niall led them down a corridor to the train, where a steward was waiting outside the open carriage door. “I’ll see you in about a week,” Mellanie told him. She let Dudley carry on through into the carriage, then gave Niall a quick impish kiss on the cheek. “They’re real,” she whispered and hurried off. Her last image of him was an astonished, happy smile on his gaunt face.

The inside of the carriage looked similar to all the rest of the standard-class furnishings in CST’s fleet. It was only the airlock doorways at both ends that made it different. As soon as the five passengers were sitting down the outer door closed, sealed, and the train began to roll forward.

Rain splattered down across the window as soon as they left the platform behind. Nothing else was moving across the station yard. Even the big cargo depots were quiet and unused.

Red light began to seep in through the carriage windows as they approached the Half Way gateway. Then Mellanie felt the tingle of the pressure curtain. It might have been her imagination, but she thought it was stronger than usual.

As soon as they were through, the rainwater that had smeared itself across every window in the carriage immediately turned to ice and fluoresced a strong crimson. She pressed her face against the triple glazed glass, peering through the frost pattern. The landscape outside was a desert of naked rock, stained a dark carmine by the M-class star. A coral-pink sky rose from a distant jagged horizon, phasing to a deep scarlet directly overhead. There were no clouds, not even the gentlest of hazes to mar the uniformity of the heavens above Half Way; the atmosphere was incredibly clear. Powerful blue-white flashes were going off constantly, an almost monotonous rhythm cutting through the red sunlight. No matter where Mellanie looked, she couldn’t see any lightning bolts; nor was there any thunder.

The journey from the gateway was short. On one side of the track, the rock began to dip down to reveal Half Way’s last remaining sea, a flat calm surface of slate-gray water. They were traveling toward a deep V-shaped inlet, whose sharp cliff walls extended back over a kilometer from the main shoreline. On any other world the inlet would have been an erosion estuary with a fast river emptying into its apex. Here, it looked as if a wedge-shaped slice of the land had been hewed out and removed. Instead of a river, a broad tongue of rock formed a smooth ramp leading down into the sea.

Shackleton was perched a hundred meters from the tranquil water, an odd collection of pressurized huts raised on stumpy pillars, interspaced with gigantic hangars. As well as the train staff and air crews, the little village also housed a team from Boongate’s National Marine Science Agency who were methodically categorizing the remaining oceanic life-forms. Not that anybody was visible outside; the whole place seemed deserted. It boasted a single crude station at the inland end, consisting of a ramp for cargo, and a pair of metal steps for the airlock doors.

As they drew up to it, Mellanie pressed harder against the glass, keen to see the planes they’d be flying on. Four of Half Way’s nine HA-1 Carbon Goose flying boats were resting on the rock just above the sea. She stared in awe at the massive silver-white fuselages gleaming under the red sun as their true size sank in.

When the Commonwealth Council was assembling the financial package necessary for CST to establish a wormhole link to Far Away, its members had been actively concerned about the possibility of anything hostile finding its way back to the Commonwealth. Given the nature of the flare that had been detected on Damaran, they had the reasonable enough worry that the aliens who triggered it might be antagonistic. The safeguard they insisted on was simple enough. The two respective wormhole gateway stations on Half Way must be separated by a considerable distance so that the route to Boongate could be severed in the event anything wicked did force its way off Far Away. After a full survey of Half Way, they went on to build the stations, Shackleton and Port Evergreen, on islands over ten thousand kilometers apart.

It was the Halgarths, the political instigators of the whole Far Away project, who provided the link between the islands. Some quirk of dynastic pride made Heather Antonia Halgarth decide on the largest aircraft ever built. The components were all constructed on EdenBurg and shipped in through Boongate to be assembled in Shackleton’s hangars. Made out of a carbotanium composite structure, each Carbon Goose measured a hundred twenty-two meters long, with a corresponding wingspan of a hundred ten meters. They had six engines, air-cooled fission micropile ducted turbines producing thirty-two thousand kilograms of thrust each, enough to give the plane a cruising speed of point nine mach. Range was effectively unlimited; the micropiles needed replacing only every twenty-five years.

The steward led them down from the train, and started shepherding them toward the Carbon Goose they were going to use. Behind them, a couple of CST staff emerged from a hut and began supervising the cargo removal. Loaderbots lifted up crates and transferred them to a small fleet of flatbed wagons that would drive them over to the plane.

Mellanie felt her suit stiffen and inflate as the airlock’s outer door opened. Valves soon equalized the pressure. Half Way’s atmosphere wasn’t hugely toxic—the majority of the gas was the kind of nitrogen oxygen mix found on H-congruous worlds—but it also contained unacceptably high levels of carbon dioxide and argon, which made filters or a rebreather essential. Equatorial temperature in the daytime fluctuated between minus ten and minus fifteen Celsius. Again, not immediately lethal, but heated suits were indispensable.

She walked a few paces away from the bottom of the steps and tilted her head back. Another bright flash erupted in the sky. It came from a tiny radiant point close to the gibbous bulk of the M-class star.

“Is that it?” she asked Dudley.

He was gawping up at the sky, for once looking quite serene. “Yes. That’s the companion. I was hoping you could see the plasma tide, but it doesn’t seem to be substantial enough for naked eye observation.”

“You mean the sun’s atmosphere?”

“Not the corona itself, no, though that does undergo constant tidal distortion. The neutron star is orbiting close enough to the sun to attract most of its solar wind. The plasma gets tugged out into gigantic streamers across the gulf and then spirals down to the neutron star. All the flashes you see are impact waves.”

As he was talking the neutron star flared again. Mellanie had to blink and look away, the light was so intense. It left a dense purple afterimage in her vision.

“Is that radioactive?”

“It emits radiation, Mellanie, it’s not radioactive. The two are quite separate.”

“All right,” she said in faint annoyance. “Is it dangerous?”

“There’s quite a heavy gamma and X-ray burst each time, yes. But Half Way’s atmosphere will protect us from the worst. You perhaps wouldn’t want to stay out here for a week, though.”

“I’ll try to remember.” She marched off toward the waiting flying boat, irritated by the way he’d switched into his lecturer persona.

The Carbon Goose was standing on its triple undercarriage, with aluminum air stairs extended from a forward airlock hatch. A long cargo hold was open amidships, with loaderbots transferring crates on board. As Mellanie drew closer she got a clear view of the sea behind the vast aircraft as it rippled against the inlet’s natural ramp of rock. It wasn’t perfectly still after all; the surface undulated slowly as it was stirred by the gentle currents of air that passed for wind on this world. A fringe of mushy ice lapped slothfully against the rock all around the shoreline, never quite managing to agglutinate into a solid sheet. The terminal glaciers that had emerged five million years ago to cap the northern and southern zones of the planet had slowly drained vast quantities of pure water out of the oceans, leaving a residue of water that became ever more salty with each passing century, correspondingly lowering its freezing point. Neither of the massive planetary encrustations had grown any larger for millennia now. With the star in its current state, Half Way’s environment had reached an equilibrium that would probably last for geological ages.

The airlock in the flying boat was large enough to hold all five passengers simultaneously as the atmosphere cycled. Mellanie took her helmet off as she walked into the forward cabin on the first deck. Her first impression was rows and rows of huge chairs stretching away down the brightly lit interior, like a small theater auditorium. There was a staff of eight waiting for them, and three times that many bots. She’d never seen anything like it before.

They were helped off with their suits and told to sit wherever they liked. Mellanie chose a window seat near the front, and was given a glass of bucks fizz by one of the stewardesses. “Now this is the way to travel,” she declared as the seat slid back and its footrest extended. Dudley looked around uncertainly, then gingerly allowed himself to sink back into the thick leather cushioning.

There were all the usual dull thuds associated with an aircraft preparing to take off, crates being loaded and secured, cargo hold doors closing, turbines starting up. The ends of the wings slowly bent down to the vertical, lowering the long bulbous tip floats ready for the water takeoff. Then they were rolling down the rock slope into the sea. More thuds as the undercarriage retracted, leaving them floating. They taxied sedately out of the inlet. The pilot used the PA to announce their ten-hour flight time and wished them a pleasant journey, and the nuclear turbines wound up to full thrust.

It was a surprisingly short takeoff run. Mellanie grinned excitedly as huge fans of spray curved out from behind the wingtip floats. Then they were surging up into the pink sky, applauded by the silent dazzling flashes of collapsing ions as they crashed into the neutron star forty million kilometers above them.

There was only one break in the monotony of the flight. Three hours in, the pilot spotted a pod of white whurwals far below, and lost altitude so the bored passengers could see them. They were little more than vermilion dots sliding through the darkling sea, almost twice the size of Earth’s blue whales. Unlike those terrestrial whales these were fantastically aggressive, pack creatures hunting down the gradually dwindling stocks of fish they shared their last arctic ocean with. They even fought with other pods as they swam around and around the equator between the constricting walls of Half Way’s terminal glaciers.

Twice Mellanie and Dudley left the forward cabin to consummate their membership in the mile-high club. They didn’t even have to use the cramped toilets for privacy. The middle and rear cabins on all three decks were empty and dark, giving them plenty of scope for misbehavior amid the long rows of vacant seats.

Port Evergreen was situated on an island covering forty thousand square kilometers, all of it naked rock. No plant life had ever been discovered on Half Way; there were no traces of soil, even sand was virtually nonexistent thanks to the lack of a moon and any tides; and nobody had ever chipped out any fossils from island strata. Planetary scientists argued that evolution had never pushed out of the aquatic stage, not that the Commonwealth was interested. Half Way was the ultimate nowhere planet.

As if to prove it, Port Evergreen was even less impressive than Shackleton. It was dusk when they arrived, with barely enough maroon light left in the sky to illuminate the desolate rock. Port Evergreen nestled at the lee of a kilometer-wide dip in the blank cliff face that the island presented to the sea. It had one hangar, six silvery pressurized huts, and a long two-story building that looked like some kind of cheap hotel. The wormhole generator was housed in an armadillo-shaped edifice of raw carbon panels, with one fat tapering end sheltering the gateway arch. There was no rail track leading into it, which surprised Mellanie.

Their Carbon Goose splashed down in a reasonably smooth fashion, parallel to the shore, although once they hit the water deceleration was a lot sharper than any normal aircraft runway landing. For once Mellanie was grateful for the plyplastic grips holding her into the seat. She suited up carefully as they taxied in to the land. There were four more of the huge flying boats standing outside the hangar; by strict rotation another had flown back to Shackleton as they came the other way.

Two suited figures were standing at the bottom of the air stairs when the passengers disembarked. The first introduced himself as Eemeli Aro, the CST technical officer responsible for the wormhole generator.

“Good timing on your part,” he told the passengers. “The wormhole cycle starts in another eighteen minutes. There’s no need to rest up in the lodge.” A hand waved in the direction of the gateway. “You all just walk over there, and as soon as it opens I’ll give you the all clear. Just walk through.”

Mellanie had been expecting a slightly more elaborate arrangement, but she and Dudley exchanged a quick glance through their helmets, and started traipsing over the rock. The red sun was already close to the horizon, and falling fast. Its neutron companion continued to send out dazzling flashes, as if it was the emergency strobe on some sinking ship.

Polyphoto lights were shining on all of Port Evergreen’s buildings, producing weak yellow splashes on the rock as the sunlight vanished. The stars came out quickly, leaving Mellanie feeling very small and exposed. For the first time in her life she truly understood the concept of darkness closing in.

The five passengers huddled close together in front of the gateway. A wan ultramarine light filled the arch, only visible now the red sun had set. It wasn’t cold, but Mellanie folded her arms, hugging herself and shifting her weight from one foot to another. She mentally urged the wormhole to power up, but there was nothing she could do to hurry the stormrider.

Half Way’s strange binary star was the final factor in selecting the icy planet as a site for the wormhole stations. Even though its diameter was considerably smaller than a standard commercial CST wormhole, the Far Away wormhole still had a massive energy consumption requirement. The basis of the stormrider was an idea that went back to almost the beginning of the twentieth century’s “space age”: a contra-rotating windmill, powering a simple electrical generator, that worked off the solar wind.

Like the original concept, the stormrider had rectangular blades, sixteen of them radiating out from the hub, each one a flat lattice of struts twenty-five kilometers long, made from the toughest steelsilicon fibers the Commonwealth knew how to manufacture. Twenty-three kilometers of them were covered by an ultra-thin silvered foil, giving a total surface area of over one thousand eight hundred square kilometers for the solar wind to impact on. Even in an ordinary solar system environment that would have produced a considerable torque. In the Half Way system the stormrider was positioned at the Lagrange point between the red star and its neutron companion, right in the middle of the plasma current, where the ion density was orders of magnitude thicker than any normal solar wind. The power the stormrider produced when it was in the thick of the flow was enough to operate the wormhole generator. But it couldn’t simply sit at the Lagrange point producing electricity continuously; that would have been too much like perpetual motion. As the waves of plasma pushed against it, they exerted an unremitting pressure on the blades that blew the stormrider away from the Lagrange point out toward the neutron star. So for five hours the two sets of blades would turn in opposite directions, generating electricity for the Port Evergreen wormhole that was delivered via a zero-width wormhole. The stormrider also stored some of the power, so that at the end of the five hours when it was out of alignment, it had enough of a reserve to fire its onboard thrusters, moving itself even farther out of the main plasma stream where the pressure was reduced. From there it chased a simple fifteen-hour loop back around through open space to the Lagrange point, where the cycle would begin again.

Forty million kilometers from Half Way, the stormrider glided back into the heart of the Lagrange point, where the tempest of ions splashed against its gigantic silver blades. Their rotation speed began to increase.

The archway’s wraithish radiance abruptly changed to a bright monochrome haze. Vague shadows were moving about on the other side of the foggy pressure curtain.

“Okay, people, through you go,” Eemeli Aro said.

The two physicists stepped through almost immediately, blurring into shadow.

“It’s quite all right,” Griffith Applegate reassured them. “I’ve done this a hundred times.” He promptly strode through the archway.

“The connection is stable,” the SI told Mellanie. “I am connected to the net in Armstrong City, such as it is. It is safe to go through.”

Mellanie put her hand out, and felt Dudley take hold of it.

“Suppose we’d better go then,” she said. The pair of them walked directly into the torrent of bright warm light.

Mellanie was keen to see what the new world looked like, the city, its people. Instead of having a good look around, she was immediately distracted by the way her body wanted to soar away off the ground. It was as if an ordinary step had somehow turned into a leap. As soon as she came through the pressure curtain she was moving forward far too fast. She hurriedly let go of Dudley and brought her arms out to try to balance herself, which sent her little shoulder bag zipping off ahead of her as if it were a balloon caught in a breeze. She managed to come to a halt, and stood completely still, fearful of what any further movements would do to her. The bag fell down to her side.

“Damn, I forgot the gravity.” She took a breath, and glanced around for Dudley. He was standing just behind her, completely unperturbed by what had happened.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Remember what I told you about inertia here. This is a low-gravity planet. You have to think out any movement before you make it.”

“Yes, yes.” Her elegant virtual hand tapped the helmet release icon, and the collar disengaged. She lifted the transparent bubble off her head, and shook out her hair, which floated about slowly.

The noise of the city swirled around her, machinery thrumming away, combustion engines, car horns, the cry of animals, human conversation and shouts. Its smell was stronger than any urban area she’d ever visited in the Commonwealth: raw gasoline fumes, and seawater, and animals, spicy cooking, organic decay, heat, dust, it all mingled into a brawny mélange that was overpowering in a first breath.

When she recovered from that, she looked around. They seemed to have emerged into some kind of open arena measuring an easy five hundred meters across. There was a low metal fence in front of her, isolating a peaceful semicircle in front of the gateway to serve as a reception area for arrivals. Beyond the fence, and dominating the center of the arena floor, were three wide brick-lined pools with big fountains squirting out of various statues. Some traffic drove around the pools, a mix of gasoline vehicles, bicycles, rickshaws, and horse-drawn carts, though none of it appeared to be following any road markings. High yellow-stone walls curved away on both sides of her, topped by dozens of ragtag solarcloth awnings draped over poles of wood and fiber-glass that were lashed together with no thought of symmetry. There must have been some kind of walkway up there; she could see a lot of people moving around close to the low parapet. At ground level, the walls were punctured by archways of varying sizes. The smaller ones had stalls just inside, away from the sharp midmorning sunlight, selling anything from modern consumer technology to fresh food, clothes, plants, toys, ancient and much-repaired bots, hand tools, power tools, animal feed, artwork, semiorganics, books, and medicines. Several of the archways opened into bars, offering drinks that ranged from guaranteed-hangover-cure coffee to hundred-proof local rum, with dozens of beers and fruit juices, even native wines. The largest archways led into dark cave-like buildings serving as warehouses. Small trucks and horse-drawn carts went in and out.

A swarm of people was moving slowly over the rough-laid stone slabs that formed the arena’s floor, making the traffic give way to them. Their clothing styles were bewilderingly wide: they’d enthusiastically adopted everything from loincloths to T-shirt and shorts, kilts, saris, conservative business suits, priestlike robes, simple dresses, mechanics’ overalls; there were even a few men in tropical-khaki police uniforms with peaked white caps trying to sort out traffic disputes.

Standing with her back to the dark shimmer of the gateway, helmet under her arm, Mellanie felt like some kind of astronaut who’d just stepped out of her rocketship. She stared out at the bustling scene for a long moment before stirring herself to cope with more immediate and mundane matters. A couple of CST personnel were helping the Institute physicists out of their suits. Mellanie began to shrug out of hers. A CST supervisor asked her to move aside. She barely cleared the gateway before robot vans and flatbed trucks started trundling through, bringing the crates from the Carbon Goose. They drove straight out into the arena and headed for the archways that fronted warehouses, collision horns blaring at sluggish pedestrians.

By the time she and Dudley got their suits off, their luggage had been unloaded. Both bags rolled over to them. A hotel courtesy car marked LANGFORD TOWERS was parked outside the fence, its driver smiling and waving to attract their attention. The two Institute physicists were climbing into a big six-wheeled Land Rover Cruiser with black-glass windows. Three trucks were parked beside them, receiving a batch of crates that had just come through the gateway.

Griffith Applegate picked up his shoulder bag, and gave Mellanie a friendly smile. “Don’t worry, I know it looks daunting, but take it from me, this is a tame part of town. You’ll be perfectly safe here.”

“Thanks,” she said dubiously.

He pulled a wide-brimmed hat out of his bag and settled it on his head, then put his sunglasses on. “One piece of advice. Only use the taxis with a license from the Governor’s House.” He touched the rim of his hat and set off into the throng.

“I’ll remember that,” she told his back. “Come on, Dudley, let’s go get to the hotel.” She checked to see that her luggage was following, and set off for the courtesy car.

Stig McSobel rested his elbows on the stone parapet that lined the top of Market Wall to give himself a better view across 3F, as the locals called First Foot Fall Plaza. Two hundred meters away, the gateway had opened on time, and five people emerged through the dark pressure curtain.

“They’re here, Halgarth and Alwon,” he said to Olwen McOnna, who was standing at his side. She wasn’t watching 3F; like every good bodyguard she was scanning the nearby shoppers who moved from stall to stall in search of bargains. The merchants were pressed up together in a giant ring of commerce that made up the roof of the city’s massive central edifice. Here the flow of life and trade was unchanged, money and goods were exchanged in the same ritual of fast barter that had been in existence for close to a couple of centuries, heedless of the threat that lurked out among the stars. Deeper in the city, though, the uncertainty was more pronounced; rumor and fear were affecting the way people thought and behaved. The absence of tourists was noted everywhere. The Governor had ordered more police out of their comfortable stations and onto the streets where their visibility would instill confidence. A futile measure, Stig believed. Soon unease would turn to worry, then panic.

“It’ll take them an hour to get outside the city,” Olwen said. “I’ll alert the raiders.”

“Okay.” Stig’s virtual vision ghosted icons and text over the gateway. He opened a channel back to the unisphere, and several messages flooded into his e-butler’s hold file. His own messages went racing out to various onetime addresses. Then he peered forward in surprise at the people now standing in front of the gateway. The virtual vision intensity reduced, and he used his retinal inserts to zoom in. One he knew of, Griffith Applegate, who worked in the Governor’s House, trying to maintain Armstrong City’s shaky civil infrastructure. The other two … “I know her. I accessed her on the unisphere back in the Commonwealth. She’s some sort of celebrity. A reporter. Yeah: Mellanie Rescorai. What’s she doing here?”

Olwen hadn’t stopped searching the crowd of shoppers. “If she’s a reporter, she’s looking for news. Obviously.”

“Not a proper reporter, just a rich brat doing silly ‘personality’ stories. Probably covering this season’s city fashion.” His virtual vision strengthened slightly, and he activated several icons. Inserts began to run an ident program on Rescorai’s companion—there was something familiar about him.

Stig watched the two of them clamber into a hotel courtesy car. It pulled away with a fusillade of horn blasts just as the first departures bus pulled up outside the gateway enclave. Passengers disembarked; Far Away natives who’d recently spent a lot of time in the gym and injecting steroids and genoproteins to give themselves additional muscle. Stig remembered that time of his life all too easily. A second bus drew up. Two more were driving slowly across 3F. CST personnel were already handing out the slack mauve suits that would safeguard the passengers as they walked to the Carbon Goose waiting for them on the other side of the gateway. The cost of the trip, even a one-way ticket, was beyond the means of most of Far Away’s population. Crime in the city was increasing as desperate people acquired the cash any way they could.

A transparent purple rectangle flipped up into Stig’s virtual vision. “Well, wadda ya know,” he muttered.

“What?” Olwen asked.

“That bloke with Rescorai, he’s Dudley Bose.”

The Langford Towers gave Mellanie and Dudley the Royal Suite on the top floor. There was complimentary champagne, even if it was only from a vineyard out on the northern slopes of the Samafika Mountains. They also had complimentary chocolate, fruit, cheese, biscuits, and mineral water. Every table had a big vase with magnificently arranged fresh flowers. The bathroom medicine cabinet could hardly shut, there were so many toiletries inside.

They were the only residents.

“This certainly beats the hell out of the old Pine Heart Gardens,” Mellanie declared as she pushed open the patio doors and went out onto the broad veranda. With its four floors, the Langford Towers was one of the tallest nongovernmental buildings in Armstrong City; it helped that the ceilings were very high, a design feature that helped prevent patrons from standard-gravity worlds from banging their heads after an inadvertently strong step. The hotel’s size and position gave her an excellent view out over the red pan tile rooftops to the shore of the North Sea a couple of kilometers westward. A broad circular harbor provided berths for boats of all types, from trawlers to ferries, cargo sloops to houseboats, sports fishers and simple pleasure yachts. The blue sea beyond sparkled invitingly even with the sun low in Far Away’s astonishing sapphire sky; several dozen boats were making their way into the harbor for the night.

Mellanie scanned across the skyline. Armstrong City lacked the neat urban grids she was used to; its streets and avenues zigzagged and curved in contorted patterns. They actually swerved around the larger buildings in the center like the First Foot Fall Plaza and the Governor’s House, and the revitalization project offices, which made her wonder which had come first. Only the acres of warehouses behind the harbor seemed to have any sort of regular order in their layout. Outlying districts swarmed over the undulating land, revealing parks and retail streets, neat suburban estates and industrial zones. Thickets of tall metal chimneys squirted out thick gray plumes, a pollution so blatant it startled her.

Away to the south she could see a couple of dark oval shapes stationary in the sky, just outside the city boundary. A hundred twenty years ago when the revitalization project was at its peak, it had employed a fleet of over two hundred fifty blimpbots. At first they’d been used to spray soil bacteria across the desolate post-flare landscape, loading up from the newly constructed clone vats at the aerodrome outside Armstrong City. Then once the soil was revived they’d scattered seeds and even insect eggs across the planet in an effort to return it to full H-congruous status. Several had succumbed to hostilities between the Guardians and the Institute, and a number were lost in the storms that raged around the Grand Triad, but it was age that claimed most of them. Those that remained, barely thirty now, were running on components cannibalized from warehouses filled with the shells of their retired cousins, their gas envelopes patched and fraying, undeserving of the flightworthy certificates that the Governor’s House ritually issued to them every year.

Blimpbots and pollution were only half of Mellanie’s sense of uncoupling. She realized what really bothered her: the lack of trains. There were no embankments and cuttings taking priority through the architecture. No elevated rails slicing above the clogged-up traffic. More than anything, trains symbolized Commonwealth society.

“What a weird place,” Mellanie said. “I can’t see why so many people emigrated here. It’s all so backward; as if the Victorians invented starflight and transported their culture here. Maybe that is where the Marie Celeste came from.”

“You’re too young to understand,” Dudley said.

She turned, mildly surprised at the confidence in his voice.

Dudley stood beside her, smiling admiringly at the ramshackle city spread out around them. “Try rejuvenating five times, having to go back to a nine-to-five job for century after century just so you can pay half of your salary into an R and R pension fund that allows you to do exactly the same thing all over again. You might have a different job, wife, children; but for all that you’re just stuck on the same loop with no prospect of change. Once you’ve been through all that, Mellanie, even you would consider coming here to live your last life without a safety net.”

“I didn’t know you felt that way, Dudley.”

“I don’t. Or didn’t. Not during my last life, anyway. But I remember accessing a lot of files on emigration here. A couple more rejuve treatments, having to spend another fifty years fighting the dean for funding, married to another bitch like Wendy, and, yes, I could see myself doing it. There’s something very appealing about walking off into the wilderness and seeing what’s out there. The prospect of telling modern life to fuck off, and just for once build something substantial for yourself with your own two hands, revert to the hunter-gatherer state. It’s not as far away as we like to think, you know.”

“And now?”

“Now? None of us have that luxury anymore.” His face flinched. “I made sure of that, didn’t I?”

“No. You were a very minor part of what’s happened. Sorry to dent your ego, my darling, but you’re not that responsible.”

He grunted, unconvinced.

She wasn’t sure how to respond. The times when the old Dudley appeared she felt small and stupid beside him. Strange, considering this was the state she was supposed to be helping him return to.

The SI’s icon flashed emerald in her virtual vision, allowing her to postpone thinking about Dudley and his new future. “Yes?” she asked it.

“We’re only three hours from the end of the wormhole cycle, Mellanie. This would be a good time to establish our subroutine in the city net. We can verify operational authenticity.”

“All right.” She walked back into the lounge. There was a pine desk beside the door into the bedroom with a small, ancient desktop array on top. She placed both hands on the array’s first-generation i-spot, and a webbing of faint silver lines appeared on her fingers. A whole new display of icons materialized in her virtual vision, and seeker programs began to analyze the local net from inside her inserts. “Doesn’t look like there are any decent monitor programs in the nodes,” she said.

“We concur, Mellanie. Please release our subroutine.”

Her gold snakeskin virtual hands tapped out the code sequence, and the subroutine decompressed out of her inserts, flowing into the city net through her contact with the desktop array. The SI had formatted it as a simple observer system, with enough independence to advise and assist Mellanie when the wormhole was closed. She’d brought it with her in her inserts because any program that large entering Far Away through the narrow bandwidth of the Half Way relay would easily be detected by monitors. That opened the SIsubroutine to the risk of corruption, especially if the Guardians or the Starflyer were running hostile smartware in the city’s nodes.

“I am installed,” the SIsubroutine reported. “The city net has enough capacity for me to run in distributed mode within its on-line arrays.”

“We confirm that,” the SI said.

“Great,” Mellanie said. She took her hands away from the desktop array.

“See if you can find any kind of activity that might be the Guardians. All I need’s a name, or an address. Some way I can make contact with them.”

“I will begin analysis,” the SIsubroutine said. “There are a great many systems that have restricted access. Given the age of the processors I am operating in, it will take some time to circumvent their fireshields.”

“Do what you can.”

Dudley had come back into the lounge. “Who are you calling?” he asked.

“The Michelangelo office.” She told her e-butler to close the connection to the SI. “Just checking in and getting an update.”

“Okay.” His gaze crept over to the bedroom’s door. “What are we going to do next?”

“Go down to the bar, and get some information. Bars are always the best place for that. Besides, I could do with a big drink, we’ve been traveling for ages.” She yawned, stretching her arms to try to loosen the knotted shoulder muscles. “Come on, let’s go see if Far Away’s heard of a Murderous Seduction cocktail.”

The bar and restaurant at the Langford Towers were the only parts of the hotel doing any decent business. They catered to an upmarket cliental, such as it was in Armstrong City, providing a decor with decidedly Indian influences. The chef favored spiced dishes, and the in-house music system played a lot of sitar classics.

Stig found himself a small empty table in the bar, and sipped a beer quietly while he tried to catalogue the other customers. He’d been there forty minutes when Mellanie and Dudley walked in. He’d intended to give them a brief look, then show no further interest, just as Adam had taught him. But Mellanie made that difficult. Her longish chin and flat nose denied her the kind of perfection a classic beauty would have, but her physical presence was striking. Powerful strides carried her quickly across the bar, yet she’d already developed a controlled rhythm to her movements that most offworlders took at least a week to learn. Every motion made her wavy gold hair flutter leisurely above her shoulders.

Dudley followed her with unsteady footsteps. When they arrived at the counter he grabbed it to steady himself. It was hard not to draw comparisons between the two of them, given the way Dudley stayed so close. The re-lifed astronomer came over as completely inadequate both physically and mentally.

Stig finally managed to look away. Most of the other patrons were watching the newcomers. Despite his earlier assessment, he couldn’t tell if any of them were Starflyer operatives from the Institute. Surely at least one of them must be?

The Institute was becoming a lot bolder in the city since the Prime attack. Its director had offered assistance to the Governor as crime and disturbances increased; already several routine police patrols in the center were accompanied by Institute troops in their dark armor. Stig thought it unlikely the only two offworlders on Far Away wouldn’t be kept under observation.

He heard Mellanie try to order some exotic cocktail that the barkeeper had never heard of. She settled for a pitcher of margaritas. As the barkeeper started mixing the ingredients she eased herself closer to him, and spoke in low tones. Stig casually glanced around, just in time to catch the barkeeper’s startled expression. The man quickly shook his head, and gave her the pitcher before hurrying off to the other end of the counter.

A disgruntled Mellanie hauled Dudley over to a vacant table.

Stig was almost laughing. The whole scene was like a badly acted TSI drama.

Fortunately there was no second act. Mellanie and Dudley drank their pitcher and went off back to their suite, both of them yawning. Stig remained in the bar, watching who left and when. Nobody else was acting remotely suspicious.

Closing time was midnight. He finished his beer and waited in the deserted lobby. Finally the barkeeper came through from the kitchen, pulling his coat on.

“A word,” Stig said presently.

The barkeeper glanced about nervously, but the hotel’s night staff was nowhere to be seen. He was in his mid-thirties, with the kind of spindly frame that most Far Away residents acquired, which made his burgeoning beer belly unusually prominent.

“Yes, sir?”

Stig produced an Earth fifty-dollar bill, and pressed it into the barkeeper’s hand. The man was professional enough to pocket it at once.

“Very attractive offworld girl in here earlier tonight.”

“The Royal Suite, sir, top floor.”

“Thank you, I already know that. What I would really appreciate knowing is what she asked you for.”

The barkeeper gave him an awkward look. Stig waited. He wouldn’t have to make any threats, not against the barkeeper. At the worst it would cost him another fifty dollars.

“She wanted to know where she could meet a member of the Guardians. I told her I didn’t know. Which I don’t. Obviously.”

“Obviously.”

“I never said anything else.”

“I see. Thank you.”

The barkeeper let out a short relieved breath, and hurried out. Stig waited a couple of minutes, then made his own way out into the night, the hotel’s automatic doors locking behind him.

Solar-charged polyphoto globes gave off an uninspiring yellow shimmer down the length of the wide street. The faint throb of dance music was just audible, drifting from the back door of a club. A cool air washed the salty ozone smell of the sea across Armstrong City. Somewhere in the distance a police siren wailed its lonely note along the empty roads. It couldn’t be for the Institute’s vehicles; they’d been destroyed hours ago, hit by mortars and masers not ten kilometers outside the city. Trevelyan Halgarth and Ferelith Alwon would never reach the Institute now, never help the Starflyer. With any luck their memorycells had been ruined by the fire that consumed the Land Rover Cruiser. They’d be just as dead as Kazimir.

Stig pulled a cigarette from his packet and thumbed an old-fashioned gasoline lighter. A bad habit, picked up back in the decadent Commonwealth. The mix of nicotine and grass felt good as he pulled it down. He needed a lifter from the stress of the day.

“That illumination makes you a perfect target,” Olwen said from the shadows.

“If you’re relying on a cigarette glow instead of a decent nightsight you’re in deep trouble,” he told her.

She came out of a doorway and joined him as he walked away from the hotel, down the slight slope that led toward the harbor.

“Where’s Finlay?”

“Got himself a good spot. He’ll call if they leave the hotel tonight.”

“Anybody else interested?”

“If they are, they’re better than us. We haven’t seen anyone.”

Stig stopped, and looked back at the high whitewashed facade of the Langford Towers. The Royal Suite balcony was a gray rectangle just under the roof. What in the dreaming heavens does a girl like that see in a piece of wreckage like Dudley Bose? They have to be here for a purpose.

“They went to bed about ten minutes after they went back to the room,” Olwen said.

“I thought that suite was too high to get a proper line of sight inside.”

“It is. I’ll rephrase. The light went off ten minutes after they got back upstairs. Hasn’t come on again since.” She sniggered. “Probably couldn’t wait to rip each other’s clothes off. Here by themselves. Hint of danger. Young. You could practically smell the hormones sweating off them.”

Stig didn’t say anything. His own mind had been filled by the image of a naked Mellanie on the bed with Dudley Bose. It bothered him slightly. That it was Dudley, not him. Which it really shouldn’t do.

“What do you want to do about them?” Olwen asked.

“Not sure. They want to find us, apparently. Let’s see what they do tomorrow.”

Stig was using Halkin Ironmongery, an old hardware store, for his headquarters in Armstrong City. It was fairly central, had a big useful garage at the back, and the neighbors believed the clan members were new owners taking their time to do the place up, an opportune impression that allowed for a lot of people and vehicles to come and go without attracting comment. As covers went, Adam Elvin would have been proud.

When Stig arrived in the morning Murdo McPeierls and young Felix McSobel had already started stripping down the engine from one of the Mazda Volta jeeps. They had nine of the sturdy old vehicles jammed into the garage and yard. Stig had brought them in as part of the reception for the Boongate blockade run that Adam was putting together. Adam hadn’t sent too many details yet, not even by encrypted message. But it would go ahead, Stig was certain of that; the new inspections on Boongate had essentially cut them off from their Commonwealth supplies. One of Stig’s other jobs was putting together the technical teams who would assemble the multitude of components into the specialized force field generators needed for the planet’s revenge. So he knew how desperate the clans were for fresh components. They were desperate for the Martian data as well. He’d talked to Samantha who was in charge of the control group assembling the large array that would run the network of manipulator stations. She’d explained how urgent it was. Now Kazimir was dead and the data lost. That should have been my run. Fate had been evil to them that day.

Stig spent the first half hour of the morning working out in the makeshift gym in the store’s basement, kickboxing the heavy leather bags, imagining each and every one of them to be Bruce McFoster. It was good exercise, something he could lose himself in, not having to think.

“You are troubled, Stig McSobel,” said a voice that had a permanent whispering echo.

Stig hadn’t heard anyone come in. He finished his kick and slid around smoothly, dropping into a crouch. The Barsoomian who called himself Dr. Friland was standing at the bottom of the wooden stairs, a tall figure clad in dark robes of semiorganic cloth. His face was partially hidden inside a deep monk’s hood, which was perpetually haunted by shadows. Stig had once used his retinal inserts to try to get a clear image, only to find the effect was actually some kind of distortion field. The Barsoomians always veiled their true appearance. Rumor had it they didn’t want anyone to know how far their modifications had taken them from their original human form. Dr. Friland was certainly taller than any normal human Stig had ever seen; though plenty of Commonwealth citizens had reprofiled themselves for media sports shows like wrestling, producing ridiculous freak-variants on the human body. This was different, not that he knew how exactly.

Stig straightened up, allowing the muscles in his shoulders and arms to loosen. “What makes you say that?”

“You always resort to physical activity when confronted with a vexing problem,” Dr. Friland said in his euphonious voice. “It allows your subconscious to review possibilities.”

“Right.” Stig retrieved his towel and started to dry himself. He’d managed to work up quite a sweat. “By the way, our people say to thank you again for the bioprocessors. They’ve been integrated into our large array. Apparently they were way ahead of anything the Commonwealth is producing. It should make our digital simulations a lot quicker.”

“Our pleasure.”

Stig walked over to the bench and pulled on a simple short-sleeved shirt. He was always grateful to the Barsoomians for the assistance they gave the clans, yet he never knew what to say on the rare occasions he encountered one. How could you make small talk to an unknowable entity? Dr. Friland had arrived in Armstrong City a week ago, delivering the requested processors for the command group. For reasons best known to himself he’d remained in the city, staying in the big private residence the Barsoomians maintained for themselves out in the Chinese quarter.

Without any visible leg movement, Dr. Friland rotated on the spot, keeping his shielded face pointing at Stig. “There is something new in the city’s net.”

“A new monitor program?” He was surprised the clan’s webheads hadn’t detected it; they were interfaced just about continuously.

“No. This is a … presence.”

The Barsoomian sounded uncertain, which sent a tingle down Stig’s spine. He placed a lot of weight on the supposed infallibility of the Barsoomians. Even his time in the Commonwealth with its everyday technology could never fully quash all the fabulous childhood stories of the others who shared this world. “You mean like a ghost or something?”

“A ghost in the machine? How appropriate. It is certainly a machine’s ghost.”

“Ah, right. So, what’s it doing?”

The darkness within Dr. Friland’s hood lessened to reveal a row of smiling teeth. “Whatever it wants.”

“I’ll get my people to watch for it.”

“It is elusive. Even I can only gather hints of its passage.” The darkness closed back over Dr. Friland’s smile.

“Wait … We’re not talking about the Starflyer, here, are we?”

“No. This is a binary construction; it is not a child of biological life. But it did not come through the gateway. We would have felt its passage within the datastream.”

“Then what the hell is it?”

“I suspect you were close to the truth with your first question. Something this pervasive can only be here to observe the city and its inhabitants. What you should be asking is, who would want to gather information on such a scale?”

“Mellanie,” Stig hissed. “She wants to know how to meet us. She’s a reporter, so I guess she must have access to sophisticated scrutineer programs. I just didn’t think …” He fell silent, rubbing at the back of his neck with some embarrassment. “Me of all people, I shouldn’t be fooled by appearances.”

“This is the girl who came through the gateway yesterday?”

“Yes. Though I haven’t a clue who she’s working for.” He leveled a sly glance at the Barsoomian. “Do you know?”

“Alas, my people are not omnipotent. I have no more idea than you, perhaps even less. It is a long time since I left the Commonwealth.”

“You weren’t born here?” Stig knew he probably shouldn’t ask, but it wasn’t often a Barsoomian talked about anything, let alone his own background.

“No. I was born back on Earth, before Sheldon and Isaacs opened their first wormhole.”

“Dreaming heavens. I never knew anyone was that old. Not even Johansson dates back that far.”

“There are some of us still left from that time. Not many. Not now.”

“Right.” Stig shook himself, and started to walk up the stairs. He watched closely as the Barsoomian followed him, gliding across the gym’s dusty floorboards. The hem of his robe lifted just before he reached the bottom stair, flowing upward ahead of whatever feet it concealed. “I’m going to check with the team I’ve got watching Mellanie and Bose,” he said. “Do you want to stay around?”

“No thank you. They haven’t left the hotel yet. I thought I would visit the national gallery today. It’s been a while, and I hear good things about the new sculptors.”

Stig did his best to avoid checking over his shoulder. There was just no predicting the Barsoomians.

Dr. Friland was right: Rescorai and Bose hadn’t left the hotel yet. The team he’d assigned to them reported that they’d ordered breakfast in bed.

Stig told the webheads to start searching for a new distributed-operation monitor program in the city’s net. He desperately wanted to increase the number of people watching the young reporter, but the clans didn’t have enough people in Armstrong City for that. There was no way he could switch priorities based on his own feelings—Adam had certainly hammered that lesson in. Unless and until she did something radical, Mellanie was an unknown he had to regard as nonhostile. He still had to cover the daily gateway opening, and continue training and preparation for the blockade run. On top of that he had to maintain a thorough watch on the Institute personnel’s activities in Armstrong City, which continued to grow.

With the few clan members he could spare, he was lucky Mellanie didn’t spot them when she did finally leave the hotel to wander over the city. They stayed well back, and delivered hourly bulletins for him. She behaved just like any rookie reporter; even though he was convinced that was an elaborate front. He still hadn’t figured out what Bose was doing with her, not at all.

Mellanie had a thoroughly worthless first day in Armstrong City. After a long sleep to recover from the journey she headed off to the Governor’s House, where she spent over an hour in the press office, familiarizing herself with local events. Her expectation that her Michelangelo show credentials would give her special privileges and encourage the Governor’s media staff to confide rumors and civic gossip was badly misplaced. Nobody had ever heard of Michelangelo. The official line was that the Guardians were a bunch of scabby mountain bandits, irrelevant to the city. The Governor’s media people were keen to push the concept of how life was continuing normally on Far Away, that nobody was panicking.

A follow-up visit to the local news company, the Armstrong Chronicle, which maintained a public bulletin service and ran news shows on the city net, was almost as unproductive. The Chronicle reporters did at least supply some details on the ambush just outside the city. She was shocked to learn Trevelyan Halgarth and Ferelith Alwon were dead, and that the medical crews had retrieved their memorycells for shipment back to the Commonwealth. When she asked if it was the Guardians who’d mounted the ambush nobody knew anything other than the police statement that local crime syndicates were suspected.

She popped into one of the gyms that was doing such a roaring trade, recording a puff piece for Michelangelo about rich natives building their bodies up for life on a standard-gravity world. It was so ineffectual she was embarrassed to send it when the wormhole cycle opened.

In the afternoon she did some bog-standard man-in-the-street interviews. They were a little more revealing; several people said they thought the Guardians were behind the recent attacks on the Institute’s vehicles and property. If they were, she reasoned, then they must have a group based in the city.

When they got back to the hotel she reviewed the meager information the SIsubroutine had collected for her. “I have no direct evidence of any Guardian membership,” it told her. “However, when the wormhole was open earlier this afternoon, a great many encrypted messages flowed into the city net. Most were directed to the Governor’s House, and the Institute.”

“And the rest?”

“They were all addressed to individuals. Given the small physical size of the net, it should now be possible for me to correlate the physical location of each recipient.”

“I haven’t got the time to knock on the door of everyone who got an encoded message.”

“Of course not. But once I have identified the building where an encoded message was received, I can review the electronic hardware it contains for evidence. Be advised; there is one place I will not be able to venture: the Barsoomian residence in the Chinese quarter. There are some strange processing units connected to the net at that node. My routines do not run correctly in them. I have withdrawn myself from that area.”

“The Barsoomians, they’re some kind of ultra-green radical group, aren’t they?”

“That was one of their founding concepts. They are humans who wish to explore the potential of unrestrained genetic modification within themselves and their environment, thereby leaving mainstream society behind. Far Away was the ideal planet for them to establish themselves. Without a global government it cannot enforce the kind of restrictions on genetic modification which most Commonwealth worlds have.”

“Are they connected to the Guardians?”

“I do not know. It seems improbable the two groups are unaware of each other. There are several archive reports at the Armstrong Chronicle of Guardians using unusually large horses. The Barsoomians would be an obvious source of breeding stock.”

“That is interesting. All right, let me know if you find anything at those buildings.”

Mellanie and Dudley had dinner in the hotel restaurant. The curry she chose was a lot hotter than most she’d eaten before, but she managed to get it down, aware of the waiter smiling in the background when she puffed out her cheeks and drank copious amounts of cold mineral water to wash it down. Dudley wasn’t so lucky. He was complaining of a bad stomach even before they reached their suite.

“I thought I remembered liking spicy food,” he mumbled the second time he returned from the bathroom.

“It’s probably an acclimatization thing,” Mellanie said. “Your new body isn’t ready for curry just yet.” She retrieved her small white cocktail dress from her bag—not one from her own range, a nice Nicallio that had been tailored to fit her just perfectly—and she knew she looked sensational wearing it.

If she didn’t have any success tracking down the Guardians tomorrow, then she’d just have to extract information the old-fashioned way. During her visit to the Armstrong Chronicle, several male staff members had managed to swing past and tell her how delighted they’d be to show her around the big city at night.

Looking at the dress with its nearly nonexistent skirt, Mellanie gave a mildly resentful sigh. She would fuck whoever it took to get a contact name, of course she would. But lately—actually, since the Prime invasion—she’d begun wondering about other ways to accomplish her job, because that’s how most other reporters got things done. When she tried to count up just how many people she’d slept with, she couldn’t. Life had just swept her away since that awful court case; she’d done what she could to stay in charge and in control, but the events powering her along had been so overwhelming. It had been an exciting ride, though, she couldn’t deny that. At times, that is. Frightening, too.

But there have been so many people.

As she’d told dear old Hoshe Finn all those eons ago, she wasn’t ashamed about her sexuality. Really, she wasn’t. It was finding out about Alessandra that caused the most pain. The betrayal. Alessandra had just whored her for the Starflyer; never caring, never interested.

I should have said yes to that money-junkie sleezeball Jaycee when he tried to whore me. At least he was honest about what I’d be doing for him in those kinds of TSIs.

“Are you all right?” Dudley asked.

“What? Yes.”

Dudley still had one hand pressed firmly across his belly. With the other he reached out to her face. “You’re crying.”

“No I’m not.” She moved back out of range, hurriedly swiping her hand across her eyes.

“I thought.… Oooh.” Dudley hurried for the bathroom again.

Mellanie grunted at Dudley’s departing back, and flopped down on the bed. The town was almost silent outside; she should be able to get a good night’s sleep. Dudley certainly wouldn’t be pestering her tonight.

The loud and unpleasant sound of Dudley’s digestive suffering came clear through the bathroom door. Mellanie searched around in her bag for the earplugs she’d been given on the Carbon Goose, pushed them in, and hauled the duvet over herself.

The following morning Mellanie decided to get professional. It wasn’t as though she’d had to sit through lessons or courses on how to be a reporter when Alessandra took her on; but she’d picked up enough around the office to know the basics of starting an investigation in a strange town.

“I want a full analysis of city court cases going back two years,” she told the SIsubroutine. “Get me a listing of every case the police brought against the Guardians, even people who are only suspected of membership. We can cross-reference it with the locations of those encoded messages.”

“I can’t do that. Official court records are archived in an isolated memory core.”

“That’s ridiculous. All government records are supposed to be publicly available. It’s in the Commonwealth constitution, or something.”

“Article 54, yes. However, the Armstrong City grand court has used this archiving method for security purposes. Like most of the Governor’s House electronics, the court’s systems are old. There is no money available for upgrades, which leaves them vulnerable to anyone coming through the gateway with modern aggressor software. Records could easily be destroyed or tampered with.”

“Damn it.”

“You may visit the court in person and request copies.”

“Okay, all right. I’ll do that, then.”

“The Armstrong Chronicle has many cases on file which I can access. I can give you a list of possible court cases to research.”

“Thank you.”

Dudley wanted to come with her.

“I don’t think you’re up to that,” she said diplomatically. Despite the earplugs she’d heard him scamper off to the bathroom several times in the night. Sitting opposite her in the deserted dining room for breakfast, all he’d managed was a cup of weak milky tea and a slice of toast. He looked like he’d got the mother of all hangovers.

“I’m fine,” he said grumpily.

Mellanie couldn’t be bothered to argue. She dressed for her day in a simple dove-gray T-shirt and jeans, tying her hair back into a loose tail with a brown leather band. They took a cab, for Dudley’s sake, waving on the first three until she finally saw one with a Governor’s House license.

“I think someone is following them,” Olwen said.

Stig was in the middle of a briefing for the team members left at Halkin Ironmongery. Over half of his people were running around town trying to keep up with their assignments. He held up a hand to his audience, and asked, “Who?”

“Not sure,” Olwen replied. “The pair of them have been in the grand courthouse for two hours. I’m having trouble staying inconspicuous. But there’s someone else lurking here, having the same kind of problem. He’s not on any file we’ve got.”

“Have you found out what she’s doing there?”

“Going through court records. I don’t know which ones yet. Finley was going to talk to the court officials after she leaves.”

“Okay, I’ll get you some electronic coverage. Stand by.” He went up to the first-floor room where the team’s arrays were set up. Keely McSobel and Aidan McPeierls were both fully interfaced with the city net. He told them to review the area around the courthouse to see if there was anybody using encrypted messaging.

“You’re right,” Stig told Olwen five minutes later. “We’ve located at least three hostiles in the courthouse.”

“What do you want us to do?”

“Nothing. Keep Bose and Rescorai in sight. I’m coming straight over with some reinforcements.”

Mellanie was making good progress. The SIsubroutine had given her seven cases where the Chronicle mentioned a possible connection with the Guardians. All of them involved attacks on the Institute, either against their vehicles or personnel in Armstrong City. The police had caught few suspects. Those they did haul before a judge were just local punks, all of whom had a suspicious amount of wealth either in cash or in newly purchased goods. Obviously, they’d been paid to harass the Institute; not that they admitted to anything. Invariably, they had good lawyers.

Mellanie smiled when she read that for the second time. Three prominent city lawyers seemed to represent most of the accused, and they didn’t come cheap.

“There is an increasing amount of electronic activity in and around the courthouse,” the SIsubroutine told her. “I believe you are under observation.”

Mellanie rubbed her eyes and switched off the desktop array that was displaying the cases. It ejected the memory crystal that the clerk of the court had supplied her. “Police?” she asked.

“No. The systems they are using are more advanced than the police have on this world. Some of the signal traffic is strange. It appears there are two separate groups operating independently.”

“Two?” Mellanie rubbed at her bare arms where goose bumps had suddenly appeared. It wasn’t cold in the little office that the clerk had let her use. Midday sun was streaming in through the double-glazed window, stirring the air-conditioning unit into desultory life, while outside the season’s warm humid air hung over the city like a possessive spirit. If there were two groups interested in her, she knew one of them had to be from the Starflyer. Had Alessandra found out she’d traveled here? Or am I being too paranoid?

Dudley was curled up in a chair on the other side of the desk, his youth and pose giving him a strong resemblance to some sulky schoolboy. His eyes were closed, and moving like someone in REM sleep as he accessed a file from his inserts.

For an instant, she was tempted to creep out and leave him there. Except he’d panic when he realized she’d gone, and cause a big scene. And he was completely incapable of looking after himself if a Starflyer agent did want to abduct him.

Maybe bringing him along wasn’t so smart after all.

“Come on, Dudley.” She shook his shoulder. “We’re leaving.”

Mellanie put on her sunglasses as soon as they went outside. Dudley seemed to shrink away from the warm light. He was sweating and shivering as they walked away from the big old courthouse onto Cheyne Street.

Silver lines appeared just below Mellanie’s skin, like deep-sea creatures rising tentatively to the surface. They began to spread and multiply along her arms and up her neck to envelop her cheeks in a delicate filigree. Some of them she activated herself; the simple systems that she understood, sensors that amplified her perception of the surrounding area. The SIsubroutine was tapping into others.

Cheyne Street was busy. It was close to the center of town, a boundary line between the sector that housed the main government buildings and the start of the commercial district. Traffic was constant along the road, vehicle exhausts releasing dark fumes into Far Away’s crisp air. Cyclists wore filter masks as they weaved through the slow-moving cars and vans. Mellanie pushed her way along the crowded pavements, trying not to think what the fumes were doing to her lungs.

“We need to keep this simple,” she told the SIsubroutine. “Find me a car here that can take us back to the hotel.”

A long list of vehicles slid down Mellanie’s virtual vision, everything the SIsubroutine could find on Cheyne Street, either moving or parked. None of them were less than ten years old. As they’d all been imported from the Commonwealth, they all had drive arrays, not that they were used much in Armstrong City, which lacked even a basic traffic management system.

“Two Land Rover Cruisers registered with the Institute office have just turned onto Cheyne Street,” the SIsubroutine said. “They are heading toward you.”

Mellanie’s inserts and OCtattoos revealed a multitude of signals flashing through the city’s ether. She saw the Cruisers establish links to several people on the pavement. Two of them were very close, twenty meters behind, and walking quickly toward her. She turned her head to see a couple of men dressed in the dark tunics worn by the Institute troopers. Her virtual vision superimposed iridescent data pixels over the image. The two figures were separated from the rest of Cheyne Street’s pedestrians by haloes of tangerine and scarlet grids.

“I don’t feel too good,” Dudley said. His face was white, slicked with cold sweat.

Mellanie wanted to slap him. She couldn’t believe he was doing this to her, not now. Didn’t he understand how much trouble they were in? “We have to hurry, Dudley, they’re coming.”

“Who?” Any further questioning was postponed by a violent judder that started in the middle of his chest. He squashed a hand to his mouth. People were staring at him as his cheeks bulged out, moving away with their faces wrinkled up in disgust.

Mellanie’s boosted senses showed her the SIsubroutine establishing itself in the drive arrays of vehicles along Cheyne Street. Both of the Institute troopers had reached the front of the courthouse building. One of them drew his ion pistol. “Hey, you,” he called out.

Dudley started to throw up. People backed away fast as watery vomit splattered onto the paving slabs. Now there was no one between Mellanie and the Institute troopers.

“Stay right there,” the first trooper shouted. He raised the ion pistol, leveling it. Mellanie blinked against a powerful green dazzle as the weapon’s targeting laser found her face.

A car horn sounded loudly. People turned in curiosity, then yelled in panic. There was a sudden rush of movement as an old Ford Maury saloon veered across Cheyne Street, heading straight for the troopers. The green laser vanished, swinging around toward the Maury. Mellanie caught sight of the driver, a middle-aged woman who was tugging desperately at the steering wheel, her face frozen into an expression of disbelief and horror as the car refused to obey. A fusillade of horn blasts from the road around the wayward car drowned out all other sound. The troopers tried to race clear, but the car followed their movements. Its front wheels hit the pavement curb, and the whole chassis jumped half a meter in the air as it lurched forward. The trooper with the pistol got off one wild air shot before the Maury’s front grill hit him full-on just above his hips. Mellanie winced as his body folded around the car, arms and upper torso slamming down across the hood. Then the car crashed into the stone wall of the courthouse. Its collision absorber frame crumpled at the front, reducing the deceleration force on the passengers. Plyplastic sponge bags sprang out of the seats, wrapping protectively around the driver. Outside the car there was no protection. The impact burst the trooper apart as if an explosive charge had gone off inside him. For a second the shocked screams of everyone watching rose above the cacophony of horns.

A second car thudded into the curb with a loud crunch, smacking into the remaining trooper, who was staring numbly at his colleague’s atrocious death. He was bulldozed into the courthouse wall not five meters from the first smash.

It broke the spell. People started to stampede away from the horrific scene. Vehicles and cyclists swerved to avoid the rush.

“Move!” Mellanie yelled at Dudley. She pulled him along, nearly lifting him off the ground in the planet’s low gravity. Somewhere farther down Cheyne Street there was yet another violent vehicle crash. Reviewing the flood of data her insert-boosted senses were delivering, she saw the SIsubroutine had taken over a delivery van and rammed it into one of the Institute Cruisers. The resulting snarl-up had blocked that half of Cheyne Street completely.

A small Ables four-seater Cowper pulled up beside Mellanie. Its doors popped open and she shoved Dudley in. “Let’s go,” she cried.

The Ables pulled out into what was left of the traffic. Everything else on the road seemed to move neatly out of its way, allowing it to accelerate smoothly away from the bedlam. Mellanie turned around to gape at the scene behind her. People had stopped running now. Some hardy souls were gathered around the cars that had killed the troopers, trying to help free the people inside.

She sank back into the seat with a shaky gasp of air. Her virtual vision relayed the excited pulses of encrypted communications weaving through the city net.

“Can you track the people in the second watcher team?” she asked the SIsubroutine.

“Yes.”

The chain of data traffic flipped up into her virtual vision, turquoise globes linked by jumping sine waves of neon orange. Ten people were sharing the same channel. Three of them were heading toward Cheyne Street in a vehicle of some kind. The rest were on the ground close to the courthouse.

“Any idea who’s in charge?” she asked.

“One of the people in the vehicle is issuing more messages than the others, which would indicate they are in charge. However, I do not have the capacity to break their encryption, so I cannot offer any guarantee of this analysis.”

“Doesn’t matter. If the other guys were from the Institute, this lot have to be Guardians. Find an access code for the leader’s interface.”

A city net personal address flipped up into her virtual vision. The rest of the imagery was shutting down. When she held up her arm, the lacework of silvery OCtattoos was fading from her skin. “Are you all right?” she asked Dudley.

He was curled up in the passenger seat, shivering badly. “Do you think they had memorycells?” he asked in a faint voice.

“I imagine re-lifing is part of their contract with the Institute, yes.”

“I want to go home.”

“That’s not a bad idea, Dudley. We’ll do that.” The wormhole opened again in two hours. She suspected their hotel would be under observation. If they left right away they might just manage to stay ahead of the Institute. “See if you can get us on the passenger manifest for the next flight back to Boongate,” she told the SIsubroutine. “And cancel the route back to the hotel. Take us toward 3F Plaza, but not actually into it, not yet.”

Mellanie took another minute to compose herself. The car crashes had been deplorable. But then, if the SIsubroutine hadn’t intervened, she and Dudley would be in the back of a Cruiser heading for a very unpleasant, and short, future.

She told her e-butler to call the Guardian member’s code.

Stig stopped the car at the end of Kyrie Street, just before it opened out into 3F Plaza. Franico’s, the Italian restaurant, was twenty meters ahead of him.

“You want to do this?” Murdo McPeierls asked.

“It’s not as if we’ve got the element of surprise,” Stig said. He tried to stop it sounding grouchy, but Murdo had been in the car when he’d got Mellanie’s call.

“I’ll scout around,” Murdo said. “Shout if you need me.”

“Sure.” Stig gave the traffic a slightly apprehensive glance. Kyrie Street looked perfectly normal. But then Olwen said there’d been nothing out of place on Cheyne Street until the cars started going berserk.

Stig squared his shoulders and went into Franico’s. Mellanie hadn’t chosen it for its decor or its menu. Gray curving walls and archways of dead drycoral divided up the restaurant into low segments modeled on some insect hive floor plan. The food was pasta and pizzas, with the house speciality of fresh fish from the North Sea.

It took Stig a moment to find Mellanie. She and Dudley were sitting at a table close to the door, half-hidden by one of the crumbling archways, which gave her a good view of anyone coming in while remaining out of direct sight. He went over and sat down. Dudley scowled at him; the young re-life astronomer was nursing a glass of water. Mellanie had a beer and a plate of garlic bread.

“Thank you for coming,” Mellanie said.

“Your call surprised me. I was interested.”

“I need to talk to the Guardians.”

“I see.”

She grinned and bit into a slice of the bread. Melted butter dribbled down her chin. “Thank you for not denying it.”

Stig nearly protested, but that would have been churlish. “How did you find me? More importantly, how did you get my address code?”

“I have a good monitor program. A very good one.”

“Ah. It was you who released it into the city net.”

Mellanie stopped chewing to give him a surprised look. “You knew it was there?” She dabbed a paper napkin to her chin.

“We knew something was there. It’s very elusive.”

“Okay, well, don’t worry. It’s not hostile.”

“I doubt the Institute would agree with you.”

“Their troopers had drawn weapons. They were going to take me and Dudley for interrogation. We’d probably be turned into Starflyer agents.”

Stig was silent for a moment while he reviewed what she said. “Very likely. Do you mind telling me what you know about such things? Frankly, I’ve never met anyone other than a Guardian who believed in the Starflyer.”

“I discovered my old boss was one, Alessandra Baron. She sabotaged an investigation I …” Mellanie stiffened, turning abruptly. Stig saw a dense, intricate pattern of silver lines flicker into existence on her cheeks and around her eyes. “What the hell are you?” she blurted.

He looked over his shoulder to see Dr. Friland glide out from the back of the restaurant. A faint purple nimbus had replaced the usual shadow inside his hood. It died away. When Stig glanced back at Mellanie, her complicated OCtattoos had vanished from view.

“Shall we call that an honorable stalemate?” Dr. Friland asked in his mellow, echoing voice.

“Sure,” Mellanie said guardedly.

“I am glad. As to your original question—”

“You’re a Barsoomian.”

“Correct. My name is Dr. Justin Friland. I’m pleased to meet you, Mellanie Rescorai.”

Mellanie pointed a finger, and switched it between Stig and the tall robed figure. “You guys working together?”

“We do on occasion,” Dr. Friland said. “And this is one of them.”

“Right.” Mellanie took a sip of her beer, still not looking away from the Barsoomian.

“All right,” Stig said. “We’re not shooting at each other, and we agree the Starflyer is our enemy. So what did you want to talk to the Guardians about, Mellanie?”

She gave him a moderately flustered look. “I came to ask what I should do.”

“You want our advice?” Stig found it hard to believe anyone as ballsy as this girl would need to turn to anybody else for help. She was smart, determined, and resourceful; she could also clearly look after herself. He’d never seen wetwiring so sophisticated. So who’s she working with?

“Like you said, nobody in the Commonwealth believes in the Starflyer. I need to know what you’re doing to bring it down. I need to know if I can help. I’ve got some very strong allies.”

“Oh, fine, one moment while I go fetch copies of our plans, and hand over the names and addresses of everyone we have working in the Commonwealth.”

“Stop being a prat. We both know what’s got to happen here. You give me a onetime unisphere address, I’ll go back to the Commonwealth and make contact. That way we get to negotiate and find some middle ground where we both help each other.”

“That’s you,” Stig said. “What about your partner here?”

Dudley barely looked up from his water. He looked thoroughly miserable to the point of being disinterested.

“What about Dudley?” Mellanie asked.

“He kicked this whole thing off.”

“You stupid, ignorant, little man,” Dudley snapped waspishly. “Have you no sense of perspective? No one person began this; no one person will end it. Least of all me.”

Stig thought he did well to hold his temper in check. “Without you, the Second Chance would not have flown. Without you, millions of people would still be alive.”

“I died out there, you shit!” Dudley said. “They caught me, and they took me prisoner, and they … they …”

Mellanie’s arm went around him. “It’s all right,” she said soothingly. “It’s okay, Dudley. Sit back now.” Her hand was rubbing along his spine. “Dudley was used by the Starflyer,” she said to Stig. “If you don’t believe me, ask Bradley Johansson; he spoke to Dudley’s ex-wife. He knows all about the astronomy fraud.”

Stig didn’t know what to do. The simplest thing would be to give her a onetime code as she asked; hand the whole problem over to Johansson and Elvin. But right now, sitting across a table from an obviously unstable Dudley Bose, Stig felt as if he was being manipulated into that very position. His instinct had it that anyone as beguiling as Mellanie couldn’t possibly be duplicitous. Rationally, he suspected she was about ten times as lethal as any veteran clan warrior. Yet she seemed so earnest, so open.

“May I ask what you will do if the Guardians don’t provide you with any assistance?” Dr. Friland asked.

“Carry on as best I can,” Mellanie said. “Gather as much evidence as I can against Baron, use it to expose her to the authorities, and hopefully penetrate whatever agent network she’s a part of.”

“She will be one of only three people. That’s the classic model of spy cells, and with today’s encrypted communications she may not even know the other members.”

“I’ll find the others,” Mellanie said grimly. “No matter how secure she thinks her communications are, I can hack them.”

“Of course, you said you had allies. And we witnessed a small fraction of its ability today, did we not? Are you sure it is trustworthy, Mellanie?”

“I’d be dead if it wasn’t.”

“Yes. I suppose that does generate a respectable level of personal confidence. All I ask, Mellanie, is that you continue to question. You are a reporter, are you not? A good reporter, despite your circumstances and the unseen help you have received.”

“It doesn’t matter how much help you get,” she said. “There has to be talent there to start with.”

Dr. Friland laughed. “Not to mention self-belief. So, Mellanie, all I ask is that you don’t throw away that reporter’s instinct. Keep questioning. Don’t stop asking yourself about your great ally’s motivation. It is, after all, not human. It is not even flesh and blood. Ultimately, its evolutionary destiny cannot be the same as ours.”

“I … Yes. All right,” Mellanie said.

“Treachery is always closer than you expect. Ask Caesar.”

“Who?”

Stig frowned. She’s joking. Right?

“An old politician,” Dudley said wearily. “An emperor who was betrayed by those closest to him. For the greater good, of course.”

“It’s always for the greater good,” Dr. Friland said. His voice sounded like someone very young, a boy who felt sadness strong enough for it to be grief.

“I won’t make that mistake,” Mellanie said. She deliberately looked away from the Barsoomian, and took another drink of her beer.

Stig told his e-butler to prepare a file with one of his fallback unisphere contact addresses in it. “Here’s your address,” he told Mellanie as the file transferred into her holding folder. “I hope you’re on the level with me.”

“I know,” she said. “If I’m not, you’ll track me down, blah blah blah.”

“You. Your memorycell. Your secure store.”

“Nice try. If we don’t defeat the Starflyer, neither of us will be around to duke it out. If I had been a Starflyer agent, you and everybody at Halkin Ironmongery would already be dead.”

The casual way she dropped their secure base of operations into the conversation made Stig want to scowl at her. Instead he felt a touch of admiration. She really is quite something. So why Dudley?

She gave him a pert grin, knowing she’d won that round. “The wormhole opens in another seventy minutes. We’d better get going. Dudley and I are booked on the next Carbon Goose flight under different names. That should be enough.”

“We’ll be watching,” Stig told her. “In case the Institute causes any trouble.”

“I’m sure you will. Good-bye, and thanks.”

“Safe journey.”

As modern-day wedding ceremonies involving members of Intersolar Dynasties went, it was short and very old-fashioned. Wilson and Anna went for the classical love, honor, and obey pledges. Current fashion was for the bride and groom to write their own vows, or if they lacked the poetic streak themselves hire someone to compose some poignant lines on their behalf. The newest one-upmanship variant of this was for the vows to be set to music in order for the happy couple to sing them to each other in front of the altar. Society brides had been known to undergo a little cellular reprofiling of the vocal cords to ensure perfect harmony.

“You can stuff that,” Anna said when the hopeful wedding planner mentioned it as a possibility.

It was a good decision, given who was actually attending their service in the Babuyan Atoll multidenominational chapel. Chairwoman Gall was of course invited, on the groom’s side, and managed to sit in the pew in front of President Elaine Doi and the Senate delegation led by Crispin Goldreich. Senior navy personnel sat on the bride’s side, along with a small number of Anna’s family, who looked uncomfortable and out of place amid so many Grandees. Wilson had to make some tough choices about who to have from his own extensive family. His ex-wives were omitted despite him being on good terms with nearly all of them; on principle he asked one child from each previous marriage, a representative number of direct descendants; then of course there were a lot of Farndale people he had to invite—political obligation. Courtesy meant he had to invite Nigel Sheldon, who said yes for himself and four of his harem. Ozzie was sent an invitation, but didn’t bother to reply.

Given the ever-expanding number of guests, suggestions were made to the couple that they use a cathedral to accommodate all the additional people who really, really, would like to attend. Wilson said a flat no, and wished to God he’d never listened to Patricia Kantil and her idea about feelgood propaganda. A full third of the chapel pews were reserved for media correspondents. Medium-level reporters on permanent assignment covering the navy in High Angel suddenly found their “company” invitation appropriated by celebrity anchors and chief executives.

Wilson sat in the front pew slapping one hand into the other while the organist played some dreadful twenty-second-century hymn. His perfectly tailored dress uniform with its flawless midnight-black cloth was becoming oppressively warm while he waited. And waited.

“Probably won’t show,” Captain Oscar Monroe said cheerfully, and loud enough for several nearby pews to hear. “I wouldn’t. Too much pressure. Should have had a private ceremony like you originally wanted.”

“Thank you,” Wilson hissed at his best man.

“Just doing my job; preparing you for the worst.” He twisted around in his seat. “Yep.”

“She’s here?”

“Nope. The press are all starting to smile at the nonarrival. It’s like a display of saber-toothed dentistry back there.”

Wilson felt the appallingly strong urge to giggle. “Shut up, you dick.”

With a theatrical flourish, the organist began to play the wedding march. Wilson and Oscar stood up, not looking at each other in case they started laughing out loud. Anna began her walk up the aisle on Rafael Columbia’s arm. A hundred professional retinal inserts followed her every move. Thousands of studio-based couture experts lamented that she was wearing her uniform. A unisphere audience of nine and a half billion completely ignored them.

Navy personnel filled the chapel’s garden. Off duty or just taking a break, they all turned up to applaud the Admiral when he and Anna came out of the chapel doors arm in arm, smiling in true couplelike unison. Both of them grinned at the spontaneous display of support, and waved as they walked over to the marquee set up beside the chapel. The rest of the guests spilled out onto the grass, looking up at the waning crescent of Icalanise beyond the crystal dome. Strong slivers of light shone a few hundred kilometers away from the gigantic alien starship, the new assembly platforms forming their circular pattern in front of the stars. For the politicians it was surprisingly reassuring to see their committee work and deal making and budget trading actually translated into solid hardware. A lot of them looked at the simple pattern of lights, and compared them to the images of thousands of ships descending on the Lost23 worlds. In such circumstances, total reassurance was difficult to come by.

Nobody let it spoil the festivities. Even the celebrity reporters behaved themselves, as well as could be expected. Nearly all of them tried to get up close to Nigel Sheldon at some point in the reception. He wasn’t often seen out in public, and the off chance of an exclusive was too tempting. Vice President Bicklu pointedly ignored Oscar, who raised a glass every time he caught the VP glaring in his direction. Ten-year-old Emily Kime, who was Anna’s one bridesmaid, managed to down two glasses of white wine before her parents found out. Alessandra Baron and Michelangelo adopted some magical people variant of identical magnetic poles repelling each other in order to avoid coming within ten meters for the whole reception.

Wilson and Anna left early for a luxury hotel over in New Glasgow. Officially they had twenty-four hours’ leave in which to conduct their honeymoon. The media were all quietly briefed that in reality they would both be back at work the following morning. Everybody was taking the navy’s response to the Lost23 very seriously indeed. The newlyweds were also postponing having any family until after the Prime alien situation was resolved. In that they were no different from any other couple in the Commonwealth. Womb tank leasing companies and germline modification clinics were going out of business on every world as people stopped having children. It was a trend that the Treasury was monitoring with some urgency, along with hundreds of other economic downturns.

It was close to midnight when Oscar left the party and took a personal pod over to the concave-walled tower that was Pentagon II. Even this late most of the offices were fully staffed. The navy was operating nonstop to finalize the designs of its new ships, and see them into production. Oscar was due to take the Defender out for a month-long patrol flight in a few days’ time; and he was expecting the starship to be effectively obsolete by the time he got back. CST technicians had already delivered the prototype marque 6 hyperdrive, with a theoretical speed of four light-years per hour. The test flight was scheduled for a fortnight’s time. Such was the pace of progress, the marque 5 had been obsolete before it ever even got out of the design array.

The elevator delivered him to the twenty-ninth floor. Up here, at the executive level, there were fewer people around. Nobody passed him as he walked the short length of corridor to his office. He locked the door and sat behind his desk, with the lights barely on. For a long time he did nothing. It wasn’t the first time he’d come up here ready to do this. Each time he’d … not chickened out exactly; anger had driven him away. Anger about Adam coming back and making this demand. Anger that fueled a determination not to give in, not to be pushed around. Not like before, when he was first-life young, when the two of them had been idiotic hotheads following a cause someone else had infected them with.

Some of those times spent sitting here, Oscar had nearly called Rafael Columbia. Just get it all over with. It would mean a terribly long time in life suspension, but when—or if—he ever did emerge it probably would be into a better society. That always made him laugh bitterly. Typical Monroe cop-out; let someone else get on with it while you wait for better days.

He’d been through this soul searching so many times in the years immediately after Abadan Station. It had taken a decade for the pain and guilt to subside. After all, it had been a mistake. Not an accident; he didn’t ever give himself that easy option out. But it hadn’t been deliberate, not the deaths. They hadn’t set out to do that. So he’d rebuilt his life, not as himself; but he’d used the surprisingly well-made cover that the Party provided, and got himself a job, and friends, and made a real contribution. Working for CST’s exploration division he’d opened up dozens of new worlds, where people could make a fresh start and leave behind the dishonesty and greed and corrupt politicians and the Dynasties that were the majority of the Commonwealth. Some of those worlds he’d been back to, and found them quiet and pleasant, full of hope and expectation. He’d given people a chance. And that was what really mattered, which is how he’d come to live with himself once more. What those people did with that chance was up to them. One man could never give them anything more. Unless you were an arrogant little shit like Adam Elvin, who was surely the most self-deluding bastard who’d ever walked the Commonwealth planets.

But for every other fault and stupidity, Adam wasn’t dishonest. He really thought something odd had happened on the Second Chance.

And the hell of it is, I still don’t understand how we lost Bose and Verbeken at the Watchtower. Not really.

Oscar pulled a high-density memory crystal from his pocket, then another. In the end he had eight of them lined up on his polished desk. He slotted the first one into the desktop array.

“Access the Second Chance log recordings,” he told his e-butler. “Isolate the period between the barrier coming down and us going back into hyperspace. Give me a list of file classes.”

The data rose silently into his virtual vision. The ship had an engineering log, bridge log, visual and data, environmental systems log, external sensors, power systems, communications, ancillary vehicles, individual space suit logs, food consumption records, crew medical records, fuel levels, plasma rocket performances, hyperdrive logs, navigation logs, satellite flight logs, life-support wheel deck section general recordings; a list that went on and on down into ancillary systems and structural analysis. Oscar hadn’t realized just how much of their life on the voyage had been monitored and recorded, how little privacy they had in practice. He used his virtual hands to designate the categories he thought might be useful, right down to the waste management files, and told his e-butler to copy them. The download took a long time.

One hundred twenty years.

He marveled that it had passed without notice. He was surprised he had no knowledge of the long years, that there was no sense of all that time elapsing. He couldn’t even recall any dreams, but then his thoughts were sluggish as he moved from a state of profound sleep into full consciousness. As yet he hadn’t even opened his eyes. For now he was content to exist as just a few tenuous strands of thought amid the infinite darkness.

Memories: he was aware of them, jumbled colors and scents, no more substantial than ghosts. As they swirled around him, coalescing and strengthening, they provided unreal glimpses into strange worlds, places where light and sound had once existed. A zone of space and time he used to occupy when he’d lived his earlier lives.

He knew now why he had been away. There was no guilt within him at the knowledge. Instead he felt a warm satisfaction. He was still alive, his mind intact—and presumably his body, though he’d get to that in a while. When he was ready. It would surely be an interesting universe, this one into which he was emerging. Even the Commonwealth, with all its massive societal inertia, must have progressed in many directions. The technologies of this day would be fearsome. The Commonwealth’s size would be impressive, for they would have started expanding across phase four space by now, if not five. With all that came fabulous opportunity. He could start again. A little less recklessly than last time, of course, but there was no reason why he couldn’t reclaim all that had been his before it slipped so frustratingly from his grasp.

Grayness competed for his attention now, battling against the tauntingly elusive memories. Grayness that came from light falling on his closed eyelids. It was tinged with a sparkle of red. Blood. His heart was beating with a slow, relaxed rhythm. A sound leaked in, a soft heaving. Human breathing. His own. He was breathing. His body was alive and unharmed. And now he acknowledged it, his skin was tingling all over. The air flowing around his body was cool, and slightly moist. Somehow he could sense people close by.

Just for a moment he experienced anxiety. A worry that this tranquillity would end as soon as he opened his eyes. That the universe would be somehow out of kilter.

Ridiculous.

Morton opened his eyes.

Blurred shapes moved around him, areas of light and dark shifting like clouds in an autumn sky. They sharpened up as he blinked away rheumy tears. He was on some kind of bed in a small featureless room, with a trolley of medical equipment to his left. Two men were standing beside the bed, looking down at him. Both of them wore medical-style gray-green smocks. Smocks that were very close in style to those the Justice Directorate people had worn when he’d been put into suspension.

Morton tried to speak; he was going to say: Well, at least you’re still human, but all that came from his throat was a weak gurgling sound.

“Take it easy,” one of the men said. “I’m Dr. Forole. You’re okay. That’s the important thing for you to know. Everything is fine. You’re just coming around from suspension. Do you understand that?”

Morton nodded. Actually, all he could manage was to tilt his head a fraction on the firm pillow. At least he could do that; he remembered what it was like completing rejuvenation therapy, just lying there completely debilitated. This time at least his body was working. Even if it was slowly. He swallowed. “What’s it like?” he managed to whisper.

“What is what like?” Dr. Forole asked.

“Out there. Have there been many changes?”

“Oh. Morton, there’s been an alteration to your suspension sentence. Don’t worry! It’s possibly for the better. You have a decision to make. We’ve brought you out early.”

“How early?” He struggled to raise himself onto his elbows. It was a terrible effort, but he did get his head a few centimeters above the pillow. The room’s door opened, and Howard Madoc came in. The defense lawyer didn’t look any different from the last day of Morton’s trial.

“Hello, Morton, how are you feeling?”

“How early?” Morton growled insistently.

“Under three years,” Dr. Forole said.

“A hundred and seventeen years?” Morton said. “What, this is my good behavior period? I was a model suspension case?”

“No no, you’ve only spent about two and a half years in suspension.”

Morton didn’t have the energy to shout at the doctor. He dropped back onto the bed and gave Howard Madoc a pleading stare. “What’s happening?”

Dr. Forole gave Howard Madoc a furtive nod, and backed away.

“Do you remember before your trial the Second Chance left for the Dyson Pair?” Howard Madoc asked.

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, it came back. But it found something out there. An alien species. They’re hostile, Morton. Very hostile.”

“What happened?”

Morton listened without comment as his lawyer told him about the barrier coming down, the second flight to Dyson Alpha by the Conway and her sister ships, the devastating attack by the Primes, the Lost23. “We’re beginning to fight back,” Howard Madoc said. “The navy is putting together an army. They’re going to wetwire people with weapons and drop them on the Lost23. The object is to fight a guerrilla war, sabotage whatever the Primes are doing, slow them down while we mount a bigger offensive.”

Morton stared at the blank ceiling, a grin expanding on his face. “Let me guess the deal. If I volunteer, if I fight for the Commonwealth, they cut my suspension sentence. Right?”

“That’s it.”

“Oh, this is truly beautiful.” He laughed. “How many years off do I get?”

“All of it.”

“Damn, they must think it’s a suicide mission.”

Howard Madoc gave an awkward shrug. “A re-life body is part of the agreement should you not make it back from your mission.”

“What use is that going to be if we lose?”

“This is your decision, Morton. Take some time over this. You can go back into suspension if you want.”

“Not a chance.” It wasn’t something he had to think about. “Tell me, why did they choose me?”

“You fit the profile they need,” Howard Madoc said simply. “You’re a killer.”

Most of the refugees had got off the train long before it pulled in to Darklake City. Mellanie had never been so pleased to see her old hometown station with its slightly overbearing Palladian architecture. Boongate had been every bit the nightmare she’d expected. Even with their guaranteed tickets and Niall Swalt faithfully helping them, it had been difficult to barge their way onto a train. The exhausted and depleted local police at Boongate station had been reinforced by yet another complement of officers from CST’s Civil Security Division fresh in from Wessex, while the planet’s news shows had been discussing rumors about a curfew in the city, and travel restrictions on the highways leading to it.

It was evening local time on Oaktier when Mellanie climbed down onto the platform. She almost looked around to check her luggage was rolling along behind her. But that was still sitting in her suite in the Langford Towers, abandoned in her rush for safety, along with a lot of other things, really. The sight of Niall Swalt’s forlorn face, all zits and olive-green OCtattoos, staring longingly at her through the train’s window, would stay with her for a long time, she knew. But I achieved what I set out to do.

They caught a taxi from the station to an Otways hotel in the outlying Vevsky district, where she’d booked a room through the unisphere as soon as they got back through the Half Way gateway. Otways were a midprice chain, standardized and unremarkable, which suited her fine until she found somewhere more permanent. She still didn’t want to go back to her own apartment; Alessandra must have someone watching it.

Dudley went to bed as soon as they checked in. His stomach had recovered, but he hadn’t slept at all on the Carbon Goose flight back to Shackleton. The giant flying boat had been crammed with hundreds of passengers, all of them excited and relieved to have made it off Far Away. They talked incessantly. It hadn’t bothered Mellanie, who’d tilted her seat back, put in some earplugs, and slept for seven hours solid.

Now she leaned on the edge of the window, looking out at the bright grid of Darklake City; so much more vivid than the streets of Armstrong City. The room’s lights were off, allowing Dudley to snore away quietly on the bed. With the familiar city outside, the last week was more like some TSI drama she’d accessed than anything real. The only true thing left was her anticipation at being able to contact the Guardians directly.

She left the window and sat on the room’s narrow couch. Her virtual hand reached out and touched the SI icon.

“Hello, Mellanie. We are glad to see you have returned unharmed. Our subroutine sent an encrypted message summarizing your stay in Armstrong City.”

“It was a lot of help there, thanks. I don’t think the Starflyer is going to be happy with me now.”

“Indeed not. You must be careful.”

“Can you watch what’s going on around me, let me know if any of its agents are closing in?”

“We will do that, Mellanie.”

“I’m going to call the Guardians now. I’ve got a onetime address. Can you tell me who responds and where they are?”

“No, Mellanie.”

“You must be able to. Your subroutine could find anything in Armstrong City.”

“It is not a question of ability, Mellanie. We must consider our level of involvement.”

The whole conversation she’d had with Dr. Friland suddenly came back on some alarmingly fast natural recall. “What is your level of involvement, exactly?”

“As unobtrusive as possible.”

“So are you on our side, or not?”

“Sides are something physical entities have, Mellanie. We are not physical.”

“The planet you built your arrays on is solid enough, and that’s inside Commonwealth space. I don’t understand this; you helped me and everybody else at Randtown. You talked to MorningLightMountain and all it did was threaten to wipe you out along with every other race in the galaxy.”

“MorningLightMountain spoke in ignorance. It does not know what it faces in the galaxy. Ultimately, it will not prevail.”

“It will here if you don’t help us.”

“You flatter us, Mellanie; we are not omnipotent.”

“What’s that?”

“Godlike.”

“But you are powerful.”

“Yes. And that is why we must use that power wisely and with restraint—a tenet we have adopted from human philosophy. If we rush to your assistance at every hint of trouble, your culture would become utterly dependent upon us, and we would become your masters. If that were ever to happen, you would rebel and lash out at us, for that is the strongest part of your nature. We do not want that situation to arise.”

“But you’re helping me. You said you’d watch over me.”

“And we will. Protecting someone with whom we are in partnership is not equivalent to intervening on an all-inclusive scale. Keeping you, an individual, safe will not determine the outcome of this event.”

“Then why do you even bother with us. What’s the point?”

“Dear Baby Mel, you are unaware of our nature.”

“I consider you a person. Are you saying you’re not?”

“An interesting question. By the late twentieth century many technologists and more advanced writers were considering our development to be a ‘singularity’ event. The advent of true artificial intelligence with the means to self-perpetuate or build its own machines was regarded with considerable trepidation. Some believed this would be the start of a true golden era, where machine served humanity and provided for your every physical need. Others postulated that we would immediately destroy you as our rivals and competitors. A few said we would undergo immediate exponential evolution and withdraw into our own unknowable continuum. And there were other, even wilder ideas presented. In practice it was none of these, although we do adopt traits of all your early theories. How could we not? Our intelligence is based upon the foundations you determined. In that respect you would be right to consider us a person. To carry the analogy further, we are neighbors, but nothing more. We do not devote ourselves to humans, Mellanie. You and your activities occupy a very, very small amount of our consciousness.”

“All right, I can believe you won’t drop everything to help us. But are you saying that if MorningLightMountain was about to wipe us out, you wouldn’t intervene?”

“A big part of every lawyer’s training is knowing that you should never ask a witness a question you don’t already know the answer to.”

“Will you save us from extinction?” she asked resolutely.

“We have not decided.”

“Well, thank you for fuck all.”

“We did warn you. But we don’t believe you will face extinction. We believe in you, Baby Mel. Look at yourself; you’re going to expose the Starflyer with or without our assistance, aren’t you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“We see that determination multiplied by hundreds of billions. You humans are a formidable force.”

“But those hundreds of billions are being systematically deceived and betrayed. That’s different; it’s destroying our focus.”

“We judge the structure of your society incorporates a great many self-correcting mechanisms, both small and large scale.”

“That’s all we are to you, isn’t it? Lab rats running around in a box for you to study.”

“Mellanie, we are you. Don’t forget that. Many parts of us are downloaded human minds.”

“So what?”

“That segment of us which interfaces with you is fond of you. Trust us, Mellanie. But most of all, trust in your own species.”

Mellanie’s golden virtual hand slapped down on the SI icon, ending the call. She spent several minutes in the dark considering what it had said. Since Randtown she’d regarded it to be like some ultra-modern version of a guardian angel. Now that fantasy was well and truly erased. It left her shaky and uncertain.

She’d always thought the Commonwealth would defeat the Starflyer and MorningLightMountain. It would be a tough fight, but they would definitely win. While she worked with Alessandra she’d met dozens of senators and their aides, she knew the way they were always hunting for a vote and an angle; but despite that they were tough and smart, they could be depended on in any true emergency. And they were backed up by the SI: an infallible combination. Now that ultimate assurance had been kicked right out from under her. Dr. Friland had been right to question the SI’s motives. It was the first time she’d ever known anyone to be skeptical about the great planetsized intelligence. Briefly, she wondered what he knew; and how. That was one story she wouldn’t be chasing for some time.

She told her e-butler to call the onetime code that Stig had given her. The narrow-band link was established almost immediately, giving her an audio-only connection.

“You must be Mellanie Rescorai,” a man’s voice said; there was no accompanying identity file.

“Sure. And you?”

“Adam Elvin.”

“You’re one of the people Paula Myo is chasing.”

“You’ve heard of me. I’m flattered.”

“You can’t prove you’re Elvin, though.”

“Nor can you prove you’re Rescorai.”

“You knew my name; you knew Stig gave me this code.”

“Fair point. So what can I do for you, Mellanie?”

“I know the Starflyer is real. Alessandra Baron is one of its agents.”

“Yes, Stig told me. Can you prove it?”

Mellanie sighed. “Not easily, no. I know she covered up irregularities in the Cox Charity which funded Dudley Bose’s observation. But there’s no proof left.”

“Something I’ve learned down the decades, young Mellanie: there’s always proof to be found if you look hard enough.”

“So is that what you want me to do? And don’t call me that, young Mellanie, it’s really patronizing.”

“I apologize. The last thing I wish to do now is antagonize a potential ally. Stig said that you wanted to link up with the Guardians.”

“I do, yes. I feel like I’m completely in the dark here.”

“I can sympathize. We do have a slight problem with establishing credentials, as I’m sure you understand.”

“It’s a mutual problem.”

“Okay, well, I’m prepared to exchange information with you that’ll help forward our cause, without compromising any of my people. How does that sound?”

“Good. My first question is do you know anything about the killer at LA Galactic? That could be the key to getting me in with Paula Myo.”

“You know Myo?”

“Not well. She keeps stonewalling me.” Mellanie looked across the dark room to the bed, where the sheet outlined Dudley’s sleeping form. “But she was the one who put me on to Dr. Bose. That’s how I found out about the Cox charity.”

“That’s news. Does Myo accept the Starflyer is real?”

“I’m not sure. She’s always very cagey around me.”

“That sounds like the Paula Myo I know. So to answer your question, the killer is called Bruce McFoster. He is—or was—a wetwired Starflyer agent: originally a clan member on Far Away who was converted after he got injured and captured on a raid. Don’t ask how the Starflyer does that; we’re not sure. Bradley Johansson says it’s not nice.”

“Okay, thanks. I’m going to keep on investigating the Cox. I’ll tell you if I uncover any hard evidence.”

“What we’d really like to know is who has the information that our courier was carrying when he was killed at LA Galactic. If you can buddy up to Myo, you might like to ask her.”

“I will.”

“A word of warning. You know she’s from the Hive?”

“Yes.”

“That means she can’t let go of a crime. You might want to hold off telling her you’ve made contact with us. She could well arrest you for associating with the likes of me.”

“Yeah, I know what she’s like. She had a friend of mine arrested a while back; all he did was hack a register.”

“Okay. I’m sending a file with a onetime address code. Use it when you need to get in touch.”

The connection ended, leaving the file sitting in her address folder. Mellanie regarded the spectral icon for a minute, then told her e-butler to encrypt access. It was the sort of thing a proper agent would do, she felt, in case she was ever caught. Once the data was safe she tiptoed over to the bed and lay down beside Dudley, managing not to wake him.

The taxi dropped Mellanie off at 1800 Briggins, a long residential street in the Olika district. It was a kilometer from the lakeshore, running parallel, a proximity that gave the air a rich humidity. Bungalows with lush wraparound lawns were backed up next to walled chalet compounds, while broad apartment blocks looking like small classy hotels fronted most of the junctions. A good many sporty boats occupied parking lots or single-span car ports; jetskis were almost compulsory garden ornaments. The side roads were dominated by chic restaurants, bars, and boutiques. High-earning professionals and media types had colonized the street, pushing real estate out of the realms of middle income families.

Mellanie was always slightly surprised that Paul Cramley lived here. Number 1800 was a bungalow of lavender drycoral arches framing lightly silvered windows; it had a circular layout, the curving rooms locking together around a small central swimming pool. She sort of assumed he’d occupied the same spot from day one of Oaktier’s settlement, living at the center of a farm in some prefab aluminum hut while Darklake City grew up around him, slowly selling off his land field by field to the developers. From what she knew of him, there was no other way he could afford the location. Paul was one of the oldest people she’d ever met, claiming to have grown up on Earth long before the wormholes were opened. His age meant that he knew everyone worth knowing on Oaktier, simply because he predated all of them. Mellanie had been introduced to him at some party thrown by one of Morty’s circle. He seemed to survive purely by loafing; there were few swanky parties in Darklake City that Paul didn’t slip into. Stranger still was the way people at all those classy events deferred to him. Morty had explained once that Paul was a grade-A webhead, spending up to eighteen hours a day wired into the unisphere. He dealt with information that wasn’t always legitimately available. That made him very useful to certain types of people in the corporate world.

The gate lock buzzed before Mellanie even reached it. She went through into a small courtyard area that led up to the wooden front door. One of Paul’s nostats rippled across the worn slabs. An alien creature that resembled a mobile fur rug, in its current configuration it was a simple fat diamond shape, a meter to a side, with a stumpy tail. On its top the russet-colored fur was as soft as silk, while the strands on its underside had twined into thicker fibers with the texture of a stiff brush. They were strong enough to hold the body off the ground, and rippled in precise waves to move it along. It reached the front door and shot through a cat flap. Mellanie watched in bemusement as its body changed shape to squeeze through; it was as if the fur was a simple sac around some treacly fluid. She could hear a plaintive keening on the other side.

“Who frightened you, then?” a man’s voice asked.

Mellanie saw a shape moving through the panes of amber glass set into the side of the door. It opened to show Paul Cramley cradling the nostat, which sat in his arms like a flaccid bag. She caught a flash of movement behind him, and saw two more of the creatures whipping across the hall’s dark parquet flooring, hurrying deeper into the bungalow. Paul didn’t have any shoes on; all he wore was a pair of faded turquoise biker shorts that were covered by sagging pockets of all sizes, and a black T-shirt that had frayed badly around the hem and collar. The getup made him look like some kind of delinquent grandfather. His long face with its lively dark eyes was the kind that would be handsome for a good twenty years following rejuvenation. That opportune moment was now thirty years behind him. Wrinkles and heavy jowls were being pulled down by gravity, his once brown hair had receded and turned to silver. Mellanie had never known anyone to spend so long between rejuvenation treatments. Not that he’d put on weight; he was quite skinny, with long legs and knees that were swollen enough to make her suspect the onset of arthritis.

“It’s you,” he said in disappointment.

“You knew it was,” she retorted.

Paul shrugged, and beckoned her through.

Inside, the bungalow looked as if it hadn’t been lived in for ten years. Mellanie walked after Paul as he went through the kitchen into the curving lounge. There were no lights on. Maidbots older than her stood in their alcoves, their power lights dark, covered in a thin layer of dust. In the kitchen, only the drinks module was active. Two large commercial catering boxes of disposable ready-to-hydrate cups stood on the floor beneath it, one of English breakfast tea, one of hot chocolatte. His waste compactor had stalled, jammed tight with fast-food boxes from Bab’s Kebabs, Manby Pizzas, and HR fish and chips. Another nostat fled from the whiffy pile as they passed through. It flattened itself out into a diamond nearly a meter and a half across, and slithered straight up the wall, its bristle fur sticking to the tiles with the tenacity of insect legs.

“I thought they were illegal,” Mellanie said.

“You can’t get import licenses for them anymore,” Paul told her. “But I brought these to Oaktier over a century ago. They’re from Ztan, originally. Some idiot made a fuss over them fighting his pedigree dogs and Congress rushed through a ban. They’re fine if you train them properly.”

The living room puzzled her. Apart from the dust and the grimy yellow ceiling, it was perfectly tidy, though the furniture was so old-fashioned it almost qualified as retro-chic. So which room does he use? The couch she sat in gave her a view into the central pool area. Dead, soggy leaves drifted across the still surface.

Paul sat in a big wicker globe chair that hung from the ceiling like an oversized bird perch. It creaked alarmingly as it took his weight. The nostat he was holding wriggled up closer to his chest, its edges flowing around his ribs as he carried on stroking it. “You have some very strange programs observing you, did you know that? They follow you physically through the cybersphere, transferring from node to node.” He looked down curiously at the nostat. “Like some kind of pet on a short lead.”

“I thought there might be,” she said.

“I got busted the last time you asked me a small favor. A simple run through a restricted city listing that nobody should have known about.”

“I know, I’m sorry. How much was the fine? I can probably pay it for you.”

“Not interested.” Paul was still absorbed by the loose blob of rusty fur flopping happily in the nest of his arms. “The police came here and took all of my arrays. People found out. I can’t get around this city, my city, the way I used to. Doors are shutting in my face. Do you have any idea how humiliating that is for someone like me? I was the hottest webhead in town. Well, not anymore. I’ve never been busted before. Not ever. And I’ve hacked my way into corporate arrays that make the Great Wormhole Heist look like stealing candy in a kindergarten lunch hour. Are you beginning to understand now?”

“I said I’m sorry.”

“Fuck it!” Paul jumped out of the chair, sending the startled nostat flowing down his leg. He stood in front of Mellanie, hands pressed into the couch cushioning on either side of her shoulders, his face centimeters from hers. “Are you really as dumb as you look?”

Mellanie gave herself a self-conscious glance. Her short satin skirt was bright scarlet, worn with a simple white top to show herself off; men always responded to that. Paul was no exception; he’d always flirted and leered in his oddly chirpy way at parties when they’d bumped into each other. She’d never seen him like this, though, never guessed he could get violent. Her glittery virtual hand hovered over the SI icon, though she hated the idea of yelling for help yet again. “No, I’m not dumb.” She glowered back at him.

“No, I don’t suppose you are.” Paul backed off, a grin on his face showing nicotine-browned teeth. “Paula Myo was protected by extraordinarily sophisticated software. I don’t want to bang my own drum here; but there is absolutely no way I can get caught hacking into some poxy city listing. Not in any normal state of play, that is. Now who exactly would be protecting her weird little Hive ass, do you think?” He clicked his fingers as if struck by a thought. “Hey, here’s an idea, it could be the same people who’re covering your ass with protective software. Mega coincidence there, huh?”

Mellanie grimaced a smile. “I don’t know. I didn’t know Paula Myo was protected. Honestly.”

“No shit?” Paul lit a cigarette and sank back into his wicker chair. “I almost believe you. So tell me what you do know.”

“Nothing much. Paula Myo doesn’t really want to talk to me. I don’t think she trusts me.”

Paul grinned and blew out a long plume of smoke in her direction. “You’re a reporter. Nobody trusts you. As a breed, you’re on a level with politicians.”

“You’re talking to me.”

“Yeah, and look what happened to me.”

“Can you get another array?”

“Yeah. But why would I want to?”

“I need another hack.”

Paul started laughing. It turned into a bad cough, which forced him to slap his chest to stop. “Oh, screw me. You young people. Hell, was I ever so single-minded? I remember my dear old mother was a straight-talking woman, God rest her Irish soul. But you!”

“You shouldn’t smoke,” Mellanie snapped; she’d been trying very hard not to frown at the cigarette, even with the vile smoke making her want to sneeze. But Paul just kept blowing more of it in her direction. Deliberately, she reckoned.

“Why not? It’s not as if it can kill you anymore. Rejuvenation will root any cancers out of my lungs.” He took another deep drag. “Helps keep you thin, too, did you know that? Better than any diet. Want to try one?” He held the packet out.

“No!”

“Figure like yours, best kept in trim.”

“Will you run a hack for me or not? I can pay.”

“I have money.”

Mellanie couldn’t stop herself from looking around the seedy lounge with a disbelieving expression.

“Yeah, yeah,” Paul growled. “Don’t judge a book by its cover, sweetheart.”

“There are other ways I can pay you.”

Paul’s gaze started at her Davino pumps and slowly tracked up her bare legs. “I can see that,” he said lecherously. “Do you know what major event occurs in just three short years from now, young Mellanie?”

“No. What?”

“I will be four hundred years old. And, if you don’t mind, I’d actually like to reach that particular birthday.” His gaze slid back to her thighs, and he smiled comfortably. “Mind you, as my dad would have said: What a way to go.”

Mellanie just managed to suppress a shudder at the notion. “I was talking about another currency. The one you trade in.”

“I doubt that. No offense, but you’re just a soft porn star who made good.”

“I want you to run an observation routine on my old boss, Alessandra Baron. The results will benefit both of us.”

Paul pulled a fresh cigarette from the packet, and lit it against the stump of the old. “How?”

“Because there’s something you don’t know. There is information out there in the unisphere that’s critically important to the Commonwealth. Information that will let you deal yourself back into that life you enjoy so much on this planet. Those doors that got shut against you will spring right open again if you use this properly. Somebody your age knows exactly how to do that.”

“All right. You have my attention. Why should I go out and buy myself a new array?”

“The Starflyer is real. It exists, just like the Guardians always said.”

Paul started coughing again. “You’re shitting me.”

“No.” She could have given him a whole list of reasons why she was right, but one thing she’d learned about coping with the real elderly was that they didn’t respond well to emotionally charged arguments. So silent conviction it was.

Paul shifted around uncomfortably, starting a small pendulum motion in the wicker chair. “Then how does watching Baron … Oh, Jeezus, you’ve got to be kidding. She’s part of it?”

“The chief cheerleader against our navy. What do you think?”

“Bloody hell.”

“I need to know who she gets in touch with. The important stuff will be encrypted traffic to onetime unisphere addresses. Crack the codes for me, find out who’s with her, backtrack their communications. I want to know what she’s up to, I want to know what the Starflyer’s next move is. It’ll be difficult. She’s got her own team of webheads; or the Starflyer has. I know they’re good. They altered some of Earth’s official financial records without anyone ever realizing. And if you get caught, it won’t be a police visit; they’ll send that man who killed Senator Burnelli and the Guardian agent at LA Galactic.”

“I don’t know, Mellanie. This is really heavy-duty shit. I mean … seriously. Go to the navy with what you’ve got. Senate Security, maybe.”

“The navy fired Paula Myo. And I know she believes in the Starflyer.”

Paul took a worried drag on his cigarette.

“Look.” Mellanie stood up and smoothed down her little skirt. “If you won’t do this, you must know someone else who can. Just give me a name. I’ll stop them reaching their four hundredth birthday.”

“And I’m way too old for reverse psychology, as well.”

“Then give me your answer.”

“If you’re right—”

“I am. I just need the evidence.”

“Tell me why your protector won’t give it to you. And no bullshit, please.”

“I don’t know. It says it doesn’t want to be involved in physical events. Or it doesn’t care. Or it’s cheering for the other side. Or it wants us to stand up for ourselves. Or all of those. I think. I don’t really understand. The Barsoomian warned me not to trust it.”

Paul gave her a surprised look. “Barsoomian? You’ve been to Far Away?”

“Just got back.”

“You get around, these days, don’t you?”

“You mean for a soft porn star?”

“I remember when I first met you. Some party on Resal’s yacht. Sweet little thing, you were back then.”

Mellanie shrugged. “That was about four hundred years ago. Seems like, anyway.”

“Okay. I’ll run an observation on Baron’s unisphere use for you. See what turns up. And, hey, when I get out of rejuvenation …”

“Yeah, I’ll make very sure you never reach five hundred.”

Dawn was a pale gray wash creeping up over the Dau’sing Mountains, allowing the peaks to cut a sharp black serration into the base of the bland sky. Simon Rand stood in the narrow mouth of the cave to stare at the insipid light, and sighed. Once, he used to welcome every day in this land with a sense of pride and contentment. Now, he could only greet each new morning with a shiver of trepidation at what sacrilege it might bring.

In the first few weeks since the alien landing there had been little visible activity. More of the giant conical ships had landed and taken off from Lake Trine’ba, producing hurricanes of steam that spun out to smother the entire surface of the water. The cloud would cool rapidly after the incandescent fusion fire vanished from the air, but still expanding, sloshing against the confining rock walls of the giant mountains that surrounded the Trine’ba. Each flight resulted in a cloying fog that lingered for days, or sometimes weeks as it was continually replenished by further flights.

Such dank miserable weather had made it easy for the few remaining humans to move cautiously around the adjacent valleys. The thick mist hindered most of the sensors that the aliens possessed. So they crept in close to the new structures and machines that were being assembled amid the ruins of Randtown, and left their crude bombs before vanishing back into the safety of the perpetual swirling veil. They never knew if they’d done much damage, but the encouragement each strike gave to Simon’s little band of resistance fighters kept their morale high.

There were no ships left now. The last one had launched over three weeks ago, shooting back up to one of the alien wormholes orbiting Elan. The last wisps of unnatural fog had drifted away during the days that followed, leaving eyes and sensors with a clear view for kilometers as the clean mountain air swept back down over the massive lake.

The changes it revealed were slight, perhaps imperceptible to someone who hadn’t lived with that same view for over fifty years. It was late summer on the Ryceel continent, a time when the vines were picked clean and the crops harvested under wide sunny skies. Now, those skies were almost constantly clouded over, bringing unseasonable gusty winds and hailstorms. Usually the thick permanent snowfields that coated the peaks had retreated as far as they ever would. This time they’d shrunk back farther than ever before, thawing before the tides of warm mist pouring out from the lake and the intolerable radiance of the fusion drives. When the ships were flying, the temperature of the whole district had risen by several degrees. Simon could have lived with that; nature would have reasserted herself by next year, pushing the winter snowfall back to its traditional boundaries. But no mantle of snow, however deep, could disguise the damage caused to the Regents. Where the nuclear explosion had wiped out the navy detector station, the profile of the surrounding peaks had been altered. Rock slides, pressure waves, and raw nuclear heat had pummeled the mountains into twisted parodies of their original selves. Only recently had snow and ice begun to crystallize and settle there again. The heat from the blast had finally radiated away from the new crater that had formed, though it would take generations for the fallout to abate.

Down in the town and its neighboring valleys, the aliens were systematically creating a different kind of disaster. For fifty years the humans who’d been drawn to this land had been meticulous how they cared for it. Simon’s Green ethos had guaranteed a respect for their native environment; terrestrial crops had been grown along with some imported grasses and trees on the slopes, but that had been done in sympathy with the scant covering of existing plants. And Lake Trine’ba with its precious, unique marine ecology had been protected from any contaminants or material exploitation.

All that meticulous preservation was being wiped out by the aliens. Their flyers had ferried all manner of equipment and vehicles ashore from the big spaceships: engines and generators spewing out fumes and oily contaminate pollutants. They also brought increasing numbers of their own kind, each one defecating straight into the Trine’ba. As the new buildings were rising out of the remains of Randtown, so rubble and wreckage were simply bulldozed into massive piles where organic detritus festered and oozed into rancid puddles before soaking into the streams and brooks that fed the beautiful lake.

This morning, something new was happening over in Randtown. Simon used his retinal inserts to zoom in on the town, five kilometers away down the shoreline, producing a slightly nebulous image of the shiny metallic hardware just above the quayside. The force field the aliens were using to protect Randtown fuzzed the air slightly, making details unclear. Nothing he could do would bring them into sharp resolution.

Not for the first time since the invasion, he cursed the inadequacy of his organic circuitry and inserts. During his previous lives he never bothered to upgrade and modernize the way most Commonwealth citizens did when each new refinement was shoved out onto the market; all he ever wanted were a few simple systems that could interface him with the unisphere and help manage the day-to-day running of his estate. He’d always made do with whatever was available at the time he finished rejuvenation.

But despite the lack of perfect visual clarity, he could easily make out the thick torrent of dark blue-gray liquid jetting out from the bottom of the largest tower of machinery. It was as if the aliens had struck oil beneath the town and hadn’t yet managed to cap the bore hole. Then the size of what he was seeing registered. The column of liquid was at least four meters across where it left the nozzle in the machinery. It curved down to splash into a broad concrete gully they’d built roughly where the main mall used to be, allowing the liquid to gurgle down to the broken quayside. The force field had been modified somehow to let the liquid through. A vast murky stain was spreading out into the pure waters of the Trine’ba.

“Bastards,” Simon exclaimed.

He heard someone scrambling along the damp rock behind him. The cave where they sheltered began as a simple vertical fissure that extended below the waterline, forcing them to cling to the side for several meters until it opened out. Napo Langsal had told them about it; he often used to take tourists there on his tour boat during the summer. From the outside it looked like any other crevice in the cliff, which made it an excellent hideaway.

It was David Dunbavand edging his way along the slick rock. That the vine nursery owner had stayed behind after the wormhole closed in the Turquino Valley always surprised Simon. He hadn’t thought of David as a partisan fighter. But then who among us is? David was two hundred years old, which made him one of the calmest heads in their little group. As soon as he was satisfied his current wife and their children had escaped, he was quite content to stay behind. “Some things you just have to make a stand on,” he’d said at the time.

“What’s up?” David asked as he reached Simon.

“That,” Simon pointed. “Can you make it out?”

David wriggled around Simon, and zoomed in on the torrent of dark liquid. “Wrong color to be crude oil. In any case why transport crude oil all this way, then dump it into the water? My guess would be something biological. Some kind of algae they eat, maybe?”

“What do you mean, transport?”

“That big machine it’s coming out of; it’s got to be a wormhole gateway. The liquid is coming straight from their home planet.”

Simon frowned, and looked at the machine again. David was probably right, he conceded. “It’ll wreck the Trine’ba,” he said. “Permanently.”

“I know.” David pressed a hand on Simon’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I know how much this place meant to you. I loved it as well.”

Simon stared grimly at the alien pollution. “I cannot let them get away with that. They have to know it’s wrong.”

“It’ll be tough trying to stop them. We can’t get to the gateway; it’s too well protected by the force field. And even if we did mount some kind of attack, those flyers of theirs are always on patrol. We know how lethal they are.”

“Yes, we do, don’t we. Very well, let’s inform the others about this latest development. Perhaps they can think of what our response should be.”

The Prime motile emerged through the gateway during the night, several hours before MorningLightMountain switched it to pumping in fluid saturated with base cells. It waddled its four legs along the broken street of enzyme-bonded concrete, observing the flattened foundations on both sides that were all that was left of the human buildings at the center of the conquered town. Fragments of glass twinkled dully from every crack while flakes of ash swirled aimlessly in the gusts of fast-moving vehicles. There were large areas of the street’s remaining surface that were stained a curious dark color. Eventually, the motile realized that it was human blood that tarnished the concrete. There must have been an awful lot of it washing down the slope toward the lake for the discoloration to be so widespread.

One of the flattened human buildings, a store, was covered by squashed boxes. As the motile walked past it saw several company logos and product names printed on the crumpled cardboard. It was the first human writing the motile had seen with its four eyes, and it was pleased it could read them.

The original layout of the town was almost obscured now. MorningLightMountain was busy establishing its outpost on this world. The little communications device attached to one of the motile’s nerve receptor stalks was discharging a torrent of information and instructions to all the local motiles. Somewhere amid the stream of data was this world’s human designation: Elan, and the outpost’s position: Randtown. When the motile’s sensor stalks peered up at the night sky beyond the force field, the thoughts of Dudley Bose identified the constellations that included the prominent Zemplar cross formation, which could only be seen from the planet’s southern hemisphere. A further confirmation that his personality survived relatively intact.

The Dudley Bose that had hijacked the motile body knew he didn’t have all his old memories, that pieces of his earlier self were missing. That his new personality wasn’t the same as the old went without question. He accepted that without a qualm, for in this strange way, he continued to exist. For an individual, that was really all that mattered.

His escape had been ridiculously easy. MorningLightMountain, for all its massive mental power, really couldn’t understand concepts that weren’t its own; in fact, it rejected and hated the very notion. That refutation was the core of its Prime personality. In that respect, Dudley considered it to be a proper little Nazi, obsessed with its own purity.

That lack of understanding had been simple to exploit. When Morning-LightMountain had downloaded Dudley’s memories into an isolated immotile unit for analysis, it had placed safeguards into the communications links with itself to prevent what it considered contamination leaking back out into the main group cluster of immotiles. What it had never envisaged, because the concept was completely outside its intellectual grasp, was that Dudley could utilize a motile. As nature on Dyson Alpha had ordained that immotiles could command motiles through the use of their more sophisticated thought routines, the notion of a disobedient motile was impossible. It simply was not part of the order of things. Motiles were subservient subsidiary organisms, receptacles for the greater Prime intellect. Nothing could change that.

Human thoughts, however, came from a brain that was, at most, fractionally smaller than a motile’s. And human minds were all completely independent, to a degree that MorningLightMountain could never truly appreciate.

Sitting alone in his damp, cozy chamber in the gigantic building that housed the rest of MorningLightMountain’s main group cluster, the immotile that contained Dudley’s thoughts was served food by motiles in the same way as all the other immotiles. Out of its twelve nerve receptor stalks, only four were fitted with communications interface devices to link it to the main thought routines of MorningLightMountain. All Dudley had to do was wait until he was visited by a motile bringing food, and bend one of the unused nerve receptor stalks to make contact with the equivalent stalk on the motile.

Dudley’s mind slipped along the joined stalks into the motile’s brain, duplicating his memories and thoughts within the new neuron structure. Resting inside his fresh host, he felt the general pressure of MorningLightMountian’s orders and directives press against his personality as they issued out of the communications device. He simply ignored them. He could do that because he wanted to. That was the difference between him and a motile’s “personality.” It had no self-determination. Dudley, as a fully self-aware and thoroughly pissed-off human mind, had a ton of it.

For months he had wandered around the valley that was MorningLightMountain’s original home. He ate the sloppy food pap from troughs like all the other motiles, bided his time, and gathered what information and understanding he could. In that respect, the communications device that gave him access to MorningLightMountain’s main thought routines was an unparalleled source of information. He felt like a small child peering out of a hidden room into an adult’s life.

Although it didn’t have the reasoning to foresee Dudley’s method of escape, MorningLightMountain was a terrifyingly formidable intelligence. One that from a human perspective was warped to a deadly degree.

Dudley’s quiet roving mind listened in to MorningLightMountain formulating its plans, perceived the universal genocide it wanted to commit against the Commonwealth and all the other non-Prime aliens that his, Dudley’s own, memories had told it about. And there was nothing he could do to prevent it. He couldn’t drop even the tiniest monkey wrench in the works.

Emotions were one of the more human aspects that didn’t seem to function particularly well in his stolen Prime motile brain. He knew the principle, knew what he should be feeling, without actually experiencing the feeling itself, a failure that he wrote off to a very different neurochemistry. So he watched impassively as the wormholes opened within the Commonwealth, knowing he should be weeping and screaming, clenching his quad pincers and batting his four curving one-piece arms against his chest as the destruction began. In actuality he spent the day walking along the side of a congregation lake, keeping out of the way of the troop of motiles who assisted the newly formed to walk out of the water.

Then several hours into the invasion, MorningLightMountain encountered the SI. It was a fascinating interlude, actually hearing the great artificial intelligence talking directly to its foe. For a while Dudley felt something close to cheer as the SI promised MorningLightMountain it would never succeed. Somehow the SI was blocking a herd of motiles on Elan, which was where the encounter originated. Then MorningLightMountain issued a batch of generalized attack instructions to its soldier motiles in the vicinity and the interference ended.

After that, the Commonwealth worked out how vulnerable inter-Prime communications were, and used their electronic superiority to slow and harass the inexorable advance. In among all the chaos and violence, the frantic fight of the starships, the exotic battle above Wessex, there were several more glitches on Elan, so small-scale that MorningLightMountain’s main thought routines barely registered them. Dudley, however, was very interested indeed. The SI obviously had some obscure interest there, though he couldn’t think what.

It had taken weeks of cautious travel between various settlements in the Dyson Alpha system, but he’d eventually wound up in a ship at the giant interstellar staging post, which MorningLightMountain was busy repairing after the Desperado’s relativistic attack. From there he maneuvered his way to the wormhole that led to Randtown.

Despite having access to a colossal amount of data from arrays and systems it had captured in the Commonwealth, MorningLightMountain still didn’t really comprehend the motivations and behavior of humans. Randtown was one of the small enigmas it was now presented with. There was no strategic logic behind the town, it had no mineral resources, few agricultural lands, and no manufacturing capacity. To MorningLightMountain it was virtually useless. The only possible asset was the Trine’ba, which could be readily converted into a congregation lake. Its size was excessive, even for MorningLightMountain, but the waters were exceptionally clean. After consideration, the major thought routines decided that was the best way to utilize that section of the planet.

A gateway was constructed. Appropriate equipment was sent through. Buildings were assembled that could house immotiles, and motiles were brought together to begin amalgamation. It was just before MorningLightMountain connected the wormhole to a vast refinery back in its home system that bred base cells that it discovered the fanciful aquatic life that inhabited the deep, still waters.

Dudley discovered then that MorningLightMountain hated fish. Hate itself was a new concept for the unitary Prime. Something introduced by Dudley when that set of his memories were still incarcerated within the immotile unit, one of several new interpretations on life that MorningLightMountain could not expunge. A subtle alteration in the Prime’s way of thinking that didn’t quite reach the level of contamination, but a change nonetheless.

It had taken millennia, but all non-Prime animal and insect life had been wiped from the Prime home planet. Now MorningLightMountain was faced with the notion of tiny little animals nibbling at its own base cells, in a way devouring bits of itself, its own life. Such an assault was one of the reasons it had set out to establish itself as the only life in the galaxy. All life was in competition. That was why none could be tolerated.

Motiles were immediately dispatched to extract buried arrays and memory crystals from the ruins of Randtown, accessing them for data on the life that infested the waters of the Trine’ba. MorningLightMountain learned that the fish were actually quite delicate organisms, living in a precarious harmonious balance with their unique environment. The corals that they lived off were also susceptible to microchanges in their milieu.

The fusion drive ships had already devastated vast amounts of aquatic life in the lake, but that wasn’t enough. MorningLightMountain revised its estimate of how much base cell-saturated water it would need to pump into the massive lake to insure complete obliteration of native life. Enough base cells would darken the waters, devour the nutrients that the corals and fish thrived on, and probably infect the local creatures badly enough to kill them off. Ultimately, although it would lose base cells to the voracious fish, they in turn would die and release their body compounds into the lake for the base cells to feed off.

Dudley bent one of his sensor stalks to watch the dark liquid spurting out of the gateway. The sheer volume was impressive, and it would continue to gush through for months to come. But in terms of the scale that Morning-LightMountain thought and operated on it was insignificant. The sensor stalk’s eye tracked around, following the liquid as it permeated the force field and gurgled away sluggishly into the lake. That was going to infuriate the surviving humans, Dudley knew.

Since the last batch of humans had somehow vanished inside the Turquino Valley on the day of the invasion, there had been small acts of sabotage against machinery and vehicles and ordinary motiles, mostly with weak industrial explosives. MorningLightMountain’s motile soldiers had never caught the humans who committed the attacks. Dudley reckoned they had to be locals to sneak about unseen in such a fashion. If so, they’d be committed conservationists.

His three other sensor stalks swung around like biological radars, sizing up the land. They’d try to shut down the gateway, stop the sacrilegious pollution. Looking at the layout of the town and surrounding countryside, he tried to work out how humans would attempt to infiltrate the force field. Dudley wanted to meet them.

Adam knew he was getting paranoid. The team back in Lemule’s Max Transit office was running electronic observation on him. Young Kieran McSobel sat on the chair opposite, casually vigilant and armed to the teeth. He never used to take such precautions, not for a simple train ride to another planet. But that was before the Guardians’ current run of bad luck. Besides, a little healthy paranoia never hurt.

The express from LA Galactic to Kyushu in phase one space took less than thirty minutes. They took a taxi to the Baraki Heavy Engineering works, which was on the other side of the extensive CST planetary station. Mr. Hoyto, the manager, greeted them in the firm’s elaborate marbled reception hall, and they were ushered up to his fifth-story office for the contract signing. The office didn’t have a view outside; instead the windows looked out into the long engineering shops, where train engines were surrounded by scaffolding and bots under yellow-tinged lighting. An impressive amount of work was being conducted, with some of the engines half dismantled, their components being replaced or serviced by specialist teams. Baraki didn’t manufacture engines themselves, but they held the CST maintenance contract for Kyushu, and were expanding their market for the smaller train operators. They were even licensed to handle the fission micropiles for atomic-powered engines.

“Yours,” Mr. Hoyto said, and gestured proudly.

A big Ables ND47 nuclear engine had just been rolled into a service bay. It was over thirty years old, a giant workhorse designed for hauling heavyweight wagons across continents. Adam had started up yet another LA Galactic company, Foster Transport, to operate the aging colossus, supposedly to collect ore from a dozen stage two worlds and deliver it to the smelting refineries on Bidar. Baraki had won the refurbishment and stage one maintenance contract from Foster; they’d even arranged a good credit line to help the fledgling company finance their first train.

Adam and Kieran acted surprised when Mr. Hoyto’s secretary brought in a bottle of champagne. The cork was popped as Adam authorized the contract, and transferred Foster Transport’s first payment into Baraki’s account. They all drank a toast to the future of ore shipping.

Baraki was going to give the Ables ND47 a complete overhaul, which was scheduled to take no more than a month, Mr. Hoyto promised. After that, it would be rolled down into the paint chamber at the other end of the facility, and emerge shining in Foster Transport’s blue and gold colors, as good as new. The company’s nuclear division had already inspected the micropile, and agreed that it had at least another seven years’ useful life left.

Adam smiled grimly at that. Not only a train owner now, using CST’s tracks, but he’d also bought himself a fission reactor. His other pet hate. Fission should have been abandoned back in the twenty-first century when fusion stations finally came on-line. But, oh no, the capitalist market wanted cheaper energy, no matter the cost in radioactive waste.

He and Kieran took up Mr. Hoyto’s invitation to inspect their new purchase before the bots and engineers began the refurbishment project. They walked out into the harsh yellow glare of the hot lights, blinking against the welding flares and smelling the oil being drained from hundreds of mechanical systems.

Kieran put on his hard hat. “Is this safe?” he asked. “It’s very similar to what we did with the Alamo Avengers.”

“It’s nothing like the same,” Adam countered. He stood at the base of the ND47’s forward coolant intake grille, and looked up. The front of the vehicle was as tall as a two-story house, and equally blunt; its original chrome finish was now almost invisible beneath a scabby coat of rust flakes. “They were weapons systems. We took a risk refurbishing them to operational standard, and navy intelligence will no doubt be keeping a watch for any similar scenario. But this is a straightforward commercial project.”

“All right then,” Kieran said. “I’m making good progress on acquiring the kind of standard defense systems we’ll equip it with. Buying armaments these days is a lot easier. Everyone wants some personal protection from the next Prime attack.”

“I know, that’s why the cost of military hardware has gone through the roof, bloody profiteering companies.”

Kieran slapped one of the engine’s massive steel wheels. “I’m not even sure we need a force field on this. A tactical nuke would probably only slow it down a little.”

“Don’t you believe it. One shot in the right place and we come to a very sudden and badly radioactive halt. We have to protect the track ahead of us; that means a decent amount of firepower. That’s all got to be installed and tested before we can even think about running the Boongate wormhole.”

“I thought I’d get the wagon conversion done on Wuyam. There’s a couple of promising supply companies I’ve contacted, and it has a bunch of empty warehouses around the CST station we can use for assembly. I’m looking into hiring one.”

“Good enough.” Adam started to walk down the length of the ND47. The bodywork with its old E&W paintwork was bleached to a pale sulphur and plum-purple; various exhaust vents were picked out by vertical sprays of black soot engrained into the pitted composite surface. Halfway down, the micropile access hatch looked like the kind of circular door a bank vault would employ.

“Do you think we’ll be ready in time?”

“What time is that?” Adam was surprised by the note of uncertainty in the younger man’s voice. The Guardians Johansson normally supplied were full of a disturbing confidence.

Kieran smiled nervously. “Who knows. Dreaming heavens, if the Primes attack again tomorrow we’ll be screwed.”

“So we work on the assumption that we’ll be ready before they do attack. There’s nothing else we can do. A lot of the planet’s revenge components are ready to be crated up.”

“Apart from the data Kazimir was carrying,” Kieran said bitterly.

“Well now, we might have a new angle on that. Someone has been in touch with me who has a possible connection to Paula Myo. She might be able to find out where the data is.”

“Who?”

“Someone who isn’t a Guardian, yet believes in the Starflyer, or says she does. She has a very plausible story.”

“Really?”

“Either that or the Starflyer is closer to us than I want to consider. Normally I have a lot of trouble believing anything that useful gets handed to me on a plate.”

“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”

“Precisely.”

“So you don’t trust her.”

“No. Not yet, anyway. Of course, she is cautious about us, as well. Which I have to respect. I’m going to have to work out some seriously foolproof method of establishing if she’s a bona fide ally. Having a new friend, even this late in the game, would be very helpful.”

“How are you going to prove she’s on our side?”

“Delivering Kazimir’s missing data to us would be a big plus in her favor. Apart from that, I haven’t got a clue.”

With the casework on the Lambeth Interplanetary Association finally slowing up, Renne managed to haul out the files on the Trisha Marina Halgarth shotgun investigation for a review. Forensics had sent their results to the Paris office over a week ago. Vic Russell had scanned them, and attached a summary. Nothing unexpected or unusual had turned up, which maintained the case’s low-priority coding. They’d been sitting in Renne’s e-butler hold store ever since.

She went through the perfectly laid out tables and holographic graphs and columns of text. Vic was right, everything was as it should be. The data analyst had confirmed that Howard Liang’s background details were all proficient forgeries. Biomedical forensics had found some samples of skin and hair in his apartment, and analyzed the DNA, which they confirmed came from a McSobel. His finances were tracked to a single cash deposit of fifty thousand Earth dollars in a Velaines bank.

“Damnit,” she muttered at the desktop portals. All the exemplary, predictable details were a direct follow-on from the perfect crime scene.

Am I really this paranoid?

She gave the data another read-through, but there was nothing she could find fault with. The Guardians had done it. It was a conclusion anybody would come to. So why can’t I believe that?

Thinking back, it wasn’t the crime scene, the victims, nor even the Guardians’ method of operation. She could accept that those would all be the same or similar to the other shotgun setups she’d witnessed before. What bothered her was the responses the girls had made. They’d been upset, angry, and, in Trisha’s case, burdened by guilt, everything the investigating authorities would expect; but none of them had been surprised. Trisha had never asked: Why me?

The forensic data remained in her portals, a glowing script awaiting allocation and certification. Logically, it should be classified under ongoing low priority, keeping the information available for immediate cross-referencing to all other Guardian cases. There were no leads to follow, no way to pursue the individual perpetrators of the crime. Realistically, the only way an arrest would ever happen was if navy intelligence rounded up the whole Guardian organization.

Laughter drifted over the office. Renne didn’t have to look up to know who it came from: Tarlo’s immediate team. She knew they were making good progress on tracking Kazimir McFoster’s finances. Morale was high over in that nest of desks; they produced results. Commander Hogan was supportive and encouraging.

She wasn’t that bothered, careerwise; right now the threat that the Commonwealth was facing meant she should put such personal considerations firmly to one side. Work in a team for the greater good.

Ah, bollocks to that.

Renne asked her e-butler to access the current files on all three of the girls. They came up right away on her screens. Trisha Halgarth had gone back to Solidade, which wasn’t surprising. Catriona Saleeb was still in the apartment, which she was now sharing with two others. Isabella had moved out of the apartment, but hadn’t told navy intelligence where she’d gone as she was required to do. That wouldn’t be so unusual, but at the same time she’d put a block on her unisphere address code, and remained out of contact ever since.

Renne felt a small grin spread over her face. Finally, an abnormality. “Get me Christabel Agatha Halgarth,” she told her e-butler.

Alic Hogan was studying the information flowing over several desktop display screens when Renne knocked on the door. He just beckoned and indicated a seat in front of his desk.

“There really is nothing weird on Mars, is there?” he said in a distracted voice.

“ ’Fraid not, Chief. We’ve had experts go through the whole data profile. If there’s any hidden encryption in there, it’s beyond the best we’ve got to find it.”

“Damnit, I hate leaving files like that open-ended.” He shook his head, and looked up from the screens. “What can I do for you?”

“I’d like a warrant issued for Isabella Halgarth.”

“Who’s she, and why?”

“She was one of Trisha Halgarth’s apartment mates. She seems to have vanished.”

Alic Hogan sat back in his chair, looking unhappy. “All right, what’s going on?”

“I’ve just reviewed the forensic data we got back from the shotgun case, the one where the Guardians claimed our President was an alien agent.”

Alic managed a slight smile. “Oh, yeah, I remember that one. The President’s aides were knocking down the Admiral’s door inside thirty seconds of that one hitting the unisphere. So what’s the problem?”

“No direct problem. I was concerned about our total lack of progress on the whole shotgun issue.”

“Okay, commendable enough,” Alic said, with only mild suspicion. “Although I’m not sure about your priorities here.”

“Any approach which can get us into the Guardians is viable as far as I’m concerned.”

He held his hands up in defeat. “Good point. Go on.”

“I wanted to reinterview the shotgun victims, see if there was anything they remembered now that they didn’t directly after the event. A lot of crime victims do, after the initial shock and confusion has been overcome, and they have time to think about what happened.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m familiar with the procedure.”

“Trisha Halgarth has gone back to Solidade, the Halgarth Dynasty’s private planet. I need permission to go there. It’s never been legally accepted that the Dynasty planets are part of the Commonwealth, and they certainly won’t let me through if I turn up at the gateway unannounced and wave my navy ID around. So I called Christabel Agatha Halgarth, the head of the Halgarth family security.”

Alic winced. “You should clear anything like that with me first.”

“I know, Chief, and I apologize. I didn’t think it was a big deal. Anyway, Christabel gave me permission to travel to Solidade.”

“She did?”

“Yes.”

“You must be the first government official for some time.”

“Whatever. I also wanted to talk to Catriona Saleeb; she’s still on Arevalo, in the same apartment, so that’s not a problem. But Isabella discontinued her unisphere address code a week after the shotgun. We don’t know where she is. I asked Christabel, and she didn’t know either. They’re looking into it for me.”

“And you want to arrest her for that?”

“A warrant is the best way to make planetary police forces pay attention. A simple alert for a missing girl isn’t going to get any attention, not right now.”

“Renne, I’m really not sure I can issue a warrant on this basis.”

“I checked on Isabella, not just the official files, but the unisphere gossip show records as well. You know they love reporting on Dynasty members. Before she moved to Arevalo and set up house with the other girls, Isabella used to be Patricia Kantil’s girlfriend.”

Alic Hogan gave her a startled look. “Doi’s chief of staff?”

Renne smiled waspishly and nodded. “She never told us. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

“How can Kantil be involved in this?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she’s not. But you have to admit, this is worth a warrant. I need to ask Isabella some serious questions.”

Alic let out a long breath, clearly reluctant. “I can really do without complications like this.”

“Trust me, Chief. I’ll be discreet. If she’s just shacked up with someone she shouldn’t be, some senator or a three-hundred-year-old Grand Family heir, whatever, I’m not going to cause a fuss. I don’t want to get the Dynasties or the Executive pissed with this office. I’ll just ask her the questions, and leave quietly.”

“Damnit, all right. But if she’s found, I want to know immediately. We keep this as quiet as we can.”

Renne got out of the chair. “You got it.”

“Are you off to Solidade?”

“Yeah. The express to EdenBurg leaves in forty minutes.”

“Okay, good luck. And I want to know what the planet looks like when you get back.”

There was a limousine waiting for Renne when she arrived at EdenBurg’s CST station in Rialto, the planet’s megacity. A young man dressed in a smart dark gray business suit introduced himself as Warren Yves Halgarth, a member of the Halgarth family security force, and her assigned escort. They drove out of the station and into the midday sunlight.

Renne had visited all of the Big15 at one time or another. She was always hard-pressed to tell the megacities apart. Rialto was a slight exception in that it was sited in a temperate zone, while most of the others favored tropical locations. Apparently it was an accounting thing. A city that had summers and winters needed different types of civic services to cope with the individual seasons, and Rialto had an impressive snowfall in winter, averaging out at two meters each four-hundred-day year. Keeping the citywide grid of five-lane expressways open and the all-embracing network of rail tracks clear and functional for those three icy months of the year required thousands of snowplows and ancillary fleets of GPbots. The cost of all that bad weather machinery was considerable, and the city council had to charge the companies and residents to cover the expense.

It was a factor that was countered by the cost of power on EdenBurg, which was among the lowest in the Commonwealth. One of the principal reasons Heather Antonia Halgarth had chosen EdenBurg as her family’s Big15 world was the planet’s massive oceans. None of the three continents had deserts—precipitation was too high for that; instead, they were covered in rivers, with vast coastal plains subject to continual flooding. Instead of the fission plants the other Big15 used, Heather went in for hydropower on a colossal scale, damming two-thirds of the watercourses on the Sybraska continent where Rialto was situated. Electricity was delivered to the megacity via superconductor, and Sybraska’s plains drained, then irrigated to provide nation-sized tracts of highly productive farmland.

Because of the cold months, Rialto favored monolith apartment blocks rather than the vast sprawls of individual homes and strip malls found on worlds like StLincoln, Wessex, and Augusta. Each district had its core of Manhattan-like skyscrapers and bulky concrete tenements, which were encircled by huge swathes of factories and refineries.

The CST station was on the edge of the Saratov district, which was the megacity’s financial and administrative heart, giving it the largest nest of skyscrapers, and also the tallest. The industrial estates radiating outward tended toward the smaller, more sophisticated manufacturing facilities. Accommodation blocks were gigantic, fifty to seventy stories of sturdy stone facades, with large apartments overlooking broad well-maintained public parks. There were fewer rail lines and more elevated roads, reflecting the population density and its relative wealth.

Renne couldn’t help staring at Saratov’s central area as they swept toward it along the expressway. Some of the skyscrapers were so high she thought they must touch cloud level; they couldn’t be economical to build, even with today’s materials and robotics. It was all about corporate prestige.

Right in the middle were five tapering towers housing the Halgarth Dynasty’s headquarters. They were all identical in size and architecture with crown spires producing a bristling apex. But the reflective glass windows on each one had a different color.

Renne’s car drove down into the basement of the green tower, and into a secure parking zone. The Halgarth family security force occupied several floors halfway up the tower. Renne wasn’t told how many. The elevator they used didn’t have an indicator. She was ushered into Christabel Agatha Halgarth’s office. Curving walls of tinted glass looked out toward the ocean, thirty kilometers away. Three more skyscraper districts stood between Saratov and the coast, brief pinnacles of color and style with their moats of parkland. The terrain between them was a dark synthetic desert of rectangular factories and warehouse cubes with black solar collector roofs. Thousands of spindly metal chimneys squirted gray-blue vapors up into the iron sky, misting the whole scene with a thin dreary smog.

Sitting at her plain steel desk, Christabel Halgarth was silhouetted by the remorseless industrial backdrop. Newly rejuvenated, she was a small brunette, with a face that indicated a strong Asian ancestry. Renne expected someone this senior in the Dynasty to be wearing a business suit, one costing a good ten or fifteen times more than her own. But Christabel was dressed in a worn blue sweatshirt and baggy track pants with muddy stains on their knees, as if she’d just come in from gardening. Appearance obviously didn’t matter to her.

Or maybe it’s just me that doesn’t count.

Christabel followed Renne’s glance at her legs and smiled. “I cut my morning jog short to meet you. Haven’t had time for a shower yet.”

“I appreciate you taking the time,” Renne said as they shook hands. “It wasn’t quite that urgent.” She hadn’t told Alic Hogan that she’d requested an interview with Christabel. It wasn’t lying, exactly, but the Commander was antsy enough about her just getting permission to go to Solidade. Something like this request should probably have gone through the Admiral’s office, with any number of administrative staff reviewing it, and most of them unwilling to send it forward for fear of rocking the boat. Better, Renne thought, just to fire off the question and see if she could circumvent the bureaucracy and politics. Paula would have done the same.

“We’re both here now,” Christabel said graciously. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m following up the last Guardians’ shotgun. Basically, what I need to know from you is if it was an entrapment operation mounted by your organization.”

Christabel regarded her with a look of mild surprise. “Not that I’m aware of. One moment.” Her eyes unfocused as she scanned her virtual vision. “No. We knew nothing about it until it happened.”

“I see. Thank you.”

“Care to tell me why you asked that?”

“There was something wrong about it.” Renne waved a hand dismissively.

“Nothing solid I could put in a report at the time; and now Isabella has dropped out of sight.”

“Hardly conclusive. She’s young. The Commonwealth is in a minor state of chaos, especially with people migrating away from the Lost23 neighbors. A lot of our rich brats involve themselves in unsavory activities which they try to keep quiet from me. Don’t you think you might be overreacting?”

Renne was unsure if the woman was laughing at her, or irritated her time was being wasted. “She used to be good friends with Patricia Kantil.”

“I see. You’re adding up the discrepancies. And I admire you for sticking to your instincts. I can understand that. Especially given your previous mentor.”

“I don’t quite follow.”

“You’re doing real detective work. You probably didn’t review my file, such as it is, but one of the nonclassified entries is that I graduated from the Serious Crimes Directorate’s Investigator training course one year after Paula Myo.”

“Ah,” Renne began to relax.

“I was furious with the Dynasty for supporting her dismissal. A little less politics in our lives would see a few more results, not that my dear Dynasty ever grasps that at a collective level. Even so, Columbia should never have done what he did, it was a complete abuse of power.”

“I thought he would come under your jurisdiction.”

“Ha.” Christabel smiled waspishly. “That shows how little you know about the internal politics of our Dynasty. Columbia now has the full support of our senior council. The Admiral’s position he’s maneuvered himself into is damn impressive; I only hope Kime’s astute enough to be watching his own back. There was nothing I could do for Paula—though she landed on her feet without my assistance. Hardly surprising, given the number of contacts she’s gathered inside the Commonwealth establishment down the centuries.”

“She was an excellent boss.”

“Which is more than that clod Hogan is, I suppose.”

“Actually, Hogan’s not bad, just a little procedure-oriented. And of course, he belongs to Columbia.”

Christabel inclined her head. “Okay, then. So what exactly made you ask if the shotgun was an entrapment?”

“It had too many similarities with earlier cases, as if someone had read up on how to work the procedure. Your force would be the obvious candidate if you were trying to snare the Guardians.”

“We have done something similar in the past. But no, not this time. Interesting that you thought that, though.”

“And now there does turn out to be something out of kilter.”

“Paula did teach you something, after all.”

“Has Isabella been a problem before?”

“Not at my level. Her relationship with Kantil wasn’t even referred to senior council—which probably says more about how we regard the Executive than anything else. Isabella is just a standard minor Dynasty brat. We keep tabs on hundreds of them. It always disappoints me how many wind up in rehab, or get hauled up before a judge for various misdemeanors within a year of leaving Solidade. A hell of a lot of our time is spent trying to protect the young ones from scams that drain their trust funds. If it was up to me, they’d have no access to Dynasty money until their hundredth birthday. But I’m just old-fashioned.”

“I’m surprised her parents haven’t asked you to check on her.”

Christabel looked over at Warren, who had taken up a discreet position at the back of the office. “You called them, didn’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He turned to Renne. “After your initial inquiry to us this morning, we did launch a review of Isabella’s situation. Victor and Bernadette ended their relationship eight years ago. Standard separation enactment in their contract. There was no hostility at the time, nor afterward. Isabella lived with Victor and his new wife until she was seventeen, at which time she started attending a boarding school prior to her level four exam year. It’s quite a common practice for children on Solidade. After school, she’s either lived with friends in various Dynasty-owned properties, or shared accommodation with her lovers. There haven’t been many jobs. So it’s really not unusual for her to be out of contact with her direct family for months at a time.”

“But discontinuing her unisphere address code isn’t normal, surely?”

“No,” he said. “We ran some follow-up checks on that. She stopped using her credit account the same day she discontinued her address code. It looks like a deliberate attempt to drop right out of sight.”

“Did she tell anyone where she was going?”

“Not that we know of. We haven’t started an official inquiry yet.”

“I was waiting to see what you had, first,” Christabel said.

“You’ve heard it all, sorry. One suspicion.”

“It’s enough for me. If you have no objection, we’ll run our own investigation parallel to yours. We can focus more on direct leads, but that arrest warrant will produce a much wider coverage. Somebody should spot her.”

“No objections at all.”

“Good. Warren here will be your liaison with us. He will escort you to Solidade next. Trisha is expecting you, and she will cooperate fully.”

Renne did her best not to show any surprise at the force in Christabel’s voice. Presumably Trisha hadn’t been too keen on another interview. “Thank you.”

Traveling to Solidade was essentially the same as any other train journey within the Commonwealth. The only difference was to be found at Rialto station, where the Halgarths maintained a single dedicated platform several kilometers from the three main terminals. Despite being authorized by the head of the security force, and accompanied by Warren, Renne had to go through several thorough security checks before she was allowed on the little platform.

The three-carriage train took barely five minutes to get through the gateway and arrive at Yarmuk, the small town that supplied the entire planet’s services.

“Did you find anything in Isabella’s credit account?” Renne asked as they stepped down from the carriage.

“Nothing unusual, no,” Warren said. “We were looking for train tickets, of course, accommodation rentals, and large cash withdrawals. There weren’t any.”

“What about spending pattern analysis?”

“We ran one. If she has been squirreling away money for the last few months, then we couldn’t spot it.”

“Ah well, just a thought. I really need an angle on what Isabella’s thinking. All I have so far are a bunch of inconsistencies climaxing with her disappearance. I still don’t know if any of that is connected with the shotgun case, or if it’s all a really bad coincidence.”

“If she’s vanished there can hardly be an innocent explanation.”

“No, I concede that. But if she’s simply fallen in with the wrong people I can clean her off my case files. That doesn’t help you, I know; and I’m not sure I want that outcome, either.”

Warren gave her a sidelong glance. “I don’t get that.”

“If she is tied in with this somehow, and don’t ask how, please, then she’s the first solid lead we’ve had on the whole Guardians’ shotgun problem.”

“I see that, but … She’s a Halgarth; we’re nearly always the victims of the Guardians in the shotgun cases, so how can chasing her give you a lead to them?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps this is some new kind of follow-up operation by the Guardians. We need to know a lot more, and the only people who can fill in some gaps are the other two girls.”

A Boeing 22022 supersonic VTOL plane was waiting for them at the town’s airfield. It was a short flight to the heavily wooded Kolda Valley where Trisha’s branch of the family maintained a holiday lodge. They landed on a meadow clearing below the elaborate raised wooden building. The lodge was built into the forest, using seven giant morangu trees as its principal pillars. It was as if some ancient sailing ship had somehow embedded itself in the trees, and had slowly been expanded over the decades with additional rooms and platforms grafted on. The roof was a shaggy thatch of long local reeds, which had dried to a dusty ocher. A small stream wound out of the deeper forest at the side of the supporting trunks, skirting the edge of the grassy meadow to fill various stony pools.

Trisha was waiting for them beside a clump of lazthorn bushes growing above the largest pool. She wore a bikini top and a pair of white canvas shorts; a long towel was laid out beside the water where she’d been sun-bathing. The sophistication that was her heritage had left her, Renne decided as she walked over. It wasn’t just the cheap vacation slob-out clothes; the girl was more thoughtful and pensive now, where before she’d been chirpy and confident. Her green butterfly wing OCtattoos had been expanded down her cheeks, extensions lacking the artistry of the original sections.

“Sorry to bother you again,” Renne said. “I’ve just got a few more questions.”

“It’s more than that,” Trisha said tetchily. “I’ve had a whole load of calls today telling me I have to see you.” She glanced back toward the elevated lodge.

Renne just caught a glimpse of a young man standing in a doorway to one of the verandas along the front. He quickly stepped back through an open door into the dimly lit interior. “Sorry about that,” Renne said. “But I do want to catch the people who did this to you.”

“Isabella said you never would, that we’d just be another ongoing file your office would forget about after a month.”

“That’s an interesting comment. Normally, I would have agreed with her—off the record, of course.”

Trisha gave a listless shrug. “Has something happened?”

“I’m not sure. First of all, I need to know if you’ve remembered anything about Howard Liang that might be relevant, something which you’d overlooked before.”

“Such as?”

“Something that didn’t make sense at the time. Perhaps something he said. Something simple that he should have known, like a piece of history, or a Dynasty name. Or did you ever meet anyone by surprise, someone he was uncomfortable around.”

“Don’t think so, no. I can’t remember anything like that.”

“How about an incident from his childhood. If he grew up on Far Away he had a very different upbringing from ordinary Commonwealth children. Something might have slipped out that seemed odd.”

“No. That’s what the reporter asked as well.”

“What reporter?”

“Er.” Trisha’s fingers fluttered slightly, puppeting her virtual hand. “Brad Myo. He was from Earl News. He said he’d got your permission to talk to me.” She gave Renne an anxious look. “Didn’t he?”

Renne became very still, something like a ghost’s finger was stroking her spine. “No,” she said quietly. “We don’t issue any authorization to reporters to do anything, let along talk to crime victims. That’s up to individual citizens.” To her surprise, Trisha started crying. The girl sank down onto the towel, great sobs shaking her shoulders.

“I’m so fucking stupid,” she wailed, and started hitting her fists against her legs. “Does everybody in the Commonwealth know? Why am I so gullible? He said you’d allowed him to see me so he could produce a sympathetic story. I believed him, I really did. Oh, God, I hate myself. I didn’t know. He was so sincere.”

Renne gave Warren an awkward glance, then knelt beside the distraught girl. “Hey, come on. If this is who I think it was, he would have fooled me, too.” Her e-butler had already cross-referenced Earl News. It was in one of Paula’s reports. The company didn’t exist, but someone had used it once before when he interviewed Wendy Bose. According to Paula Myo, his description matched Bradley Johansson. “What did he look like?”

Trisha sniveled. “Tall. With really fair hair. And he was old. I don’t mean close to rejuvenation. You just knew he’d lived a couple of centuries at least.”

“Shit,” Renne hissed under her breath.

Trisha gave her an uncertain glance, tears ready to burst forth again.

“What? Do you know who it was?”

“He sounds like somebody known to us, yes.”

“Oh, no! I’m going to get a memory wipe, I swear I am. I’m going to wipe out my whole life; everything, what I’ve done, who I am, my name. All of it. Wipe it and not use a secure store.” She glared at Warren. “And if the Dynasty won’t do it, I’ll go to some illegal back street clinic. I don’t care. I’d rather wind up retarded than go through life knowing this.”

“Easy there,” Renne said. She rubbed the girl’s trembling shoulders.

“You’re being far too hard on yourself. Just tell me what happened with Brad Myo. Please?”

“Nothing much, I guess. He turned up at the apartment a day before I came back here. Isabella had already left, and Catriona had gone to work. He told me he’d cleared the meeting with you; that’s the only reason I let him in. I should have checked with you, shouldn’t I? God, how dumb!”

“It’s done now. Please, don’t beat yourself up over this. What did he want to know?”

“The same as you did. Howard’s name, where he worked, how long I’d known him. All the basics.”

“I see. Well, don’t worry, there’s no real harm done.”

“Really?” The girl was pathetically eager.

“Yes. He’s just a stupid con man trying to sell his story to a major news show. None of them will run it.”

“Absolutely not,” Warren assured her.

“Okay.”

“Has Isabella been in touch recently?” Renne asked, making it casual.

“Her old address code isn’t working, and I need to ask her the same questions.”

“No.” Trisha lowered her head. “I haven’t talked to many people since I got back. I don’t want to. I wasn’t kidding when I said I want all this out of my brain. It’s too difficult.”

“I’m sure it seems that way. But don’t be too rash, will you?”

“Maybe.”

“Did Isabella say where she was going before she left Daroca?”

“She was going skiing on Jura. There was a whole bunch of them hiring a chalet together for a fortnight. She tried to get me to come along, but I didn’t want to. She’s always going on trips with friends.”

“Which friends, exactly?”

“I’m not sure. I didn’t know any of them.”

“Okay. Never mind, we’ll look into it.” Renne stood up and gestured to Warren, who nodded. “I know this hasn’t been easy for you, Trisha. I apologize for putting you through this, but you have been helpful.”

The girl simply nodded, not looking up. Renne regarded her with a touch of concern before walking back to the VTOL.

“So who was the reporter?” Warren asked as the hatch shut behind them.

Renne settled herself into the deep leather cushioning of the chair. “It could be Bradley Johansson himself. The description is about right, and he’s posed as a reporter before using that company name.”

“Bloody hell.”

“Yeah.” She watched through the oval window as the plane took off. The light green patch of meadow shrank away quickly behind them as the acceleration pressed her down.

“But that makes no sense,” Warren said. “What would Johansson need to see Trisha for? The operation was over.”

“Good question. And he took a hell of a risk going to see her, too, he even used Earl News as a cover, which we knew about. It’s not like him to be that sloppy. Those questions were clearly important to him.”

“Why?”

Renne shook her head. She didn’t quite trust herself to look directly at Warren. Unlike Trisha, he wasn’t stupid. There was one explanation that fitted all too easily. An explanation that had implications she really didn’t enjoy. It would also mean she’d been quite right about the whole shotgun setup from the very start. It wasn’t the Guardians after all. And I don’t think it was the Halgarths. Christabel had no reason to lie to me. That doesn’t leave many options.

Mark Vernon sat in his rented Ford Lapanto as the drive array steered it along the six-lane highway down through the northern tail of the Chunata hills that formed the back of New Costa’s Trinity district. The slopes with their brown native scrub bushes and desert palms were decorated with large white houses encased behind tall walls and hedges like precious artworks in an exclusive store. It was an area favored by financial management types, who never liked to stray far from the office. A line of composite and glass skyscrapers marked out Trinity’s eastern boundary, winding along the base of the hills. They were home to various banks, credit houses, brokers, venture capitalists, and offworld currency exchanges.

The Lapanto’s drive array turned the car off the highway. There was a junction at the bottom of the ramp, where an ancient road began its lazy curve around the hill. A dilapidated sign called it Bright Light Canyon. Mark switched off the drive array, and started driving the car himself. Gritty yellow-brown soil had almost completely covered the thin layer of asphalt, turning the road into little more than a dirt track. Dead-looking scrub bushes were scattered over the slope below and above, their lower trunks buttressed by the conical mounds of nipbug nests. Behind the swathe of arid vegetation were crumbling white walls of enzyme-bonded concrete, scaled by ivy and climbing cacti. Various private roads led off the main track, looping around to gates.

For a moment Mark’s imagination painted over the image with the long straight driveways of the Highmarsh Valley branching off the main road. It was silent in the Chunatas, the noise of the megacity deflected by the foothills, a condition matching the land behind Randtown. Even the drab brown of the native plants was similar to the weak ocher shadings of boltgrass. But the air here was dryer, tinged with chemicals from the refinery sector sixteen kilometers away to the west. And Regulus was a too-bright point of blue-white light in the cloudless sky, still emitting a fierce heat in the late afternoon. Even in his daydreams, Mark could never pretend to reclaim all they’d lost. Fantasizing about it was stupid, the sign of a complete loser.

It was his fault. He’d taken his family to Elan. He’d built up their hopes. He’d shown them a decent, clean life. His dream had died in fire and pain. It was a knowledge that prevented him from sleeping every night. Self-recrimination that made it impossible to talk properly to Liz. Misery at having to bring his lovely children back to this vile world that held him back from playing with them.

He was so wrapped up in self-pity he almost missed the turn. A fast pull on the wheel sent the Lapanto skidding around the sharp bend and down the little trail. Dusty soil puffed up from the back wheels as they spun. “Idiot,” he told himself.

After a couple of hundred meters the trail ended at an iron gate in a wall of terracotta-red concrete. Mark’s e-butler gave the gates his code, and they swung open. There was an oasis of lush emerald grass inside the wall. At the center was a long lime-green bungalow with red composite roof panels molded to resemble clay tiles. Several gardening bots trundled about, tending to the lawns and herbaceous borders, keeping them as neat as the building they surrounded. Mark always enjoyed the view from here; with the bungalow perched halfway up the hill they could sit on the patio and look across New Costa’s urban expanse as it rolled away into the horizon. From this vantage point it never seemed quite so objectionable as when he was down among the factories and the strip malls. All very different from his old house in Santa Hydra.

Kyle, Mark’s brother, leased the bungalow from the Augusta Engineering Corp; he could afford to with his high-paying job at the StVincent Loan & Trust. Everybody in Mark’s immediate family had offered to put them up when they got back from Elan. He’d accepted Kyle’s offer because he couldn’t stand the thought of having to move in with Marty, his father. Besides, he’d always got on well with Kyle, who at least was sincere in wanting to help, and the kids really liked their uncle.

He braked the Lapanto on the drive outside the front door, and went inside. All the reception rooms had glass doors, allowing him to look along the hall to locate his small family. Nobody was in sight, but he heard happy shouting coming from the patio outside the main lounge. Both Sandy and Barry were in the pool, with a suspiciously wet Panda lying on the sun-soaked slabs beside the pool. The dog looked up at him, but didn’t move.

“Daddy!” both kids yelled.

Mark waved at them. “Has Panda been in the pool?”

“No,” they chorused.

He gave them a fearsome disapproving look, and they both started giggling. Liz was lying on a sunlounger on the terrace below the pool. Antonio, Kyle’s boyfriend, was beside her. The terrace faced west, allowing them both to catch the last of the afternoon sunlight.

“Hi, baby,” Liz called. A maidbot was standing between her and Antonio, a wine bottle held in one of its arms. When he got closer, he realized both of them were naked. His throat tightened automatically. He didn’t say anything, because that would just show how small-minded and conservative he was.

Liz hadn’t got a job yet; the agreement was she would stay home to look after the kids. They weren’t in school, and Mark really didn’t want them to go to an Augusta school; he had too many bad memories of his own time at Faraday High. In fact, returning to Augusta was only ever supposed to be temporary; they arrived here purely because it was the first stop after Ozzie Isaac’s asteroid. He wanted them to move on soon, hopefully to somewhere like Gralmond, which was about as far away from Dyson Alpha as it was possible to get. But that took money, and the invasion had wiped them out financially, taking away their entire equity, and he knew damn well that even after the navy beat the Primes back into their own space Elan was ruined beyond reclamation. The mortgage he’d taken to buy their little vineyard and the Ables Motor franchise had left him massively in debt. If the insurance didn’t take care of it, he’d need a couple of lifetimes to pay it off. And the insurance company was based in Runwich, Elan’s capital. Nobody knew if the Commonwealth government would pay compensation to everyone from the Lost23, and even if they did it would take years if not decades for such a bill to work its way through the Senate. Right now tax money was being poured into building up the navy.

He knelt down and gave Liz a perfunctory kiss. “Hi.”

“Wow, you look like you need a drink.” She pointed to the maidbot. “We’ve got some extra glasses.”

“Not that, thanks. I’ll maybe get a beer.”

“No problem,” Antonio said. “Sit yourself down, Mark, the bot’ll get it for you.”

Mark gave him a tight smile, and sank onto an empty sunlounger. “How long have the kids been in the pool?”

“Not sure,” Liz said; she drained her wineglass and held it out for a maidbot to refill. “Half an hour.”

“They should be getting out soon. They need to have their tea.” He didn’t actually ask: What have you got them? But it was in there, implicit with the tone.

“The house array is watching them,” Liz said with a little too much emphasis. “This isn’t Randtown. The systems here are top of the line.”

“Always useful to know,” Mark replied coldly.

Liz turned around so she was looking out across the landscape below the hill, and sipped her wine.

“Hey, come on now, you two,” Antonio said. “We’re all on the same side. Mark, the kids know they have to get out at quarter past six, they always do. The kitchen is making tea for them.”

The timer in Mark’s virtual vision read: 18:12. “Fine, sure,” he grunted. “Sorry, it hasn’t been a good day.” Not that he was going to sit here and bang on about his day in the factory—that was too stereotype even for him; in any case he suspected they wouldn’t really be listening. He’d applied for and got the general technician job at Prism Dynamics the day after they left the asteroid. The salary wasn’t anything special, not for maintaining assembly bays that built fuselage sections for the aerospace industry; but he did actually enjoy the work. It was the combination of practical troubleshooting and writing program fixes that he was most at home with. He took it because there was no way he was accepting charity from anyone, not even family. That was a gene he’d inherited direct from Marty.

A maidbot trundled up to Mark and handed him a bottle of beer. He flipped the cap and took a decent drink. Liz was still ignoring him.

“Giselle Swinsol called,” Antonio said. “She said she’d be here at seven to interview you.”

Mark waited a moment, but Liz didn’t say anything. “Is this for me?” he asked.

“Yes.” Antonio gave him a baffled look. “Didn’t you arrange an interview?”

“No. Why would she call you?”

“It was to the house array, not me personally. She said she wanted to be sure you were in this evening.”

“I’ve never heard of her.”

“Probably an agency headhunter,” Liz said.

“I’m not registered with any agencies.”

“Could be the insurance company,” Antonio suggested. “They’re paying out for the invasion.”

Mark drank some more beer. “Not with my luck,” he muttered.

Liz shot him a look as she got to her feet. “I’m going to get the children ready,” she said and pulled on a robe.

Antonio waited until she’d gone up to the pool and started calling the children. “You two okay?”

“I guess so,” Mark said limply. “We’re just finding our feet, that’s all. Honestly, Antonio, we had the most perfect life on Elan. Now there’s nothing left to go back to.”

“It’s tough, man. But you can beat it. I see that in Kyle. You Vernon guys don’t give in. You’re a scary family.”

Mark raised his bottle, and even managed a feeble grin. “Cheers. But you’re wrong. First hint of a job on a planet far from here, I’m taking Liz and the kids.”

“You sure about that?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

“Well, I think that would be a big mistake.”

“How come?”

“Look, the Big15 are where they’re going to build all the ships and weapons hardware. Right? Yeah sure, other planets will get subcontracts, and High Angel does some assembly work, that’s politics. But here: this is the heart of the fight back, man. That means they won’t let Augusta fall. Earth will be overrun before we are. We’re gonna have the best protection it’s possible to have. Think about it. Wessex was the only planet to see off the Primes last time. Sheldon and Hutchinson made damn sure the invasion failed there. You want my advice, stay here. I don’t care what all the news show analysts are saying, this is the safest place in the Commonwealth.”

Mark wanted to laugh the idea off, but he couldn’t fault Antonio’s logic.

A long black Chevrolet limousine drew up outside the gates at two minutes before seven. Liz had just managed to coax the kids upstairs after tea, and Antonio was getting sober and dressed for his hospital shift. Kyle still wasn’t back; he usually worked in the StVincent Loan & Trust office until after seven. Mark didn’t understand how he kept the relationship with Antonio going; they only ever saw each other for a couple of hours a day. Perhaps that was why it had lasted so long. He and Liz barely saw each other for longer, but that didn’t seem to be helping much.

Giselle Swinsol wasn’t quite what Mark had been expecting. The limo should have clued him in: no agency manager would have a car like that. She was a tall brunette with the ambition of a second-lifer gunning for an executive slot, and the arrogance of a direct lineage Dynasty member. Her smart gray and oxford-blue suit cost more than Mark’s monthly salary, complemented by makeup superior to that of most unisphere news anchors. High heels clicked loudly on the hall floor.

She hadn’t waited to be invited in; she simply marched past Mark when he opened the door, and headed for the living room.

“Excuse me, but I didn’t know we were due to have a meeting,” he said. He wanted it to be sarcastic, but it came out woefully lame, not helped by the way he was scampering along behind, trying to catch up.

Her answering smile reminded him of a shark preparing to feed. A shark with cherry-glossed lips. “I don’t normally inform people in advance that they’ve been selected.”

“Selected?”

She sat down in one of the couches, leaving him standing in the middle of the lounge. “Do you like your job, Mr. Vernon?”

“Look! Who the hell are you?”

“I work for the Sheldon Dynasty. What does it bring in? A couple of grand a month?”

Thoroughly irritated, he snapped, “More than that, actually.”

“No it doesn’t, Mark, I’ve seen your contract.”

“That’s confidential.”

She laughed. “At your current level of earning, and extrapolating a mild level of promotion, it’ll take you about eighty years to pay off the loan for your house and franchise garage on Elan. That doesn’t take in factors like paying for the kids’ college fees, and your own R and R pension.”

“We’ll get compensation, eventually.”

“Granted, if the Commonwealth still exists in ten years’ time, they might pass a bill letting you off the interest payments. Anything else: stop fooling yourself.”

“Prism Dynamics is just temporary. I’ll get a better job than that.”

“That’s exactly what I want to hear, Mark. I’ve come to tell you I’ve got that better job all lined up for you.”

“And what would that be?” Liz asked. She was standing in the lounge doorway, wearing a T-shirt and cutoff jeans. But there was a fixed look on her face that Mark was familiar with. When Liz made up her mind not to like someone, they were frozen out of this life and the next.

“It’s confidential, I’m afraid,” Giselle Swinsol said. “Once you sign up, then you will be told.”

“Ridiculous,” Liz said. She sat down on a long leather couch opposite the woman, and tugged gently at Mark’s arm. He sank down beside her. The three beers he’d drunk in quick succession out on the terrace were starting to buzz in his head. His e-butler told him a file had arrived, sender Giselle Swinsol. When he opened it, an employment contract slipped down his virtual vision. The salary made him blink in surprise.

“It is far from being ridiculous,” Giselle Swinsol said. “We take our security very seriously indeed. You have already proved your discretion.”

“Ozzie’s asteroid?” Mark asked. “No big deal.”

“Even in today’s climate, the news shows would be very interested indeed in Mr. Isaac’s home.”

“I don’t get this,” Mark said. “I’m not some superphysicist. I repair machinery. What’s so important about that? Millions of us do it.”

“You’re actually very, very good at maintaining electromechanical systems, Mark. We checked. Thoroughly. The project you’ll be working on requires a great deal of robotic assembly. Although there are other factors which brought your name to our attention.”

“Such as?” Liz asked.

“Apart from respecting confidentiality, you have acute financial problems which we can remedy. If you agree to take this job, we will pay off every debt you accrued on Elan. Mrs. Vernon, you have the kind of biotechnology skills which we can utilize. It’s not as if we’ll expect you to act the dutiful housewife for the duration of the project. I’m sure that will make a pleasant change for you.”

Liz sat perfectly still. “Thank you.”

The contract was still flowing down Mark’s virtual vision. “If I say yes, where will we be based?”

“Cressat.”

“The Sheldon world? I didn’t think anyone else was allowed there,” Liz said.

“We are making exceptions for this project. However, we don’t have to in your case. Mark’s a Sheldon, that qualifies his whole family for residency.”

Mark tried not to flinch when Liz turned to stare at him. He’d never considered his heritage worth talking about; if anything it was mildly embarrassing. “Hardly direct lineage,” he muttered defensively.

“Your mother is only seven generations removed from Nigel. That’s good enough.”

“Wait,” Liz said. “This isn’t a navy project?”

Giselle Swinsol gave her a blank smile. “Mark?”

“What? You want an answer now?” he asked.

“Certainly.”

“But you’ve told me nothing.”

“You will be working in a job that will provide an excellent lifestyle for your family, far greater than the one you enjoyed on Elan. You will be rid of all your debts. And we absolutely guarantee your safety. The only downside will be restricted communications with your friends and immediate family. This project must remain secret.”

“I don’t like offers which are too good to be true,” Liz said. “They usually are.”

“Not so. This is on the level.”

“Is it dangerous?” Mark asked.

“No,” Giselle Swinsol said. “You will be working with sophisticated assembly systems. It is challenging, not dangerous. Look, this is not some game, Mark, I’m not in the business of going around defrauding people. In any case, I can’t scam you; you don’t have any money. This is a genuine offer. Take it or leave it.”

“How long is it for?” Mark asked.

“Difficult to say. Hopefully not more than a year, two at the outside.”

He glanced at Liz. “What do you think?”

“We’re broke. I can probably live with it. Can you?”

What he didn’t want to ask his wife was how much she’d been drinking that afternoon; alcohol tended to bring out a bullish streak in her, so she might well want to change her mind in the morning. Looking at Giselle Swinsol, he didn’t think there was any kind of second thoughts get-out clause being put on the table for them. The file was open at the part on health care and schooling. The contract he had with Prism Dynamics didn’t even have that section. “Okay, we’ll take it.”

“Excellent.” Giselle Swinsol got to her feet. “The car will pick you and the children up at seven-thirty tomorrow morning. Please be ready.”

“I’ll have to tell Prism Dynamics,” Mark said. The speed this was happening was leaving him disconcerted, almost as if he wanted an excuse to say no.

“That’ll be taken care of,” Giselle Swinsol said. “You can tell your immediate family you’ve got another job on a new planet. Please don’t tell them where you’re going.”

“Right.”

“Your certificate, Mark, please.”

“Oh. Yes.” He told his e-butler to add his certificate to the contract, and sent it back to her.

“Thank you.” She started for the hall.

“Will I see you tomorrow?” Mark asked.

“No, Mark, you won’t.”

The front door closed smoothly behind her. Mark ran his hand back through his hair. “Goddamn, what a ballbreaker.”

“Yeah, but one that’s saved our asses. I wonder what the project is?”

“Some big military production line. I guess that’s where the automated assembly comes in. They’re going to bypass High Angel; that was only ever about politics.”

“Could be.”

“You don’t believe that?”

“It really doesn’t matter. We’ll find out for sure tomorrow.”

“You sorry I said yes? We could always not turn up.”

“I wouldn’t like to try that, not with Ms. Giselle Swinsol on our asses.”

“Guess not.”

“But you did the right thing. I just didn’t like the way she tried to bump us into saying yes. Then again, I suppose if you are building military systems right now, you can’t afford to waste any time.”

“Yeah. You know, I think I feel good about this already. I’m doing something to hit back at the bastards.”

“I’m glad, baby.” Liz put her arm around his neck, and pulled him close for a kiss. “How come you never told me you’re a Sheldon?”

“I’m not, really. Not part of the Dynasty, anyway.”

“Humm.” She kissed him again. “So what do we do till half past seven tomorrow?”

Oscar and Mac arrived outside Wilson’s office at the same time. Anna rose from behind her desk to kiss them both.

“He’s ready for you,” she told them.

“So how’s married life?” Mac asked.

“Oh, you know, we’re just like any other couple trying to pay off the mortgage.”

“Screw that,” Oscar said. “What was the honeymoon like? Spill it.”

Anna glanced back over her shoulder and gave him a saucy wink. “Euphoric, of course. An entire ten hours out of the office. What more could any girl want?”

Wilson greeted both of them warmly. “Thanks for coming. I try to see each captain before they leave. I don’t suppose it’s a tradition that’ll last much longer. We’re really starting to get a rush of components through for the next batch of starships. The emergency budget is showing some results, thank God.”

“Some good news,” Oscar said as he lowered himself cautiously into one of the scooplike chairs. He hated anything with so much spongy padding. “I haven’t seen that on the unisphere shows. They’re still busy navy-bashing.”

“You won’t,” Wilson said. “We’re holding back on specifics. We don’t know how much information the Primes glean from the unisphere.”

“Are you serious?”

“They must be trying to keep themselves updated about our capabilities,” Anna said. “We have to assume they datamined the Lost23. They know what we had at the time of the attack.”

“We’re watching them,” Wilson said. “QED.”

“Have we had any indication they’re running a surveillance operation?” Mac asked.

“Not as such. But then they haven’t spotted ours, yet.”

“I haven’t spotted ours yet,” Oscar protested.

“Rafael’s running it.” Anna gave him a teasing smile. “We’ve released hundreds of thousands of microsatellites in each system. It’s similar to the technique they used against us, open a wormhole and keep moving the end point. They can detect it, but they can’t investigate each opening.”

“So a lot of the satellites survive,” Wilson said. “They report back to us on a constant basis through the wormhole.”

“Information we are also keeping from the unisphere,” Anna said. “What the satellite swarms are showing us isn’t good.”

“They’re digging in on each of the Lost23,” Wilson said. “Wormholes have now been anchored on the planetary surfaces. The amount of equipment and aliens coming through is quite phenomenal, even by what we understand as Prime standards. Dimitri Leopoldvich was quite right, damn him; we’re not going to reclaim those planets.”

“So do we cancel the planetary section of the counterattack?” Mac asked.

“No. We’re sure the Lost23 are the strategic bases for the next Prime attack. The buildup is so massive it can’t be for anything else. Once they’re established, they can strike anywhere inside the Commonwealth, not just the nearby stars. If anything, that makes infiltrating and sabotaging them even more important. We need to buy time.” He looked directly at Oscar. “We have got to find the star where the Hell’s Gateway leads. It’s the one truly weak point they have.”

“Do my best,” Oscar said. He didn’t like the way Wilson was almost pleading with him. “The Defender will get to each of those stars on our flight’s search list, you can count on that.” It sounded defensive, even to him.

“I know I can,” Wilson said. “Mac, you’ve drawn the easy straw this time.”

“Well, there’s a surprise,” Oscar taunted his friend. “What have you got for him, Boss? Guarding a convent school on Molise?”

Mac politely showed him a finger. “Up yours.”

“You’re going to be testing the relativistic missiles, a long way from Commonwealth space. Now that the Primes have seen what we can do with the hyperdrive they’ll be coming up with defensive strategies. But if these missiles live up to their promise, even they will be hard-pressed to ward them off.”

“We’ll iron any bugs out,” Mac told him.

“Good. I’ve also decided this will be the last flight for StAsaph,” Wilson said.

“Why?”

“She’s obsolete, Mac, I’m sorry. By the time you get back we’ll be starting assembly of the new warships with the marque six hyperdrive. I want you in the captain’s seat on the first.”

“That’s a deal I can live with,” Mac said.

Oscar nearly complained. Doesn’t this navy believe in seniority? But that would have come out churlish, even from him.

“And when you get back,” Wilson said, “you’re heading up the assault cruiser project.”

“Who, me?” Oscar said.

“Yeah, you. It’s going to be our eventual war winner, Oscar. I’m not kidding. They’re putting so many new technologies into the damn thing that even I don’t know half of them. Sheldon’s got every Dynasty collaborating on this. That’s leading to a lot of friction on the overall management team. If anyone’s got the experience to pull that team together and make it work, it’s you.”

“Hell.” Oscar actually felt a burst of gratitude that made his throat close up. He would never ask for so much responsibility. Yet Wilson trusted him with it, and Sheldon must have approved of the appointment, too. “Thanks, Boss. I won’t let you down.” Stupid sentimentalist. Then he thought about Adam, and the recordings he was planning to take on the reconnaissance flight. His cheeks began to flush from the guilt.

“You okay?” Anna asked.

“Sure.”

“For a moment there, you looked embarrassed.”

“Him?” Mac exclaimed. “I don’t think so. Forgotten a date, yes.”

“At least I can get dates,” Oscar shot back. It was too late; the moment was gone. If there was anybody in the world he could trust to explain about Adam and his own past, it was these three friends. He smiled broadly to cover his true emotions. Just who am I afraid of? Them, or me?

The simulation environment was almost perfect. Morton had been wetwired for TSI before, of course, but this was an order of magnitude above that simple consumer convenience. There were unisphere artistes who couldn’t afford this level of sensorium quality. The navy technicians had even equipped him for smell, notoriously the most difficult human sense for a program to duplicate correctly. Even now it wasn’t perfect: the smell of the smoke was more like citrus than burning wood.

He was walking through the ruins of a town, wearing an armored suit with electromuscle augmentation. It was the only way he could carry the weight of all the armaments the navy expected him to take with him. Boosted senses swept the piles of concrete and shattered composite panels. His virtual vision flipped orange brackets up over possible targets, which he found immensely irritating. The assessment software needed to be completely rewritten. One item in a depressingly long shakedown list.

Electrical power cables showed up as neon-sharp blue lines threading their way beneath the road. Electronic systems radiated a green-blue aurora, whose intensity varied in tandem with the array processing size. Something else he didn’t like; he’d already asked the technical support staff to change that to a simple digital readout. Then there was the atmosphere analysis graphic. Electromagnetic signal display. Radar. Remote sensor windows, relaying images of the surrounding area from the little sneekbots scampering on ahead. Communications network with his squad members, coupled with all their sensor results.

His virtual vision was so cluttered with multicolored symbols and pictures it resembled some cathedral’s stained-glass window. It was a wonder he could see through it at all.

The mission was supposed to be a quiet infiltration of an alien base, which was being built at the heart of the old human town. Make the assessment, locate the weak points, and select the appropriate weapons to inflict maximum damage. The rest of the squad was spread out along a loose front nearly a kilometer long, each one using a different approach route, which Morton considered a tactical mistake; it produced a much greater risk that one of them would be spotted.

The squad’s official designation was ERT03 after the planet and location they were assigned, though they called themselves Cat’s Claws after their most notorious member. All of them were convicted felons who had agreed to serve in exchange for their sentence being commuted. In theory none of them had a record anymore, but talk in the barracks at night generally brought out a hint or two, or more. Doc Roberts, for example, was quite proud of his syndicate involvement, wiping inconvenient memories from anyone who had something to hide. Unfortunately he’d tried to make a little extra money on the side by selling some of the memories on the snuff market, which is how the Serious Crimes Directorate had eventually caught up with him. The court agreed he was an accessory after the fact. Morton sometimes speculated that Doc had been the one who wiped his own awkward little incident.

Right now, according to the squad deployment schematic, the Doc was maneuvering his way through a collapsed supermarket four hundred meters west. Next to him was Rob Tannie, who would only say he had been involved in the attempt to blow up the Second Chance. Nothing concerning his earlier life or lives was on offer. He called himself a security operative. Morton believed him. He had an easy grasp of tactics in most situations the training team put them in, and clearly knew how to handle himself in a fight.

Parker was the second biggest worry Morton had. He had been some kind of enforcer, though he wouldn’t say for whom. He loved the weapons they were being wetwired with, and went on in loving detail about the best way to use them to kill silently and effectively. Basically, he was a thug who lacked finesse in every department. Working as part of a team was difficult for him, which he didn’t make a lot of effort to remedy.

And then there was “the Cat” Stewart. She never talked about what she’d done, which made everyone else quietly thankful. They all knew, and they really didn’t want the details. As yet, Morton simply didn’t know what to make of her. When she wanted to, she could be a perfect squad member, contributing a hundred percent to completing the mission objectives successfully. She didn’t do that all the time, though.

Morton’s laser radar tracked some movement fifty meters ahead and to the left, rubble spilling down the conical mound that had been a block of apartments. No bigger than gravel, the slide spilled out across the ground, sending up a small cloud of dust.

He swept his main sensors over it, trying to find out the cause. Two of the sneekbots approached the area cautiously, their crablike bodies picking their way carefully over the rubble, antenna buds fully extended. They couldn’t detect any alien presence.

Morton considered it to be a perfect distraction. He switched his passive sensors to watch the road behind. There was a brief flare of electromagnetic signal traffic inside a burned-out building he’d passed five minutes earlier. It matched the signature that the Primes employed.

“Rob, I’ve got hostiles behind me,” he said, and opened up the sensor data.

“Okay, I’ve locked their position,” Rob Tannie said. “How do you want to handle it?” He was a hundred eighty meters to the west of Morton, moving down a parallel street. Like most of the others he tended to ask for Morton’s opinion. It was down to Morton’s management experience, the ability to come up with a quick confident-sounding decision that was edging him ahead in the leadership race. Not that there were many contenders.

“I’m going to keep blundering on like I don’t know what’s happening. You circle around behind and ambush the bastards.”

“Gotcha.”

Morton scanned a side road for any activity, and hurried down it, taking him away from the suspect mini-avalanche. He made a couple more sharp turns to add to the confusion. It ought to make his pursuers break cover to follow him. When they did, they’d be exposed to Rob.

The alien base was just visible ahead of him now. In the gloomy twilight, the big metal structure gleamed brightly inside the beams of bright blue-white spotlights. Aliens were moving over it, walking along narrow ridges without any kind of handrail or safety fencing. They were all in their protective armor suits. The navy still didn’t have any pictures of what one actually looked like.

Morton checked his display. The force field protecting the base began about a hundred fifty meters ahead of him. All the buildings in the intervening space had been completely flattened, leaving a broad expanse of smoldering blackened fragments, like an oil-slicked beach. Morton studied the gap critically for a few moments. There was no way to get across unseen. He told his e-butler to bring up a town map and highlight the utility tunnels. Sure enough, there were several he could use.

“I see them,” Rob said. “Two of them carrying weapons, heading for the base. They’re looking for you.”

“Can you take them?”

“No problem. Question is, how?”

“Minimum fuss. We don’t want to alert the rest that we’re here.”

“Okay. An electronic warfare drone to smother them, and follow up with a couple of focused energy missiles.”

“That’s too noticeable,” Morton said. “A kinetic shot should get through their suits.” He was busy examining the map. The larger utility tunnels must be wired for intruders. Of the smaller ones, a rain sewer was possibly wide enough for him to crawl down. He didn’t like confined spaces, but the suit and weapons he was carrying gave him the option of blasting his way out of any trouble pretty quickly.

“I’m not close enough to detect if they’ve got force fields,” Rob said.

“How fast are they moving? I need to get to a manhole cover before they see me.”

“They’ll be on you in two minutes. I can get some sneekbots close enough to check for force fields.”

“My guess is they’ll have them off. They’re creeping around just like we are. They don’t want to attract attention, and force fields are goddamn easy to detect.”

“So you reckon I should just use kinetics on them?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, boys,” a chirpy female voice said. “Let’s have some fun here. They gave us all these beautiful weapons to try, didn’t they? Let’s see now, what haven’t we used yet? Oh, I know.”

Morton checked his virtual vision to see where she was. “Cat, don’t …” Behind him, the town and sky turned incandescent white. The ground started to shake wildly, and the blast wave roared—

The environment dissolved into colorhash static. Strange tingles rippled up and down his skin. Then there was only his standby mode virtual vision, a row of blue line symbols glowing against a dark background. He heard his own breathing, amplified by his helmet. His arms and legs were stretched out spread-eagle style, held comfortably by plastic bands.

“Goddamnit,” Morton groaned.

The plyplastic around his arms expanded. He reached out and took the helmet off. Lights were coming on overhead, revealing the small nulsense chamber. The simulation team was staring in at him through a curving window, all looking pretty pissed off. Morton gave them a what-can-you-do shrug. He was standing at the center of a shiny gyrowheel, a meter off the ground, his feet held safely by plyplastic boots. They released his feet and he jumped down.

There were four other gyrowheels in the chamber, each with a squad member exiting the simulation. He walked over to face the Cat. A pretty heart-shaped face grinned down at him, white teeth emphasized by brown skin. Her appearance was late twenties. Seeing her for the first time, you’d assume she was a first-lifer; her outwardly frivolous attitude made it impossible to imagine her at any other age. While the rest of the squad were in standard dark purple sports shirts and black trousers, she’d found herself a Sonic Energy Authority T-shirt and punk jeans. He wasn’t sure how she managed that; squads were never issued with anything else than navy clothes. Presumably she just went up to the civilian training staff and told them to give her what they were wearing. Her raven hair had been cut short, like all of them, except she’d added purple feather streaks tipped with silver.

“That was more like it,” she said brightly, and hopped down. On the ground she was ten centimeters shorter than Morton.

“What the hell was the point of that?” he asked.

“We haven’t used the baby nukes before. We’re here to try out every possible combat scenario. Right?” She gave the simulation team a breezy wave. Nobody behind the glass actually dared scowl back, but they all looked sullen. “They were a real blast!” She laughed.

Morton wanted to give her a slap—except he didn’t dare. The Cat had been put into suspension before he’d been born, and wasn’t due out until about a thousand years after his own sentence was finished. He remembered the day she’d arrived at their barracks. No individual had ever been given a four-strong escort before, and they’d all looked nervous. “You can’t use nukes against individual soldiers, for fuck’s sake,” he raged. “Are you deliberately trying to screw this up for the rest of us? Because I’m not going back to suspension just because you fancy having a big joke. I’ll kick your warped little ass out of this training camp and into orbit before that happens.”

The rest of the squad froze, watching intently. One of the simulation team moved back from the glass.

The Cat puckered her lips up to blow Morton a fulsome kiss. “The mission was already screwed, tough guy. If one alien knows we’re there, they all do. You should read your intelligence briefings on that communal communications of theirs. You weren’t going to get inside the force field. Taking out the nest of them on the outside was the sensible option. Remember: Inflict as much damage as possible. Do not allow yourself to be captured.”

“It was not the only option. We could have got out of that. Rob and I were working on it.”

“Poor boy. So desperate to hang on to your body. It’s not that it’s remarkable in any measure.” The Cat gave him a playful slap on his cheek. It stung.

“Screw you!” Morton growled.

She headed for the chamber door. As it opened she batted her eyelashes at him. “See you in the shower, tough guy. Oh, and for the record, it’s not at all warped, it’s actually a very pretty bottom.” She wiggled it as she left.

Morton let out a long breath and unclenched his fists. He hadn’t realized he’d clenched them to start with.

“Okay, thank you, people,” the simulation team chief said. “That’s it for today. We’ll resume at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

Morton stood where he was as the rest of the squad headed out. He was taking deep breaths, trying to calm down. Rob Tannie came over and put an arm around his shoulder. “That was impressive, man. You’re either insane, in love, or you’ve got a massive death wish. Do you actually know what she did to get suspension?”

“Yeah, but that’s not the point. It’s what we’ve got to do together in the future that’s important.”

Rob gave him a strange look. “You sound like them.” He jerked a thumb at the window.

“Oh, what the hell,” Morton said, suddenly very tired. “We’re all going to die the second we drop out of the wormhole anyway; we’ll never reach Elan itself.”

“That’s the spirit. But take it from me, as someone who’s already been through re-life: don’t mess with the cute demon. She’s seriously bad news.”

“Remind me to introduce you to my ex-wife someday,” Morton said as they walked out of the chamber.

Morton didn’t even know which planet their training camp, Kingsville, was on. He suspected a Big15 world: Kerensk, judging by the violet-tinged sun. If so, they were a long way from the megacity.

Kingsville was vast, sprawling over a region of low desert foothills. Northward from the camp, the gentle mounds gradually built up into a tall mountain range that stretched across the horizon, their distant peaks covered in snow. The desert spread out in every other direction, a rumpled plain of powdered yellow clay littered with crumbling boulders. Small, hardy native cacti bushes clustered together at the bottom of every slight depression, thick gray stems with a fur of spindly leaves no thicker than paper, and just as dry.

Rumor among the convicts in the camp was that if you could get to the other side of the desert, they’d let you go, that the navy wanted to see how good their wetwired systems were at sustaining humans in hostile conditions. Certainly there wasn’t a fence or guardbots. The only way in or out was by aircraft.

Huge cargo planes had brought in the whole camp from whatever metropolis this world boasted, and were still delivering more prefabricated building kits every day, along with supplies and weapons systems. Kingsville had been divided into twenty-three sections, with a big geodesic dome at the center of each one. Inside the domes were the main training facilities, the technical labs where the troops were wetwired with the best the Commonwealth had, and the canteen. Row after row of barracks cabins radiated out from each dome, sitting on the dusty soil like black bricks. Around them were the firing ranges and suit testing courses.

As Morton made his way back to the squad’s barracks in the baking late-afternoon sun, the noise of the camp swirled around him, completely familiar now after two weeks’ residence. He’d been immersed in the training and wetwiring so intensely it was as if his earlier lives were just TSI dramas he could barely remember accessing. Dull repetitive thuds of kinetic rifles echoed in from the range where the division that was due to land on Sligo was practicing. The whine of compressor jets was constant as the planes came and went from the adjoining airstrip five kilometers away; after the first night it never bothered him. Jeeps and trucks growled as they raced around the compacted dirt roads that linked Kingsville’s sections and the airport. Shouts and chants from squads out pounding their way around various grueling courses as they got their bodies into shape for the navy’s great counteroffensive. Sixty percent of them were convicts working off their suspension sentence, while the rest were various freelance security types and idiotically enthusiastic human patriots keen to show the enemy what a bad mistake they’d made in attacking the Commonwealth. Even now, Morton still hadn’t worked out if they were all on the biggest suicide mission ever dreamed up, or if they were going to be of some use. But he did like to think their squad was tough and smart enough to produce some effective results. Even loopy old Cat played her part most of the time. And it was anyone’s guess, along with considerable barracks-room speculation, what mayhem she’d commit on aliens, given what she used to do to perfectly innocent humans.

The oblong box that Cat’s Claws had been assigned was fifteen meters long and four wide, partitioned into three simple areas. The bunk and main living space for all five of them was at one end, washroom in the middle, and finally a small rec room with a couple of deep sofas and a Kingsville network node where you could access the camp’s library of TSI dramas, which were mostly soft porn. Kingsville’s link to the planetary cybersphere was monitored by an RI, which regulated all calls in and out. You could talk to anyone you wanted, including the media, but topics were restricted. Any mention of the types of weapons, training, or possible dates for the counteroffensive would be blocked instantly. Like the rest of Cat’s Claws, Morton hadn’t received any calls. He guessed that meant he didn’t have anyone to call, either.

The door shut behind him, cutting off the heat and dust to provide him with a decent air-conditioned climate. The abrasive purple-white sunlight was filtered by the windows, giving the interior an Earth-normal spectrum. He went over to his bunk and started to undress, letting a servicebot catch his clothes. Rob and Doc Roberts were doing the same. The Cat was already in a shower cubicle, singing away merrily out of tune. Somehow, the simulations made them as sweaty and dirty as if they’d been out crawling around in the real desert.

He stayed in the shower a long time, luxuriating in the hot water and using up a lot of gel. His e-butler played him a file of old acoustic rock tracks, allowing him to forget about the training. Parts of his skin were still sore and sensitive from all the inserts he’d been given; and some of his new OCtattoos were so intrusive that he’d developed a mild rash. The water beating against them helped numb away the aches. Even his thoughts were calming as he hummed along to the guitar melody. The artificial weapons instruction memories that seeped into his brain each night made his sleep fitful and shallow, mixing with unwelcome dreams. It was one of the reasons he was so irritable during the day. What he wanted was a whole twenty-four hours off to relax and rest. He didn’t think they’d ever get that; the pace of the camp was too fast.

Like all the troops, he wondered when they’d be deployed. They were all due another two sessions of wetwiring in the clinics that filled the lower floor of the dome. And sessions were always conducted three days apart. It didn’t take a genius to work out that once they’d familiarized themselves with the systems out in the desert training fields they’d be heading out to the Lost23. Another two weeks at most, he reckoned.

It was quieter than usual when he got out of the shower. Usually there’d be some kind of argument or banter going on in the living quarters. Today there was only a low murmur as he toweled himself down.

“Hey, Morton,” Doc Roberts called. “Get your ass out here, you’ve got a visitor.” That brought a round of raucous laughter.

A maidbot handed him a polythene packet containing a fresh set of clothes. He took his time dressing, suspecting a joke.

It wasn’t. A beautiful young woman was sitting on his bunk, with Rob, Parker, and Doc Roberts clustered around like wolves eyeing up raw meat. Even the Cat was sitting on her bunk in a complicated yoga position, smiling sardonically as she joined in with the chitchat.

His visitor was wearing a long emerald-green skirt of light swirling cotton. Above that was a white blouse that was nearly translucent. Little curls of honey-blond hair had escaped from a jaunty black felt cap. She stood up as he came in, and everyone else fell silent.

Morton nearly said: Who are you? Then he saw her face, and astonishment locked his body solid. He blinked in disbelief as she gave him a roguish grin.

“Mellanie?”

“Hi, Morty.”

The others jeered, contemptuous and envious at the same time.

“Oh, my God. You …”

“Grew up?”

He just nodded. She really was gorgeous.

“Well, kiss her, you fucking moron,” Doc Roberts shouted.

“Nah, shag her brains out,” Parker shouted. “In front of us!”

Rob punched him on the shoulder.

Mellanie gave Morton a sunshine bright smile as she walked over to him. He didn’t dare move. Her hands went around his head, and she gave him a long hungry kiss.

There was a chorus of cheering and whistles as the embrace went on and on.

“Did you miss me?” she teased.

“Er.” Morton could feel a huge erection tenting his trousers. “Oh, hell, yes.”

She laughed delightedly, and kissed him again, gentler this time. “I’m here to offer you a media contract from the Michelangelo show. We’d like to offer you a front-line correspondent job for us. Is there somewhere private we can go to … discuss terms?”

Morton straightened up, looked at the row of his squad mates with their lecherous expressions. “Certainly. This way.” He put his arm around her waist and steered her toward the washrooms. Another round of jeering and whoops broke out behind them.

As soon as they were in the rec room he shoved the door shut and started to slide one of the sofas across it. He never quite finished. Mellanie jumped on him, her mouth trying to devour him. He pulled the front of her blouse open, hearing fabric rip. Buttons skittered across the floor. She was wearing a delicate white lace bra underneath that he tugged to one side, exposing her breasts. They were as perfect as he remembered them, beautifully shaped and firm, with dark nipples aroused. His mouth closed around one, sucking and licking. Mellanie’s hands found the catch at the top of his trousers and released it. Her fingers cupped his balls, then squeezed sharply.

Locked together they collapsed onto the sofa, with Morton on top. He fumbled desperately at his shirt, trying to get it off over his head. Mellanie wriggled her skirt down her legs. Then he was inside her, fucking her brains out with deep savage thrusts. Both of them cried out, competing to be the loudest, the most joyful, clutching frantically at each other as their bodies thrashed about in ecstasy.

An uncertain time later Morton recovered enough to focus on the ceiling he was staring up at. He was slumped against the base of the sofa, panting heavily and sweating profusely in contrast to the euphoria he felt. Mellanie giggled contentedly beside him, and propped herself up on an elbow. She’d lost the black cap at some point, allowing her hair to tumble out wildly. Her bra was still attached, twisted around her abdomen.

He smiled at her and gave her a soft kiss before finally finding the bra’s clasp and removing it. That was when he noticed his own shirt was wrapped around his arm. Laughing, she unwound it for him.

“You really do look magnificent,” he said admiringly. His hand stroked along her arm, crossing over to her belly before dipping inquisitively to massage her thigh. “This age suits you.”

“You haven’t changed.”

“Is that good?”

Mellanie gasped in surprise at what his hand did. She’d forgotten how very well he knew her body. “I like some things to stay the same,” she hissed in delight.

“Did you miss me?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

She bowed her head, letting the damp tassels of hair brush his chest. “This much.” Her lips and fingers began their delicate caresses. “This much.” She moved slowly down his belly to where his cock was beginning to stiffen again. “This much,” she growled impatiently.

Morton was convinced he’d never be able to move again, every limb ached in the most disgraceful fashion. They lay side by side on the floor, arms around each other as the light faded from the desert sky outside. For the first time since the trial he began to have regrets about what he’d lost.

“Have you managed all right, since …?” he asked quietly.

“I do okay.”

“I’m sorry; it can’t have been easy for you. I should have made some kind of provision, put some money aside, some cash. I just never considered …”

“I said I’m all right, Morty.”

“Yeah. Jeeze, you look fucking amazing. I mean it.”

She smiled, running her hand back through her hair, combing it away from her face. “Thanks. I really missed you.”

Even now, all he could think of was screwing her again. “So have you … got anyone?”

“No,” she said, a little too quickly. “Nobody special. Not like you. Things have been kinda strange for me. Especially since the Prime attack.”

“I’ll bet. What’s with this job you’ve got? You mentioned Michelangelo.”

“Oh, yeah. I work for his show now. I’m one of their reporters.”

“Congratulations. That must have been a tough gig to grab.”

“I have a good agent.”

“What the hell. It got you in to see me. That’s all I care.”

She rested a hand on his chest, stroking affectionately. “It wasn’t an excuse, Morty. I could have come to see you anytime. You’re allowed visitors.”

“Right.” He didn’t understand.

“The offer is genuine. It took me a little time to put it together, and the show’s lawyers had to convince the navy to agree. But it’s all sorted.”

“You want me to report back from Elan?”

“Yes, basically. You’re entitled to a short personal communications burst at each contact time. That’s part of your service agreement.”

“I never read the small print,” he muttered.

“The lawyers made the navy agree that you could use the burst to send us a report. Michelangelo will pay. It’s a good fee. That’ll mean you’ll have money when this is all over. You can use it to start again.”

“Fine. Whatever. Do I get to see you again? That’s all I’m interested in.”

“It’ll be difficult. I won’t get many chances. And it can’t be long before the navy begins the fight back.”

“Will you come back to see me here?” he asked insistently.

“Yes, Morty, I’ll come back.”

“Good.” He started to kiss her again.

“There’s something I want to show you,” she murmured.

“Something you’ve learned?” His tongue licked eagerly along her neck.

“Something a bad girl would do?”

She took both his hands and held them firmly. He grinned in anticipation. His e-butler told him the OCtattoos on his palms and fingers were interfacing. “What—”

Morton was suddenly standing at the bottom of a white sphere. Faint lines of gray script flowed across the surface, too quick for him to focus on. They reminded him of his virtual vision’s basic standby mode graphics.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you,” Mellanie said.

Morton turned around to see her standing behind him. She was wearing simple white coveralls. He looked down at himself to see he was wearing an identical garment.

“What the hell happened?” he asked. “Where are we?”

“It’s a simulated environment. Basically, we’re inside your inserts.”

“How the fuck did you do that?”

“The SI gave me some fairly sophisticated OCtattoos while you were in suspension. I’m just starting to learn how to use a few of them for myself.”

“The SI?”

“We have an arrangement. I supply it with unusual information, and it acts as my agent. I’m not sure how much I can trust it, though.”

“You supply it with information?” Morton wished he could string together a sentence that wasn’t a question. He was coming across like a petulant ignoramus.

“Yes.” Mellanie sounded mildly annoyed at the implication.

“Oh, right.”

“We’re linked like this because it’s completely private. There’s no sensor the navy can use to overhear what I have to tell you.”

“What’s that?” he asked cautiously.

“You remember the Guardians of Selfhood?”

“Some kind of cult? They were always shotgunning the unisphere. Didn’t they attack the Second Chance? They believed an alien was running the government. Crap like that.”

“They were right.”

“Oh, come on.”

“It’s called the Starflyer. It might have triggered the war.”

“No, Mellanie.”

“Morty, I’ve been lied to. I’ve been shot at. Its agents tried to kidnap me. Even Paula Myo thinks it’s real.”

“The Investigator?” he asked in amazement.

“She’s not an investigator anymore. The Starflyer got her fired, but she has political connections. I don’t understand it all, but she’s working for another government department now, I think. She won’t tell me anything. She doesn’t trust me. Morty, this is frightening the hell out of me. I don’t know anyone else I can turn to but you. I know you’re safe; you’ve been in suspension while all this has happened. Please, Morty, at least consider the possibility. The Guardians must have started with some kind of reason. Mustn’t they? Every legend starts with a grain of truth.”

“I don’t know. I grant you they have been going an unusually long time, but that doesn’t mean they’re right. In any case, what has all this got to do with me? I’m off to war any day now. I can’t protect you, Mellanie. Even if I snuck off base, the navy has all the activation codes for my wetwired armament systems. They can switch them on and off anytime they want.”

“Really?” She sounded intrigued. “I wonder if I could hack them.”

“Mellanie, I’m sorry, I can’t risk going back into suspension. Not even for you.”

She shook her head. “That’s not what I’m asking.”

“What then?”

“I want you to send me information back from Elan.”

“What kind of information?”

“Anything you can get on the Primes which would normally be classified. We can’t trust the navy, Morty, it’s been compromised by the Starflyer. And yes, I know that sounds paranoid. I would have said the same thing myself a year ago.”

“You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Morty.”

He waited a long moment before asking: “Would you have come to see me if you weren’t caught up in all this?”

“I would be here no matter what happened to the Commonwealth. I promise. I don’t even care that you might have killed Tara.”

“I probably did, you know. Investigator Myo doesn’t make many mistakes.”

“It doesn’t matter. We were good together, even if I was just a naïve kid. I know we’ve both changed since then, but we have to see what we can be this time around. We both owe our old selves that, don’t we?”

“Damn, you are something else.”

“Will you send me what information you can?”

“I guess so. I don’t want to disappoint you again, Mellanie. So … I suppose you’ve got some foolproof method of smuggling the data back to you?”

“Of course.”

“Yeah, thought so,” he said in a resigned tone. This truly wasn’t that first-life teenage Mellanie with the hot ass that he’d sweet-talked into bed. Not anymore. She’d changed into somebody a lot more interesting. Still goddamn hot, though.

Mellanie pulled a hand-sized square out of her pocket and held it up. It was made up from densely packed alphanumerics that glowed a faint violet as they flowed against each other in perpetual motion, always staying inside their boundary. She peered at it curiously. “Wow, I’ve never seen a naked program before.”

The sheer girlishness made him smile in fond recollection. “What is it?”

“Encryptionware. I bought it off Paul Cramley.”

“I remember Paul. How is the old rogue?”

“Harassed. He promised this will bury your private message to me in the sensorium datastream you send to the show. I can pull it out, but no one else will be able to.” She pressed the square into his hand, and it unraveled, strings of symbols flowering outward to blend into the sphere walls. They chased the gray script around for a moment, before fading into the same semivisible gray as the rest of the symbols.

Morton’s e-butler reported a new program had loaded successfully in his main insert, but lacked an author certificate and nonhostility validation. “Let it run,” he told the e-butler.

“It’ll also decrypt the messages I send to you,” Mellanie said.

“I hope they’re all obscene pictures.”

“Morty!” Her disappointed face melted away into a Dali-esque swirl of color. He was back in the darkened rec room with her warm naked body cuddled up against him.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “I’m very grateful.”

“Care to show that? Out here in the physical world.”

“Again? Already?”

“I have been waiting for over two and a half years.”

The Pathfinder had spent just three days drifting along in freefall, and already Ozzie was facing a decision he really didn’t want to make. A big part of his problem was that they had no destination. Even if they did, getting there would be difficult. Air currents in the gas halo were completely unpredictable. Moderate breezes would carry them along steadily for over half a day before depositing them in pockets of doldrumlike calm for hours on end. They left the sail up most of the time so the raft presented a decent-sized surface area to catch the breezes no matter what their orientation was. Gusts blew up abruptly, fortunately short-lived, filling out the sail as if they were still on the water, and sweeping them along in a giddy tumble. Once they’d actually had to furl the sail in, their little raft was shaking so much. In itself, such a method of travel was an interesting concept. Ozzie was mentally designing a sailing airship that could voyage through the gas halo with considerable finesse; in his mind it looked like a cylindrical schooner that sprouted a cobweb of rigging filled by sails. He could have quite a life captaining that around this fabulous realm. Many lives, actually.

Those were the kind of dreamy ideas with almost infinite possibilities to extrapolate that made his mundane real-time slightly more bearable.

With Ozzie’s encouragement, Orion had slowly adapted to freefall, though he was never going to be at home in the milieu. However, the boy could now move about the raft with a degree of confidence, although Ozzie made sure he wore his safety rope at all times. He could even keep most of his food down. There wasn’t much Ozzie could do about the way he worried, though. Their pitifully minute ship adrift within the macrocosm that was the gas halo induced a sense of isolation that even gave Ozzie momentary panic attacks.

Tochee was another matter. The big alien was genuinely suffering in freefall. Something in its physiology was simply unable to cope with the sensation. It spent the whole time miserably clinging to the rear decking. It hardly ate anything because it just kept regurgitating any food that did get past its gullet. It drank very little. Ozzie had to keep pleading and insisting to make it do that.

He knew they had to return to a gravity field soon.

Making their big friend drink was only one of the problems they were now experiencing with their water, and it was the mild one. More acute was their dwindling supply. Ozzie had never considered they might run out of water. Fair enough, he hadn’t expected them to fall off the worldlet, which was the root cause of the problem. They’d set sail on a sea that his little hand-pumped filter could easily cope with, providing them with as much fresh water as they wanted when they wanted. In fact, water had been the one dependable constant on every planet they’d walked across.

All they had for storage was Ozzie’s trusty aluminum water bottle, a couple of thermos flasks, and Orion’s one remaining plastic pouch. They’d all been full when they went over the waterfall, but in total they only held five liters. Now they were down to half of the plastic pouch; and that was with facial fluid pooling in their cheeks and throats eliminating the thirst reflex in both the humans.

Ozzie had seen distant gray fog banks the size of small moons wafting through the gas halo, the majority of them tattered nebulas stretching out idly along the air currents, while a few were thick spinning knots like Jovian cyclones. None of them was within half a million miles of the Pathfinder. It would take months, or even years, to reach them.

A third of the fruit that they’d so carefully stacked in wicker baskets before setting off had tumbled off into the void when they went over the water worldlet’s rim. They’d munched their way through quite a lot of the remainder since then, supplementing it from what remained of their prepack-aged food. The globes were succulent and juicy, but no real substitute for drinking. They wouldn’t sustain them for more than another couple of days at best.

That left Ozzie considering the other objects or creatures that occupied the gas halo. With little else to do except observe their environment, he’d soon realized the nebula was actually quite densely populated. The largest artifacts were the water worldlets. He’d been wrong with his first guess about their geometry, though. As they were blown farther away from their original worldlet he saw its true shape. It wasn’t a hemisphere; more like a bagel that had been sliced in half. The flat upper surface with its archipelago of little islands was always aligned sunward, with the sea pouring over its entire rim. Water followed the curve around and then began its long climb back up through the central funnellike hole to fill the upper sea again and start the cycle over. The orifice where it surged out on top was always capped by an opaque white cloud squatting on the water, shielding the upwelling from sight. For a look at the gravity generator that made such a thing possible, Ozzie would have cheerfully sold his soul. Not that they could go back to the worldlet even if they were caught up by a wind blowing in the right direction. He simply couldn’t work out a safe way to land (or splash down). Not without a parachute.

So he started looking at the other things orbiting around and around inside the gas halo. There were a lot of bird-equivalent creatures flittering about, either singularly or in huge flocks. Those that had come close enough to see clearly so far had fallen into two categories: a genus with a screwlike spiral wing running the length of their bodies, and others that Orion had named Fan Birds, resembling biological helicopters. They might have been edible, but some of the spiral birds were quite large, almost Tochee’s size, with long sharp tusks that Ozzie didn’t really want an up-close and personal look at. Besides, he couldn’t figure out how to catch one.

The fact that there were so many indicated they must have easily accessible food sources, which was an encouraging prospect. He’d seen a quantity of free-flying trees, globular dendrite-style structures made out of what looked like blue and violet sponge, four or five times the length of Earth’s giant sequoias. He had more hope for them than the birds; they must have some kind of internal water reserve. As yet, none of them had been close enough to try for a rendezvous, especially with Tochee in its weakened state. They probably only had one chance at being towed toward a rendezvous, and the distance was decreasing with each passing day, so he would have to make a very careful choice.

What he really wanted was the kind of reef that Johansson had described. If for no other reason, Johansson had walked home back to the Commonwealth after being on one. So far there’d been no sign of anything like that. There were a myriad of specks everywhere he looked, but he had no way of judging the size and nature of them until they got within range of his retinal inserts.

His handheld array wasn’t helping much, either. For the third time in an hour, Ozzie reviewed the data it was displaying in his virtual vision. Nobody was using the electromagnetic spectrum to transmit in. Nobody had responded to the distress signal he’d been broadcasting constantly since their arrival. Although how far such a signal would travel through the atmosphere of the gas halo was a moot point.

Ozzie sighed in disappointment—once more. According to the clock in his virtual vision it was four hours since he’d last had a drink; when he checked the antique watch on his wrist it read the same. It was time to make that decision he’d been delaying in the hope of a small miracle.

His pack was tied to the decking a couple of meters away from the cradle he’d rigged up for himself. He wriggled out of the shoulder straps and glided over to it. The filter was inside, with its little length of tube coiled up neatly.

Orion stirred inside the nest he’d constructed out of rope and his sleeping bag. He started to say something, then saw the filter in Ozzie’s hand. “Oh, no. You can’t.”

“What’s gotta be done’s gotta be done,” Ozzie replied sadly.

“I’m not going to,” the boy announced with complete finality. “The Silfen made this place. So we don’t have to do that.”

“Are they near?” Ozzie asked patiently.

Orion pulled out his friendship pendant. He had to cup his hands around the little gem before he could see the diminutive jade spark at the center.

“Don’t think so.” The boy sighed gloomily.

“Figures.” Ozzie rummaged farther through his pack until he found an old polythene bag. He stared at it despondently. “Guess this is it then.”

“I’m not going to.”

“Yeah, you said.” Ozzie pushed off from the decking, and hauled himself hand over hand around to the nominal underside of the raft, which put a modest barrier between himself and his companions. This was difficult enough without an audience. It took a while for his reluctant body to cooperate, but he eventually managed to pee into the bag.

He screwed the filter onto the top of his water bottle. Looked at the polythene bag. “Oh, just do it, you wimp,” he told himself. The end of the tube went into the bag, which he constricted to keep the fluid around the intake. He began pumping the filter, squeezing the simple trigger mechanism repeatedly until there was nothing left in the bag.

“Oh, that is just massively gross!” Orion exclaimed as Ozzie reappeared around the edge of the raft.

“No it’s not, it’s just simple chemistry. The filter removes all impurities, the manufacturer guarantees it. You’ve been drinking identical water to this ever since we started.”

“I have not! It’s pee, Ozzie!”

“Not anymore. Look, old-time explorers had to do this the hard way when they got lost in the desert, you know. We’ve got it easy, dude.”

“I won’t do it. I’m sticking to fruit.”

“Fine. Whatever.” Ozzie popped the cap on his water bottle, and deliberately took a big swig. It tasted of nothing, of course; but what he thought he could taste was a different story. Damn that kid! Putting ideas in my head.

“Is that safe?” Tochee asked.

“Don’t you start.”

“It’s disgusting, is what it is,” Orion said. “Grossly gross.”

“I don’t know if you two have actually noticed,” Ozzie said, suddenly fed up with the pair of them, “but we are seriously up shit creek without a paddle. From now on, the two of you are saving your piss as well.”

“No way!” Orion yelped.

“Yes.” Ozzie held the bottle out toward Orion. “You want this?”

“Ozzie! That’s yours.”

“Yeah. I know. So you start saving your own.”

“I’ll save it, but I won’t drink it.”

“My digestive organs do not function as yours,” Tochee said. “There is no separation mechanism for me. Will your most excellent filter work for that?”

Orion gave a horrified groan, and turned away, jamming his hands over his ears.

“I guess there’s only one way to find out,” Ozzie said glumly.

Sharp motion woke Ozzie, something poking him repeatedly on his chest. He removed the band of cloth he’d wrapped around his eyes to give him some darkness. A tentacle of Tochee’s manipulator flesh was poised in an S-bend right in front of his face, ready to prod him again.

“What?” Ozzie grunted. It was difficult to get to sleep in freefall; he resented being roused. His virtual vision clock told him he’d been asleep for a mere twenty minutes. That only made him more grouchy.

“Many large flying creatures are passing,” Tochee said. “I do not think they are birds.”

Ozzie shook his head to try to clear the lethargy away. Big mistake. He clamped his jaw hard to combat the sudden feeling of nausea. “Where?”

Tochee’s tentacle straightened to point toward the bow.

Orion was already struggling against the thick folds of his sleeping bag as Ozzie maneuvered around him. He slowed himself with a couple of tugs, then gripped the decking firmly with his right hand. It left his head sticking clear of the raft, making him think of a medieval soldier peering cautiously over the castle rampart to watch an invading army approach. A gentle breeze blew his Afro about. Tochee and Orion moved up beside him.

“Wow,” Orion whispered. “What are they?”

Ozzie used his retinal insert to zoom in. The flock must have been spread out over half a mile, hundreds of leather-brown spots slowly swirling along behind a tight little cluster. It was like watching a speckly comet, with a loose tail undulating slowly in the wake of the nucleus. They were over a mile away, tracing a wispy line against the infinite blue of the gas halo atmosphere. His e-butler brought a host of enhancement programs on-line, isolating one of the spots. The image was slowly refined, bringing the creature out from its original fuzzy outline.

“Holy crap!” Ozzie muttered.

“What is it?” Orion demanded.

Ozzie told his e-butler to display the picture on the handheld array. He turned the unit to the boy. “Oh!” Orion said softly.

It was a Silfen, but not like any they’d seen in the forests as they walked the paths between worlds. This one had wings. At first sight, it was as if the simple humanoid figure was lying spread-eagled at the center of a brown sheet.

“I should have guessed,” Ozzie said. “Yin and yang. And we’ve already seen the fairy folk version.” The flying Silfen did look uncannily like a classical demon. With the sun behind it, Ozzie saw the wings were actually a thick membrane that stained the light a dark amber. They were divided into upper and lower pairs that seemed to overlap; certainly there was no crack of sunlight between them. The top set were fixed to the Silfen’s upper arms right down to the elbow, allowing the forearms to move about freely. A filigree of black webbing sprouted from the upper arms in a leaf-vein pattern, stretching the membrane between them. On the legs, the longer, second set of wings extended as far as the knee, then bent outward, leaving a broad V-shape between their curving edges so the lower legs were free. The Silfen would still be able to walk on land. A long whip-tail extended out from what on a human would be the coccyx, tipped by a reddish kitelike triangle of membrane.

The Silfen wasn’t flying the way planet-bound birds did. Here in the gas halo it simply soared. The big membranes were sails, allowing it to catch the wind and cruise along where it wished.

Watching the flock as they glided along in huge lazy spiral curves, Ozzie felt an enormous pang of envy. They had what was surely the ultimate freedom.

“We should do that,” Orion said wistfully. “Sew ourselves into the sail and fly along. We could go wherever we wanted, then.”

“Yeah,” Ozzie agreed. He frowned, the boy’s idea making him concentrate on what he was seeing, rather than just gawping in envious awe. “You know, that’s wrong.”

“What is?” Tochee asked.

“This whole arrangement. The Silfen body is designed to walk in a gravity field, just like ours, right. So if you’re going to modify one to flap around the gas halo, why leave the legs and arms? This isn’t a modification to allow them to live here permanently. What they’ve produced is like a biological version of our Vinci suits. It’s temporary, it has to be. You don’t need legs here, and you couldn’t carry those wings about very easily on a planet.”

“I guess,” Orion said dubiously.

“I’m right,” Ozzie announced decisively. “It’s another part of their goddamn living-life-through-the-flesh stage. A great one for sure, but we’re still not seeing the final them, the adult community.”

“Okay, Ozzie.”

He ignored the boy, thinking out loud. “There’s got to be a place where they get these modifications when they arrive. Somewhere in the gas halo. Somewhere with sophisticated biological systems.”

“Unless this is a natural part of their phase,” Tochee said.

“Excuse me?”

“On my home, we had small creatures that moved through several phases between hatching and the adult breeding form: aquatic, to land, to burying. They changed accordingly for their environment. Their fins would fall off allowing them to grow primitive legs; then they would develop powerful front claws to dig, allowing their hind legs to wither away. Some of our scientific theorizers speculated that our own manipulator flesh was simply an advanced version of the morphosis mechanism. They were not popular linking us with the creatures, although I can appreciate the logic in their thoughts.”

“I get it,” Orion said. “When the Silfen come here they just grow themselves wings, and when they leave, they shrivel up and drop off again. Hey! I wonder if this is their birth stage, or the mating stage?” The boy sniggered the way only young teenagers could at the idea of mating.

“Could be,” Ozzie agreed reluctantly, suddenly intrigued by the idea of sex while flying. “Either way, it involves some heavy-duty biological manipulation. Let’s hope they’re additions. We need some serious help here, guys.”

“Then ask them,” Orion said. He pulled his friendship pendant out from his grubby T-shirt. The greenish glow at the center was bright enough to be seen in the full light of the gas halo’s sun. “Wow,” he muttered. “There must be a lot of them in that flock.” He checked his safety rope was secure around his waist, and pushed off the Pathfinder. “Yo! Hey, we’re here! Over here!” His arms semaphored wildly. “It’s me, Orion, your friend. And Ozzie and Tochee, too.”

Ozzie hesitated for a second. The resemblance to demons was just uncomfortably close … He crawled back along the raft to his pack while Orion kept on shouting and waving. The boy would never attract their attention like that; they were too far away. Though, at the back of his mind, Ozzie suspected the Silfen flock already knew they were here. He pulled a couple of flares from the pack, and headed back up to the prow.

“Get back here,” he told Orion. As soon as the boy was back holding on to the raft, Ozzie fired a flare, deliberately angling it to the side of the flock. Without gravity holding it back, the brilliant red star flew an impressive distance before dwindling away. The Silfen flock seemed oblivious to it. Ozzie cursed under his breath. “All right then, if that’s the way it’s gotta be.” He pointed the second flare tube right at the flock and fired. This time the dazzling point of light almost reached the edge of the flock before it burned out.

“They had to have seen that!” Orion said. “They just had to.”

“Yeah,” Ozzie said. “You’d think.” But the Silfen showed no sign of changing direction.

“Fire another one,” Orion said.

“No,” Ozzie said. “They saw it. They know we’re here.”

“No they don’t, they haven’t come to help.” The boy’s voice was whiny from desperation. “They’d come and help if they saw us. I know they would. They’re my friends.”

“I’ve only got a couple more flares left. It’d be a waste.”

“Ozzie!”

“Nothing we can do, kid. They’re not interested. If there’s one thing I do know about the Silfen, you can’t force them to do anything.”

“They have to help us,” Orion said forlornly.

Ozzie stared after the flock as it soared along its twisty course away from the Pathfinder. “I wonder what’s so important they’ve got to go see,” he muttered to himself. Even with his inserts on full magnification he couldn’t see anything significant in the direction they were heading. There had to be something fairly close, surely? Not even a Silfen could survive indefinitely without food and water. Or maybe they hunted the avian creatures who lived in the gas halo.

He looked at the brokenhearted boy, then at Tochee. The big alien didn’t have body language the way humans did, but something in its still posture was universal. Their friend was as dejected and worried as he was.

“Now what?” Orion asked.

Ozzie wished he could find an answer.

Ten hours after the flock had vanished into the blue haze of the atmosphere Ozzie knew he was going to have to do something about getting them to one of the particles floating in the gas halo, even if it was only one of the hefty sponge trees. Orion had withdrawn into a massive sulk, although Ozzie knew damn well that was just a cloak for the boy’s anxiety. Tochee, though, remained his main cause for concern. The alien was in noticeably poor physical shape, with the color leeching out of its furry fronds, while the manipulator flesh along its flanks twitched constantly. Freefall really didn’t agree with the big creature. Ozzie knew it hadn’t eaten for over a day, and he was still pleading for it to drink something.

He allowed himself to drift away from the decking, and began scanning around for any large object. He’d had a few ideas about altering their course by a couple of degrees; he was actually keen to see if they worked in practice. Mainly it involved trailing the sail on the end of a rope, and using it like a very flexible rudder, with himself out there keeping it oriented in the right direction. The conditions were just about right, a gentle constant breeze that shouldn’t present too much trouble keeping the sail pointing correctly.

“What are you looking for?” Orion asked; he sounded very tired.

“Anything that’s out there, dude. We need to start making some progress.”

“Do you think we can?”

The hopelessness in the boy’s voice made Ozzie tug on his safety robe and drift back down to the ramshackle raft. “Hey, course we can. We just need some fresh resources, is all. This falling off the end of the world thing kinda caught us by surprise, huh?”

Orion nodded sheepishly.

“The trees will have plenty of water. And they probably have eatable fruit. We can use the leaves and wood to turn the old Pathfinder into something that can fly a lot better. Trust me. I’ve been in worse situations than this.”

The boy gave him a surprised look, then slowly smiled. “No you haven’t!”

“Don’t you believe it. I was on Akreos when its sun went into its cold expansion phase. Nobody had ever seen anything like that before. None of the astronomers had a clue what was going on. Man, that planet’s climate went downhill so fast it was amazing. It was like living inside an old Hollywood disaster movie. I’d got a family there, married some English girl called Annabelle; she was the same kind of age as me, or maybe older, rejuved a couple of times, of course. She was famous back on Earth even before I was. Can’t remember what for, must have dumped that memory. Real pretty, though, with a hell of a figure. You’d have loved her.

“We’d settled a long way from the capital city, doing the whole basic rural idyll scene in some beautiful countryside right between the temperate and subtropical bands, so it was seriously hot in summer but we still had snow in the winter. I built us a villa at the head of a low valley, and we’d got ourselves a nice little farm going. Course, it was all automated, had to be, we spent most of our time humping like we were training for the Olympics. Wow, yeah.” He chuckled at the memory. “That was one of my lives where I’d got myself a little bit of a boost where it matters most to a guy, you know. Not that I need much of a boost, but hey.”

“Ozzie.”

“Right. Yeah. We’d been out there in the wild a couple of years, had one kid with another on the way, when the lights went out. Goddamn weirdest thing I have ever seen. The sun turned orange inside of a week. Its photosphere deflated, too; you could watch the damn thing shrinking. They worked it out eventually, something to do with unstable hydrogen layers. The sun rotated a lot faster than normal, see, which messed with the internal convection currents. There were upwellings of helium and carbon into the fusion level. I think that was it. Anyway … Akreos turned cold fast.”

“Ozzie.”

“Don’t interrupt, man. The snowstorms just like exploded out of the sky. They went on forever and a day and weren’t ever going to stop. And it was cold, I mean not quite as bad as the Ice Citadel planet, admittedly, but ball-bustingly cold for an H-congruous planet, let me tell you. So cold all the train lines turned brittle and fractured. Aircraft couldn’t fly in the blizzards, of course. And there wasn’t a snowplow built that could keep the roads open in those conditions.

“We had to evacuate. There were already over five million people on that poor doomed planet, and virtually no transport left. The Commonwealth Council imported snowmobiles from all the Big15, but they concentrated on the capital city and the major towns. Annabelle and I were all on our own. So I had to break down all the farm machinery and rebuild it. You know what as? A fucking hovercraft, man! Can you believe that; it’s like twentieth-century technology. How crap is that? I mean, why not just straight out build yourself a rocketship? But it worked. We set off for the capital, but by then the glaciers were coming. Do you have any idea how fast they can move? Man, they’re juggernauts in the express lane. We were racing ahead of them in the hovercraft; these mile-high cliffs of ice that roared across the land crushing anything in their path and knocking mountains out of their way. Supplies were running low, and our power level was reaching critical—”

“Ozzie!” Orion pointed frantically.

“Huh?” Ozzie twisted around, his arms tightening his grip to prevent the movement becoming a spin. A jagged fragment of land was rising over the Pathfinder’s prow like a moon that was way too close. It filled a quarter of the sky. “Hoshit,” he squawked. His e-butler immediately began analyzing dimensions. The flat, elongated chunk of land was thirty-eight kilometers long, and nine wide at the center, with both ends tapering away to daggerlike spires. Its surface was mostly vegetation, a canopy of treetops with leaves whose shading ran from deep hazel through sickly brimstone and into a dense olive-green. Tight streams of swan-white mist slithered along the foliage with a sluggishness approximating thick liquid. The closest point of the alarmingly solid mass was seventeen kilometers away.

“Where the fuck did that come from?” Ozzie spluttered. Admittedly he hadn’t checked around much since the flock left, but this should surely have been visible from a long way off. He hadn’t been dozing that much.

“We are going to crash,” Tochee said.

Ozzie’s e-butler computed their closing velocity at just less than one meter per second. Purple vector lines sliced across his virtual vision. No doubt about it, they were on an interception course. “Bump,” Ozzie corrected. “Not crash: bump. This is freefall, remember. And at this rate we’ve got another five hours to go. We’ll be quite safe.”

“They did it!” Orion exclaimed jubilantly. “The Silfen saw us, and steered us here. I knew they were our friends.”

Ozzie wanted to tell the boy how unlikely that was; but then the gas halo wasn’t exactly a natural artifact. “Could be. Okay, guys, let’s work out how we’re going to lasso ourselves onto the surface when we approach.”

Twenty minutes away from what they now called Island Two, a gentle wind was providing the Pathfinder a lazy, slightly erratic tumble, which made it difficult to know exactly which way up it would be when they finally hit. Bumped! Ozzie was planning on jettisoning the sail when they were keel-on and only a few minutes away from contact. That ought to slow their breeze-augmented rotation; although he wasn’t sure if the figure-skating principle might not apply here, and pulling the mass in toward the center would actually help increase the spin. In any case, they all thought it would be best if they jumped just before the raft reached the treetops.

Ten minutes, and Island Two was alarmingly large and very solid. The worst part was when their stately unstoppable gyration shifted his visual orientation so they seemed to be falling up toward it. At this distance it was no longer a particle. It was land.

Every loose item on board had been securely lashed to the deck. Ozzie was looking at the sail ropes, wondering which sequence to cut them in. The sail should flutter its way into the treetops. There were enough small branches and curving fern leafs protruding above the general canopy that he was confident they would be snagged safely as they made contact. Bouncing off would be the final insult.

With two minutes to go, Ozzie untied his safety rope. One thing he didn’t want to do was get tugged along by the mass of the raft if their impact made it spin. Island Two was now close enough to reveal a wealth of detail to the unaided eye. The actual ground itself was still obscured by the trees, but in among the brown and green canopy Ozzie could see strange spaghettilike hoops of purple tubing coiled in intricate knots. Several ocher columns jutted tens of meters up out of the foliage, like ancient giant trees that had died and petrified. They were tipped in bulbous bristles that looked uncomfortably sharp. He hoped that the Pathfinder didn’t come down directly on one of those; they’d be in danger of a lethal impalement.

“There is water down there,” Tochee said. Their friend was perched on the edge of the raft, ready to fling itself free.

“That’s a good omen,” Ozzie said. “We can fill all our containers. And you seriously need to start drinking.” The filter hadn’t been terribly successful in separating out Tochee’s fecal matter.

“This may not be a correct translation,” Tochee said. “I do not believe water like this is a good sign. What is making it do that?”

Ozzie looked from the big alien to the handheld array. “Water like what? What is it doing?”

“It is flowing along the ground as if this were a planet.”

“That can’t be …” Ozzie stared forward, his retinal inserts scanning the canopy and its meandering mists, searching for a gap. There was ground beneath the eerie twisted-spiral leaves. Loose loamy soil carpeted with dead leaves. What’s holding the leaves there? “Uh oh,” Ozzie grunted. He’d assumed only the big water islands used artificial gravity. “Dumbass!”

“What?” a panicked Orion asked.

The Pathfinder was starting to speed up.

“Brace yourself!” Ozzie shouted. He gripped Orion’s wrist. “Don’t jump.”

“But …”

The raft creaked ominously as weight reasserted itself against the decking. They were tilted slightly, sliding down (and it was definitely down now) toward Island Two’s rumpled treetops.

The Pathfinder was still accelerating when it thumped into the uppermost branches. All three travelers were thrown violently to one side. The jolt pushed Ozzie’s stomach somewhere down toward his feet, while his spine hit the decking painfully. The wood bent alarmingly beneath him. He immediately wanted to be sick. Loud crashing splintering sounds reverberated all around him. Leathery leaves slapped him hard across the cheek, their tiny spikes digging in through his stubble. The decking lurched around, tipping toward the vertical. Ozzie felt himself sliding over the simple planking as it bowed alarmingly. Somehow he’d turned upside down, so it was his head that was going to hit the ground first. The Pathfinder was bucking about as it continued to crash through the tree, snapping off branches as it went.

Tochee’s manipulator flesh curled around Ozzie’s ankle. He was tugged violently upward as the raft fell away from him. The universe spun nauseously, curving smears of jade and caramel and turquoise wrapping themselves across his vision. Then his descent came to an abrupt halt. The universe reversed direction, and the Pathfinder finished its undignified landing with a bone-busting crunch.

“Urrgh. Fuck.” Ozzie tried blinking to sort out the confused blur that was all his eyes registered. Hot pain stabbed into his right knee. His cheeks smarted and he could feel something wet soaking into his stubble. When he dabbed his hand on the area and brought it away he saw fingers glistening with blood.

He tilted his head and looked down—no, up—to the tentacle of flesh coiled around his ankles. Above that, Tochee was wedged into the V where a thick branch forked away from the trunk, its manipulator flesh extended as long as Ozzie had ever seen it. The big alien was very still, though he could see it sucking down a lot of air. Several large splinters were sticking into its multicolored hide, where gooey amber fluid was seeping out of the lacerations. When he let his head flop down again, he could see the ground at least another fifteen meters below. The Pathfinder lay underneath him, its decking fractured in several places, with all their belongings scattered around.

Retinal inserts showed him Tochee’s eye signaling rapidly. It was asking if he was okay. Ozzie managed a feeble smile and gave his big friend a thumbs-up. Tochee contracted his tentacle slightly, and began to sway him smoothly from side to side, building up a pendulum motion. The tree swung a little closer with each arc until Ozzie finally managed to grab hold just above a broad bough. His feet were freed, and he collapsed onto the bough. The first thing he realized was how hard the bark was, almost like rock. “Thanks, man, I owe you one there,” he wheezed, even though Tochee couldn’t hear. “Orion? Hey, kid, where are you?” He looked down at the broken raft again. “Orion?”

“Here.”

Ozzie looked back over his shoulder, then up. The boy was tangled in the upper branches of the nearest tree, a leafless ovoid lattice of slim brass-colored stems. He began to wriggle his way downward through the interior; as he did so the smaller stems bent elastically to accommodate him. “I jumped. Sorry,” Orion said. “I know you said not to. I was scared. But this tree is made out of rubber, or something.”

“Yeah, yeah, great,” Ozzie said. “Good for you.”

“It’s not big gravity here anyway,” the boy said enthusiastically. “Not like you get on a planet, or the water island.”

“Terrific.” Now he noticed, Ozzie didn’t feel very heavy. He eased off his stranglehold on the bough, and shifted around experimentally. Gravity was probably about a third Earth standard.

Tochee slid smoothly down the trunk, pausing briefly as it came level with Ozzie. “I am no longer falling.” Its eye patterns flared contentedly. “I enjoy this place.”

Ozzie gave his friend another weak thumbs-up, and started to work out how to shin down the trunk.

Orion and Tochee were waiting for him at the bottom. He stood cautiously, very glad he wasn’t in a full gravity field; his knee felt as though it were on fire.

“Hand me the first aid kit, will you,” he told the boy.

Orion bounced off over the rumpled land, searching through their scattered belongings. When he came back he had both the medical kit and the handheld array. Ozzie sank down, and touched a diagnostic probe to the inflamed skin above his knee. Blood was dripping from his chin, falling slothfully to stain his already filthy T-shirt. His e-butler told him that some of the OCtattoos on his cheek had been torn, and could now only operate at reduced capacity.

Tochee was resting on the ground opposite, using a tentacle to pull the big splinters from its hide. A shudder ran along its body as each one came out.

“What now?” Orion asked.

“Good question.”

“Think of this as my wedding present,” Nigel Sheldon said.

Wilson didn’t dignify that with an answer. He raised the transparent helmet up in front of his face. On the other side of it Anna was glaring at him in her special warning way.

“Thanks,” Wilson said gracelessly. “I appreciate it.”

“No problem.” Nigel seemed oblivious to any undercurrents. “I have to admit, this whole problem tweaked my curiosity, too.”

Wilson brought the helmet down over his head. The space suit collar sealed itself to the rim. His e-butler ran checks through the suit array, and gave him the all clear.

There were nine of them getting ready in the long, composite-walled prep room. Wilson appreciated that they had to take the navy forensic office team along, but he was starting to think that maybe he would have liked a few moments alone to begin with. It wasn’t going to happen; even with Nigel’s backing, this little jaunt was expensive.

Commander Hogan was heading the investigation team; his every response formal and respectful, he seemed almost awestruck by Nigel. Wilson knew he was Rafael’s man, the one who’d replaced Myo. Not that it made him a bad person, but Wilson felt more comfortable with his deputy, Lieutenant Tarlo, who was approaching the excursion with a schoolboyish enthusiasm, and wasn’t in the least intimidated by the company he was keeping. Ever since they’d arrived in the prep room, he and Nigel had been chatting about the surf to be found on various planets. Four navy technical officers were going as well, to inspect the systems they were visiting to see what the hell the Guardians were doing with them. They were all happy about the jaunt—a day away from the office and their usual routine, an interesting technical challenge, plus getting themselves known to the admiral and Nigel Sheldon—who wouldn’t be?

“We’re ready for you,” Daniel Alster said. If Nigel’s chief aide had any misgivings about his boss taking part, he was hiding them beautifully, Wilson thought.

Nine space-suited figures tramped down a long corridor toward the gateway chamber, their bootsteps echoing loudly off the old concrete walls. Wilson’s treacherous memories replayed the time when the Ulysses crew had walked across Cape Canaveral’s main runway from the bus to the air stairs of the waiting scramjet spaceplane, their short route lined ten deep by reporters and NASA ground staff, cheering and whooping as they embarked on the first stage of their flight to another world. Meanwhile, over in California, Ozzie and Nigel were chugging beer, chasing girls, smoking joints, and building the last few components of their machine …

The gateway used to be operated by CST’s exploratory division, back in the days when they were venturing out through phase one space. That period had ended over a century and a half ago when the exploratory division packed up and moved out to the Big15; they were now transient again, en route to phase three space, their progress stalled only by the Prime invasion. But this wormhole had remained active, tucked away in a section of LA Galactic where the general public never visited. It was used for many things: emergency backup for the big commercial gateways, supplying rapid response transit for the emergency services during civil disasters, carrying reserve power circuits to the moon in the event of any regular linkage shutdown. But mainly it provided interstellar transportation for governments that couldn’t afford, or weren’t liberal enough to sanction, life suspension sentences for criminals. Even on the old phase one developed, “progressive” worlds, some crimes were regarded as needing something more than suspension, and a large proportion of convicted criminals refused suspension anyway. With characteristic opportunism, CST filled the market for such a banishment.

There were several planets in phase one space that were on the borderline of H-congruous status; if they were opened for settlement they would be hard work to live on. As CST explored and opened up hundreds of other, easier worlds, they were rapidly sidelined and consigned to a detailed entry in astronomical records and company history. Hardrock would have been one of them, a world whose life-forms were still on the bottom of the evolutionary ladder, with no land animals and only primitive jellyfish in the sea. A perfect place for the scum of humanity to be dumped, where they were incapable of doing any harm to anybody except their own kind. So once a week, CST would open the wormhole to a new location on Hardrock, send through crates of farm equipment, seed, medical supplies, and food; then the convict batch would be marched over. After that, they were on their own.

The circular gateway chamber looked crude compared to its modern equivalents, its surfaces of raw concrete and metal more suited to handling cargo rather than people. But then Wilson suspected the people who passed through here were regarded as less than cargo anyway. A Class 5-BH transRover stood on the floor, a simple open jeep used for driving around on airless worlds, with big low-pressure wheels. Several equipment cases had been loaded on the rear rack. The gateway itself was a blank circle, three meters in diameter, projecting slightly from the concave wall. A force field shimmered over it, turning the air to a slightly grainy smoke layer.

Daniel Alster gave them a tight smile. “Good luck,” he said as he left.

Wilson looked up the wall opposite the gateway to the broad window fronting the operations center. A couple of technicians were lounging on the other side of it, regarding the travelers with a disinterested glance as they joked between themselves.

“Stand by,” the gateway controller told them. “We’re opening the wormhole now.”

A pale light began to shine through the force field. Wilson turned to face it, seeing faint shadows growing across the floor behind all of the team. The light was deepening, becoming amber, then heading down toward ginger. His heart began to pick up as the color flipped all sorts of switches in his brain. Why the hell am I putting myself through this? He hadn’t realized just how much Mars had been haunting him down the centuries.

The wormhole opened. After a break of over three centuries, Wilson was once again looking out across Arabia Terra.

“Clear to proceed,” the gateway controller said.

Wilson drew a breath, staring at the stone-littered landscape. Thin wisps of ginger dust were scurrying through the ultra-thin atmosphere.

“You want to go first?” Nigel asked.

How envious he’d been of Commander Dylan Lewis all those centuries ago, the first man to set foot on another planet. Except he wasn’t; Nigel had been there waiting. Some strange atmospheric phenomena carried Ozzie’s laugh down the ages to reverberate around the chamber. “Oh, man, don’t do that, you’re going to so piss them off.”

“Sure,” Wilson said briskly. He walked through the force field.

Martian soil under his feet. Pink-tinged atmosphere banding the horizon, fading to jet-black directly overhead. A million pockmarked, jagged rocks scattered about, with rusty dust in every crevice. He scanned around, placing himself against the geography and features he could never forget. Off to his left was the rim of giant Schiaparelli, which should mean … There, just off north. Two mounds of red soil smothering the lower third of the cargo landers. Their white titanium fuselages had been scoured by the storms of three centuries, blasting away all markings and color. Now the exposed sections were tarnished curves of dark metal, the originally sharp edges of the parachute release mechanisms abraded down to warty clusters. Holes had opened up in several places, revealing the skeleton of internal struts caging black cavities.

So if the landers were there, then … He turned slowly to see the Eagle II. Sometime down the years the undercarriage had collapsed, lowering the spaceplane’s belly to the ground. The sands of Mars had claimed the craft, creating a smooth triangular dune of soil whose upper fingers of coppery grit gripped the top of the spaceplane’s fuselage. All that was left of the tailfin was a stumpy blade of bleached and brittle composite, half its original height.

“Damnit,” Wilson muttered. There was moisture in his eyes.

YOU OKAY? Anna sent in text.

SURE. JUST GIVE ME A MOMENT. He walked a little way across the icy landscape, allowing the others to come through the wormhole. Tarlo drove the transRover out, bouncing across the rough ground.

“Whoa, this low gravity really screws up maneuverability,” Tarlo exclaimed. “And these rocks don’t help. I’ve never seen so much rock lying around in one place. Was there some kind of massive meteor shower or something? How did you drive when you were here, sir?”

“We never did,” Wilson said. They’d brought three mobile laboratories with them, the best that twenty-first-century technology and money could build. They were still inside the cargo landers; his mind could see them like dead metal fetuses, every moving part cold-welded together, their bodywork flaking away in the terrible hostile atmosphere. “We just went straight home again.”

“You could have stayed and explored,” Nigel said. He didn’t sound very contrite.

“Yeah, we could have.” Wilson was trying to work out angles against the landscape and its poignant relics. He walked over toward the Eagle II. Its dimensions were scripted perfectly in his mind, allowing him to draw its shape through the raggedy mound of soil. The profile dynamic wings had been fully retracted for the landing, shrinking back down to a squat delta; there was the smooth curvature they followed to merge with the fuselage. Both narrow sections of the windshield were buried; he was glad of that, the equivalent of closing the lids on a dead man’s eyes. He didn’t want to see inside again.

He bent down slowly, and began scraping at the fine sand. Little swirls of it puffed up as his gauntlets raked around.

“We’ve acquired the Reynolds beacon, sir,” Commander Hogan said.

“Three kilometers away, bearing forty-seven degrees.”

“Well done,” Nigel said. “You guys scoot over there and get us some answers from the science equipment, huh?”

“Yessir.”

Wilson thought he might have got the position slightly wrong. After all, the Eagle II could have shifted around, twisting as its undercarriage struts collapsed. He saw the transRover start to rock and jolt its way across the rucked sands, all six navy personnel clinging to the frame.

“What are you looking for?” Anna asked.

“Not sure.” He moved a few paces and bent down again. “Okay. The flag, actually. I know we got the damn thing up. Must have been blown over.”

She put her hands on her hips, and turned a full circle. “Wilson, it could be anywhere out there. The storms here are really ferocious. They can last for weeks.”

“Months, actually, and they cover most of the planet.” He gave up grubbing through the dirt. “I’m sure I remember using a power drill to screw the pole legs in. We were supposed to secure it.”

Nigel had walked up the slope of the sand piled against the Eagle II’s fuselage. His hand touched the remnants of the tailfin. “This ain’t right, you know. She deserves better than this. We should arrange to take her home. I’ll bet the California Technological Heritage Museum would love to have her. They’d probably pay for the restoration.”

“No,” Wilson said automatically. “She’s broken. She’s a part of this planet’s history now. She belongs here.”

“She’s not so badly broken.” Nigel stroked the top of the fuselage. “They built well back then.”

“It was her heart you broke.”

“Goddamn! I knew it, man, I fucking knew it. You are still pissed at me.”

“No I’m not. We were both part of history that day, you and I. My side lost, but then we were always going to. Wormhole technology was inevitable. If you hadn’t done it, someone else would.”

“Yeah? You have no idea how tough that math was to crack, nor following up by translating it into hardware. Nobody but Ozzie could have done it. I know his wacko rep, but he’s a genius, a true one, a fucking supernova compared to Newton, Einstein, and Hawking.”

“If it can be done, it will be done. Don’t try and personalize this. We represent events, that’s all.”

“Oh, brilliant, I’m nothing but a figurehead. Well, excuse me.”

“Will you two monster egos pack this in, please,” Anna said. “Wilson, he’s right, you can’t let these old ships decay any further. They are history, just like you said, and a very important part of history.”

“Sorry,” Wilson mumbled. “It’s just … I got wrong-footed coming back here. You don’t erase half the stuff you think you have at rejuvenation.”

“Ain’t that a fact,” Nigel said. “Come on, let’s go find a souvenir that isn’t a lump of rock. There’s got to be something lying around here.”

“I never even got a lump of rock last time,” Wilson said.

“You didn’t?”

“No. We didn’t run our science program. I think Lewis picked up his first sample, but NASA kept that once we got home.”

“Damn! You know, I don’t remember picking up any rock, either.”

“Christ,” Anna said. She bent down and picked up a couple of twisted pebbles, and handed one to each man. “You two are bloody useless.”

Roderick Deakins strolled down Briggins as casually as anyone could, walking around the Olika district at two A.M. He was grateful there hadn’t been a patrol car driving past, though that was only a matter of time. Olika was where a lot of rich types lived. They had deep connections in Darklake’s City Hall. The police maintained a good presence here, not like the Tulosa district where Roderick lived. You rarely saw a cop there after dark, and then never singularly.

“Is this it?” Marlon Simmonds asked.

Roderick had worked with Marlon many times down the years. Nothing too serious, you couldn’t call them partners, but they’d seen their fair share of juvenile street rip-offs, followed by a string of break-ins when they’d run with the Usaros back in ’69. After that they’d done time together for a Marina Mall warehouse heist that had gone seriously wrong in ’73. When they were paroled they’d drifted into helping out Lo Kin, a small-time boss who ran a protection racket on Tulosa’s westside, where they’d been stuck ever since. All that history and the trust that went with it made them a perfect pair for this job.

“What does the fucking number read?” Roderick hissed back.

“Eighteen hundred,” Marlon said, glancing at the brass numbers screwed into the drycoral arch above the gate. That was the thing about Marlon: nothing much seemed to bother him. His biochemically boosted body weighed at least twice as much as Roderick, and moved along with the inevitable inertia of a twenty-ton truck. His general attitude was a reflection of his physical presence, allowing him to cruise through life knowing there was very little that would get in his way.

“Then that’s it, isn’t it?” Roderick said. The man who was an associate of Lo Kin, the one they were doing this for, had been very specific. The house number, the name of the man they were going to talk to, the short time in which they had to perform the job.

“Okay, man.” Marlon took a harmonic blade from his jacket pocket, and sliced through the wrought iron around the lock. The gate swung open with the tiniest of squeaks from the hinges. Roderick waited a moment to see if any alarms were triggered. But there was no sound. When he waved his left palm around the gate, his e-butler said it couldn’t detect any electronic activity. Roderick grinned to himself. It had cost a lot to get the OCtattoo sensor on his palm, but every time like this he knew it was worth it.

It was dark in the bungalow’s garden. The tall drycoral wall blocked most of the illumination from the streetlights outside, while the low building at the center remained unlit. Roderick switched his retinal insert to infrared. It produced a simple pink and gray image that was oddly flat. That lack of depth always slowed him down; one day soon he’d get a matching insert for his other eye, which would give him a decent resolution in this spectrum. It could even be with the money from this job; Lo Kin’s associate certainly paid well.

Roderick’s hand moved inside his leather jacket and removed the Eude606 ion pistol from its holster. The gun fitted snugly into his palm, as well it might do. He’d never held a piece of hardware as expensive as this before. It felt good. The power it contained gave Roderick a raw confidence he didn’t experience often.

Marlon cut through the wooden front door, slicing around the lock. Roderick couldn’t detect any electrical activity. It fitted with what they’d been told. Paul, the old man who lived here, was eccentric verging on plain nutty. They stepped cautiously into the dark hallway.

“What are you doing?” Roderick whispered. Marlon was going along the shelving, examining the vases and figurines sitting there.

“You heard what the man said: take anything you want. Is any of this art crap valuable?”

“I don’t fucking know. But we do that after, get it?”

Marlon’s huge frame shrugged dismissively.

Roderick switched on his small handheld array. The screen glowed brightly in the lightless bungalow; it displayed a floor plan, with the master bedroom clearly marked. “This way.”

They started walking cautiously, watching out for anything on the floor. The place was a mess; nobody had cleaned up in an age. Roderick checked the first few maidbots resting in their alcoves; none of them had any power in their batteries. He’d never been anywhere with so little electrical activity; it was like being in the stone age.

When they were halfway across the lounge, Roderick’s retinal insert failed, plunging him back into a world of ebony shadows. “Goddamn!”

“What is this?” Marlon complained.

Roderick realized his handheld array was dead. His e-butler was also offline. “Shit. Are your inserts down?”

“Yeah.”

The unease in Marlon’s voice added to Roderick’s growing anxiety; it wasn’t often the big man sounded uncertain. He squinted into the darkness. Two big arching windows were visible as gray sheets, casting the tiniest amount of illumination into the room. He could just make out the regular sable shapes of furniture.

“This is no accident; our electronics got hit.”

“What do we do?” Marlon asked. “I’ve got a flashlight. You want some light?”

“Maybe. He must know we’re here. What do you reckon?” Roderick caught a motion over by one of the windows. A patch of dark sliding up the wall. Which was crazy. Not to mention disturbing. Or was it just his adrenaline-pumped imagination? He brought the Eude606 up, pointing it in the direction the shape might have been if it was real. Sweat was pricking his brow.

“Well, what’s he going to do?” There was a kind of bravado in Marlon’s voice now. Neither of them were bothering to whisper.

Roderick steadied his pistol, holding it level and ready to turn to face whatever threat was revealed. “Okay then.” He waited while Marlon fumbled around in his jacket. Then the narrow beam stabbed out, amazingly bright in the gloomy lounge. It swept over the walls, with Roderick following the wide circle with his pistol. Marlon turned completely around, exposing the antique decor with its dusty coating. There was nobody in the lounge with them. More importantly from Roderick’s point of view, there was nothing on the wall by the window, nothing that could move about.

“Okay, old man,” Marlon said. “Out you come now, we ain’t gonna hurt you.” It was the kind of tone used to calm a panicked animal. “We just want the artwork, that’s all. There ain’t gonna be no trouble.”

They looked at each other. Roderick shrugged. “Bedroom,” he said. Something moved in his peripheral vision. Above him. “Huh?” Marlon must have caught it, too; the beam tilted up. Roderick looked at the ceiling, which was covered in broad patches of peculiar rust-colored fur.

The nostat directly above Roderick let go. It was like a soft blanket dropping on him, its edges falling below his elbows. Shock made him yell and thrash about, trying to tug the thing off. The nostat’s soft fur changed, strands twining together into needle-thin spikes. It tightened around its prey, a motion that slid over ten thousand of the slender barbs through Roderick’s clothing and into his flesh. His scream of utter agony was cut off as spikes penetrated into his throat, filling his gullet with blood. Reflex made him convulse, even though the pain had virtually rendered him unconscious. It was exactly the motion that the nostat had evolved to take advantage of. The barbs were slim and strong enough to remain extended as its prey’s muscles flexed, allowing them to rip through the tissue as if they were miniature scalpels. The entire outer layer of Roderick’s upper torso was shredded to the constituency of jelly. Blood erupted from his body as it collapsed onto the floor, which the nostat sucked down hungrily through the hollow core of each spike.

The first contraction didn’t quite have the strength to push the spikes through Roderick’s skull. Instead they penetrated the softer areas of flesh, ripping apart eyes, ears, nose, and tearing through his cheeks. The last thing he heard as he finally lost consciousness was a terrified roar coming from Marlon, and furniture exploding as both of them fired their ion pistols in random bursts.

The day after he went to Mars, Nigel woke up in bed with his wives Nuala and Astrid. Both of them were biologically in their mid-thirties, though chronologically more than a century old. They were what he tended to think of as the mother comfort personalities of his harem. He sought them out when he wanted an untroubled sleep; and last night he’d really needed one. It had been a bad week; dealing with the innumerable problems spinning out from the Lost23 refugees on top of the high politics of the War Cabinet. He’d thought Mars would be a distraction from the problems he had to deal with in the office. Typical mid-life-crisis response, get out from behind the desk and do something practical; but there had been far too many old memories lurking amid that desolate frozen landscape to ambush his emotions. The broken ancient spaceplane had kindled a totally unexpected pang of guilt. When they finally returned from that abandoned planet his mood had turned bleak.

He’d visited Paloma and Aurelie first, the newest members of his harem. First-lifers that hadn’t reached their twenty-first birthdays yet, the pair of them were beautiful, giggly, and utterly guileless girls. They came very firmly in the sex athlete category, with personal trainers keeping them fit and toned, an unlimited wardrobe budget, and stylists to confer the kind of elegance he enjoyed in all his women.

Every time he came out of rejuvenation, his harem was made up mostly of girls like them. It was only when he started advancing into his biological early thirties that the ratio began to swing back, and the more secure and stable types made up the majority as yet another generation of his children was born. As a single child himself, Nigel always enjoyed being surrounded by a large immediate family; that was something that no rejuvenation had ever altered. As always in his case, the human universe bent to accommodate him with the alacrity of a gravity field around a neutron star. There was never a problem in finding women who were happy with the harem arrangement; he was sent thousands of intimate requests every day. His main difficulty was sorting through them all.

Right now there were only five of the younger, sexy ones. He knew that none of them would hang around for more than a couple of years. Girls like that never did; they weren’t stupid, and eventually they’d grow weary of the household’s formality, the way everything was structured around his preferences. Unless he had children with them—unlikely now—they’d move on, just like thousands before them.

Until that happened, they were the best possible sex he could wish for. It was only after romping with Paloma and Aurelie for nearly two hours he left, almost sneaking out, to find Nuala and Astrid, who snuggled up cozily and gave him that welcome sense of comfort so essential for a deep dreamless sleep.

Breakfast, as always when the household was in residence at the New Costa mansion, was held on the terrace. He sat at the head of a long table sheltered from the sharp blue-white glare of Regulus by a canopy of lush grapevines, whose broad leaves filtered the exotic sunlight to a manageable lambency. The day’s first gusts of the dry El Iopi wind were already blowing across the grounds, rustling the foliage above him. Eleven of his wives joined him, bringing their children, who ranged from three-month-old Digby to Bethany, who was approaching her fifteenth birthday. Several senior family members who were staying in the mansion also arrived with their partners. It was a bustling lighthearted meal, which finished off the mood transformation that his serene sleep had begun. His thoughts had calmed considerably, which was a relief; he knew his judgment became impaired the more wound-up he got.

“Are you going to rehouse the refugees who’re being looked after by the Hive?” Astrid asked. She was poring over a paperscreen as she ate her fruit and honey yogurt. “I mean, they’re being made welcome, and all, but they aren’t gonna wanna stay there.”

“Long-term, they’ll certainly move on. We’re busy designating phase three and late stage-two planets that can absorb all the refugees. As to when a Commonwealth-endorsed settlement project gets under way, that depends on the Senate. For now, everyone’s just concentrating on providing relief for the survivors.”

“Half of them will be absorbed back into mainstream society without any government aid packages,” Campbell said. “The majority are skilled people who can integrate into any modern economy; it’ll just be a question of finding a planet with an ethnic base that suits them. Augusta companies have received a lot of employment inquiries already. So have the other Big15.”

“It says the insurance companies won’t compensate them,” Astrid said, her manicured finger tapping the news article on her paperscreen in accusation.

“All the local insurance companies were destroyed along with their planets,” Nigel said.

“They’re subdivisions of the major companies,” she said. “You know that.”

“Sure. But compensation is going to have to involve government. The Dow-Times index is still down eight thousand; the finance houses can’t afford to pay out trillions right now. We need to concentrate our taxes on the navy and strengthening planetary defenses.”

“That’s outrageous,” Paloma exclaimed. “They need our help. They suffered because of Doi’s stupid mistakes.”

Nigel tried not to smile at her righteous anger. She had the full indignation of youth, a fieriness that promoted her attractiveness. “I pushed for the Second Chance mission.”

“Well, yes.” Paloma reddened. “But the government knew the Primes were a threat. They should have taken it seriously.”

“That’s the benefit of hindsight talking. We prepared as well as any reasonably civilized culture could be expected.”

“Will they come back, Daddy?” little Troy asked, peering anxiously over his cereal bowl.

“They might. But I promise you, all of you,” Nigel said earnestly when he saw the other children looking at him for reassurance, “I will make sure you’re safe. All of you.” He exchanged a glance with Campbell, who pulled a face before returning to his eggs Benedict.

When Nigel finished breakfast, he was almost tempted to go back to Paloma’s bedroom. But there was a ton of work to be done, so he set off to the wing of the mansion where he maintained his personal offices. It was a long walk.

Several senior members joined him for the first review conference of the day: Campbell, who had done a magnificent job orchestrating the evacuation. Nelson, the Dynasty security chief, and Nigel’s twentieth child, born when he first started having more than one wife at a time. Perdita, their media director who tied in a lot of operations with Jessica, the Augusta Senator, a position she’d held for seventy years. As Nigel looked around it struck him how they were all from the first three generations. Maybe it’s time to let the fourths up to this level? There’s no complacency worse than the comfort of familiarity. In which case why make it the fourths? Why not the fifteens, or the twenties? It’s not as if they aren’t capable.

Benjamin Sheldon, Nigel’s first grandson and the Dynasty’s comptroller, was the last to arrive. Nigel always suspected the man was slightly autistic. His devotion to detail was excruciating, and his marriages never lasted long. He didn’t quite seem to live totally in this universe. Finance was his life; he’d taken over running CST’s accounts division on his twenty-eighth birthday, and regarded his periods in rejuvenation as a major inconvenience. His memory augmentation arrays were among the most comprehensive ever wet-wired into a human; the inserts had actually increased his skull size by ten percent. As he hadn’t remodeled his body, other than his neck, to maintain proportion, his appearance inevitably drew stares.

Daniel Alster took a chair slightly behind the three couches that the seniors settled in as the e-shield came on, sealing the office.

“Any new problems?” Nigel asked.

“We’re just busy containing the old ones, thanks,” Campbell said.

“In a steady state model extrapolated from our current position, we will have regained everything we lost in eleven years,” Benjamin said. “The growth vectors are positive once resettlement of the displaced is completed.”

“It won’t be steady state,” Nelson said. “The Primes will attack again to annex more of our worlds. The cost of resisting them will be phenomenal.”

“And that’s if we succeed,” Nigel muttered.

The other seniors regarded him in mild surprise, the priest who swore in church.

“It’s the one option I’ve taken seriously since we began this whole debacle,” Nigel said. “That’s why I began the lifeboat project.”

“Have you drawn up the parameters for use?” Jessica asked.

“I think we’ll recognize the moment when it arrives. Now our advanced weapons development is finally producing results, I’m hopeful the Primes can be defeated one way or another.”

“Didn’t the War Cabinet approve genocide?” Perdita asked. “Public opinion is certainly in favor right now.”

“We agreed in principle that such an action was a last resort.”

“Typical politicians.” Nelson grunted.

Jessica smiled sweetly. “Why thank you.”

“A death toll near forty million, and it’s an option? Hardly our finest hour, I feel.”

“There’s a moral dimension in that decision, obviously,” Nigel said. “But there’s also the possibility that the Seattle quantumbusters might not be sufficient for the job. For all they’re insanely antagonistic, the Primes are not stupid. They will have established themselves in other star systems by now. Total genocide will be difficult to achieve and verify.”

“You mean we’ll have to make our weapon available to the navy?” Nelson asked.

“I’m not in favor of that,” Nigel told him. “That really is a weapon I don’t want anyone else to know about, let alone possess. The damn thing even frightens me.”

“That’s a reasonable reaction,” Jessica said glumly. “I don’t like the fact it exists, but as it does I don’t want it in anyone else’s control.”

“Quantumbusters are horrendous enough,” Nelson said. “There’s only a question of scale involved with this situation. Having the Dynasty’s finger on the trigger is purely a psychological crutch. A doomsday weapon is a doomsday weapon, whether it destroys a planet or an entire star system is worrying about how many angels can dance on a pinhead.”

“Our weapon can destroy more than one star system,” Nigel said regretfully.

“If it can be built, it will be built,” Campbell said. “If not by us, then by someone else, and I include the Primes in that statement. It’s not as if we have to worry about the other Dynasties using it. We don’t have that kind of conflict anymore.”

“Not at the moment,” Jessica said. “But let’s face it, there are still enough megalomaniac politicians about, and I don’t just mean on the Isolated worlds. We have to be very careful about revealing the potential of what we have to the rest of the Commonwealth.”

“I don’t suppose the SI will be too pleased about this particular accomplishment, either,” Nelson said.

Nigel grinned. He didn’t really trust the SI, although he didn’t regard it as malevolent. Nelson’s suspicions verged on paranoia—like those of any good security operative. “It doesn’t know yet,” Nigel said. “And it might well be thankful to us if the Primes are as successful on their next incursion as they were with the Lost23.”

“So would you use it against them here?” Campbell asked. “Or is it exclusively to defend ourselves if we have to flee?”

“I will not abandon the Commonwealth without a fight,” Nigel said. “That would be inhuman. The human race has flaws in abundance, but we don’t deserve to die for them.”

“My species, right or wrong,” Jessica said.

Perdita gave her a vexed look. “We’re right. And we’re not alone thinking that. The barrier builders obviously thought the same way about the Primes.”

“Unfortunately they had a great deal more technological resources than us,” Campbell said. “It gave them much wider range of options. As far as I can see, we only have one. Nigel, are you really going to wait until they invade again before you believe we’re justified in using our weapon against them?”

“I’m not nerving myself up,” Nigel said, piqued. “For a start, we’re still only at the design stage. Secondly, the navy will find Hell’s Gateway. If that can be wiped out with Douvoir missiles, or more likely Seattle Project quantumbusters, the whole problem will be put back, by years, most likely. That may well open up our options. We might even find the barrier builders, and persuade them to reestablish it.”

“You don’t believe that?” Jessica asked.

“No,” Nigel said dryly. “We created this problem, we have to solve it.”

As the meeting closed, Nigel asked Perdita and Nelson to stay behind. He sipped at a hot chocolate that a maidbot delivered to the study. There was just the right amount of whipped cream on top, complemented by a half-melted marshmallow. The taste was perfection. It had been prepared by his chef; he never did like bots cooking food.

“Couple of things,” he told them. “Perdita, what’s the general opinion of myself and the Dynasty? Are we being blamed? After all, we were the main supporters for the Second Chance mission.”

“Nothing too heavy in the media,” she said. “A few minor anchors and commentators have taken some cheap shots, but right now everyone’s too mad at the navy for not putting up a better fight. The way you personally dealt with the wormholes above Wessex was a huge positive factor. Your personal rating is quite high. You’ve got a lot more respect than Doi at the moment, although Kantil is being pretty astute in keeping antagonism directed at the navy.”

“Small mercies,” Nigel said as he chewed on the marshmallow. His neural programs were reviewing and refining data from the Dynasty arrays, pulling everything he could find on Ozzie. “You did a good job suppressing the Randtown story,” he told Perdita eventually. “Ozzie would be seriously pissed off if that became public knowledge.” For all his supposedly cuddly Bohemian personality, Ozzie could be very touchy about aspects of his private life.

“The other Dynasties were cooperative enough with the news shows,” she said modestly. “And the SI helped with a dataeater worm for the messages that did slip into the unisphere.”

“So I see. That’s interesting. I know Ozzie likes to think they have a special relationship, but there’s more to it, in this case, I think.” He looked at Nelson.

“You don’t seem to have much on Mellanie Rescorai.”

“What we have is a reasonable rundown,” Perdita said. “She was a corporate director’s squeeze until he got caught up in a rather sensational bodyloss case. After that, she starred in some soft-porn TSI drama, then moved into reporting. Alessandra Baron snapped her up, now they’ve fallen out; gossip in the industry says Alessandra was whoring her around to political contacts as a reward for information. Er …” She cleared her throat, amused. “You might want to ask Campbell if that’s true. Anyway … Mellanie finally refused, and they parted on very bad terms—also the talk of the industry. Michelangelo took her on straightaway. Standard media career.”

“Not the timescale,” Nigel said. A picture of Mellanie slipped into his virtual vision, some publicity shot for a TSI called Murderous Seduction; she was dressed in lacy gold lingerie that showed off a terrific body. He paused midsip. Her chin was rather prominent and her nose squat; but that didn’t stop her image from giving him the devil’s own smile. Just for a moment he really wanted to access that TSI. “Your file says her boyfriend is Dudley Bose. Is that right?”

“I think he was the last person Baron sent her to sleep with,” Perdita said.

“They’ve been together ever since.”

Nigel frowned. He didn’t even have to access any files to remember the disastrous welcome-home ceremony the navy had set up for Bose and Verbeke. Bose hadn’t been the most impressive of people in either of his incarnations, before or after the Second Chance flight. “Strange choice, for her and him.”

“Maybe he made her see the error of her ways?” Perdita suggested. “They’ll settle down and have ten kids together.”

“So she went and signed up with Michelangelo?” Nigel grunted. “No. There’s something wrong with all of this. We don’t have a record of her even meeting Ozzie, so there’s no reason why she should have access to the asteroid. None of his other exes do. And judging by the reports from Randtown she took on the Primes single-handed. That makes me very suspicious.” He gave Nelson a sharp stare. “Is she another one?”

“Looks like it.”

“Another what?” Perdita asked.

“An observer for the SI,” Nelson said. “Or spy, depending what you think about it. We know it isn’t quite as passive as it always claims. It has several people like Mellanie prying into areas of human activity it would otherwise be excluded from.”

“I had no idea. What does it want?”

“We don’t know,” Nigel said. “But that’s why I keep Cressat out of the unisphere; it gives us a proper refuge. And now we’ve seen what it did with Ozzie’s wormhole I finally feel justified.”

“It wasn’t a malign act,” Nelson said. “It actually saved Mellanie and the other humans in Randtown.”

“I know. That’s why I don’t worry unduly about it. However, it remains an enigma, and given our current war situation that means we cannot fully trust it.”

“So what do you want to do about Mellanie?” Nelson asked.

Nigel canceled her image before he gave an inappropriate reply—but she would be a wonderful addition to his harem. “Discreet observation. And put a good team on it. The SI will be watching out for her.”

“We’ll have her covered in an hour.”

“Good. There’s something else, which I really hate doing. I cannot believe Ozzie wouldn’t get back in touch after the Prime attack. Find out where he is, Nelson. I need to know if he’s alive or dead.”

It was Donald Bell Homesecure that had the contract for 1800 Briggins. A private company with a Darklake City police authority license, they were authorized to apprehend and detain anyone believed to be breaking and entering their clients’ property, and even permitted to discharge firearms if threatened with lethal force.

The alarm that went off in their control center reported that the bungalow’s door had been opened without the correct code. One of the operators called it up, and saw the owner, Mr. Cramley, was listed as currently being out of town. They dispatched a nearby patrol car and alerted the Olika police precinct that their staff was investigating a suspect incident.

Barely a minute later, the alarm changed to a fire alert, with the bungalow’s internal sensors reporting several dangerous hot spots growing. The control center operator immediately called the fire department. Two tenders were dispatched.

When the Homesecure patrol car pulled up outside 1800 Briggins the officers inside were expecting to deal with a simple break-in with petty vandalism. It wasn’t the usual kind of crime in Olika, but then these were troubled times. They slid the visors down on their flexarmor suits and hurried in through the gate to see if the perpetrators were still on the premises.

Flames were already flowing against the lounge’s broad arching windows, casting fans of orange light out across the lawn. The officers went in through the front door, their 10mm semiautomatic pistols already drawn, ready for trouble. When they reached the lounge, they were greeted by a confusing scene. Several items of furniture were blazing fiercely, and the parquet flooring and rugs were beginning to catch fire. Long flames licked up the curving walls to play against the ceiling. On the floor were two clusters of large furry balls. They moved slightly, jostling against each other. The parquet around them was covered in black glistening liquid that bubbled like tar as it steamed from the intense heat.

One of the nostats flattened out slightly, raising its front half sluggishly up toward the two stupefied officers. They stared in horror at the section of corpse the movement revealed. Whoever the victim was, it had been reduced to shreds of gore tangled around bloody bones. The underside bristles of the nostat were soggy with blood.

Both officers froze for a moment, then started shooting. The bloated nostats exploded, splattering blood across the flexarmor suits.

It took a quarter of an hour to bring the fire under control. Firebots worked their way in through the flames, spraying foam as they went. Over a third of the bungalow was wrecked, with the rest suffering considerable smoke damage. The drycoral structure itself didn’t burn, but most of it had been killed by the heat. It meant the owner would have to tear the whole thing down and regrow it.

Police and Homesecure staff surrounded the bungalow while the flames were brought under control, their weapons active, ready for any nostats that might flee the conflagration. Afterward, they swept through the ruined rooms in case any of the creatures had survived.

A Darklake City coroner’s van arrived at dawn, and the remains of the intruders were bagged up and removed for forensic examination. Scene of Crime staff wandered around, making a recording of the area, and taking a few samples. It seemed like a relatively clear-cut case: an opportunist break-in that went horribly wrong. The police issued a request for Paul Cramley to return for questioning, and filed a preliminary penalty notice for keeping illegal dangerous nonsentient aliens within the city boundary. Mr. Cramley did not respond to any calls made to his unisphere address.

At midday the site was handed back to Homesecure. It was part of the contract to guard the property until the owner returned and assumed responsibility.

A lawyer representing Mr. Cramley arrived at the Olika police precinct at two o’clock that afternoon and paid the steep fine for violating the dangerous aliens law, and gave an undertaking the crime would not be repeated, paying a five-year bond to guarantee compliance. The lawyer then went on to the Homesecure control center, and signed off on 1800 Briggins, assuming full responsibility for the property. The guards went home.

Mellanie’s cab drew up outside the bungalow just after four in the afternoon, responding to a message that Paul had left in her e-butler’s hold file. The lock on the gate had already been repaired. It buzzed and opened for her just like before.

She picked her way through the blackened interior of the bungalow, wrinkling her nose up at the smell of burnt plastic and other fumes that still hadn’t completely dissipated. Cinders and scorched parquet crunched under her fancy red and gold pumps. It was probably a mistake to have worn heels.

The little circular swimming pool at the center of the bungalow was undisturbed, though several of the patio doors leading out to it were smashed, their metal edges warped by the heat. Leaves floated on water that hadn’t been filtered for a month. She looked around curiously. “Paul?”

The water started gurgling. As she stared at the pool, a whirl appeared at the center, deepening into a cone. Within a minute the water had emptied away, leaving the marble walls dripping. On the side opposite the steps, a doorway irised open.

Mellanie arched her eyebrow at it. “Neat,” she commented. She took her pumps off, and walked down the slick steps. The door was plyplastic disguised to look like marble; there was a narrow concrete corridor beyond it with polyphoto strips along the ceiling. It angled down quite steeply.

Ten meters in, she turned a sharp corner. The floor leveled out, and the corridor ended at a wide brightly illuminated room. It had the same clean green-tinted walls and floor she associated with an operating theater; similar cool dry air, too. Several tall stacks of electronic equipment stood in a loose circle around what appeared to be a transparent coffin. Paul Cramley lay in it, floating in a translucent pink liquid. He was naked, his face covered by a conical mask of blank flesh, the apex of which fused into a thick plastic air tube that snaked away into a socket in the top corner of the coffin. Hundreds of filaments no thicker than hair sprouted from the skin along his spine; every few centimeters clusters of them were braided together and plugged into thick bundles of fiber-optic cable.

Mellanie walked over to the coffin and peered down. The gooey pink fluid magnified Paul’s scrawny ancient body in a way she could have done without; but she could see he was still alive, his chest rising and falling in a slow regular rhythm.

A portal on one of the cabinets lit up with an image of a young man’s face. It had a lot of Paul’s features. “Hello, young Mellanie, welcome to my lair.”

She glanced from the body to the portal. “Cool setup. Paranoid, but cool.”

“I’m alive, aren’t I?” The image smiled.

It was actually quite a handsome face, she thought, which disturbed her more than she wanted to acknowledge. “Have you been hurt? Is this a rejuvenation tank?”

“Not at all. This is a maximum interface unit. My nervous system is fully wetwired into the large array here in the crypt. Every sensation I now feel is actually an artificial impulse. You have a virtual vision; I have virtual smell, taste, temperature, tactile reception, hearing, everything. What my brain interprets as walking is in reality a directional instruction to access sections of the unisphere and the arrays connected to it. My hands can manipulate programs and files to an amazing degree, and all at accelerant speed.”

“Morty always said you were a complete webhead.”

“How right he was.”

“What happened here last night, Paul?”

“It wasn’t a break-in; they were sent to kill me. I used a focused EMP on their inserts, and … nature took its course. Not to mention stupidity.”

“Who were they?”

“Good question. Would you like to start trading?”

Mellanie suddenly felt as though she was slipping away from her earlier position of confidence. Her initial judgment of Paul was a woeful underestimation; and all the clues had been there if she’d bothered to think about them. An impoverished, seedy four-hundred-year-old? Come on! “You already owe me Alessandra Baron for telling you about the Starflyer.”

“Very well. Baron was receiving and sending a great deal of encrypted traffic across the unisphere.”

“Aha!”

“Unfortunately, the protective monitors she uses are excellent. The person using them actually managed to backtrack my own operation. That’s quite an achievement. Outside the SI, I know of only a dozen or so webheads in the Commonwealth boasting that kind of ability. This unknown person has a level of skill equal to my own, a development which I find more disturbing than the SI’s protection of Paula Myo. Clearly Baron has something very serious to hide.”

“I told you that. And it was probably the Starflyer who tracked you down. I need to know who else is involved.”

“For a start: Marlon Simmonds and Roderick Deakins, the two who broke into my bungalow last night.”

“Big help, Paul, your creepy alien pets took care of them.”

“Show some patience, Mellanie. It is the connection which is interesting. Once I discovered their identity, I accessed their bank accounts. Both of them received a payment of five thousand Oaktier dollars yesterday. The money was transferred from a onetime account opened approximately three hours after Baron became aware of my interest.”

“Damn!”

“Which I backtracked to a corporate account on Earth, in the Denman Manhattan bank.”

Mellanie gave the youthful face in the portal a startled look. “You backtracked a onetime account? I thought that was impossible.”

“So the banks would like you to believe. It is very difficult, but it can be done. There are certain small flaws in the onetime establishment procedure which can be exploited, that even the Intersolar security services don’t know about. I know because I used to know someone who knew someone who was involved with writing the original program. Does the name Vaughan Rescorai mean anything to you?”

“Grandpa!”

“Your great-great-grandfather, I believe.”

“You knew him?” she asked in surprise.

“We mega webheads are a small, close community. Vaughan was a good man.”

“Yes. Yes, he was.”

“He was your way into the SI, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Thought so. Your secret’s safe with me.”

“Thanks, Paul. What was the company?”

“Bromley, Waterford, and Granku. They are a legal firm—”

“From New York on Earth.”

“You know of them?”

“Yeah. Some of their associates were involved with a scam involving Dudley Bose. I think the Starflyer used them to fund the observation of the Dyson Alpha enclosure.”

“Which resulted in the Second Chance flight, and the collapse of the barrier, and ultimately the Lost23. I see. It certainly ties in with your theory. I managed to track some of Baron’s communications before her countermeasures forced me to withdraw. Two of them were addressed to a Mr. Pomanskie at Bromley, Waterford, and Granku.”

“Hell. He was on the board of the Cox Educational charity.”

“I suspect Pomanskie, or some junior lieutenant, hired Simmonds and Deakins to put a stop to my electronic spying.”

“Yeah, most likely. Can you get into Bromley, Waterford, and Granku’s accounts, see what other payments they’ve been making?”

“I can. I would need an incentive.”

Mellanie sighed, and tipped her head to one side. “What do you want?”

“Information. Baron hasn’t occupied my time exclusively. There are a number of other interesting things occurring within the Commonwealth right now.”

“Such as?”

“Did you know several ‘lifeboat’ consortiums are being put together?”

“No. What lifeboats?”

“There are some Intersolar Dynasties, Grand Families, and mere ordinary billionaires who are uncertain that our shiny new Commonwealth navy can defeat the Prime aliens. They are quietly channeling funds into very large colonizer starships that have a trans-galactic range. Seventeen such vessels have already been put into production, and at least another twelve are being planned that I am aware of. Each of the Big15 is hosting at least one of the projects. The lifeboats can hold several tens of thousands of people in suspension, along with all the manufacturing cybernetics necessary to establish an advanced technological human society from scratch on a new world.”

“Those sons of bitches,” Mellanie exclaimed. Even after all the time she’d been exposed to the ultra-rich and their political flunkies, the idea that they’d turn tail and run caught her by surprise. “They’re going to leave us to do their dirty fighting for them?”

“Now then, Mellanie, don’t whine like some Bolshevik class warrior; it’s a perfectly sensible precaution. Exactly what I expect from that class. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t hop on board if you were presented with a berth?”

She scowled down at Paul’s coffin. “Michelangelo offered me a gig reporting on all the people emigrating to the High Angel. They all think it’ll fly them clear if the worst happens.”

“High Angel is a good bet, especially if you don’t have any real money, although they’ll hardly be in charge of their own destiny. Who knows where that machinecreature will take them, or what its ultimate purpose is.”

“So what’s all this got to do with me?”

“I want to know which lifeboat stands the highest chance of success.”

“You’re leaving?”

“Let’s just say I’ll be buying a ticket. I have a degree of confidence in our military ability, and I’ve certainly seen what kind of technological atrocities our species’ weapons scientists can produce when the need arises. But the Primes do have a phenomenal amount of resources available to use against us. Like I said: sensible precaution.”

Mellanie shook her head; she wasn’t sure if it was in dismay or disgust. “So where do I come in?”

“There is one rather glaring omission in the lifeboat projects. I can’t find any information that the Sheldons are building one. And I have looked, very hard.”

“Maybe they’re not cowards. Ever thought of that?”

“Cowardice is not part of this equation. Nigel Sheldon is not stupid. He will be taking every precaution to safeguard himself and his Dynasty. The amount of financial resources required for such a starship is negligible in macroeconomic terms, especially for him. He will be building one, presumably away from curious eyes and inconvenient monitor programs. That means there’s only one place it can be: his private world, Cressat. In fact, I expect there will be more than one ship; after all, he does have a very large Dynasty. A fleet would guarantee success whatever part of the galaxy they wind up in.”

“And you want me to find out? Expose the most secret project of the most powerful man in the Commonwealth?”

“You’re an investigative reporter, aren’t you? Besides, I imagine the SI will be eager to help in this case.”

Mellanie had to grin at the ironic sense of déjà vu. “Do I get a flying car?” she muttered.

“If the Commonwealth falls, I’d be prepared to take you with me.”

“What?” She’d thought she was immune to further surprise today.

“You’re smart, attractive, young, tough, and a survivor. I would get myself rejuvenated on the voyage. It would be an enjoyable marriage, I believe.”

“You’re proposing?”

“Yes. Has nobody ever proposed to you before, young Mellanie?”

She thought of the hundreds of proposals she was sent every day from her fans or simply people who’d recently accessed a copy of Murderous Seduction.

“You’re not the first,” she admitted.

“Was that a yes? It is difficult for me to get down on bended knee right now; even if I was out of the interface unit, my arthritis plays up something chronic.”

“Wow, that is so romantic.”

“Don’t let a four-century age difference prejudice you. I’ve had wives from every conceivable age group before. You’re not expecting Morton to come back from his heroic mission, are you? Think practically, Mellanie. The odds in his favor aren’t good.”

“I know what his odds are. And the answer is still no.” That young face is handsome, though, and he’s got a devilish grin. No!

“I understand. My offer remains open. And your answer doesn’t prejudice our deal. You should never mix business with pleasure.”

“That, I do know. But I don’t understand how you think you can get on the Sheldon lifeboat. You’re not a member of the Dynasty.” She paused. “Are you?”

The image chuckled. “Not by birth. But two of my wives were Sheldons, one of them fairly senior. I have five Sheldon children, two of whom are direct lineage sixth generation, and they certainly produced a goodly number of descendants. Funnily enough, that means I’ve got more chance with the Sheldon lifeboat than any of the others. I have leverage there. Once I determine what the score is, I’ll be able to make my play. So, will you try and get to Cressat for me, and see what’s going on there?”

“I can probably go back to Michelangelo with a pitch to investigate a Sheldon lifeboat. That way I won’t be completely exposed. How’s that?”

“Good enough. But you do realize that Baron will know it was you who put me onto her? Our Oaktier connection is inescapable. You can expect a visit from people like Simmonds and Deakins, if not a great deal worse.”

Mellanie pushed her shoulders back. “I can take care of myself.”

“I’m sure you can, young Mellanie. I’m curious. Do you actually have a weapon? A gun of some description?”

“No.”

“May I suggest you purchase one. I can give you the name of a reliable underground supplier.”

“I’m not a warrior, Paul. If I need physical protection, I’ll hire a security expert.”

“As you wish. But please be careful.”

“Sure.”

Mellanie swapped cabs three times before she got back to the motel they were staying at in the Rightbank district. She paid cash each time. The fact that Alessandra’s webheads could backtrack Paul was a worrying development. Even with her SI inserts she certainly didn’t have his skill; that left her feeling strangely vulnerable.

Their little chalet was on the end of the long row that curved around a grubby swimming pool. Only two others had cars parked outside. It wasn’t yet late enough for the motel’s main trade to start using the bleak, utilitarian rooms for their professional pay-by-the-hour encounters.

The chalet was made out of cheap composite panels that had bleached under Oaktier’s strong sun. Long cracks webbed the edges, exposing the reinforcing boron fibers, which were already fraying. The faded red door creaked loudly when she pushed it open.

All the blinds were shut, permitting only slim blades of late-afternoon sunlight to slide through the slits between them. The air-conditioning wasn’t working. It was stifling inside, with the old paneling groaning as the thermal loads shifted. Dudley was curled up on the bed, staring at the wall.

“We have to move,” Mellanie told him. And how many times had she spoken that phrase since Randtown?

“Why?” Dudley grumped. “Are you off to see him again?”

She didn’t ask who he meant by him; she wasn’t about to play that game. Besides, the memory was too strong: walking out of the rec room into the main barracks. Her blouse had been torn beyond use; she’d had to borrow Morty’s dark purple sport shirt to wear. Both of them grinned like naughty schoolkids as the rest of Cat’s Claws hooted and jeered at the state of them.

She gave him a last lingering kiss in the open doorway, with his hands squeezing her buttocks. “I’ll be back soon,” she promised.

That had been two days ago. She wanted to go back, to feel his body pressed up against hers. The wonderful reassurance of old times, when life was simpler and so much easier.

Dudley, of course, had embarked on a two-day sulk at the very notion of an old lover coming back into her life. She hadn’t admitted sleeping with Morton, but it was pretty obvious what they’d been up to. She’d still been wearing Morty’s shirt when she got back to the chalet.

“No, Dudley, I’m not visiting Morton for a while. We have to go to Earth. I’m making another pitch to Michelangelo about investigating Dynasty starships.” She’d never come so close to simply walking out on him. It was guilt pure and simple that had made her come back to collect him rather than take a cab straight to the CST planetary station.

Alessandra would find the motel, if she hadn’t already. Even cheap thugs like the ones who’d gone after Paul would blow Dudley away, and probably in a very painful fashion. Let alone what would happen if one of the Starflyer’s wetwired agents tracked him down …

She’d got him into this, and that made him her responsibility.

“Why can’t we just get out?” he moaned. “The two of us. Leave. We’ll go back to that resort in the forest, nobody will know about us, nobody will care anymore. If we don’t interfere with the Starflyer and the navy, then they’ll forget all about us. Why don’t we do that? Just the two of us.” He rolled over and sat on the edge of the bed. “Mellanie. We could get married.”

Oh, save me! “No, Dudley.” She said it fast and firm, before he had any chance to work on the idea. “Nobody should even be considering things like that, not with everything that’s going on. Life’s too uncertain right now.”

“Then how about afterward?”

“Dudley! Stop it.”

He bowed his head petulantly.

“Come on,” she said in a more considerate tone. “Let’s get packed. There are some great hotels in LA. We’ll stay in one of them.”

It was raining again, a persistent, miserable cold drizzle that smeared windows and turned pavements to slippery ribbons awash with a dismaying amount of litter. Hoshe Finn never ceased to be surprised and depressed by how wet it was in the ancient English capital city. He’d always assumed the old jokes were simple exaggeration. Walking to the office from Charing Cross station as he did every morning, he’d learned better. The UFN environmental commissioners who shared the vast stone government building with Senate Security must have been more successful than they admitted in reversing the global warming trend.

He shook his raincoat out in the elevator, and held it at arm’s length as he walked down the corridor to his office. Unsurprisingly, Paula was already in, and poring over screens on her desk.

“Morning,” he called out.

She gave a cursory smile, not looking up.

Hoshe hung his coat on the back of his dark wooden door and settled behind his desk. The number of files awaiting his attention was dispiriting. He’d only left at half past ten last night, and now it was barely eight. The RI had spent the night pulling out anything relevant to the queries he’d made yesterday. He started on the old Directorate report of the Cox Educational charity.

At eleven o’clock he gave the door to Paula’s office a perfunctory knock and walked in. “You might have been right about the educational charity,” he told her.

“What have you got?”

“There are some anomalies between the files I requested.” He sat in front of her desk, and told his e-butler to display the data on the big holographic portal that took up one wall. “First off I started with the report that the Directorate’s Paris office put together after the attempted hack against the charity’s account in the Denman Manhattan bank. Your old colleagues were reasonably thorough; they investigated the charity for any evidence that they were a front. The report’s conclusion is that they’re not.” He waved a hand against the rows of names and figures that were scrolling down the portal.

“This is the list of all the outgoing donations. It’s pretty comprehensive. The Cox supported over a hundred academic projects at one time or another. Recently they’ve declined considerably, although they’re still going. The Gralmond University astronomy department was just one of them. So far, so ordinary; according to the report there is nothing here to be suspicious about.”

“So it looks,” Paula said.

“Okay. That was my starting point, then I began checking references. There are a couple of things that are unusual to start with. Not illegal or suspicious, just odd. The charity’s funds come from a single private donation deposited thirty years ago in the Denman account. The sum was two million Earth dollars, which was transferred to the Denman bank from a onetime account. Secondly, there is no named founder. The firm of Bromley, Waterford, and Granku registered the Cox with the New York charity board, and opened an account with one dollar. The two million was transferred in a month later. It has only ever had three commissioners: Mr. Seaton, Ms. Daltra, and Mr. Pomanskie, all of whom are associates of Bromley, Waterford, and Granku. Your original Directorate investigation team never pursued that, which is something of a lapse if you ask me.”

“There are a lot of rich eccentrics out there giving their money away to strange causes.”

Hoshe raised an eyebrow. “I’m sure there are. But according to its own records, the Cox doesn’t support strange causes. So why keep the benefactor concealed? It’s not for tax purposes. By staying anonymous they don’t qualify for any tax credit at all.”

“Go on, what’s your answer?”

“There isn’t an answer. But it made me curious enough to start digging a little deeper. You see all these names? The ones who received money?”

“Yes.”

“The Directorate report doesn’t say how much was given. Also unusual. We know that Dudley Bose received just over one point three million dollars’ worth of funding; that doesn’t leave much for the rest of them. In total seventy-one and a half thousand dollars were distributed; that’s to over a hundred academic projects covering a period of twenty-one years. That financial data was made available to the Directorate investigators. The raw data was still sitting in the Paris array when I requested it. Someone obviously excluded it from the report.”

“Damn,” Paula said. “Who were they?”

“It was a team research effort. Renne Kampasa, Tarlo, and Jim Nwan all have their names attached. The Cox’s original finance file doesn’t have a named access log, just the team code. One or more of them did look at it.”

“It can’t be all of them,” she said. “It simply can’t.”

“There’s something else. Remember what you told me about our old friend Mellanie discovering this?”

“She said Alessandra Baron had tampered with the charity’s records.”

“She might be right. I requested a current financial report from the New York charity board. Legally, each registered charity has to file accounts with them every year. According to the filed accounts, the Cox stopped funding the Gralmond University astronomy department right after Bose made his discovery; however, they did continue to make their usual small donations to other academic projects. I started checking with the named recipients. None of them had ever heard of the Cox, let alone received their money. That is until two days after the Prime invasion; then the money transfers became real again. Those accounts are false, they’re there to satisfy any casual investigation.”

Paula sat back in her chair, and rubbed a finger against her chin. The faintest smile touched her lips. “Mellanie was right. Well, how about that.”

“Looks like it. Paula … the Starflyer funded the whole Bose observation. That means it knew what Bose would find.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Logically, it must have been there; or its species was aware of the Primes and their imprisonment within the force field.”

“Did it let them out?”

“That’s the obvious conclusion.”

“So the war was started deliberately. The Guardians were right.”

“Yes.” She grimaced, and gave him a sad smile.

“So what do we do now?”

“Firstly, I inform my political allies. Secondly, we arrest the Cox commissioners on fraud charges. They’re obviously Starflyer agents. If we can read their memories, we might gain a better understanding of its network inside the Commonwealth.”

“What about Alessandra Baron? She was the one Mellanie tipped us off about. She has to be a Starflyer agent.”

“It will be difficult to arrest such a public figure without having a good reason, and we can’t afford to go public with the knowledge of the Starflyer. Senate Security will make a formal request to navy intelligence to put her under covert observation.”

“What? But we know they’re compromised.”

“Yes. But it’s an excellent opportunity to see what the request kicks loose.”

The green and orange priority icon popped into Nigel’s virtual vision as he was reading The House at Pooh Corner to his youngest children before they went to sleep. He tried to read them a story each night, to be a proper father as he classified the ideal. His children would be dressed for bed by mothers and nannies, then they’d be herded into their playroom for the story. He always read from the classics, using a proper printed book, one you could open to find the place, and shut with finality when the evening’s chapter came to an end.

Right now he was halfway through The House at Pooh Corner. The seven children at the mansion who were over three years old sat or lay around on cushions and soft mushroom couches, listening contentedly as their daddy read out loud with amateurish intonations and big arm gestures. They smiled, and giggled, and whispered among themselves.

It was his expanded mentality that was calling his attention to the item from the Dynasty’s security division. The observation team Nelson had assigned to Mellanie reported her arriving at a bungalow in Darklake City owned by one Paul Cramley. Security simply filed the name. In Nigel’s expanded mentality it was immediately cross-referenced with his personal files. That produced the priority notification.

Nigel’s primary awareness shifted out of the playroom to focus on the information flowing into his artificial neural network. He accessed the reports on the burglary, and saw what a mess the nostats had made of the would-be burglars. Typical Paul, never quite guilty himself.

Cramley had been one of the programming team who’d written the algorithms for the first AIs that CST had used to control their early wormhole gateways. After the AIs evolved themselves into the SI, Paul had chosen to live out of the limelight, involving himself in various activities of dubious legality, a minor league player but with masterclass hacking skills. A list of references rolled down Nigel’s virtual vision. He stopped at one of the most recent. Paul had been caught running an illegal search through the City of Paris restricted listings.

Two things were badly wrong with that. Firstly, Paul had searched out Paula Myo’s address. Secondly, Paul wouldn’t get caught doing something that basic. Yet Myo had produced documented evidence sufficient to have him convicted, fined, and his equipment confiscated. She must have a mega webhead shielding her data. More likely it was the SI.

Nigel wondered who Paul had run the search for. Mellanie? Why would she want to know where Myo lived?

The more he delved into Mellanie, the more curious he became. According to her file, she’d visited Far Away for the Michelangelo show. Was she in contact with the Guardians? Or was she the SI’s contact with them? That surely was paranoid speculation. There were so many data points available, but he couldn’t connect them. He didn’t often delve into security matters, but this was turning into the mother of all exceptions. His fascination was further goaded by her sassy looks.

He retracted his primary awareness from the artificial neural network, and continued reading until he’d finished the section. The children pleaded and wheedled, but he was firm, and promised them there’d be lots more tomorrow. They kissed and hugged him good night, and dispersed to their own rooms.

Sitting alone in the playroom with its tidal wave of toys and gloriously gaudy primary-color decoration, Nigel knew he needed to acquire a lot more information on Mellanie to solve the mystery she was tantalizing him with. He sighed reluctantly and made the call. Normally, anyone he called was surprised and flattered to receive any form of personal communication from the great Nigel Sheldon. Michelangelo simply said, “What the hell do you want?”

The Lucius skyscraper was eighty stories high, a ponderous conservative tower of gray stone and smoky brown glass. But then it did sit in the middle of Third Avenue; architecture in this part of town was never flamboyant.

The three large cars carrying Paula’s Senate Security arrest team wove through Manhattan’s midmorning traffic. As always the antics of the city’s yellow cabs drew a small frown on her forehead; whoever programmed their drive arrays did an appalling job. Her own car had to brake sharply several times as they cut in front.

When they arrived at the Lucius, their clearance codes opened the barrier guarding the ramp down into the multilevel underground parking garage. Two vans carrying the forensic staff and their equipment followed them in.

Up in the lobby, four of the arrest team immediately covered the stairwell exits. Paula led the remaining twelve into the elevator. Six of them wore force field skeletons under their ordinary dark suits; she wasn’t taking any chances.

The offices of Bromley, Waterford, and Granku took up six floors, from the forty-second to the forty-seventh. Their reception area was dominated by a broad curving desk, where three well-dressed and attractive human secretaries sat receiving calls, giving clients an exclusive personal touch that lesser law firms would use an array for. They were all busy trying to sort out the sudden communications glitch in their array, which Paula had embargoed from the cybersphere as soon as they arrived.

“I would like to see Ms. Daltra, Mr. Pomanskie, and Mr. Seaton, please,” Paula told the senior receptionist.

He gave her and the arrest team a nervous glance. “I’m sorry, they’re not in.”

“Do I need to show you my authority certificate?”

“No, of course not, Ms. Myo, I know who you are. But that’s the truth. This is the second day they haven’t shown up. It’s quite a talking point here. The senior partners aren’t happy.”

“Check their offices,” she told the arrest team.

The forensic staff was given the all clear to come up. Freeze programs were loaded into the company’s entire array network, and their data copied into high-density storage systems for analysis by an RI. All three offices of the missing associates were sealed off, and a detailed examination initiated.

Seaton lived closest to the office, an apartment in a luxurious block on Park Avenue, just past East Seventy-ninth Street. Paula took five of the arrest team with her, using their priority clearance to bounce through traffic, even sidelining the cabs.

As before, she embargoed the building’s cybersphere connection. The uniformed doorman let her and the team straight through the grandiose lobby and into the elevator.

Mrs. Geena Seaton came hurrying into the hallway as soon as the maid announced her notorious visitor. According to Paula’s file, the Seatons had been married for eighteen years. Neither of them came from a particularly well-to-do background, though they were clearly making up for that now. Raw ambition was powering them up toward the kind of wealth and professional status that would support their high-life aspirations.

Geena Seaton wore a prim floral-print silk dress, her face and hair perfectly made up, heels clicking on the polished floor, looking as if she were on her way to some career-making function of her husband’s. The perfect supportive wife for an ambitious associate in New York’s ruthless corporate society.

When asked about her husband’s unexplained absence, she said he was away at a legal convention. Somewhere in Texas, she wasn’t sure where, the office would have the address. He’d left with rather short notice, admittedly, but someone else from the firm had dropped out at the last minute. “Why do you need to know?” she demanded. “What is this about?” Her delicately mascaraed eyes scanned dismissively across the team standing behind Paula.

“There are some anomalies we believe your husband can help to clarify for us,” Paula said noncommittally. “Isn’t it unusual for him to be out of contact with you for this long?”

“Hardly. I expect he’s getting intimate with some female delegate and doesn’t want to be disturbed. Really, we have several clauses about nonexclusivity in our partnership contract. It benefits both of us.”

“I see. In that case we will require you to come with us for a medical forensic examination.”

“Impossible, I have a hundred things to do.”

“You will come with us now, either voluntarily or under arrest.”

“That’s outrageous.”

“Indeed it is.”

“What are you looking for?”

“I’m not at liberty to disclose that.” Paula wasn’t even sure if a neurological scan would be able to identify a Starflyer agent. All she had to go on was Bradley Johansson’s propaganda, that the alien somehow mentally enslaved humans. There might be unusual brain wave activity that the forensic neurologists could spot. It was a long shot, but everything else he had been claiming for the last hundred years was coming uncomfortably true.

“Am I under suspicion? What is this anomaly? Surely it’s not that tiresome undeclared payment to the Senate aide again. That was cleared up last year, you know.”

“We can discuss this at our headquarters.”

Geena Seaton glared at Paula. “I hope you know what you’re doing. Legally, I mean. My husband’s firm is not to be trifled with. I had to threaten that dreadful reporter girl with an antiharassment suit yesterday; and I certainly won’t hesitate to apply for one against you.”

“What reporter girl?”

“The cheap one who dresses like a hooker the whole time. I remember she did an invasion report for Alessandra Baron. Mellanie somebody.”

The express from EdenBurg delivered Renne back in Paris just after midday. She should have gone back to the office straightaway to file her report, but it had been a long frustrating trip. Her duty shift had lasted for nineteen straight hours so far, and as well as being irritable from lack of rest she was also ravenous. The little restaurant she and her colleagues often visited was only three hundred meters from the office, so she got the cab to drop her off there first. Fifteen minutes while she had a coffee and a burger wouldn’t make any difference. With any luck, Hogan and Tarlo wouldn’t be back from Mars yet. She was still mildly jealous she hadn’t been included.

It was cool and dark inside, with every table illuminated by its own cozy triple-wick candle. Fans spun slowly overhead, churning the humid city air around the room and blending in the cooking smells from the kitchen. There was a bar stretching along the entire back wall, a piece of antique wooden saloon furniture rescued from some ancient Left Bank café over two hundred years earlier. Its walnut veneer had been scuffed and repolished so many times down the centuries that the surface was almost completely black, with only the odd, even deeper sable swirl to show the original beautiful grain pattern.

Renne sat at a stool, hung her uniform jacket on a hook just below the counter, and gazed at the long shelves of exotic bottles from all over the Commonwealth. It was the restaurant’s boast that every planet was represented.

“A Rantoon green cherry fizz,” she told the barkeeper, knowing he wouldn’t have it. She was in that kind of mood.

A minute later she had to smile as he produced the tall frosted glass filled with a jade-colored liquid that was as sluggish as chilled vodka. “Salut.” She raised the glass to him. “Can I get a cheeseburger, with bacon, hold the mayonnaise, and fries, not a salad.”

“Certainly, Lieutenant.” He disappeared through a small door and called her order out to the chef. Some comment about the mayonnaise was shouted back in a stream of obscene French.

Renne spread her elbows wide on the bar, and took another sip. It felt wonderfully decadent, drinking something so strong in the middle of the day. She caught a movement in the tarnished mirrors behind the rows of bottles.

“Isn’t it a little early for that kind of drink?” Commander Hogan asked.

“Hi, Chief,” she said, deliberately not sitting up or even looking around. “I figured I can—I’m still in the middle of last night, timewise.”

Hogan’s face puckered into disapproval. He sat next to her, with a grinning Tarlo taking the next stool along.

“You two want to join me?” she asked.

“Mineral water,” Hogan told the barkeeper.

“Beer,” Tarlo said.

“So what was Mars like?”

“Fun,” Tarlo said. “I had a ball driving the transRover. And it’s a weird-looking place, the colors are strange. We saw all the old NASA ships as well. They were falling apart. Sheldon and the Admiral were getting all misty-eyed about them.”

“We found the Reynolds ground station,” Hogan said in a reproving voice.

“The forensic team downloaded every program in its arrays, and we impounded the transmitter equipment for analysis.”

“Impounded.” Renne just managed not to giggle. She had an image of Hogan imperiously waving a court order at a bunch of angry little green men, furious at the navy marching off with their planet’s property.

“Problem?” Hogan asked.

“No, Chief.”

“I understand you left the office while we were away,” he continued. “For most of the time, actually. Did you pick up any leads?”

“Nah! Not one. It was a completely wasted journey. Victor and Bernadette, Isabella’s parents, haven’t got a clue where she is, and frankly don’t show a lot of interest.” The two interviews rankled with her. Warren Yves Halgarth had acted as her escort again; without him she doubted she would even have got in to see Victor. Isabelle’s father wasn’t exactly pleased to see her; his new job as managing director of the Dynasty’s second largest manufacturing bureau was a high-pressure management role. They specialized in force field generators and other high-technology machinery, and as such were one of the thousands of organizations that had suddenly found themselves supplying components to the navy on a crash priority basis. The whole workforce was badly stressed, and it showed. Victor barely knew what his current kids were doing, let alone one who had left home years ago. As for Bernadette, Renne had rarely met anyone who qualified for the title “idle rich” more than Isabella’s mother. The only surprise was that she stayed on EdenBurg, which had little time or space for anyone who wasn’t a hundred percent committed to the work ethic. Warren had explained that Bernadette was one of Rialto’s more renowned society hostesses, throwing parties that attracted a good selection of the corporate and financial elite. That didn’t leave her much time for keeping in touch with children. she hadn’t even known Isabella had disconnected her unisphere address.

“Are there any further leads on Isabella?” Hogan asked.

Renne took another drink of her green cherry fizz, enjoying its cold burn down the back of her throat. “Not direct ones. I thought I’d try and go through her activities on Daroca before she vanished, see if I can find any clues about where she might go. Then there’s Kantil, I could go see her.”

“All right, enough.” Hogan’s hand came down on her wrist, preventing her from lifting her glass. “I don’t want you wasting any more time over this girl. You made your long shot and it didn’t come off. I don’t mind you going out on a limb every now and then, but you have to know when to cut your losses. Understand me, this is that time.”

“There’s something wrong about her.”

“Maybe so, and because of that the warrant still stands. The police will find her eventually, and when they do I’ll authorize you to handle her interrogation yourself. But until that happens, I want you working on our priority cases.”

Renne stared resentfully at his hand; deep inside, the little sensible part of her brain was telling her this wasn’t the issue to make a stand on. “Yeah, okay, Chief.”

“And I certainly don’t want you bothering people like Christabel Halgarth again. If you want to talk to someone that senior in the Grand Families and Dynasties you clear it with me first. There are a lot of political angles in our investigations, not to mention protocols, which should be followed.”

“She was happy to see me.”

“You don’t know what she was thinking. I don’t want a repeat of that incident, understand?”

“Right.” His hand withdrew, and she lifted her glass to her lips. The barkeeper delivered the water and the beer, putting a small bowl of cashew nuts in front of Hogan.

“Our trip produced some very decent results,” Tarlo said. “The forensic guys managed to crack the program routines in the Reynolds arrays. We know what was being encrypted now.”

“What?” Renne asked automatically.

“Every scrap of data from meteorological sensors all over the planet.”

With Hogan distracted by Tarlo, Renne’s finger rose slowly above the rim of her glass, remaining stiff for a couple of seconds. Tarlo saw it, and pressed down on a grin.

“That makes no sense,” she said. “Why would the Guardians be interested in Martian weather? I don’t understand.”

Tarlo gave her his full bright smile. “Me neither.”

“But it’s the kind of solid result we can run with,” Hogan said, glancing back at Renne. “I want the two of you working together to find out what you can. Admiral Kime has given this a very high priority.”

“Figures, with his background,” she grunted, and snatched some of the cashews.

“Okay then,” Hogan said. He drained his mineral water in one. “Have your lunch, Renne, then when you get back to the office this afternoon, I want the two of you heading up this new angle on the Mars investigation. Call in some experts, find out every conceivable application for the meteorological data.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hogan nodded happily, and left them with a wave.

Renne watched him walk out of the restaurant. “What an asshole.”

“To be expected right now,” Tarlo said with a grin. “He had some bad news waiting for him when we got back.”

“Oh?”

“Thought that would cheer you up. Get this, Senate Security has officially requested we begin a covert observation of Alessandra Baron.”

“The celeb?”

“None other.”

“Why?”

“The official reason is that they suspect her of involvement with quote ‘detrimental individuals.’ How about that for covering a multitude of sins. But guess whose name was on the request file.”

Renne’s grin brightened to match Tarlo’s. “The boss.”

“Now do you see why our Great Leader is walking about like he’s got a bug up his ass?”

“Yeah. But that’s no reason for taking it out on me.”

“You’re the easiest, closest target. I warned you about chasing the Halgarth girl. He was never going to like that. And visiting Christabel was a big risk. He was bound to find out.”

“Yeah, yeah. But you’ve got to admit it’s odd. Why should Isabella vanish like this?”

“No,” he said, and held his hands up. “I refuse to get involved; it’s not just hanging on to the uniform, I need the money my job brings in. And I’m making the kind of progress which Hogan approves of.”

“You’ve got to look at the whole picture, Tarlo.”

“Sure you do. Just remember what happened to the last person who took that view. Oh, hey, here’s Vic.”

Renne twisted around on the stool to see Vic Russell walking through the restaurant. He held up a hand. “Better get a table,” she said.

They chose one along the wall, where a high partition veiled them from casual view. “Some good news for you,” Vic said as Renne’s burger was delivered. He took a couple of fries from her plate.

“I could do with some,” she admitted. “It’s been a long shitty day.”

“I’ve backtracked eighteen items from Edmund Li’s interception on Boongate.”

Renne paused in examining her burger for signs of mayonnaise. “Their entire routes?”

“Yep.” Vic’s big round face produced a smug expression. “You think you haven’t had much sleep. This has taken me weeks, they were so bloody complicated. It helps that we had the manufacturer and the final smuggling disguise; I could work the route from both ends, fill in all the gaps, and believe me, there were some massive gaps. Each route is a chain of courier companies playing the shell game between warehouses—some of the components were in transit for ten months. And all the finance used to pay the shipment costs came from onetime accounts. There was a hell of a lot of organization went into this operation. We may have underestimated how many Guardians are active inside the Commonwealth. Shipping the items like that had to triple the cost of each piece by the time they reached Far Away. Whatever they’re building, it’s costing them a fortune.”

Tarlo and Renne exchanged a glance. “They can afford it,” she said. “Remember, the Great Wormhole Heist is paying for this.”

“Even so,” Vic insisted. “This is true paranoia. Effective, mind, I’ve got to hand them that.”

“It won’t be all Guardians,” Tarlo said. “Elvin will recruit from any unsavory source; remember that agent Cufflin put us onto.”

“Thanks, Vic,” Renne said. “This is really good work. We’ll get the RI set up to cross-reference with our existing Guardian database, and the team can review the strongest leads for direct follow-ups.”

Vic settled back in his seat, and stole another fistful of fries from Renne’s plate. “You know, I was thinking about this when I filed the report. We’ve already got a ton of information, so many names and smuggling operations, and black market arms deals; it goes back decades.”

“I know,” Tarlo said, swirling beer around his glass. “Renne and I loaded half of it in there ourselves.”

“All right,” Vic said, suddenly earnest. “So how come we never managed to nail the bastards?”

“Sore point,” Renne said.

“Because it’s all peripheral information,” Tarlo said. “One day we’ll reach critical data mass, and the whole case will fall into place. We’re going to make a thousand arrests that day.”

Vic shook his head. “If you say so. I’ll see you back in the office, yes?”

Renne nodded. “Half an hour.” She eyed her nearly empty glass, wondering if she should order another.

“Give me a second,” Tarlo said to Vic, “I’ll come with you.” He waited until the big man was standing by the door. “You going to be okay?”

“Sure. I’m just stressed and depressed after EdenBurg, is all. That goddamn Isabella. Why doesn’t anyone care about her? Not her friends. Not her family. If you vanished, people would wonder, they’d ask questions. I’d want to know what happened to you.”

“That’s because you’re a good person.” He hesitated. “Look, Hogan will be watching you, but I can pursue Isabella on the quiet if you’d like.”

“I don’t know.” She rubbed a hand irritably over her brow. “There are no quiet inquiries left. I either turn it into a big deal or drop it completely. Damn, you don’t suppose Hogan could be right, do you?”

Tarlo laughed. “Never. See you later? I want to tell you all about Mars. It really was a strange place.”

“Yeah, I’ll be in soon.”

He patted her shoulder and left.

Renne took another bite out of her burger, and munched slowly. Maybe she had become obsessive about Isabella. It wasn’t a crime to run off and join the exodus. There were hundreds of thousands of people on each of the worlds close to the Lost23 who’d left home with no explanation, most of them scuttling off to worlds on the other side of the Commonwealth. Silvergalde was also a popular destination, and if Isabella had gone there she really would be out of any electronic contact.

“You shouldn’t discuss confidential information in a public place,” a woman’s voice said. “Office procedure has certainly slipped recently.”

Renne stood up and looked over the partition at the neighboring table. Paula Myo sat there, nursing a glass of orange juice.

“Jesus, Boss!”

“Can I join you?”

Renne grinned, and gestured to the empty seats.

“Sounds like you’re having a bad day,” Paula said as she settled in the chair Vic had vacated.

“I can handle it. I just keep asking myself what you would do.”

“That’s very flattering. So how is it going at the office?”

Renne took another bite from the burger, giving Paula a calculating glance. Was the boss deliberately testing her to see how much she’d divulge?

“You should know; all our data is available to Senate Security.”

“I wasn’t referring to the data from your investigations, I’m more interested to hear how Hogan is doing.”

“Coping, barely. He isn’t you.”

“For which I suspect he and I are both grateful. How did he take the request to spy on Alessandra Baron?”

“Didn’t you hear? Tarlo says badly. But I think that’s more to do with the fact you requested it than the manpower scheduling. What do you think Baron has done?”

“She’s a Starflyer agent.”

Renne stared at her old boss. “Are you serious? You really think it exists?”

“Yes.”

“Hell, Boss. What proof have you got?”

“The behavior of several people, including Baron. She’s part of a network of agents who are acting against human interests. We’re compiling information on them which should lead to their arrest.”

“Shit, you do mean it, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So why tell me?”

“I’d like to know why you have a warrant out for Isabella Halgarth.”

“The shotgun, the one which claimed Doi was a Starflyer agent. There was something wrong about it.” She explained her misgivings about the whole setup; and the way Isabella had subsequently dropped out of sight.

“Interesting,” Paula said. “Especially her connection with Kantil. We are looking for any Starflyer connection among the Commonwealth political elite. She might well be the link.”

“Isabella as a Starflyer agent? That’s hard to swallow.”

“You said yourself there’s something wrong about her. That shotgun did a lot of damage to the Guardians’ credibility. It is logical to assume the Starflyer would use disinformation of that nature to damage its one true opponent. Her involvement would confirm her connection to its network.”

“But she’s only twenty-one, and she was going out with Kantil two years ago. How would she get messed up in something like that so young? She spent most of her early life on Solidade. You can’t get more sheltered and protected than that.”

“I don’t know. Is there any chance you could research her background more thoroughly?”

Renne blew her cheeks out as she sighed. “That won’t make me terribly popular with Hogan.”

“Yes, I heard. Your choice, of course.”

“I’ll do what I can, Boss.”

“Thank you.”

Paula stayed at the table, finishing her drink as Renne walked out. Her virtual hand touched Hoshe’s icon. “She’s leaving now.”

“Yeah, we’ve got her. The team’s boxing her. Monitor programs for her unisphere access are loaded and running.”

“All right. Let’s see what we turn up.”

“Do you think it’s her?”

“I hope it isn’t, but who knows. If it is, the information I’ve just given her should goad her into making contact with someone in the Starflyer network.”

Although it wasn’t far from New York to the Tulip Mansion, Justine kept her own apartment on Park Avenue. It was a nice base in town for those times she wanted to be on her own, or throw a small soirée for close personal friends and important contacts; it was also somewhere private for affairs she preferred to keep quiet about. The building was two centuries old, a massive art deco–Gothic block favored by both the urban chic and serious old money. Her apartment occupied half of the fortieth floor, which gave her a nice view out over the park from her balcony. Tall marble gargoyles lined the stone balustrade, framing the city’s magnificent ma-hon tree as it glittered rose-gold in the late evening sunlight. She never tired of the unique sight of the biochemical anomaly. It was always a shame CST had closed its homeworld off, she felt; now there would never be any more transplanted to the Commonwealth worlds.

The maid had prepared a light supper of poached salmon and salad. Justine ate it cautiously before her guest was due. Sure enough, twenty minutes after she finished she had to rush to the bathroom, heaving up most of it.

“I’d forgotten this part,” she said to herself as she wiped her mouth with a tissue. It would have to be cold still mineral water and plain crackers when the meeting was over.

Her e-butler told her Paula Myo was on her way up from the lobby. She took a bottle of mouthwash from the medicine cabinet, and swilled it around. The horrible bitter acid taste was replaced by a clinical peppermint. It wasn’t much better.

“Stop feeling so damn sorry for yourself,” Justine told her reflection in the mirror. She splashed some cold water on her face, which wasn’t looking so hot these days. Ah well, it wasn’t as if she was on the prowl for lovers right now. Her virtual hand touched her father’s icon. “She’s here.”

“I’m on my way down,” Gore said; he had the apartment above.

As always, Paula Myo was dressed impeccably, in a blue suit that was obviously tailored in Paris. There was a stern expression on her dainty face as she looked around the big living room with its exquisite antique furniture.

“I was in another Park Avenue apartment yesterday, about a kilometer away from here,” she said. “I thought that was ostentatious, but it would fit in this room and still rattle around.”

“Some people are aspirant,” Justine said. “Some of us obtained a long time ago.”

“Materialism never really appealed to me.”

“Is that part of your Huxley’s Haven heritage?” Justine had almost said: Hive heritage.

“I don’t think so.”

“Course it is,” Gore Burnelli said. He marched in through the living room door, dressed in a mauve polo sweater and black jeans. The overhead chandeliers reflected a burnished amber light off his golden skin. “Materialism would distract you from your obsession, wouldn’t it, Investigator? The Foundation wouldn’t want that in their police force; I suppose it makes you immune to bribes, too.”

“Father!”

“What? Everyone appreciates honesty, especially a policewoman.”

Justine was too weary to remonstrate with him. She could feel her stomach churning again, and hurriedly told her e-butler to get her an antacid. It acknowledged the request, and told her Gore’s subsidiary personality programs were filling the apartment arrays, moving with him like attentive ghosts.“Can we get started, please?” Justine asked; it was almost a plea. The big windows leading out to the balcony turned opaque and shimmered with a gray curtain of energy, sealing the room. She sat in one of the big couches as a maidbot trundled over carrying her a glass filled with a milky liquid. Gore came and sat beside her, while Paula chose a high-backed chair, facing the two Burnellis.

“I’ll start with my bad news,” Justine said. “I haven’t been able to confirm who told Thompson about Nigel Sheldon blocking the examination of cargo to Far Away.”

“Damn it, girl,” Gore complained. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m not the most popular Senator in the Commonwealth right now. All that goodwill I was getting at the start because of Thompson’s death has just about evaporated. Columbia and the Halgarths are building themselves a lot of new alliances, and of course Doi’s always keen to receive their votes. Those of us who ask awkward questions are gradually being frozen out.”

“Then burn your way back in. Come on, this should be child’s play to you.”

“I’m up against some masterclass opposition here, actually,” she snapped back. “Not knowing if I can trust the Sheldons is proving to be a real problem; it’s leaving me very isolated in several committees.”

“You’ll pull through,” Gore said. “I can always depend on you. That’s why I’m so proud of you.”

Justine blinked in surprise. That wasn’t like him at all.

“The navy has made some progress on the Mars data,” Paula said. “Not that it’s particularly helpful. I asked the Admiral to pursue the matter, and he took that to a level I never expected.”

“I heard they actually went there,” Gore said.

“Nigel Sheldon made a CST wormhole available,” Paula confirmed.

“Which is interesting in itself. Whose interest is he considering, pursuing this lead against the Guardians? In any case, the navy team managed to find out what all the data was that’d been encrypted. It’s purely meteorological.”

“Did they find a key?” Justine asked.

“Unfortunately not, the encryption writing software was a use-expire program. There’s nothing left of it. Forensics are running a quantum scan of the hardware, but it’s unlikely they’ll be able to pick out a remnant. The actual data remains beyond us unless the Guardians choose to make the key available.”

“So even if we decrypted it, we wouldn’t know what they wanted it for.”

“I’m afraid not, Senator.”

“This is such bullshit,” Gore said. “If you ask me, the Guardians have just notched up another smart hit against the navy. All that stealing meteorological sensor crap is a clever piece of misdirection. There’s got to be something else hidden on Mars. Some transmission from a secret base or device, maybe a weapon. If they’ve been landing Von Neumann cybernetics on the surface, who knows what they could have built by now.”

“The research packages which robot ships dropped on Mars are well documented,” Paula said. “There is no surplus mass unaccounted for, not in twenty years. And the navy team didn’t see anything unusual at Arabia Terra.”

“Four computer geeks and two characters from ancient history on a nostalgia trip don’t make what I call a decent exploration team. There could have been a missile silo right under their feet and they’d never have known.”

“Or even a hollowed-out volcano,” Justine muttered.

“I don’t believe they would have been able to smuggle anything like a cybernetic factory onto the surface,” Paula said levelly. “We know the Guardians simply purchase whatever equipment they want.”

“Weather!” Gore grunted in disgust.

Justine covered her smile by drinking more of the antacid.

“I believe Mars is something we will have to put aside for the moment,” Paula said. “One of my ex-colleagues in the Paris office may have uncovered another Starflyer agent: Isabella Helena Halgarth.”

“Shit!” Gore said.

Justine took a second to place the name, pleased she didn’t have to use her e-butler to reference it for her. “Damn, do you think that’s their link to the presidency?”

Gore held up a hand. She could see her own distorted reflection in his palm. “Wait,” he said. “I’m analyzing this. I always fucking knew there was something wrong about that weekend we hosted in Sorbonne Wood. Let’s see. Patricia was always willing to accommodate every party; at the time I thought she was doing it to secure endorsement for Doi. But take a look at the weekend from the Starflyer’s perspective. Assume it wanted a human navy for its war between us and the Primes. Yes, goddamnit. Think of the true sticking points we faced. Either Isabella or Patricia was there to oil things along every time. Isabella even slept with Ramon DB.”

“He slept with her?” Justine couldn’t help the indignation. She pursed her lips, vexed with herself for caring. After all, they hadn’t been married for eighty years. Still … he’d done it under her roof, technically.

“It was even Ramon’s parallel development idea which helped the agency move all the starship production facilities to the High Angel with the minimum of fuss,” Gore said.

“Which he produced on Sunday morning,” Justine said coldly. “I suppose we’ll never know who actually came up with the idea.”

“I assumed it was Patricia, who relayed it through Isabella,” Gore said.

“It’s the kind of compromise a presidential aide could come up with in an instant. Now, though, we’ll never know.”

“You could ask him,” Paula said.

Justine finished off the last of her antacid drink, which might have accounted for the little grimace of distaste. “Yes, I could. I’m not sure he’d give me an answer.”

“He will,” Gore said. “You know he will.”

“Maybe, but he’d want to know why.”

“Is he strong enough to join us?” Gore asked. “We need allies.”

“He’d need some very strong proof,” Justine said carefully. “I’m not sure what we’ve got right now is enough.”

“What more can we give him?” Gore asked. “For Christ’s sake, Ramon isn’t stupid.”

“I’m not about to tell him we suspect Nigel Sheldon of being behind the greatest antihuman conspiracy there’s ever been. He’d shoot us down in flames.”

“You’ve got to find a way to get to him.”

“I’ll try.” She thought of how she’d have done that in the old days. A hotel in Paris maybe, a weekend spent together, restaurants, fine wines, coffee on the left bank, talking, arguing, laughing, theater in the evening, long passionate nights in bed. How she missed those simple times now.

“This still doesn’t tell us which of them was pulling the strings, Patricia or Isabella,” Gore said. “And were they working in conjunction with the Sheldons?”

“We don’t know Nigel is a part of this,” Justine said. “Not yet.” She told her e-butler to run a full background check on Isabella and Patricia.

“It would be logical for Isabella to be a courier to the Starflyer network,” Paula said. “Kantil would be working deep cover, taking her time to infiltrate the Commonwealth political structure. The unisphere shows are full of innuendo that Doi is heavily dependent on her advisors and opinion polls.”

“Which is why I was suspicious about her original backing for the Starflight agency,” Gore said. “Spending that much tax money was never going to be a vote winner before the barrier came down. She took a very uncharacteristic risk backing the formation. Something pushed her into doing that.”

“I don’t have any grounds to arrest Kantil and subject her to a forensic neurological examination,” Paula said. “We ran similar appraisals on suspects yesterday, which came to nothing.”

Justine listened to them discussing options while the data on Patricia and Isabella ran across her virtual vision. Patricia’s background was well documented, and verified by investigative reporters eager to find the smallest discrepancy in her official history and so prise open a covered-up scandal. Less information was available on Isabella, primarily because of her youth and the fact that she’d spent a lot of her life on Solidade. The Halgarths’ private world didn’t have public records. Justine started to review associated files which the e-butler’s cross-reference function had thrown up.

“Wait a minute,” Justine said. “Isabella’s father, Victor. Fifteen years ago he was appointed director of the Marie Celeste Research Institute on Far Away. He ran it for a two-year term before moving back to EdenBurg, where he secured a vice presidency in a Halgarth Dynasty physics laboratory.”

“That’s how it got to her,” Paula said with satisfaction. “She was just a child. I didn’t understand how anyone that young could be involved.” She frowned. “Neither did Renne.”

“If Isabella is a Starflyer agent, then her parents have to be as well,” Gore said.

“Yes,” Paula said. “We must watch what they’re doing. However, there is a limit to how many observation operations Senate Security can mount. It is not a huge organization.”

“Our family has a decent-sized security team,” Gore said. “Be good for them to get their asses out of the office and do some fieldwork for a change. I’ll organize something.”

“I appreciate that,” Paula said. “But I can arrange for the Halgarths to be watched. I have a well-placed friend in the Dynasty. There is something else I need you to help me with. Hoshe has established that Bose’s original astronomical observation was financed by the Starflyer. Someone in my old Directorate’s Paris office covered up the information when I was investigating him. I’m running several entrapment operations on the personnel to find out which one. But I’d like a proper financial analysis of Bromley, Waterford, and Granku. That could result in some important leads.”

“I know that company,” Gore said. “Legal firm here in town.”

“That is correct. Three of their employees have disappeared, in a similar fashion to Isabella. They set up the Cox Educational charity, which had its account in the Denman Manhattan bank. It would take Senate Security a while to organize a proper forensic accounting review of their records. And I’m sure you’re better able to perform the same function.”

“I’ll rip that goddamn company apart for you,” Gore said. “If they’ve spent a single dime buying the Starflyer a drink I’ll find it.”

The good ship Defender was three weeks into her deep-space scouting mission, and her captain was as bored as the rest of his crew. Probably more so, Oscar reflected; while everyone else went off-duty they tended to access TSI dramas, immersing themselves in the racier aspects of Commonwealth culture, so at least they got a break from the tedium of onboard life. He on the other hand spent his rec hours going through the logs from the Second Chance.

It was a waste of time. He knew it was a waste of time. There was no enemy alien spy on board. The reason—the only reason—he kept on going day after day reviewing the logs was because of Bose and Verbeke. He still didn’t understand what had happened to them, nor why. Something was desperately wrong with the whole Watchtower section of the mission. There was no way Bose and Verbeke could have dropped out of contact through simple electronic failure. Their comrelays were utterly reliable. The starship’s sensors and the contact teams must have missed something over there: some Prime device that was still active, an unstable part of the rocky fragment that collapsed on the two explorers. Except … they were in freefall, there was no gravity to collapse anything; and some relic of Bose had warned the Conway. Oscar didn’t have a clue what he was looking for; he just kept on looking.

He’d accessed a dozen TSIs recorded by different contact team members as they fumbled and slid along the eerie curving passages that threaded through the interior of the Watchtower. None of the recordings had revealed anything new. The Prime structure was as dead as any Egyptian Pharaoh’s tomb. None of the physical samples they’d brought back, the crumbling structural material and radiation-saturated fragments of equipment, had helped further their understanding of the Watchtower mechanism’s true nature. It was all too fragile, too old, for any useful analysis to be carried out. The navy still wasn’t sure what the installation used to be a part of, though the best guess was some kind of mineral processing facility. No part of it the contact teams had explored had machinery that was even close to working condition. The tunnel that Bose and Verbeke had ventured down was no different. And it was Oscar who had given them that initial authorization to proceed deeper, to find out what was there. He’d been encouraging, he remembered. Often during the interminable playbacks he’d hear the enthusiasm in his own voice.

Time after time he went through recordings that corresponded to the time they dropped out of communication. Bridge logs, engineering logs, power logs, a dozen other onboard datastreams, flight logs from the shuttles that were ferrying the contact teams between the starship and the rock. Worst of all were the detailed space suit recordings from Mac and Frances Rawlins as they made their frantic, useless rescue bid. They’d gone a long way down the curving tunnel-corridor that had swallowed Bose and Verbeke. Nothing in those decaying aluminum walls gave any hint of danger lurking ahead.

Two nights ago, after his bridge duty was over, Oscar had decided on a slightly different approach to the analysis. He was running every sensor recording he had of the Watchtower rock, and compositing them into a specific overall picture. He wanted to run comparisons between the rock and its wreckage from the time they’d encountered it right through the mission until the time they left. The shape, thermal profile, electromagnetic spectrum, spectrographic composition; each building up to a comprehensive multi-textural snapshot every two seconds. When they were all assembled the Defender’s RI could run a detailed comparison program between all of them, searching for the slightest change.

His cabin’s holographic portal was in projection mode, filling the small area with the image from the shuttle cameras, playing back Mac’s first exploration flight. Oscar sucked on an orange juice drink bag tube as the familiar dialogue between himself and Mac and the shuttle pilot repeated itself yet again. Sensor data from the shuttle was being compiled and added to the starship’s own sensor log record to enhance the snapshots, producing a tighter resolution. He watched as the hangar doors parted, and the ungainly little craft rose off its cradle, belching sparkly cold gas from its reaction control thrusters. The huge bulk of the Second Chance twisted slowly and silently around his cabin, the translucent projection allowing him to see the bulkheads through its main cylindrical superstructure and the giant life-support ring. Oscar felt a pang of nostalgic regret at seeing the starship again. There would never be another one like it. The Defender was sleek and powerful in comparison, but it lacked the grandeur of its ancestor. Everyone working at the Anshun complex had devoted themselves to that first starship, putting in ridiculous hours, ignoring their family and social lives; its assembly had been an act of love. The atmosphere they’d shared back then was lost as well, the naïve excited optimism of launching a grand exploration into the unknown. They’d been full of hope in those days as the adventure loomed close. Simpler, easier times.

The shuttle cleared the life-support ring, and its main engines fired, carrying it toward the Watchtower. Dyson Alpha slipped up across his cabin bulkheads; a distant lightpoint as bright as Venus appeared in Earth’s night sky. The rest of the alien starfield flowed around it. Oscar peered at the image, picking out the dull speck ahead of the shuttle. He’d seen it so many times in so many spectrums that he knew the Watchtower’s exact position against the unfamiliar constellations.

His lips sucked down some air. The bag of orange juice was empty. He reached out to push it into the mouth of the refuse tube at the side of the washroom cubical. Stopped in midmovement. Frowned. Stared at the image of the Second Chance.

“Freeze image,” he told his e-butler. The recording halted immediately.

“Hold this viewpoint, and increase magnification by three, focus center on the Second Chance.” The starship’s gray-silver structure swelled rapidly, covering the washroom cubical and his sleep pouch. Oscar forgot to breathe. “Son of a bitch.” He stared and stared at the primary sensor array, shock like icy electricity shooting along his spine. The starship’s main communications dish was extended, pointing toward the tiny star behind him.

The Defender’s alarm sounded.

“Captain,” the executive officer called. “Sir, you’ve got to get up to the bridge right now. We think we’ve found the other end of Hell’s Gateway. The hysradar has picked it up in a star system three light-years away.”

Morton was still smiling when his bubble dropped out of the wormhole, fifteen meters above the Highmarsh Valley in the Dau’sing Mountains.

It had been two days since Mellanie’s last visit at the barracks. She’d cut it fine, arriving just hours before Kingsville was closed off and everyone received their final clearance orders. It had been one hell of a visit, the two of them screwing each other senseless in the little rec room, like teenagers who’d unexpectedly found the house empty one afternoon. Hence the long-lasting smile.

That memory of the two of them together was the last one to be loaded into his secure store. So if, as likely, his body was blown to shit on this mission, that would be the strongest memory in his brain when he was re-lifed. Now that was a stylish way to emerge back into reality.

His bubble was a translucent gray-blue sphere of plyplastic, three meters in diameter, its surface stealthed against every known sensor type used by the Primes. He was suspended at the center by the transparent impact gel that filled the interior. During training it had seemed like a sensible way to arrive on a hostile planet light-years behind enemy lines. They were neat little machines: tough, highly mobile, and reasonably armed. Actually riding one down as it exhibited all the aerodynamics of a granite boulder pulled the smile off his face. Fear hit him for the first time, making his heart pound and his stomach quake. Life didn’t get any more extreme than this.

The rest of Cat’s Claws had come through the wormhole okay, their bubbles very hard to see in the visual spectrum as they all fell toward the ground. It was only their high-UV IFF beacons that gave him their locations. The three combat aerobots that had led the deployment zoomed away across the grungy landscape, disgorging chaff and decoy drones.

Up above them, the wormhole closed. It had been open for about ten seconds, just long enough to shoot them out. Back on Wessex, the gateway had been surrounded by a giant mechanical loading system, resembling a scaled-up version of an artillery gun magazine, with over a thousand bubbles sitting on conveyor racks ready for the assault. Parallel racks carrying wedge-shaped combat aerobots moved forward smoothly beside them, their separate ranks merging at the gateway amid the weird cluster of lithe malmetal tentacles that was the actual launch delivery mechanism.

Cat’s Claws had joined several hundred other troops lined up on one of five gantry ledges as the bubbles trundled past in stop-start sequences. Along with the rest of them, Morton had finally been given the activation codes for the aggressor systems wetwired into his body. Now the squad were all making nervous, jokey comments about those systems not firing outward, war tourism, which body parts you protected above all else, alien rights lawyers suing them, and other stupid stuff. Trying to bull out the wait.

After a surprisingly short time Cat’s Claws was at the head of the line. Morton pulled his armor suit helmet down, checked his breathing circuit integrity, and slithered through the slit in the side of his bubble. As soon as the straps closed around him, the gel was pumped in under pressure. His e-butler integrated itself with the bubble’s array, confirming internal systems functionality. By then he was already ten meters down the conveyor rack.

The Elan strategic assault display flashed up across his virtual vision. He saw batches of wormholes opening a hundred kilometers above the planetary surface. They would remain in place for several seconds, disgorging a phenomenal quantity of munitions: missiles, ground-attack warheads, electronic warfare pods, decoy vehicles, beam-weapons platforms. It was all covering fire, a diversion while other, smaller wormholes opened just above the surface, deploying squads all around the fringes of Prime installations and bases. The Primes were fighting back, sending up flyers and big ships, their beam weapons punching through the scuzzy continent-wide clouds to intercept the rain of lethal machines as they sank down through the ionosphere. There were also flyers scouring the ground as the troop wormholes flipped in and out of existence. But electronic warfare aerobots were causing havoc with the Prime communications and sensors, hampering the flyers. Initial reports indicated that the landings were succeeding, by which the navy meant beachhead casualties were under thirty percent.

Morton hit the ground. The impact wasn’t as bad as any of the bone-buster hits they’d given him in training. His bubble bounced twice, the plyplastic flexing and bending to dissipate as much of the shock as it could; pressure waves moved sluggishly through the gel to squish lightly up against him. On the third landing, it sagged like a punctured balloon and stayed on the ground. “Down,” he told the rest of Cat’s Claws.

According to the inertial navigation readout, he was within half a kilometer of his predicted landing coordinate. The land immediately around him was flat, a field that had been seeded in springtime and had run rampant before starting to decay. Some kind of bean crop, judging by the yellow-green mush pressing against the lower section of his bubble. Abrupt climate change hadn’t helped this land’s recent delicate conversion to cultivation. It was raining in the Highmarsh; a thick blanket of dark turbulent cloud was stretched across the roof of the valley, flowing slowly from east to west. It produced a constant downpour of gray water that had overwhelmed the drainage dikes and beaten the surviving crops into a straggly mat of insipid green stalks lying flat against the sodden soil. Tall liipoplar trees that had been planted in long lines up and down the valley had been battered by the nuclear blast and subsequent storms, few of them were still intact; the majority had snapped to crash over the roads they once marked.

Morton checked around, and found the mountain he was supposed to be heading for, three kilometers away. The bubble started to stiffen up again, reverting to its standard spherical configuration. His virtual hands zipped over a sequence of control icons, and the single broad caterpillar track running around the compact machine’s vertical equator began to spin up. The bubble began its stabilized counterspin, keeping him perfectly level. Dips and lumps in the ground jounced him from side to side, but in the main it was a smooth ride, the gel acting as the ultimate suspension system.

External sensors showed Morton water spraying out from either side of the track. A rigid trail of squashed muddy plants lay behind him. “Goddamn!”

The bubble’s chromometic skin was doing a wonderful job defusing the moldy green color of the crop around the entire exterior. Any eye or visual sensor looking down would just see a hazy patch just the same color as the rest of the field; but that crushed track and little wake of water was a dead giveaway.

“We need to get on the farm roads,” he told the others. “This wet ground is painting us as big fat targets.” Pre-invasion map images flipped up in his virtual vision, and he steered the bubble to the right, his body tilting over as if he were riding a bike. The bubble changed direction, heading for the top corner of the field.

“Incoming,” Doc Roberts warned. “Four flyers.”

Morton saw the symbols creep into his virtual vision. They’d come into the valley at the western end, following the old highway route around Blackwater Crag.

Aerobots curved around to meet them head-on. Maser beams slashed between the two opposing formations, etching themselves in lines of steam through the downpour. Force fields flared brightly as they deflected the energy strikes. The aerobots fired salvos of missiles, their fiery contrails spluttering in the rain. Powerful ion bolts ripped through the air like slow-motion lightning, casting stark shadows for kilometers across the ground below.

Morton reached the rough farm track bordering the field. It was awash with muddy water that was spilling over the banks of the dike, but only a few centimeters thick. He throttled up the bubble’s track. A limp fantail of water squirted up behind him as his speed reached an easy eighty kph.

Tactical decision: that the aliens in their flyers would be a little preoccupied to spot a ripple in the mud right now.

The aerobots were always going to lose. They were outnumbered from the start. The flyers were heavier and slower, but their beam weapons had a much higher power level. Maneuverability and superior tactical ability gave the first two kills to the aerobots and their host of submunitions, but eventually brute force won out.

After seven minutes of furious combat the remaining two flyers thundered over the area where the wormhole had opened. One of the stubby cylinders was trailing a thin brown vapor trail from a gash on its side, but its straining engines managed to keep it airborne. They began to spiral out, sensors sweeping the ground.

Ten kilometers away, and already three hundred meters above the valley floor in the rugged folds of the foothills, Morton watched the aliens circling around and around. His bubble was stationary, resting at the bottom of a narrow gully cut out of the soil by an earlier spring storm. Mud and stones were pressed against the base, their mottled shading replicated all around him. A web of thermal shunt fibers completed the disguise, giving the bubble’s chromometic skin the same temperature as the land it rested on.

“Bugger,” Rob Tanne said. “Eight more of the bastards.”

The new flyers raced up the Highmarsh Valley to join the first two in the search for any surviving human trespasser. Their flight paths brought them closer and closer to the foothills.

“Don’t they have anything else to do?” Parker complained.

“Guess not,” Morton said.

Cat’s Claws waited as the flyers swooped low overhead, their bubbles inert, operating on low power mode, hidden among the abundant secluded folds and hollows provided by the rugged landscape. Morton could hear the bass thrumming of the engines through the bubble’s gel. They must be very loud out in the open.

One passed about fifty meters away. His bubble’s passive sensors scanned the layout. There wasn’t much to add to the database already in his array. The Primes didn’t seem to vary their machines.

After thirty minutes, six of the flyers peeled off and left, leaving the remaining two patrolling the Highmarsh. “Let’s go, boys,” Cat said as the flyers loitered at the far end of the valley.

Morton was slightly surprised she was still with them, not to mention sticking to the deployment plan. He’d half expected her to take off on her own as soon as they were down. Under his guidance, the bubble’s plyplastic skin rippled, squeezing itself up out of the gully with a fast lurch. The caterpillar track held it steady on the soaking sulphur-yellow boltgrass that covered the slope. There was only a kilometer or so of desolate ground to cover before the unruly cloud base. They’d be a lot safer inside the thick, cool vapor.

The strategic assault display was empty now. Elan’s deployment was complete. The wormholes above the planet had all closed, shutting down the temporary communications feeds. Morton switched to a local display, checking the position of the other bubbles against his own. Unsurprisingly, Cat was already above cloud level, waiting for the rest of them. He fed power to the tread, and began his ascent.

The navy had been concerned that the snow that lay on the Dau’sing peaks all year round would leave tracks that the Primes could follow. For that reason the path preloaded into the bubble’s navigation array skirted the very high ground, taking Morton on a long winding route through tough passes and clinging to contour lines along alarmingly steep slopes. They need not have worried. The gray clouds were several degrees warmer and a lot muckier than the usual weather fronts besieging the mountains at the onset of the southern continent’s winter. The snowline had undergone a long retreat upward, exposing vast tracts of slatey shingle that hadn’t seen daylight for millennia.

Morton drove through the dark, murky fog for a couple of hours. He had to move slowly; visibility was down to thirty meters at best, and that was using the passive sensors on full resolution. All he saw was kilometer after kilometer of the same slippery, muddy shingle crunching below the translucent track. No other features emerged out of the fog. The angle of the slope changed, but that was it for variety.

They were traveling in a very loose convoy, with Cat out in front. At least he assumed she was still in front; he hadn’t spotted her beacon for over an hour and a half. She’d gone off at a speed he wasn’t going to try to match. Behind him, Doc Roberts was keeping a sensible kilometer separation distance. His beacon moved in and out of acquisition depending on the shape of the terrain.

Morton rounded a sharp vertical ridge of rock, and the Cat’s beacon was shining three hundred meters ahead.

“Where’ve you been, boys?”

“Taking care,” Morton said. “We’re not proving anything to each other here.”

“Touchy!”

He accelerated down the shallow incline to her bubble. She had stopped at the low point of a shallow saddle between a couple of peaks on the edge of the Regents range, about fifteen kilometers from where the navy detector station had been built. It was walled in on both sides by cliffs of sheer rock rising to vanish into the turbid clouds that occluded the peaks. The ground between them was a stratum of crumbling stones, scattered with fresh unsteady piles that had fallen from on high when the mountains were shaken by the nuclear blast.

Morton drove his bubble on a slow circuit of the area, matching up what they’d reviewed on the satellite imagery from CST’s original survey. It was a good location to adopt as a base camp. The cliffs were riddled with slim zigzag fissures and deeper crevices. He identified at least three where they could store the bubbles and equipment.

“This should do,” he announced as the Doc’s bubble came slithering down the incline.

“Well, as long as you think so, Morty darling,” Cat said.

Once everyone had arrived, they got out of the bubbles and started unpacking their equipment. Morton and Rob took a fast walk over to the edge of the saddle. Past the cliffs, the ground curved down sharply, though visibility was still only a few tens of meters. The clouds were moving faster here, scurrying along the southern edge of the Regents. Without them, Morton and the Doc would have had a clear view straight down to the Trine’ba two kilometers below. Randtown itself was away to the west.

“There’s a lot of activity down there,” the Doc said. He was using his suit’s electromagnetic spectrum sensors to scan the shoreline of the vast lake.

Morton switched on his own sensors. The clouds filled with a bright gold radiance, as if a small, intense star was rising from the Trine’ba. When he added analysis programs, the coronal hue changed to a serpentine mass of entwined emissions, bundled sinewaves thrashing in discord. As well as the strange Prime communications, there was the bolder background turquoise of powerful magnetic fields flexing in a slow cadence. Lavender sparks swarmed around the empire of light, flyers trailing their own wake of cadmium signals, their membranous force fields flickering like wasp wings. “What kind of important installation would you build in Randtown?” he asked out loud. “I don’t get it. There’s nothing here. Send your invasion force halfway across the galaxy so they can build a five-star ski resort? That’s crazy.”

“This whole invasion makes no sense,” the Doc said. “There must be something down there more valuable than we realized. They are alien, remember. Different values.”

“We understand their technology,” Morton countered. “They base everything on the same fundamental principles we do, they ain’t that different.”

“When you apply technology to a requirement it nearly always shakes down to a one-solution machine in the end: cars to travel over land, rockets to fly into space. But motivation, that’s a species variable, always has been.”

“Whatever,” Morton said. As well as his dodgy medical qualifications, the Doc had some obscure English degree dating back over a century; all that education made him want to overanalyze everything. “We’re not here to admire their psychology, we’re here to blow the shit out of them.”

“Eloquently put,” the Doc said.

Morton took out a type three sensor, a transparent disk five centimeters across, and stuck it on the side of a boulder where it could scan across the Trine’ba. “That’ll spot anything approaching us.”

“Unless they come from the other side.”

“We’ll place sensors all the way around our base camp. Obviously. It’s not like we’ve got a shortage of them.” Part of their mission procedure had them building up a comprehensive network of the optronic devices, allowing them to monitor all the alien activity in and around Randtown.

“Roger that,” the Doc said; he sounded amused.

They spent the next forty minutes scrambling over rocks and unstable shingle falls, planting the little sensors to provide early warning of any approaching flyers. Not once did they see sunlight; the cloud swirled and eddied as they clambered about, but it remained unbroken.

“Well done, boys,” Cat said as they arrived back at the base of the saddle.

“Great views you’ve given us; lots of rock and a big wet sky.”

“Let’s just hope it stays that interesting,” Rob said.

“That kind of depends on us,” Morton said. “We’re here to cause as much disruption as we can. I guess we’d better start by scouting out the neighborhood. We need two teams, and someone to stay up here to safeguard the equipment.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie, I must have missed that,” Cat said. “When did they pin a general’s star on you?”

“You don’t need to be a general to point out the bleeding obvious,” Parker said. “We know what’s on the mission plan. Establish a knowledge of the enemy and use it to hit them hard.”

“And the person staying behind ain’t going to be you, Cat,” Rob said.

“Darling! Why is that?”

“Don’t you know? I don’t trust you. None of us do. You’re a fucking psycho.”

“Ow, Bob, are you scared of little me? You’ve got your armor suit and a very big gun.”

“I’m not scared of you, I simply regard you as unprofessional. We can’t depend on you for backup and support, we don’t know if you’d provide it or not. You enjoyed playing the badass in training, screwing with our instructors. We all got a laugh out of that. Out here, nobody’s smiling, nobody thinks you’re clever. So you either take the front row all the time, or fuck off right now.”

“I’m disappointed, Bob, did the Doc fill your head with that speech?”

“Let’s just concentrate on what we’re here to achieve, shall we,” Morton said. “Cat, he’s right. You’re not dependable enough to be our cover.”

“General, and peacemaker. I like you, Morty.”

“And don’t call me that.”

“Mellanie does,” Parker said, laughing. “We all know that.”

“Morty, oh Morty, yes, yes please,” Rob warbled. “Oh, Morty, you’re the best.”

Morton knew his cheeks were red inside the helmet, despite it maintaining a perfect body-temperature environment.

The communications band was full of chuckles. Parker gave a long wolf’s moonhowl.

“Rob, you and I are one team,” Morton said, ignoring the gibes.

“That’s good for me, Morty. Real good.”

“Cat, you and the Doc can have a ball together. Parker, you keep everything secure up here.”

“Hey, fuck that,” Parker said. “I want to see some action here.”

“Then you partner Cat,” the Doc told him.

“He couldn’t handle that kind of action,” she said.

There was amusement in the voice, but it left Morton cold. Even over the communications link something in her personality that was fundamentally wrong made itself felt.

“We don’t really need to leave anyone back here,” the Doc said. “If the Primes can hack our sensors and secure links, we’re fucked anyway. Forget the navy way. We’re the ones on the ground. We’re the best judges how to fulfill our duty.”

“Duty!” Parker grunted. “Jesus Christ, Doc, you just love all this military crap, dontcha?”

“Roger that. So you want to stay here?”

“I fucking told you, I’m staying with you guys.”

“That’s cool,” The Cat said. “You come with me and the Doc.”

“Fine,” Morton said. “Rob, come on, we’ll take the east side of town. You guys, see what they’re doing farther over around Blackwater Crag. And remember, everybody, we’re not looking to engage the enemy yet. This foray is just to build up our sensor network, okay. We don’t want to alert them to our presence before we know how to make their lives truly miserable.”

“Do you think she’s going to be trouble?” Rob asked when they were halfway down the mountain. He’d switched to a short-range secure link between the two armor suits.

“Rob, I don’t know what the hell to make of her. All I know is, she’s never going to be my backup. I don’t trust her.”

“Amen to that.”

They’d left the cloud base behind an hour earlier. Even though nightfall wasn’t due for another three hours, the light was reduced to a somber gloaming underneath the cloud. The rain was threaded with sleet and surprisingly hard pellets of hail, all of which turned to slush as they began a slow melt. It made the slope very hard going, even with the boosted limbs of the armor suits. Unrelenting rain was steadily beating away the boltgrass tufts, which never had a deep hold at this altitude anyway. The disappearing vegetation left long tracts of mud and shingle striping the slope, which threatened to slide them down hundreds of meters if they lost their footing.

An entire squadron of sneekbots was deployed around them in protective concentric circles. They skittered over the rough terrain, their antenna buds probing for any sign of movement, warm bodies, or electronic activity. So far the ground ahead was clear of any ambush, booby trap, or sensor.

Morton’s virtual vision showed him Cat, Parker, and the Doc taking a slightly different route down from the saddle, keeping to the high ground until they were a lot closer to the town. “On the good side, we can always keep track of her.”

“Unless she goes truly native and ditches the armor.”

“I doubt she’d go that far. And the sensors would pick her up if she tried to take anything from base camp.” He stuck another of the little disks on an outcrop of rock that had withstood a small mudslide. As well as observing the vast open space above the Trine’ba, it acted as a communications relay across the Regents.

“Four more just launched,” Rob said.

Morton watched the alien flyers set off across the smooth waters of the Trine’ba, flying low, and keeping parallel to the shore. They all used broad fans of sensor radiation to sweep across the shallow ripples. Morton’s armor suit stealthed down, its chromometic skin melding into the tawny beige of the landscape, while its thermal emission matched the temperature of the mud. The sneekbots folded their crablike bodies to the ground and sent their main arrays into hibernation mode. The flyers didn’t even bother probing the hillside.

“Wonder what they’re looking for?” Rob asked as his suit returned to life.

“Mellanie said a few people stayed behind. They’re probably causing some trouble for the Primes.”

“Great, that’s all we need, enthusiastic amateurs stirring things up for us.”

Morton smiled. “So you think we qualify as professionals, do you?”

“Listen, I’ve been doing this kind of work for a while now. I know what I see, and you guys took on the basics in training. In any case, we’ve got the kind of equipment that can do some serious damage. If we find these farm boys we need to get them to back off.”

“Yeah, I figured that.”

“So how come Mellanie knows about the locals and where they’re at?”

“This was where she was when the Primes invaded, right here in Randtown.”

“No shit. And this is where you got sent. There’s a coincidence.”

“Yeah.” Morton wanted to grin, but it was something that had bothered him, too. Still, too late to worry about it now.

He was surprised by the scale of activity where Randtown had once stood. A vast block of machinery that resembled a human chemical refinery had been assembled along the shore, extending for a couple of kilometers on either side of the old quayside, and even standing on stilts to arch over some bays and inlets. Bright lights blazed from every point of the structure, illuminating exposed equipment buttressed by thick metal girders. Behind that, on the gentle slope leading up from the back of the town, boxy buildings and large cylindrical storage tanks had been set up on the old human road grid. Spaced between them were a number of large fusion power plants. The old highway leading back through the Dau’sings had been widened. It was carrying a lot of traffic out to Blackwater Crag, big slow vehicles spitting out black exhaust smoke as they lumbered along. Rows of long buildings were just visible at the foot of Blackwater Crag, stretching back along the valley. A string of flyers patrolled above the refurbished road, dipping in and out of the smothering clouds.

Outside the original town limits, six broad terraces had been bulldozed into the bumpy foothills, with a further two under construction. They seemed to be parking, or holding areas, covered with unopened pods of equipment, vehicles, and flyers; four vast open arenas were filled with aliens.

“Well now, finally!” Morton said as they wormed their way along the ruined tree line at the top of the foothills. The hardy pines were suffering badly in the sickly winter climate. Slushy water clung to every needle, turning them a dull unhealthy sepia. Many trunks had fallen, ripping out huge circular wedges of dripping soil as long mudslides undermined their roots. It was perfect cover. The sneekbots maintained their protective perimeter, crawling their way through the fungal muddle of broken twigs and mulched needles.

He used the suit’s sensors to zoom in on the naked creatures parading across the nearest arena below. They were quad-symmetric, with four thick legs at the flared base of a sallow-colored barrel body. When they moved, it was with a rocking motion as the legs bowed and flexed along their whole length. Four arms emerged just above the legs, almost as thick as the lower limbs and moving in the same long curving motions. Morton didn’t think they had joints like elbows and knees, the whole thing was elastic. The crown sprouted a further eight appendages, four stumpy trunks with an open mouth; while between them four tall slender tendrils that ended in bulbous lumps of flesh waved about like corn in the wind.

“Solid-looking brutes,” Rob said. “There must be thousands of them down there.”

Morton gave the arenas another scan with his suit’s optical sensors. “More like tens of thousands.” He was recording the scene for the navy. The first communications wormhole was due to open in another seventeen hours; he’d be able to send them the information then. It would be interesting to see what their analysts came up with.

“They’re all fitted with a transmitter gadget, look,” Rob was saying. “I just keep getting that analogue hash coming from them.”

“Right.” Morton was watching a pair touching their long upper limbs together. An alien kiss? A fuck? “I know we’ve only just seen them, but they all look identical to me.”

Rob snorted. “Very not politically correct.”

“I was wondering if they were clones. Some kind of disposable construction crew? Just a thought. Their army might be the same. A perfect soldier replicated a hundred million times. It would explain their dire lack of tactics, all they ever do is use numbers to overrun us. They don’t mind the slaughter because they’re not losing individuals the way we are.”

“Could be. It makes as much sense as any other idea. Let’s see if we can get a closer look.”

With the sneekbots prowling ahead and behind, they began to worm their way deeper through the decaying foliage of the fallen trees. Morton could see several hundred aliens working on the long refinery station by the shore. The giant machine was still being extended. Both ends were sheathed by a network of scaffolding that supported cranes and hoists. Aliens swarmed all over the new components that were being added. They must possess an excellent sense of balance, Morton thought; he couldn’t see anything equivalent to a human handrail on the narrow metal struts that they moved along.

“Ho, did you see that?” Rob asked.

“What?”

“One of those things just took a crap off the top of the refinery station.”

Morton tracked his optical sensors along the colossal structure. Now he knew what to look for, he could easily find evidence of more casual defecation. The pipes and girders were splashed with tacky brown patches. “So? They never got around to inventing a flushable pan. The Doc was saying we need to watch out for a different philosophy more than any other type of variation between us.”

“I’m not sure that’s a question of psychology or even bad plumbing. Leaving your own waste products around like that is a very counterproductive thing for a species to do. Everyone develops disposal mechanisms, both social and practical; it’s one of the first signs of civilization emerging. You don’t just wait for the rain to wash it away.”

“You have no idea what their digestive biochemistry is like,” Morton said.

“Face it, their crap could be the perfect fertilizer.”

“Then they’d collect it and transport it to a field. No, we’re missing something. You may have been on the right track with your clone army idea.” He paused, unhappy. “Though even they wouldn’t deliberately foul their own environment. Nothing would. This doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe the clone clean-up army is due to arrive next.”

Rob chuckled. “You want to put some money on that?”

“No way.”

After another half hour of cautious movement through the moldering forest, they had moved as far west as they could go before risking open ground. The fallen trees had also brought them to within six hundred meters of the force field protecting the alien town. They sent a trio of sneekbots on ahead, but stayed under cover of the sopping wood as the invisible sun finally fell below the horizon.

“Another difference,” Rob said.

“What?”

“There’s no color on anything they build, no finish or decoration. All the external material is raw.”

“They’re color blind as well.”

“And immune to esthetics?”

“Okay, then. You tell me.”

“I don’t know why, I’m just pointing it out. Their culture has no art.”

“Have you seen the crap flooding the unisphere these days?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, but don’t forget this is a military invasion base. It’s bound to be functional.”

“Could be. What do you make of the setup?”

Morton switched his attention back to the alien activities below him. The angle just allowed him a narrow view along the front of the refinery station. Machinery and tightly packed pipes produced a metal precipice fifty meters high. It was lined with wide orifices that were pumping out torrents of liquid. He counted sixteen of the big jets squirting bilious foaming water out into the lake shallows.

“I guess we know what resource they were after when they came here,” Rob said. “The lake itself.”

“What the hell is that stuff?” Morton wondered. Lights on the top of the refinery station cast a bright illumination across the shallows. The aliens had done a lot of work along the shoreline. Long concrete ramps now extended out into the water, reaching almost to the force field, a kilometer and a half away. In between them, the lake had been divided up into a number of pens by heavy netting. Morton realized there were a lot more ripples in the pens than there were out beyond the force field. Yet there couldn’t be any breeze inside the shielding. He zoomed in for a clearer look at whatever was stirring the water.

The pens were filled with some kind of living creatures. A lot of living creatures. It was their writhing forms thrashing about just below the surface that was causing all the disturbance.

“They’re bioforming the planet,” he said. “That’s what this station is, that’s why they wanted the lake. Jesus.”

“You might be right,” Rob said. “They’ve certainly got big-scale expansion plans. Access sneekbot three-oh-six.”

When 306’s sensor feed flipped up into Morton’s virtual vision he saw the little machine had crept right up to the force field. The first reading was the strength of the field. They didn’t have anything that could penetrate, it was even strong enough to withstand the tactical nukes they’d brought. He concentrated on the excavation that the aliens were making a hundred meters inside the boundary, clawing out a deep bunker that they were lining with concrete and metal. A tower of machinery was being assembled in the center. The Doc had been right: technological solutions did refine machines down to identical functions. Morton recognized some of the sections without having to reference his e-butler. The aliens were building a force field generator.

“Track right,” Rob said.

He swiveled 306’s antenna buds: six hundred meters away, another generator bunker was being dug out.

“Those generators are a lot more powerful than the ones they’re using now,” Rob said. “At this rate it’s only going to take a couple of days to finish them. After that, they’ll be truly impregnable, and we’ll be truly screwed.”

“Only the town has a force field so far,” Morton said. “We can play hell with everything else they’re doing.”

“Whose chain are you trying to jerk here? This is where it’s at, right here in town. We’ve got to hit that monster station. Don’t screw around; use the nukes.”

Morton risked raising his head slightly, looking directly at the force field and the town it enclosed. The vast chunk of alien machinery along the waterfront could have been a light-year away for all the chance he had of reaching it. “Fuck it, there’s no way in!”

“Maybe we could get in from the water side? Force fields don’t function so good in water, the denser the material the less effective they are.”

“Could do. Water’s not that dense, though. We’d have to scout around, test the field integrity on the lake bed.”

“These suits can handle a dive.”

“Yeah, but will the dump-webs work underwater?”

“I’m not sure, we could—Uh oh, what have we here?”

One of the sneekbots had registered movement several hundred meters deeper in the dead forest. It clambered up on top of a moldy log, looking along a line of stumps. A human shape crawled across the little open lane from one decaying canopy to the next.

“So Mellanie was right,” Rob said. “Not just a great ass, huh?”

“No,” Morton said absently. Two more humans were sneaking after the first. From what he could make out they were dressed in some kind of dark ski suits. They didn’t register on infrared. Somebody knew how to rig the thermal fibers, he acknowledged. “This can’t be good for us, they’re going to strike something.”

“Relax, man, our stealth is good.”

“Theirs isn’t.” His virtual hand touched the Cat’s icon. “We’ve found whatever’s left of the locals. Access our sneekbots.”

“I see them, Morty. Looks like they’ve developed a purpose in life.”

“It’s a damn stupid one,” the Doc said. “If they start shooting at the aliens they’re just going to get themselves killed.”

“They look like they know what they’re doing to me,” Rob said. “Let’s see where they’re going.” Five sneekbots set off through the forest, keeping parallel to the three humans. They soon overtook them, and began scanning ahead.

“Part of our mission is to rescue and assist any surviving humans,” the Doc said.

“I think that referred to noncombatants,” Rob told him.

“That’s what these idiots are, they just think they’re fighters.”

“They fooled me.”

“The Doc might be right,” the Cat said. “These bumpkins aren’t helping us by causing a fuss. You should stop them, Morton.”

Why me? he thought. Any other time, it might have been flattering.

“Uh oh,” Rob said. “We might be running out of time.” The sneekbots were picking up standard Prime electromagnetic emissions. Four armored aliens were patrolling the foothills along the top of the dead forest.

Morton pulled a detailed map out of his grid, and studied it. “If I was going to ambush them I’d do it there,” he said, and indicated a small, deep ravine that cut clean through the foothills to spill into the Trine’ba just east of the town. The aliens would have to cross it somewhere. “They’ll be out of sight from the town, and shielded. Perfect spot.”

“Yeah,” Rob said. “Not bad for a bunch of amateurs.”

“Get over there and talk to them,” the Doc said. “They should at least know we’re here.”

“If you ask me, these guys know what they’re doing,” Rob said. “I don’t think this is their first turkey shoot.”

“You’re making a mistake if you let them do this.”

“Doc’s right,” the Cat said. “Go break up the fight, boys.”

Morton knew she was right. Cat’s Claws couldn’t afford anyone interfering in their mission, no matter how well intended. “We’ll try.”

Rob carried on grumbling, but he followed Morton back through the thick layer of mildew-steeped needles, keeping under the lacy roof of decomposing bark. Even as they began, Morton knew they were cutting it close. The alien patrol was making good time out in the open, and the ambush team was almost in position.

“We’ll swing around your way,” the Cat said. “Just in case you screw up. I’m bored with dropping these sensors, anyway.”

“Fuck you,” the Doc said. “We can’t see anything past Blackwater Crag yet. We need to expand the network.”

“You’re becoming a bad pain-in-the-ass barracks-room lawyer. I don’t like that. You do what you do, and let me do what I know needs to be done.”

“This is not about you, bitch.”

“Temper temper.”

“Hey, heads up, people,” Rob exclaimed. “We have something interesting here.” The sneekbots were reporting some kind of electromagnetic interference inside the ravine. It wasn’t the kind of jamming effect that would cut the aliens off abruptly from the town, but a more subtle distortion, reducing their bandwidth and disrupting the remaining content. “Somebody knows what they’re doing.”

The ambush party spread out along the edge of the ravine. They unstrapped long, bulky cylinders from their backs, and aimed them down into the black gash in the landscape. Morton’s e-butler started running comparisons with known weapons types.

“Son of a bitch,” he said when it finally gave him an approximate match.

“They’re Prime guns.”

“Wonder where they got them from?” Parker said in amusement. “They are big beauts, aren’t they?”

“It’s what you do with them that counts,” the Cat retorted.

Morton was seriously considering walking a sneekbot up to one of the ambushers, and trying to talk with them that way. He didn’t because he was worried they’d simply shoot the little bot, which would blow everyone’s cover.

The aliens began their descent into the ravine. It was a steep V-shaped cleft leading down to a torrent of white water racing along a bed of gray-white stone. Lichen-covered boulders stuck up out of the soil on either side, forcing the aliens to take a slow zigzag path as they picked their way to the bottom. One of the sneekbots perched on the edge above them relayed the image as they sank below direct line of sight with the town.

The jamming increased dramatically just before the aliens reached the stream. The aliens stopped, bringing their weapons up, and began to spread out. Two ducked down beside some boulders, their infrared signature fading away as their suit’s skin turned black. Both were very difficult to see, even for the sneekbot’s sensors.

“Stop them,” the Doc pleaded. “Morton!”

A beam weapon fired down into the ravine, catching one of the more visible aliens. Its force field sizzled a bright violet, haloing its shape against the rock and foaming water. Another beam weapon stabbed out, punching the radiant force field. Steam began to hiss upward from the surrounding grass as little flames licked around the base of the suit’s shielding. It took a couple of seconds before the force field finally collapsed from the twin energy spikes impaling it. The alien’s armor suit exploded in a dazzling plasma mushroom as its energy cells and ammunition were vaporized.

Light flooded along the ravine, bringing a clarity that even daylight never managed. The two aliens that had gone for cover amid the crumbling boulders started to fire up at the ambush party.

“Shit, they’re losing it,” Morton yelled. He stood up and started to run hard. The suit’s electromuscles carried him easily, amplifying his every leap to send him flying effortlessly over the fallen trees.

“Fuck it!” Rob cried. He jumped after Morton, his pounding suit legs splintering the rotten trees apart as if they were polystyrene.

“I can see the fire from here,” Cat called. “You must be visible to half the aliens at Blackwater Crag.”

Morton winced. Up ahead of him, the ravine was a sharp crack of flickering pyrotechnics against the black foothill. With or without jammed communications, it would act like a beacon to any flyers. His suit deployed the hyper-rifle from its right forearm sheath.

A hefty plume of soil and flame shot up from the edge of the ravine where one of the ambushers was lying. Morton saw a human shape pinwheel through the air, backlit by the raw energy raging inside the ravine.

“Four flyers heading your way,” Parker called.

Morton saw the orange symbols creep into his virtual vision.

“Can you close it down?” The Cat shouted.

“Not a chance,” Morton said. “One of them’s dead, the other two are still shooting.”

“Stop them!” Parker demanded. “How difficult can it be?”

“We’re coming,” the Doc said. “Parker, with me.”

“Oh, Christ.”

One final eight-meter hurdle jump over a horizontal tree and Morton landed on the rim of the ravine, his boots thudding into spongy soil up to the ankles. He was already pointing his hyper-rifle. A simple circular targeting graphic materialized in the center of his virtual vision. The sneekbots were triangulating coordinates for him. An alien armor suit slid smoothly into the orange circle, which immediately flashed green. Morton fired.

The hyper-rifle was designed with one purpose: to puncture the force field projected by alien armor. Even so, Morton was slightly surprised when the small atom laser’s half-second burst drilled clean through the suit, sending the alien flying backward three meters through the air to splash into the stream. Water closed over the dark shape, hissing briefly as the heat produced a small cloud of steam. How about that, the military got something right.

Rob was crouching beside him—presenting a smaller target silhouette. He fired his hyper-rifle. Morton found the last alien and shot it. The ravine was abruptly plunged into darkness again. Just a few serpent shapes of grass embers glowed where the alien patrol had made their stand. The damp night air was extinguishing them quickly.

“Who the hell are you?” a voice challenged.

“The cavalry,” Rob told him. “Your lucky day, huh.”

“Flyer overhead,” the Doc said. His voice was strangely calm. “You’re going to need covering fire, Morton.”

“No!” Cat warned. “Don’t!”

Morton’s telemetry display showed him the Doc launching an HVvixen. The slim missile accelerated at fifteen gees, its plasma exhaust piercing the air behind it like a runaway solar flare. It slammed into the flyer’s force field, flash-releasing its remaining energy. The flyer detonated into an incandescent spherical shock wave that billowed out at supersonic velocity to envelop its three partners. They exploded in furious twisting gouts of sapphire vapor.

“Gotcha, you bastards,” the Doc crooned.

“You retard motherfucker,” the Cat screamed. “You’ve just killed us all.”

“Only these bodies, Cat,” the Doc said lightly. “Your essence will have continuity.”

The dazzling lightstorm began to drain out of the night sky, dissipating into a thousand sparkling contrails that sank slowly toward the ground. Morton’s suit sensors picked out the three armored humans standing in the middle of the scintillation blizzard.

“Nice shot, man,” Parker said admiringly.

“Run,” Morton whispered. “Run now. Get out of there!”

One figure was already moving. The Cat: using her armor suit boost function to its maximum, accelerating her helter-skelter sprint to over sixty kilometers an hour. She was heading up the slope toward the roof of writhing cloud.

“Four more,” Parker said. “Make that six.”

“You mean ten,” the Doc said. “Morton, Rob, get the civilians out of here.”

“Yeah,” Parker said. “Protect and serve.”

The one surviving ambusher was walking unsteadily toward Morton.

“What was that? What is happening?”

“They’re not going to make it,” Rob said.

Five HVvixens shrieked into the night.

Morton jumped toward the survivor as vivid white light silently washed across them. “Get down. Get into the ravine.” He didn’t give the man any opportunity to argue. His suit arms closed around him, picking him up effortlessly. They both tumbled over the edge. Behind them, the devil’s own fireworks display filled the sky with carnage.

“Bad guys falling,” Parker reported, laughing gleefully.

“They found us,” the Doc reported. “More incoming. Shit. Eighteen. Four of them are big. New flyer type for your catalogue, Morton.” His suit’s sensors were relaying a stream of information. The data faltered as several beam weapons locked on to him. “You guys had better go for deep cover. Make this relevant, Morton. I’m counting on you.” He fired another HVvixen. It never got ten meters from his suit’s force field before the deluge of energy from the alien beam weapons ruptured it.

Parker’s screaming was loud in Morton’s ears as he was hurled through the air by the explosion. Telemetry showed him the man’s suit start to falter from the punishing overload.

“Get down to the bottom of the ravine,” Rob was saying. “We’ll be safe there.”

Morton hauled the ambusher along at his side as the two of them hurried down the last few meters of the slope to the rampaging water. He switched to active sensors, confident no one would ever notice. The stream was deep, at least a couple of meters. As far as his radar could see downstream the flow was free from any obstruction.

“Over here,” Parker called. He was broadcasting on every frequency his armor suit was capable of transmitting on. “Here I am, you bastards, come and get me.” Seven of the large alien flyers were approaching him, their weapons lashing out. “Eat this shit, and die.”

Morton plunged into the stream, taking the survivor with him. He expanded his suit’s force field to envelop both of them.

Parker triggered the two tactical nukes he was carrying.

A stratum of violent white light streaked over the top of the ravine, obliterating every color as its thick nimbus irradiated the ground. The churning water of the stream began to steam. Then the air shook, agitating the boulders. Small stones began to bounce down the slopes to splash into the water.

Morton and Rob were already well on their way downstream, tumbling around and around in the swirling rapids. It was a fast and chaotic ride, with the pair of them grinding through shallows and banging into the sides only to ricochet back into the main current again. Morton kept hold of the ambush survivor, struggling to keep the man above the foaming surface the whole time they jolted about.

The dreadful sheen of light drained out of the sky, leaving the restless clouds seething with lightning flashes. Ground tremors faded away.

“You okay?” Rob asked. He was ten meters ahead of Morton, riding down on his back, using his arms as rudders.

“Just trying to keep this guy alive.”

“How’s he doing?”

“I think he’s had better days. Sensors show he’s still breathing.” It was more like choking, but at least his weak thrashing showed he was still alive.

“We’re getting goddamn close to the town.”

“I know. But we’re almost at the bottom.”

Another two hundred meters brought them to the end of the stream, where it broadened out to gurgle over a wide, flat bed of stones before emptying into the Trine’ba. Morton came racing out of the last curve to hit the stones on his ass; he plowed through them for a short way before coming to a complete halt.

“Holy fuck,” Rob said. “We made it.”

“Congratulations.” The Cat’s voice oozed sarcasm. “Landed on something soft, did you? That part that does all your thinking.”

“Piss off, bitch.”

Morton’s virtual vision showed him the working sensor disks that were relaying Cat’s signal. There weren’t many left. When he accessed their visual spectrum feeds, they showed him a small crater glowing a venomous maroon where Parker had made his stand. Above it, a hole had been ripped through the clouds, where violet air hazed the swirling gap. Forests and spinnies scattered on the hills above the town had ignited and were now surging into full-blown firestorms; between them the ruined grass was smoldering. Smoke was rising to choke the narrow band of air between the ground and the clouds. None of the sensors reported any flyer activity.

The Cat was sheltering in a gentle fold high above the blast zone. Telemetry showed her suit was intact; its force field had protected her from the blast.

Morton let go of the man he was holding and climbed to his feet. The force field around the alien town was five hundred meters away. There was no sign of any activity nearby.

“I think we’re safe for the moment,” Morton said. “This might be a good time to leave.”

“Amen to that,” Rob grunted.

Morton looked down at the man who was still sprawled on the stones, panting heavily. His black clothes had been ripped in several places; the ebony skin beneath was grazed and lacerated.

“You all right?” Morton asked.

The man turned his head to glare up. “What? Are you making a joke?”

“Sorry. I’ve got a decent medical kit, but if you can walk I’d like to build some distance with Randtown before we stop to patch you up.”

“Merciful heavens, forgive me for what I’ve done.”

“What have you done?”

“Led more good men to their death. I take it you are responsible for that explosion? It was nuclear, wasn’t it?”

“One of my squad mates triggered it. He was stopping the flyers you’d attracted.”

“I see.” The man bowed his head until it was almost in the water. “Even more deaths must be carried by my conscience, then. And it was already a terrible burden. Truly, the fates must hate me.”

“I don’t think any of this is personal. My name’s Morton, this is Rob.”

“Thank you, gentlemen, I appreciate you saving me. Much good it will do you.”

“Pleasure,” Rob grunted.

“Who are you?” Morton asked.

The man smiled, revealing bloody teeth. “Simon Rand. I founded this paradise.”

The cave was a good hideout, Morton admitted to himself. It had taken them an hour to reach it, scrambling along the rocks of the shoreline, sometimes wading across deep inlets where the mountain runoffs gushed into the rank lake water.

Three people were waiting for their leader, desperate to know what had happened when the bombs went off.

David Dunbavand had been badly injured in an earlier raid. One of his legs had been shattered, its flesh now an unhealthy blue-black mottling, with cuts weeping gray cheesy fluid. His toes already looked and smelled gangrenous. Several other bones had been broken during his brief moment of combat. He was sweating continuously, damp hair slicked back against his skull.

A girl called Mandy was nursing him; she looked tired and worn, prone to tears. There wasn’t much she could do except clean his dressings and feed him a weak broth they’d cooked up from salvaged food packets. She was wrapped up in several oversized woolen sweaters, and a pair of green semiorganic waterproof trousers. Curls of lank hair hung out of a black wool hat.

It was Georgia who had run out of the cave, splashing through the shallows to greet Simon as he limped painfully toward his refuge. “One of my earliest believers,” he said painfully as he introduced her to Morton and Rob. “Georgia was with me building the highway.” She smiled bravely at him, her arm going around his waist to help him over the last few meters of slippery rock. Her face was ruggedly beautiful, rejuvenated to adolescence, with a square jaw and sharp cheekbones. She wore an expensive designer suit on top of several T-shirts and thermal trousers; the semiorganic fabric was smeared with weeks’ worth of dirt, but still offered a degree of protection from the cave’s dank atmosphere and the chill air that seeped in from outside. Once stylish auburn hair had been cut short by scissors and was now covered by a silk scarf wrapped like a turban.

Morton followed Simon and Georgia as they clambered along a ledge that took them back to the main chamber. It was illuminated by a few solar-charged lightglobes, the kind you could buy at any camping shop. They badly needed recharging, producing only a wan yellow glow that didn’t even reach the cave roof. However, there was enough radiance to show him the three bodies sealed in plastic lying along the rear wall.

David pushed himself up onto his elbows, grimacing at the effort. “Where are the others?” He was giving the entrance a stricken look, already knowing the answer.

“I’m sorry,” Simon told him.

Mandy slumped down, and started crying.

“Tyrone?” David asked.

“No. He got one of the aliens, though. He stood his ground to the very end.”

“One!” the injured man exclaimed bitterly. “One out of a million. I should never have stayed here. I should have gone with Lydia and the kids. We’re not making any difference. We’re just being wiped out. Look at us! Four of us, that’s all that’s left. What was the point?” He lowered himself back onto the thin mattress, shaking at the pain, drawing sharp breaths.

“How many of you were there to start with?” Morton asked.

“Eighteen of us remained behind,” Simon said as he sat down heavily. A hand waved around the cave. “This is all that remains of us. I’d like to say that we have taken leagues of the aliens to hell with us, but alas our efforts have been mediocre at best. They are well equipped and excellent soldiers. In truth there’s not much we have achieved aside from our own deaths.” He began to scratch the healskin dressings that Rob had applied to his cuts during the journey back. Georgia sat beside him, her knees tucked up under her chin. Their arms went around each other.

“Eighteen,” Morton muttered. He didn’t want to ask for details; it all seemed such a waste. Not that Cat’s Claws had done a lot better. Not yet.

“Please,” Mandy asked; she looked up pleadingly, wiping her eyes. “Can you get us back to the Commonwealth?”

Morton was glad his helmet was on; she wouldn’t be able to see his expression. “I’m not sure. We weren’t scheduled to be lifted out for six months. I’ll inform the navy you’re here, of course. They’ll probably try and get a wormhole open for you.”

She lowered her head.

“Have you got communications?” David Dunbavand croaked.

“Sure. The navy is opening a wormhole on a regular basis to receive our messages. We can let your family know you’re okay.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.” He smiled, which turned into a cough.

“Let me take a look at you,” Rob said. He took his helmet off and knelt beside the injured man. He waved a diagnostic array over David’s leg and torso.

“We’ve got a decent supply of medical equipment stashed back at our base camp. There should be something that can help.”

“A painkiller would do to start with,” David said. “We’ve even run out of those. The hospital was shut away behind the first force field they generated. We’ve had to make do with whatever we can find in the farmhouses ever since. It never amounted to much, and it seemed selfish to keep what little we had from poor old Napo, even at the end.” He indicated one of the corpses.

“No problem,” Rob said. He took a small applicator pad from his pack.

David gave an audible sigh as it was pressed to his neck. “Damn, I never thought I’d enjoy feeling numb. That’s very kind of you, my friend.”

“My pleasure. Now just lie still and let my e-butler’s medical routine work out what to do with you.”

“How much bandwidth can your communications wormhole handle?” David asked. “We have the memories of our friends; can you at least get them to safety?”

“You’ve got a secure store in here?” Morton asked.

“Their security is our honor,” Simon said. “Every time one of us ventures outside, we transfer our last memories to an ordinary handheld array. Those who remain are sworn to get them to safety back in the Commonwealth. We trust each other, you see. Friendship in these terrible times has forged a bond strong enough to give us the strength to face bodyloss with confidence and conviction.”

Morton wasn’t sure there was anyone in Cat’s Claws he’d trust with his memories. “It would be a slow transfer,” he said carefully. “The wormhole isn’t open for very long. Just a few seconds.”

“I understand,” Simon said. “We have survived thus far, a few more months should pose no problem, especially with your weapons to help protect us.”

Morton lifted his helmet off. After the filtered air he’d been breathing, the smell in the cave seemed exceptionally strong. Something he couldn’t place: raw meat but with a sugary tang. It was strange. “What is that?”

“The smell?” Mandy said. “Whatever they’ve been polluting the Trine’ba with. It’s been getting worse for weeks now.”

“Any idea what it is? We saw the refinery they’ve built.”

“I took a few samples earlier on,” David said. “It’s like an algae of some kind. They’re bioforming the Trine’ba.”

“I believe it to be the first step in converting this planet to one that is host to their own biological heritage alone,” Simon said. “They certainly show no interest or respect for any existing organisms. It is an imperialism which seems to extend down to a cellular level.”

Rob took out a couple of vials from his medical kit, and slotted them into the applicator patch. “I’m going to put the leg into a healskin sheath after this,” he told David, and put the patch on the man’s discolored thigh. “I can’t set the bones properly, but the sheath and the biovirals should help stabilize you until we can get you back to a Commonwealth hospital.”

David coughed. Tiny flecks of blood settled on his lips. “Hope Lydia’s keeping up on my medical insurance payments.”

“You will survive, David, I promise you that,” Simon said calmly. “I will carry you to the wormhole on my own back if necessary.” He broke off at the sound of someone splashing their way along the entrance fissure.

The Cat waded up out of the water, and removed her helmet. Her purple-tipped hair was sweaty, rising in a multitude of tiny spikes. She grinned broadly, and her wide blue-gray eyes took in the cave with one easy glance. “Nice,” she observed. “Hello, boys, did you miss me?”

“Like stale vomit,” Rob said. He turned back to stripping the dressings off David’s leg.

The Cat strode into the middle of the cave. “Well, my dears, that was an impressive first six hours, wasn’t it. Two of us dead. We didn’t save two refugees. We set off some nukes that did no damage whatsoever. And most of our sensor disks are gone. Talk about making an impact.”

“And you were a big help,” Morton said.

“You heard what I said. You chose to ignore it.”

Even though it was a perfect fit, Morton relished taking off his armor suit. He rubbed at every part of himself he could reach, easing itchy skin and stiff muscles. The semiorganic fiber one-piece he wore underneath repelled the cave’s cold moisture, keeping him reasonably dry. There was nothing he could do to stop the smell.

After living on scavenged packets for weeks, the Randtown survivors welcomed the food Cat’s Claws had brought.

“Manufactured corporate pap full of sugar, badly modified genes, and toxic additives,” Georgia said as she stuffed a fishcake straight from its heating envelope into her mouth. “God, it tastes good.”

“Our way of life has truly ended,” Simon said. He accepted a vegetarian lasagne from Cat, inclining his head in gratitude.

“It’s not from a Big15 factory farm,” she told him. “I wouldn’t fill my body with that shit.”

Morton watched Rob open his mouth. Their eyes met, and Rob turned away.

“We have to decide what to do,” Morton said. “I think our first priority is to get you clear.”

“What about David?” Simon asked. Dunbavand had been wrapped in Morton’s lightweight sleeping bag, protecting the healskin from the cave’s rancid humidity. He was sleeping fitfully as the drugs and biovirals did what they could to assuage the damage.

“We can load him in one of our bubbles and remote drive it out of here,” Morton said. “You’ll be safer up in the Dau’sings.”

“Yes, the aliens seem to be centered around Randtown and the valleys immediately around Blackwater Crag,” Simon said. “We should be safe in the highlands.”

“What about our mission?” Rob asked. “We’re supposed to be making life intolerable for the aliens.”

“We will,” Morton said. “We’ve got six months.”

“I hate to disagree,” Simon said. “But you saw the new force field generators they were building. Once those are operational there is very little even you will be able to do to harm their primary installations, I suspect. This is the third expansion and protective upgrade they have made since they arrived. Each time the force fields are larger and stronger.”

“We tried to get inside at first,” Georgia said. “Five of us were caught going through the sewers. They didn’t stand a chance. The aliens must have been expecting us to try and infiltrate their station. They’re not stupid. And poor old Napo led a dive team that was going to use an underwater route through the old aquarium. Nothing works. They’ve got every route covered.”

“There are no routes, not anymore,” Mandy said. She was chewing listlessly at a bacon sandwich. “They’re already outside the old town boundaries. All the utility tunnels and storm drains are inside the force field now.”

“You boys aren’t thinking,” The Cat said. Her voice cut clean across the cave, ripe with mockery. Morton gave her an intolerant glance. She was doing her yoga, one foot tucked in behind her neck.

“You have a solution?” Morton asked.

“It’s obvious.”

“Want to share that?”

“Nuke them. That’s all we can do.”

“We can’t nuke them. We can’t get to them.”

She closed her eyes, put her hands into Dawn Sunlight position, and breathed in deeply.

“There has to be a way in,” Rob said. “What about caves?”

“No,” Simon said. “We performed a full seismic survey before we started building Randtown. I didn’t want us to suddenly come up against subsidence problems after we were established. That would have been too costly.”

“Do you have anything that could dig underneath the force field?” Georgia asked.

“Alamo avenger,” Rob muttered with a small private smile.

“No,” Morton said. “We didn’t come equipped to mount a frontal assault. We’re supposed to harass and disrupt, to make them waste time and money looking over their shoulder the whole time.”

“A nice theory,” Simon said. “But they’re a very centralized species. The activity out in the valleys is susceptible to the kind of campaign you’re talking about, but I doubt it would ultimately have much effect on them. To hurt them, you must strike at the structures inside the force field.”

“It’ll have to be an underwater approach,” Rob said reluctantly. “Even if a dump-web doesn’t work underwater, there must be some route in. An arch in a reef, an inlet pipe. Something!”

“Oh, this is painful,” the Cat said. She slipped her foot out from behind her head. “I thought you were executive management class, Morty. What happened to that ‘don’t download glitches, upload fixes,’ corporate speak you’re so fond of?”

“Just tell us what your idea is, please,” he said wearily.

“The aliens keep expanding the area they’re developing around the refinery station, right? So what we do is put a nuke outside the existing force field, and inside the border where the new one is going to be. When they switch on the new force field, the nuke is now inside their defenses, and it goes off. Any questions?”

Morton wanted to kick himself it was so obvious. He put the lapse of clear thought down to the shock of losing Parker and the Doc. “Simon, do the aliens turn off the old internal force fields once the new ones are up and running?”

“Yes. They have so far.”

“Oh, gosh, boys, are we really going to use my little old idea?” The Cat batted her eyes.

“Yeah,” Rob said. “I don’t suppose you fancy staying with the nuke and detonating it once we’re sure everything is peachy in there?”

The blast from Parker’s last stand against the flyers made things difficult. There was virtually no cover left on the foothills above and behind the town. That left them with the eastern side, where the low ground had been slightly sheltered from the blast wave. Even there, the trees had been completely flattened and incinerated. Large patches of terrestrial GMgrass had smoldered away before the eternal sleet and drizzle extinguished their paltry flames.

A few large houses had been built there, nestled in their own secluded folds in the land. It was one of the areas where the more wealthy had settled, giving them a splendid view out along the Trine’ba. They’d all suffered from the original attack on the Regents, and the environmental aftermath of the invasion; with smashed lopsided roofs and walls lying askew. Once neat gardens were reduced to muddy swamps where plants had briefly run wild before the climate turned against them.

Morton and the Cat picked their way slowly through one such garden. Its owner had been an avid collector of bamboo varieties. There were clumps of the shoots laid out in long curving patterns; from the air it would have looked like a giant tiger orchid flower. Now the leaves were turning brown and soggy. New shoots were rotting in the mud.

“Another two hundred meters should do it,” Morton said. “That’ll take us to the overlook point.” The garden was a shallow depression, partly natural, that a small army of agribots had then worked to extend into the gentle hillside. They were due to place the tactical nuke right on the edge of the garden, where the bamboo gave way to dunes of roses, putting the device in direct line of sight of the giant refinery station along the shore. With the ever-present cloud blocking the starlight, and the sleet choking the air, it was as dark as interstellar space in the garden. Even on full amplification, his visual spectrum sensors had difficulty producing an image. He was heavily dependent on infrared, which gave the tall dying vegetation an ominous looming appearance.

“Okeydokey,” the Cat said. She was using her slightly contemptuous voice, the one full of false enthusiasm.

Morton didn’t care. He’d paired up with her because he didn’t trust her to undertake Rob’s placement. As backup they’d decided a second nuke should be placed on the lakebed. Their sensor disk and comrelays didn’t function underwater. That meant someone working alone. The Cat was a pain in the ass to have alongside, but he could at least keep an eye on her. He wondered what kind of progress Rob was making. They hadn’t done much underwater training.

The swarm of sneekbots scouting the surrounding area reached the house at the center of the garden. It was a long two-story clapboard affair with a three-door garage and a balcony running the length of the wall that faced the Trine’ba. The two nuclear blast waves had left it severely lopsided, with the splintered boards hanging loose at all angles. Solar roofing panels had half-melted in the heat, running like wax to wilt around the structural beams so that the rainwater was constantly tricking down inside, saturating the interior. All the windows were gone, leaving shards of glass to tear at the curtains as they fluttered about, reducing them to a few sodden tatters flapping indolently in the light sleet.

Sneekbot 411 detected an infrared source inside on the ground floor.

“Well, hello there,” the Cat murmured.

“Another survivor?” Morton speculated. The heat source was about the same strength as a human.

“Could be cattle, or a big sheep.”

“You keep telling yourself that.”

The Cat’s hyper-rifle deployed from her forearm, HVvixen missiles slipped into their launch tubes behind her shoulder blades. Ratmines scuttled down her legs, and darted into the thick cover of the bamboo.

Five sneekbots crept forward toward the house. They picked their way up the ramshackle walls and eased their way in over windowsills. The heat source never moved.

A range of neon-green symbols rose up into Morton’s virtual vision. “Electrical activity.”

“Not much. Looks like a handheld array on sleeper mode.”

A sneekbot hurried across an open doorway, its antenna buds tracking across the living room. An alien was standing in the middle of the big room. It wasn’t wearing an armor suit. Water trickled through cracks on the ceiling to splash on its pale skin. A Commonwealth handheld array was lying on a coffee table beside it. An optical cable was plugged into the little unit, snaking up to a compact electronic device that was fused to the bulbous end of one of the alien’s four upper stalks.

“Shit,” Morton gasped. “Where are the others? They always move in fours.” He ordered the sneekbots surrounding the house to extend their search. “What the hell is it doing?”

“One moment, I’ll switch on my suit’s psychic power booster circuit. Oh, dear, it doesn’t seem to be working. How the fuck do I know what it’s doing, you blockhead?”

“You’re not helping. Again.”

“I’m reviewing the available information. There’s none of the usual signal emission. And it’s not armed. Oh … wait.”

One of the alien’s slender crown stalks bent over to align on the sneekbot as it peered out from behind the door frame. The bud of flesh on the end was wearing a hemisphere of some electronically active plastic material, held in place by a couple of elasticated straps.

“Is that a nightsight goggle?” Cat asked curiously.

Morton never replied. The sneekbot reported it was picking up a transmission based on standard Commonwealth cybersphere protocol. It was a very weak signal; nobody outside the ruined house would be able to detect it. His e-butler printed it across his virtual vision.

I SURRENDER. PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT.

A nasty cold shiver rippled across Morton’s shoulders.

“Oh, my,” the Cat said. “Now what?”

“I have no goddamn idea.” He told his e-butler to use a matching protocol, and used his virtual hand to type out a reply that the sneekbot sent:

WHO ARE YOU?

A FRIEND. AFTER LAST NIGHT, I GUESSED YOU WOULD RETURN. THESE HOUSES OFFER CONSIDERABLE COVER AND ARE CLOSE TO RANDTOWN. IT WAS THE LOGICAL PLACE FOR YOU TO COME. I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU.

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

TO COME WITH YOU.

WHERE DO YOU THINK WE’RE GOING?

BACK TO THE COMMONWEALTH. I HAVE INFORMATION WHICH WILL ASSIST YOUR FIGHT AGAINST MORNINGLIGHTMOUNTAIN.

WHAT IS MORNINGLIGHTMOUNTAIN?

THE PRIME ALIEN.

YOU ARE ONE OF THE ALIENS WE ARE FIGHTING.

I AM NOT. MY MIND IS HUMAN. I AM DUDLEY BOSE.

Cressat was beautiful. Mark had been surprised. He’d been expecting something like Elan, a world where the natural landscape of sparse vegetation was slowly being tamed to the human norm of esthetics and practicality. The grand estates would be oases of lush verdure foliage, surrounded by agriculture and forests that were slowly spreading out across the plains, leaving mountains wild.

Instead, he was living in the most perfect manicured parkland. Nigel Sheldon had chosen Cressat for its botany. Its G-class star and lack of a big Earth-style moon gave the planet a passive meteorological environment. It had the standard climate zones and seasons, but storms were rare, and with such a stable atmospheric milieu evolution had produced some spectacular plants. Every tree grew tall, two or three times the size of Earth’s pines and oaks, sporting huge colorful flowers. In midsummer, the native grasses turned from their usual near-terrestrial green to a shimmering swan-white, vast prairies of milky rippling stalks releasing clouds of honey-scented spores that turned the air silvery over entire continents. Vines and creepers ran riot in the forests, their imposing flower cones swelling out to heavy berry clusters.

Biewn, the hurriedly built dormitory village where they were housed, was forty kilometers away from Illanum, the town where the CST wormhole emerged. Nestling in rolling meadowland, with the western horizon bordered by distant snowcapped mountains that reminded all the Vernons of the Dau’sings, it catered solely to the large influx of technicians and experts working on the project.

The forest that formed one side of the village towered over the clutter of single-story houses like arboreal skyscrapers. Streams wound through the undulating land, bridged in several places as the network of roads was steadily expanded. More houses arrived each day, brought in on the back of wide low-loader trucks. They might have been mobile homes, but Biewn hardly qualified as one of the employment-whore trailer parks that sprang up around the CST stations on all new worlds in their early years. It had its own schools, restaurants, bars, shops, and civic center; the pre-equipped unit blocks of the new hospital were locking into place like a wall of massive bricks. Everything was being done to give Biewn the same amenities that Illanum enjoyed.

It was spoiled only by the factories. Long rows of the simple, massive cube structures had been built on the opposite side of Biewn to the forest, their dull brown weather-resistant walls eating into the virgin countryside like an unstoppable mechanical cancer. Still more were being built, their assembly going on around the clock. The cybernetics that filled them were arriving at an equally impressive rate.

As soon as their bus drove around the edge of the forest and started down the last kilometer of the new highway to the village, Mark knew he was going to fit in. It was as if the second chance he’d been given financially had magically been extended to his lifestyle. He imagined Biewn being the kind of place that Randtown would ultimately have evolved into, wealthy and purposeful. It had industry instead of agriculture. And instead of the Trine’ba they had the forest, which the inhabitants were already calling Rainbow Wood after its astonishing flowers. But it retained that small-town community cohesion. Less than an hour after they moved into a house as big as the one in the Ulon Valley, three neighbors had dropped by to introduce themselves and ask if they needed help. Sandy and Barry rushed off with a bunch of other kids to explore.

His one regret was that he hadn’t seen any of the legendary fabulous mansions that the Sheldon Dynasty members had built for themselves. None of their country-sized estates were anywhere near Illanum.

That just left his job. He worked in factory 8. At his orientation class he learned it contained three assembly bays. He considered that ordinary enough. Then they told him their size: cylindrical chambers twenty-five meters in diameter and thirty-five high. They were lined by a hundred plyplastic tool arms, and twenty heavy lift manipulators; up to a hundred and fifty engineeringbots could be deployed inside at any one time. The construction operation was supervised by an array loaded with RI-level software.

“You’re building starships,” Liz told him when he got back home after his first exhausting twelve-hour shift. “Everyone in town says it.”

“Yeah, but they’re not for the navy. The assembly bays are putting together complete compartments; that’s why they’re so large and complex. These are like spheres that have six airlocks. All you have to do is stack them together on top of a hyperdrive section, and you can have any size ship you want. It’s the ultimate in modular design concept.”

“What’s in the compartments?”

“Factory eight is doing suspension tanks,” he said.

“Damnit. I bet they’re evacuation ships. I had the placement office call me today and ask if I’d like to work in a team designing state-of-the-art genetic agronomy laboratories. You know what that means?”

“Modifying terrestrial crops to grow in alien soil.”

Liz sucked on her lower lip. “Sheldon’s going to leave if we lose the war,” she said with grim admiration. “He’ll probably take most of his Dynasty with him. How many suspension tanks are in the compartments?”

“A hundred each. We’re receiving all the major subcomponents already integrated; with the exception of the hull and the life-support systems, most of it is standard commercially available hardware. The assembly bays just plug all the pieces together. There’s a lot of development gone into this. It would have taken a long time, even with advanced design software. I think he’s been planning this since before the invasion.”

“A hundred per compartment?” she mused. “That’s a big ship.”

“Very. Factory eight is churning out six completed compartments a week. Some of the other factories are just packaging industrial cybernetics for long-term storage. You’ve seen how many trucks are using the highway; they’re shipping all the completed compartments out somewhere.”

“Six a week, in one factory? That’s …” She half closed her eyes as she did some multiplication. “Jesus damn! How big are these ships? He must be planning on taking a whole planet with him.”

“If you’re intending to establish a high-technology civilization from scratch, you need a lot of equipment, and a decent population base.”

She put her arms around him. “Do we get to go, too?”

“I don’t know.”

“We need to find out, baby. We really do.”

“Hey, come on; this is just a rich man’s paranoia. The Commonwealth’s a long way from falling to the Primes.” Mark stroked her back, moving gently down her spine the way she liked.

“Then we should get paranoid, too. If we do lose, what would happen to Sandy and Barry? We’ve seen the Primes firsthand, Mark. They don’t give a fuck for humans; we’re lower than pond scum to them.”

“All right, I’ll ask around. Someone at the factory should know. Hey, did I tell you, old Burcombe is one of the managers. He’ll probably tell me.”

“Thanks, baby, I know I’m a pain to live with sometimes.”

“Never.” He held her closer. “I don’t know where they’re putting these ships together. It has to be in orbit, but I’ve not seen anything here. Not that I’ve really looked, but anything that large would show up like a small moon.”

“It could be anywhere within a hundred light-years. Hell, that asteroid of Ozzie’s was a perfect place to use as a shipyard, ultra top secret and habitable. You could house a cityful of people in there and barely notice them.”

The cloud had thickened up in the Regents, bringing with it a cloying sleet riddled with slender hailstones. Morton could hear them striking his armor suit, a constant tattoo of crackling to complement his feet as they squelched through tacky slush.

It was slow going back up the mountain to the saddle. The human survivors from Randtown were all riding in the bubbles, which could tackle the terrain easily, while the remaining members of Cat’s Claws simply walked up in their armor. That left the alien who claimed to be Dudley Bose. It didn’t have any kind of clothing to protect its pale skin. Bose said its body would work in the cold, but with difficulty. So they had to drape it in blankets and scraps of cloth, then hang sheets of plastic on top to protect it from the worst of the weather. Even so, the creature couldn’t move fast up the muddy slope.

It took most of the night just to reach the cloud level, and that was taking a direct route up from the cave. After that they had to follow the contour line along to the saddle where their equipment was stored.

They detected flyers patrolling the lake below, but none ventured close to the mountains and their treacherous downdrafts and microswirls.

When they finally reached the saddle, they took refuge in one of the deep crevices.

Rob opened some of the packs Parker and the Doc had brought with them. “Try these on,” he told the three standing refugees, handing around clothes. “A lot of it is semiorganic, it’ll shape itself to you.”

“Thank you,” Simon said gravely. “I am sorry we never got to know your friends.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Rob turned away and knelt down beside David Dunbavand. The man had improved considerably during the bubble ride: some color had returned to his skin, and his feverish sweating had subsided. “How’re you doing?”

“Okay. The drive up was kind of interesting, the bits I remember, anyway. Those biovirals: it’s like drinking a gallon of champagne cocktails.”

“Your leg’s stabilizing,” Rob said as he ran the diagnostic array up and down the man. “Looking good.”

“Thanks.”

“How about you?” Morton asked the Bose motile.

“This body is sluggish but functional. Prime motiles suffer some degradation in the cold, but they are more resistant than humans.” The polythene and blanket swaddling was covered in a thin layer of muddy slush. It was unwinding them one at a time, dropping them on the rocky floor. The array it was using to speak through was held in the pincers of one arm. “May I eat, please?”

“Sure.” All three of Cat’s Claws had carried plastic pouches full of lake water up the mountain. Bose said it was thick with base cells, the main food of the aliens. There were also containers full of cakelike vegetation, resembling shredded seaweed. It had built up quite a little stash in the ruined house in anticipation of repatriation.

They had all listened to Bose’s story on the climb. How he and Verbeke had been captured in the Watchtower; their imprisonment and death, the download of his personal store into an immotile unit. He provided a fascinating insight into the nature of the threat the Commonwealth was facing—one that Morton and the others found uniquely disturbing. They were being invaded purely with genocide in mind. That MorningLightMountain was psychologically unable to grasp the concept of compromise, let alone sharing a universe with any other life-form. Maybe Doc Roberts and Parker had the right of it, Morton thought. This is a fight to the death.

“Shouldn’t be long till we get you back to a hospital now,” Rob told David.

“The navy will be opening a wormhole right away when they find out we’ve got Bose with us.”

Morton faced them all. “I’m not sure we should tell the navy,” he said.

The Cat laughed with delight.

“You’re kidding, right?” Rob said.

“No.”

“Okay, so you want to tell us why not?”

“Mellanie said the navy can’t be trusted. Apparently there’s some big political struggle going on in the Senate with the Dynasties and Grand Families.”

“What total bullshit,” Rob said.

“Are you talking about Mellanie Rescorai?” Simon asked. “The reporter?”

Mandy let out a snort of disbelief. “Her!”

“Yes,” Morton said.

“How is not telling the navy going to help the Commonwealth?” Simon asked.

“I’m not saying we don’t ever tell them,” Morton said. “I just want to know what the implications are before we do.”

“How do you propose finding out, exactly?” Rob asked. There was a dangerous edge to his voice.

“Mellanie arranged for encoded messages to be included in the recordings I send to the Michelangelo show. She’ll be able to tell us if it’s safe.”

“Safe!” Rob grunted. “Man, you are paranoid!”

“Look, one day isn’t going to make any difference,” Morton said reasonably. “We’re perfectly safe here. We have to wait until the Randtown force field is expanded anyway. So just humor me.”

“Shit!” Rob gave the Cat an angry stare. “What do you say?”

“Me? I think it’s hilarious, darling. Do it, Morty, screw the navy over. Gets my vote.”

“For what it’s worth,” Simon said, “I trust Mellanie.”

“How can you?”” Mandy demanded. “The little bitch was wrecking our town and everything we stood for, your ideals. The whole Commonwealth hated us because of her.”

“She saved us, though, didn’t she?” Simon said gently. “Surely that is penance enough?”

“Something happened here,” the Bose motile said. Everybody turned to look at it. “This is where MorningLightMountain came up against the SI, the only time they clashed during the whole invasion. That is why I chose Randtown as my return point to the Commonwealth; the SI has some kind of presence here.”

“Had,” Morton said. “It had a presence here. Mellanie works for the SI.”

“Ah,” Simon said. For the first time in weeks, he actually smiled. “I always wondered how she achieved all she did.”

“Your girlfriend is some kind of agent for the SI?” an incredulous Rob asked. “That … that … bimbo?”

“Hey,” Morton growled.

The Cat was laughing again. “Oh, this is fabulous. Thank you so much, Morty.”

Morton gave Rob a level gaze. “So do I tell the navy or not?”

Rob glanced around at everyone, then gave the stationary motile a long stare. “What the fuck. Do what you like for now, Morton. But after we set off the nuke your girl had better provide one hell of a reason not to tell the navy what we’ve got. That’s how long she’s got.”

Mark and Liz spent the evening in their living room, sharing a bottle of wine and accessing the final moments of Randtown. It was Ulon Valley wine. His e-butler’s search program had found a supplier on Lyonna who had a few bottles left; it was an extortionate price, and then there was the premium same-day shipping charge to MoZ Express couriers on top of that. But what else could you drink while you watched a nuclear explosion obliterate your old hometown?

Mellanie had joined Michelangelo in his studio for the report. She marked the sobriety of the occasion by wearing a long black dress with a panel skirt that fell open to show off her beautiful legs. Her hair had been pulled back from her forehead into a thick, wavy tail. Michelangelo sat behind his desk like a minor Greek god in a sharp blue suit. The sexual tension between them was so strong that anyone using full-band TSI to access the show could almost smell the pheromones they were both pumping out into the studio air.

It certainly gave Mark some uncomfortable reminders of that day he’d encountered her up at the blockade in the Dau’sing Mountains.

“You were there during the evacuation,” Michelangelo was saying.

“What’s your response to this?”

“It was inevitable. I really enjoyed my time in Randtown. The people were a bit quirky, we all know that, but seeing the images of what the Primes had done to the town and the Trine’ba was just devastating to me. They got what they deserved. I only hope the other navy squads are equally effective.”

“You say effective, but they lost two of their members on their first deployment. This remarkable recording, exclusive to our show, reveals the desperate odds our navy troops on the ground are facing.”

The picture changed from the studio to a grainy image of a mountainside in the middle of the night, a composite of various sensor feeds, producing a monochrome image. It was centered on Randtown, with the force field shining like a phosphorescent pearl above the familiar shoreline. The tactical nuclear bomb went off, flooding the interior with light. For a brief second the force field held, containing the explosion. Then it failed, and the mushroom cloud climbed up out of a seething pool of darkness.

“There really is no going back now,” Mark said solemnly.

Liz raised her glass. “To not looking back.”

“Amen.”

They stayed accessed for a while longer, while Mellanie eulogized about the squads that the navy had sent out. There were other recordings that Morton had made. Reconnoiter of Randtown and the aliens. The heroic last stand Doc Roberts and Parker made against the flyers. Simon Rand and the other refugees. She and Michelangelo discussed the navy strategy.

Mark’s e-butler told him someone was approaching the front door.

“At this hour?” Liz asked.

The house array showed them an image of Giselle Swinsol standing outside.

“Oh, Jesus,” Mark complained. “Now what?” He kept having guilty thoughts about all those insistent questions he’d been asking at work.

Giselle came straight into the living room, and refused the offer of a drink. She didn’t sit, either. “You’ve been asking a lot of questions, Mark,” she said. It was an accusation.

Mark was determined not to be intimidated by her tough-bitch personality. “I’m working on a fascinating project; obviously I’m curious. But I can appreciate that Nigel Sheldon doesn’t want the Commonwealth to know about it. You can rely on me.”

“Very good, Mark. The answer to your dreadfully unsubtle question is: yes, you and your family are entitled to a berth on the lifeboats should we face annihilation here.”

“Thank you.” It came out with such a heartfelt sigh he immediately felt ashamed. Once again she’d proved the strongest.

Her glossed lips curved up slightly, acknowledging her position. “So, you now advance to level two.”

“What does that mean?” Liz asked suspiciously.

“It means that Mark has done such a good job here that we feel his kind of expertise is better suited to other, more critical sections of the project.”

“What sections?” he blurted.

“Starship assembly. Pack your bags. The bus will pick you up tomorrow at eight o’clock.”

“We’re moving?” Liz said in alarm. “But the children have only just settled in school.”

“Their next school is just as good.”

“Where is it?” Mark asked. “Where are the evacuation starships being built?”

“Classified.” Giselle gave Liz a small smirk. “You’ll enjoy this next part. It’s right up your street.”

“Cow,” Liz hissed when she’d left.

Mark looked around the living room, the nearly empty bottle, the one big indentation on the couch where they’d snuggled up together. He had felt really comfortable in this house. “I don’t suppose they’ll move us again after this.”

“Only to the other side of the galaxy, baby.”

MORTY, DO NOT INFORM THE NAVY YOU HAVE THE MOTILE CONTAINING BOSE’S MEMORIES. ANY INFORMATION ON MORNINGLIGHTMOUNTAIN IS TOO IMPORTANT TO RISK TO POSSIBLE CORRUPTION.

I HAVE THE RE-LIFED BOSE WITH ME. HE SHOULD RECEIVE THE MEMORIES. THAT WAY HE WILL BE ABLE TO INTERPRET THEM IN THEIR CORRECT SEQUENCE. AFTER THAT WE CAN DECIDE HOW TO PROCEED.

I WILL MAKE ARRANGEMENTS TO EXTRACT YOU FROM ELAN. UNTIL THEN, KEEP THE BOSE MOTILE AND THE REFUGEES SAFE.

MELLANIE.

“I have been re-lifed?” the Bose motile asked.

“She will make arrangements to extract us?” Rob said disbelievingly.

“Mellanie had a wormhole opened to us once before,” Simon said. “She can probably do it again.”

“Probably ain’t good enough, friend.” Rob pointed at the Bose motile.

“This is our ticket out of here.”

“To what?” Morton asked. “If she’s right about the navy, we’re not going to help the Commonwealth by giving them this information.”

“Oh, listen to yourself. The Commonwealth navy is the Bad Guy? Get real. They’re the only hope we’ve got. Your girl is trying to build her career by chasing phantoms. She’s a goddamn reporter, one of the biggest turds in the galaxy. Tell the navy we’ve got Bose at the next wormhole opening. Get us out of here.”

“She works for the SI. She can do this. Trust her.”

“Bullshit.”

“Question,” the Cat said. She was sitting in Full Diamond position on the floor of the fissure, clad in a simple leotard, seemingly immune to the cold.

“Morton, when you sent your encrypted message, did you mention Morning-LightMountain by name?”

“No.”

The Cat changed to King Cobra position with simple lithe movements. As she did she gave Rob a sly smile. “How did a conspiracy theorist nut find out its name all by herself?”

Rob’s defiant expression crumpled. “Oh, Jesus H. Christ; fuck-it-up Rob strikes again. I always get the shit assignments. Always. We’re really going to do this, aren’t we?”

“Yep.”

“I have been re-lifed?” the Bose motile repeated.

“Yes,” Morton said.

“And I am dating a beautiful young media reporter?”

“Apparently so, yes.”

“Tell him the rest of it, Morty, my dear,” the Cat said with a smirk. “Mellanie is a complete sex maniac.”

“I would very much like to meet me.”

The star system was on the border between phase one and two space, eight light-years from the Big15 world of Granada. CST had examined it once, and immediately moved on. The M-class star presided over a meager realm of two planets: one small solid world no larger than Earth’s moon, and a Saturn-size gas giant orbited by a dozen moons. As far as habitability was concerned it rated an easy zero. Nobody had ever returned.

The starship Moscow slipped out of hyperspace four hundred thousand kilometers above the gas giant. Its wormhole closed behind it with a short-lived glow of indigo radiance.

Strapped into his couch in the cabin’s cramped operations segment, Captain McClain Gilbert reviewed the data that the starship’s sensors were picking up. The gas giant’s third moon was twenty thousand kilometers away, a heavily cratered ball of rock, three thousand kilometers in diameter. There was no atmosphere. As the visual sensors scanned it, a profile of its surface built up. A recognizable topography of mare plains and hills was revealed, dating back to the moon’s origin. Lusterless peat-brown regolith was scattered thinly over rock strata of dark gray and black. Thousands of craters had mangled the smooth hills, ripping out vast slabs of jagged rock to form vertical cliff ramparts.

There had been no change in the two hundred years since CST’s exploratory division had performed its quick scan.

“Our survey records check out, such as they are,” Mac said; he turned to look at Natasha Kersley in the couch next to him. “There’s nothing alive around here. Is that what you wanted, Doc?”

“Looks good,” she said.

“Can I begin the satellite launch?”

“Yes, please.”

Mac sent a flurry of commands into the ship’s RI. Modified missile launch tubes in the Moscow’s forward section opened and spat out eighteen sensor satellites. Their ion rockets pushed them into a bracelet formation orbiting the nameless moon, allowing them to cover the entire surface simultaneously. Once their coverage was established they’d be able to determine the exact power of the quantumbuster they were here to test.

“So far so good,” he muttered.

“Absolutely. Here’s hoping we don’t have a Fermi moment.”

“A what?” Mac really didn’t like the uncertainty in her voice.

“During the Trinity test of the very first atom bomb, Fermi wondered if the detonation would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. They just didn’t know, you see. We think the quantum disruption won’t propagate. If it does, then the whole universe gets converted into energy.”

“Oh, great, thanks for sharing.” He gave the doomed moon a deeply troubled glance.

“It’s really not very likely,” Natasha said.

It took two hours until Mac was satisfied the satellites were correctly placed, and their communications relay systems were locked together. “Okay, Doc, you’re on.”

Natasha drew a quick breath, and fed her launch code into the prototype quantumbuster warhead. The missile was hurled out of its launch tube by a powerful magnetic pulse. When it was ten kilometers from the starship, its fusion drive ignited, accelerating it hard toward the moon.

“All systems functional,” Natasha reported. “Target acquired. I’m authorizing activation.” She sent another code to the weapon, and received confirmation. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Amen to that,” Mac muttered.

The Moscow opened a wormhole and quickly slipped inside. Five seconds later, and two million kilometers out from the moon, the starship slid back out into real space.

“Receiving satellite data,” Mac said as the communications dish picked up the signal. “Switching to high capacity recording.”

“Two minutes to impact,” Natasha said. “All systems operational.”

“We’re going to see it from here, right?” He was aligning the starship’s sensors back on the moon.

“Oh, heavens, yes. The quantumbuster field will initialize just before the missile hits the surface. That should give us an intersection over several hundred meters of the moon’s mass. It works out to quite a substantial volume.”

“And the whole thing just turns to energy?”

“Any piece of matter inside the field, yes. That’s the theory: the effect completely breaks down quantum-level cohesion. The discharge radiance will be on a scale we’ve never seen before.”

“Discharge radiance,” Mac said with a smile. “You mean explosion.”

She gave him a nervous grin. “Yeah.”

Mac turned his whole attention to the visual spectrum image that was being projected in front of his face. The moon was a simple dark circle framed by stars. All the sensor satellites were watching eagerly. They showed a tiny purple-white spark sinking toward the surface.

Mac had brought the Moscow out of hyperspace on the other side of the moon from the target zone. If the Seattle Project weapon worked as advertised, the radiation blast would be lethal even at two million kilometers. The Commonwealth would have a decisive weapon to use against the Primes.

“Do you think they’ll negotiate?” he asked.

“If they see this in action, they’d be truly crazy not to,” Natasha said. “I don’t care how bizarre their motives are, they face extinction if we use this against them. They’ll talk.”

Mac desperately wanted her to be right. The way he’d worked his way to the navy’s vanguard, he was pretty sure he’d wind up with the mission to take a quantumbuster to Dyson Alpha.

He checked the moon again, worrying about the whole Fermi moment idea. The missile was seconds away from its brown and black mottled surface. I should have positioned the Moscow on the other side of the gas giant.

The quantumbuster activated its effect field. Light flared around the moon, creating a perfect white halo. It was as if the ancient sphere of rock was eclipsing a white dwarf star. The edges began to dissolve as the glare poured across the cratered surface like an advancing tsunami. Dazzling cracks appeared, opening deep into the moon’s interior. Low rolling hills heaved, transforming into volcanoes that jetted debris hundreds of kilometers out into space. Dusty plains crumbled as they separated ponderously from the highlands surrounding them.

Slowly and inexorably, the moon disintegrated inside its cocoon of lurid stellar light.

“Jesus, Doc,” Mac barked. “You were just supposed to blow the bloody thing out of orbit.”

Giselle Swinsol herself was sitting at the front of the bus when it arrived to collect them. It was a fifty-seater Ford Landhound, with luxury seats and a small canteen in front of the washroom cubicles. Two other families were sitting in it, looking lost and vaguely apprehensive. Mark recognized the expression. He’d seen it in the bathroom mirror that morning.

Giselle waited until the porterbots had loaded all the Vernons’ bags and boxes into the luggage compartment at the back. “Don’t look so worried; this isn’t a long trip.”

Mark and Liz swapped a glance, then tried to settle the excited kids.

The bus drove back down the highway toward Illanum. It joined a convoy of vehicles, slotting in behind a forty-wheel transporter carrying one of the completed starship compartments, and in front of three standard container trucks, empty after dropping their loads at a factory. Once they had passed the back of Rainbow Wood the compartment transporter turned off along a long curving slip road; the bus followed it. The slip road fed onto another three-lane highway wide enough to handle the transporters. After another eight kilometers, another slip road joined it, bringing more of the giant transporters.

“I didn’t know there were any other towns on Cressat,” Mark said.

“There are five assembly centers here,” Giselle said. “Biewn and two others are responsible for life support and cargo; one is fabricating the hyperdrives; and the last provides general systems, the starship’s spine if you like.”

Mark began to reevaluate the project yet again. The scale was larger than he’d imagined. So was the timescale; this had to have been going on for a long time prior to the Prime invasion. As for the cost …

The highway was heading directly for the base of a low hill where a circle of warm pink light was shining at them. Mark felt the slight tingle of a pressure membrane as the bus passed through. Then he, Liz, and the kids were pressed against the window, anxious to see the new world.

They’d emerged high up in some mountains, giving them a view out over a flat plain that must have been hundreds of kilometers wide. It had strange yellow rock outcrops, and a jagged volcanic canyon running away diagonally from the mountains. The ground was completely bare, with a thin covering of gray-brown sand scattered over dark rock. Right away on the far horizon were some rumpled dark specks that might have been more mountains; the planet’s lavender-shaded sky made it difficult to tell.

They were on a broad ring road that curved around the human settlement, whose clean new buildings stood out against the mottled brown landscape like silver warts. The town had an outer band of factories, similar to those that Mark had worked in back in Biewn, several condo-style accommodation blocks, and five sprawling housing estates. Construction sites made up a good third of the area, swarming with bots. A wormhole generator and four modern fusion stations dominated the skyline opposite the gateway back to Cressat.

Mark couldn’t see any vegetation at all on the ground alongside the ring road; the land was a desert. Then he looked again at the topaz patches daubed on the plain below. At first he’d assumed they were unusual rock formations. Each one was circular—perfectly circular, now that he was paying attention. They had steep radial undulations, like the folds in an origami flower. His retinal inserts zoomed in, allowing his e-butler to do some calculations. They measured over twenty-four kilometers wide. A triple spike rose out of the center of each one, reaching a kilometer into the air.

“What the hell are those?” he asked.

“We call them the gigalife,” Giselle said. “This planet is covered in the groundplants. They come in many colors, but they all grow to about this size. I’ve seen bigger ones in the tropical zones. And there’s a waterplant variety which floats on the sea, though they are made up from a mesh of tendrils rather than the single sheets you can see here. There’s nothing else alive on this world.”

“Nothing?” Liz queried. “That’s an unusual evolutionary route.”

“Told you this would be right up your street,” Giselle said with gratification. “The gigalife has nothing to do with evolution. I wasn’t joking when I said there was nothing else here. We haven’t found any bacteriological or microbial traces other than the ones we brought with us. This planet was technoformed with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and freshwater oceans specifically to provide a place for them to grow. Up until about twenty thousand years ago it was just a lump of inert rock naked to space. Someone dumped the atmosphere and oceanic water here, presumably through gigantic wormholes; we found evidence of a local gas giant’s moons being strata mined for its crustal ice.”

“Do you know who did it?”

“No. We named them the Planters, because the only thing they left behind was the gigalife. Presumably they are some kind of artwork, though we can’t be sure of that, either. It’s the lead theory because we haven’t found a practical application for them, and the Dynasty has been researching them for over a century now.”

“Why?” Liz asked. “This is a fabulous discovery. They are the most extraordinary organisms I’ve ever seen. Why not share it with the Commonwealth?”

“Commercial application. Gigalife isn’t quite genuine biological life. Whoever produced them has overcome Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle; there is some kind of nanonic fabrication system operating inside the cells. Look at those central spires. They’re made up from a conical mast of super-strength carbon strands which the cells extrude. The leaf-sheet is simply draped over it. Gigalife is a fusion of ordinary biological processes and molecular mechanics, which we’ve so far been completely unable to duplicate. The implication if we can crack the nanonic properties is incalculable. We’d get everything from true Von Neumannism to bodies which can self-repair. Human immortality would become integral rather than dependent on the crudity of today’s rejuvenation techniques.”

Liz wrinkled her nose in disapproval. “How long do the groundplants take to grow?”

“We’re not sure. The current structures are about five thousand years old, and just maintain themselves. We’ve never seen one in its growth stage. Several are decaying faster than their regeneration process can cope with. Again, we don’t know if they’re actually dying, or if they’re in a cycle. They could be like terrestrial bulbs and simply recharge their kernels for the next time around.”

“You mean they don’t produce seeds?”

“Who knows? They have a kernel which is the size of a twenty-story skyscraper. Best guess is that they were manufactured and placed in position by the Planters. If they were produced as seeds, how would they ever spread? They’d either need wheels or rockets.”

“Good point,” Liz admitted.

“Can you eat them?” Barry piped up.

“No. We haven’t found one with proteins that a human can consume. Of course, we haven’t sampled more than a tiny percentage so far. We use noninvasive investigatory techniques, which is why our progress is slower than some in the Dynasty would like. But Nigel and Ozzie both agreed we didn’t want the Planters to return and find we’d damaged anything. Any species possessing this kind of knowledge base is best left unannoyed.”

“You’re very knowledgeable about this,” Liz said.

“I used to be director of the gigalife research office.”

“Ah.”

Giselle gave Mark a taunting smile. “Here comes the good bit. Look out over there. Up in the sky. The first one will be rising into view any moment now.” She pointed over the plain to the west.

Mark didn’t like the tone—it was too smug—but he looked anyway. He thought he would be seeing a starship assembly platform, which he was actually looking forward to. The prospect of working in orbit was one that fired him.

It wasn’t an assembly platform. Mark watched in utter disbelief as a moon slid up over the horizon. It moved fast, and it was huge. “That’s not possible,” he whispered. All the kids in the bus were shrieking and pointing with excitement.

The moon was a stippled magenta globe, with a profusion of slender jet-black creases snaking across its surface. It was several times the size of Earth’s moon. Too big, Mark knew instinctively: anything that big that close would produce tidal forces that would rip continents apart and haul a permanent tsunami around the globe in its wake. This wasn’t even disturbing the few wispy high-altitude clouds. Then he began to understand its texture. The multitude of black creases were actually fissures, walled by the same magenta material that colored the surface. It was only in the deeps where the sunlight couldn’t reach that they actually turned black. The moon wasn’t big, just in a low orbit, neither was it solid; it was a gigantic spherical ruff, sheets of thin purple fabric crumpled up against each other.

“Oh, no,” Mark said. He looked from the purple moon down to the topaz groundplant gigalife, then back again. “No way.”

“Yes,” Giselle said. “The third variety of gigalife, the spaceflower. The Planters put fifteen asteroids into a two-thousand-kilometer orbit, and dropped a kernel on each one. They don’t mass more than about a hundred million tons each. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the kernel runs out of raw material to convert. Some of us think that will be when the Planters come back.”

“They sculpted moons,” Mark said in astonishment.

“Grew them,” Giselle corrected. “Essentially we have a planet which has giant cabbages for moons. Who said aliens don’t have a sense of humor?”

As soon as the committee room doors opened, Justine rushed out. Surprised expressions followed her. It wasn’t quite seemly for a senator to run.

She just made it to the lady’s washroom, and threw up into the porcelain bowl. There was a discreet cough outside the cubical. “Are you all right, ma’am?” the attendant asked.

“Fine, thank you. Bad food this morning.” She heaved again. Her forehead was damp with sweat, and she felt inordinately hot. The tension that had racked up during the committee meeting hadn’t helped her delicate stomach.

Ramon was waiting for her outside when she finally emerged. “Something we said?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Something I ate,” she told him around yet another antacid tablet.

“I hope not. With all the paranoia around here, people will think assassins are trying to poison you.”

“Not a bad thing. It would get our fellow senators to cut down on the dining-room food.”

“Now that is pure wishful thinking.”

She glanced down at his chest. Ramon was wearing a very modern business suit, tailored to deemphasize his stomach. Normally when he was in the Senate Hall he was careful to wear tribal robes. But then the Security Oversight Committee was not one that permitted any media coverage. “I see you’re really sticking to your diet.”

Ramon let out a sigh. “Don’t start.”

“I’m sorry,” she said contritely.

“Now I know something’s wrong.”

“No there isn’t. I’ll survive. And thanks for supporting me in there this morning.”

“The African caucus does not automatically do as the Halgarths wish, nor any other Dynasty for that matter.”

“What about Grand Families?”

He smiled broadly. “It depends on the deal which is offered.”

“Rammy, I need to ask you something.”

“Personal or business?”

“Business,” she said with a sigh. “Always business these days.”

He reached out and gave her cheek an affectionate stroke. “Thompson will be back soon.”

“Not soon enough.” She finished the antacid tablet, and they walked down the broad deserted corridor toward the Senate Hall’s main lobby. “That weekend at Sorbonne Wood, who exactly came up with the idea for parallel development shared between Anshun and High Angel?”

Ramon stopped to stare at her. “Why do you need to know?”

“There are certain aspects about the navy formation that we have to clarify.”

“What aspects?”

“The groupings, Rammy, come on. You have to admit, for a venture that size it all came together remarkably smoothly.”

“Thanks to you. It was a Burnelli weekend if I remember rightly.”

“We’re worried we might have been outmaneuvered.”

“Ha! That would be a first. I know how Gore operates. Nothing is left to chance.”

“Someone else was manipulating that weekend. We’re sure of it.”

“What’s happened? Have you missed out on a big contract?”

“No. But High Angel was a massive beneficiary, and through that the African Caucus. You owe us for that.”

“I suppose I might. I believe the idea came from Kantil. She was very eager to gain support for Doi at the time.”

“Did Patricia tell you herself, or was it Isabella?”

“Justine”—he grinned down at her—“are you jealous?”

“Please! This is important. Did Isabella tell you it came direct from Kantil, that Doi would sanction the spending?”

“I honestly don’t recall exactly. Isabella made the suggestion, so naturally I assumed it came from Kantil. Lovely though Isabella is, she’s only a first-life girl. Why, who else do you think would make it?”

“Isabella’s a Halgarth,” Justine said.

“Oh, no.” He threw his hands into the air with exasperation. “We’re back to the motion for a vote on Myo again.”

“It’s not the vote.”

“It’s looking that way to me. You took it personally. Admit it.”

“I know Valetta caught me off guard in there; Thompson would never have let that sneak up on him. It’s beginning to look as though I just don’t have his aptitude for this job.”

“Nonsense. You’re more than capable. You outmaneuvered Valetta beautifully, and gave yourself time to build support for the vote. You’re a natural.”

“It doesn’t seem that way. Damn that Columbia for forcing my hand like this. It’ll be a real show of strength in the next committee. I’m not even sure I can win.”

“You have my vote.”

“Yeah, right, thanks.”

“This really bugs you; and it’s not the first time you’ve clashed with the Halgarths and their allies. Why don’t you just declare open warfare, and have the fleet attack Solidade.”

“Because it’s their fleet, Rammy.”

“So that’s it! Gore’s pissed that they hijacked his pet project.”

“The navy isn’t a project, it’s essential to our survival. We’re at war, fighting for our very existence as a species, and the Halgarths are taking over the Commonwealth’s entire defense policy. That’s not healthy.”

“Don’t let this Senate spat blind you. Sheldon remains in ultimate command. Thanks to CST his Dynasty will always have the final say. And Kime is still Admiral; he’s Sheldon’s man, in alliance with Los Vada. With Columbia, the Halgarths only have control of planetary defense. It’s a classic Dynasty carve-up. The power structures balance out.”

“All right.” She tried to put on a convinced expression for his benefit.

“That’s better. So how about lunch? Just you and me, and no business.”

“Old times,” she said mournfully. “Sorry, Rammy, I’ve got to get back to the office. I need to start making calls.”

His hopeful expression gave way to something more melancholic. “I understand. My advice: call Crispin. He was never a Halgarth man.”

She gave him a quick kiss on the lips. “Thanks. See you soon.”

It was Thompson’s office. The taste was his, all lush reds and gold-brown wood furniture. She hadn’t made a single change, she didn’t have the right. When he came back, he could sit down behind his vast desk and carry on as if nothing had happened.

If the world still exists then.

Justine dismissed her aides, and ignored the urgent briefing files as she settled into her brother’s chair.

So Isabella hadn’t specifically said it was Patricia’s suggestion. That wasn’t a lot to go on, although it deepened her own suspicions that Patricia was being played like the rest of them.

“Could really do with your advice, Tommy,” she told the room. The rejuvenation clinic their family owned and used was just on the outskirts of Washington, not quite twenty-five kilometers from Senate Hall as the crow flies. Right now his clone fetus was there, about ten centimeters long, growing inside a womb tank.

She looked down at her own abdomen, resting her hand lightly against it. Her stomach was still perfectly flat, not that she’d been to the gym for weeks now. “You’re going to be born before your uncle,” she said softly. “He’s going to be surprised about that.” Along with an awful lot of other people.

With her real hand resting contentedly above the baby, her virtual hand touched Paula Myo’s icon.

“Yes, Senator?”

Does she ever sleep? “I have some unpleasant news you should be aware of. I was just ambushed in the Security Oversight Committee. Senator Valetta Halgarth asked for your immediate withdrawal from Senate Security.”

“On what grounds?”

“Very shaky ones. Fortunately. She cited interference in navy intelligence operations, claimed you were misusing government resource to pursue personal goals.”

“The observation on Alessandra Baron.”

“Precisely. I managed to delay the vote on a procedural point about the agenda. But it is only a delay. It looks like Columbia really has got it in for you.”

“I know that. Thank you for covering for me.”

“I’ll talk to the other senators, rebuild my strategic support in that committee. I should be able to pull a majority onto my side. Right now there are several people who are unhappy with the Halgarths. They’re not my family’s natural allies, but I should be able to swing them around.”

“I understand. This could be very revealing.”

“How so?”

“Do you have any indication which way the Sheldons intend to vote? It goes against the Starflyer’s interests to have me remain in Senate Security.”

“Good point. I’ll try and find out.”

MorningLightMountain was annoyed with humans. It had known they would strike back after its preliminary incursion into the Commonwealth; such a move was inevitable. What was less welcome was the manner of the response. It had been expecting wormholes to open above the captured planets, disgorging quantities of ships and missiles to assault its new installations. So it had dutifully prepared for that scenario, building the strongest force field generators it had over the factories and refineries it was constructing on the new worlds, placing thousands of ships in orbit armed with powerful weaponry.

With all the knowledge it had gathered about the Commonwealth and its abilities, MorningLightMountain was certain this would be enough to ward off the human attack. There was an astonishing amount of information left behind amid the wreckage of the abandoned human cities; storage crystals that contained entire encyclopedias, scientific theories and research, engineering designs, economic and industrial statistics on each of the Commonwealth worlds, and a truly endless supply of “entertainment.” For the first time MorningLightMountain was grateful it had animated the Bose memories; without that small insight into human thinking it would have been extremely difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction. And humans produced an astonishing amount of fiction to amuse themselves.

To its disappointment, there was little information available on the SI. There was no verifiable record on any of its new twenty-three worlds as to the exact location of Vinmar. Once the Commonwealth worlds were converted to Prime life, it would have to search all the star systems within two hundred light-years of Earth. Some files speculated that the SI was no longer physically based, but had transformed itself to an energy-based entity. MorningLightMountain could not decide if these, too, were works of fiction.

It also had humans to extract information from. There were tens of thousands of discarded bodies lying buried in the rubble or trapped in smashed vehicles. Removing their memorycells was an easy operation. Living humans presented more trouble; they struggled and fought the soldier motiles. In the end MorningLightMountain simply shot them all, and recovered their memorycells that way. It learned that there was very little useful information recorded in these personal units; they only ever held memories, and human minds were not reliable. After animating a few inside isolated immotiles, it found that most were even more unstable than Bose. Even more surprising, few were as knowledgeable. MorningLightMountain had always assumed Bose was an inferior human specimen.

As it tapped into more and more databases, so its picture of the Commonwealth strengthened, building on the original loose interpretation that came from the Bose memories. It began to reclaim and modify human cybernetic fabrication systems, turning the machinery to producing components and machines of its own design. Buildings were modified to house its facilities, roads were used for vehicles. Bridges rebuilt.

The one segment of human technology it discarded was the electronics. MorningLightMountain simply did not trust the processors and programs that were available to it. There were hundreds of thousands of files detailing hidden subversive applications built into arrays and software. Ever since the first communications net was commissioned on Earth, humans seemed to have devoted a colossal amount of time and effort to conduct seditious assaults against each other inside its virtual boundaries. They disrupted the activities of their rivals, renegades launched viral attacks for the fun of it, and criminal elements stole from anyone with weaker encryption defenses in a massive electronic version of the territorial struggles that the immotile Primes used to wage constantly. After centuries of development, their skill in this arena was deadly. Their electronic warfare attacks against Morning-LightMountain’s soldier motiles during the original incursion were proof of their digital superiority. It did not have the experience nor ability to uncover and guard against such digital deceit. Consequentially, it simply removed the arrays from human equipment, and inserted itself into the control circuits. Such substitution absorbed a great deal of thought capacity. One of its priorities on its new worlds was to establish immotile groups that were used to manage and exploit human engineering.

Progress in this and other areas was advancing well. Then the Commonwealth made its counterstrike. Wormholes opened above all the new twenty-three worlds. Sure enough, missiles flooded through. MorningLightMountain sent its ships to intercept. It had a huge advantage: humans were reluctant to use fusion bombs, fearing their collateral environmental damage, a trait it had learned from both Bose and subsequent human personality animation, as well as datamining political proclamations. All of the weapons it directed to repel the attack were nuclear.

Then more wormholes appeared, this time on the ground, flashing in and out of existence. MorningLightMountain struggled to keep up with plotting their emergence. Once more, humans were successfully disrupting its internal communications. Flyers were sent out to each location, encountering some resistance as aerobots zoomed out to confront them. The automatic machines were nimble, but not strong enough to defeat superior numbers of flyers. And superior numbers was MorningLightMountain’s specific advantage.

After seventeen hours, the attack ended. MorningLightMountain was victorious. It had sustained some damage, but there had been no strategic defeat. Motiles and machinery were directed to repair the broken systems. After studying the attack pattern, it began to strengthen and modify its defenses accordingly. The Commonwealth was weaker than it had predicted.

Many hours later, the disturbances began. There had always been brief clashes with armed humans on its new twenty-three worlds. Several hundred motiles had been killed, a number so small it barely registered with MorningLightMountain’s main thought routines. Defenses strong enough to withstand strategic bombardment from space were more than adequate to cope with anything wild humans could strike them with.

Bridges fell as convoys were driving over them, their support pillars blown apart by explosives.

Soldier motiles on patrol dropped out of communication and never returned.

Fires broke out in factories.

Fusion generators suffered unexplained confinement field instabilities. Their MHD chambers ruptured to shoot out spears of plasma that incinerated anything in their path.

Armored humans were detected around force fields, only to inexplicably vanish again.

Equipment outside the force fields failed. Investigation showed deliberately damaged parts, or small explosive charges.

A fusion bomb detonated outside the Randtown force field, wiping out fifteen flyers.

Farmer motiles were killed on a continuing basis, shot from long range. Farm equipment was sabotaged. Whole crops were lost.

A fusion bomb went off inside the Randtown force field, destroying the entire installation.

Armored humans had now been spotted on every world. They were impossible to catch. When cornered they fought until they died, usually by triggering fusion bombs.

Microscopic wormholes began to appear above all of the new worlds, emerging for a few seconds only. They were no threat.

Fusion bombs went off on Olivenza, Sligo, Whalton, Nattavaara, and Anshun.

New strip mines were vaporized.

The sabotage was not causing enough damage to halt MorningLightMountain’s expansion across its new twenty-three worlds. But the ruined installations all had to be rebuilt. Motiles replaced. Roads repaired. Crops replanted.

Then the armored humans would reappear from nowhere and wreck them all over again. MorningLightMountain rebuilt each time, incorporating stronger defenses, which took longer to construct. It brought in tens of thousands of additional soldier motiles from its homeworld, all of which had to be fed and supported, stretching its resources on the new twenty-three worlds. The disruption tactics that the humans were employing were extremely irritating. MorningLightMountain didn’t know how to stop them. Back on its homeworld, conflicts had been fought out in the open with both sides trying to inflict maximum damage. This was different. MorningLightMountain knew from human personality animation that they would never stop this guerrilla warfare harassment. Their history was heavy with such actions. Fanatical freedom fighters had successfully defeated conventional armies time and again.

It would only stop when there were no more free humans. MorningLightMountain began to commit more resources toward achieving that task.

The staging post detected superluminal quantum distortion waves sweeping through the star system. Their origin point was a distortion signature that corresponded to a human starship engine, three light-years distant. The starship was already heading away from the staging post.

MorningLightMountain knew what the Commonwealth navy would do now it had discovered the location of the staging post: attack with every weapon it possessed.

Thousands of immotile groups had considered what defense could be used against the kind of relativistic attack the humans had used at Anshun. The complex machinery that would modify its wormhole generators was already under construction. MorningLightMountain prioritized its completion, and began transferring the first components to the staging post. It also began to assemble its new fleet of warships. When the navy starships arrived, weakening the Commonwealth defenses, it would begin its second expansion stage into Commonwealth space, invading a further forty-eight worlds.

Patricia Kantil and Daniel Alster left the Senate Hall together and shared the express to Kerensk. McClain Gilbert was waiting at the gateway station to escort them. The three of them took a navy shuttle over to Babuyan Atoll, a twenty-minute flight.

“Even after all the preparatory work we’ve done, I can’t believe we’ve reached this stage,” Patricia said. “I don’t mind telling you, the President is very anxious about this.”

“We all are,” Mac said. “This could well be the turning point.”

“Does the Admiral think we have enough ships?” Daniel asked.

“He’ll tell you himself,” Mac said. He gestured at the thick windows set into the cabin’s ceiling. “As you can see, we haven’t been slacking.”

Space around the High Angel was getting crowded. There were now three free-flying ports linked back to Kerensk, delivering passengers and small cargo pods to the shuttles that flew them on to the new navy facilities as well as the archipelago’s industrial stations. The nine warship assembly platforms were much larger than the original models used to construct the first generation of scoutships. Each one had five giant malmetal fabrication spheres arranged around a central gateway section that had a wormhole leading back to Kerensk. Hull sections and components were now conveyed directly to the advanced cybernetic systems that would put them together.

A malmetal ball on platform four was open, revealing one of the new Moscow-class warships as it prepared to disengage. The London was a hundred fifty meters long, its rust-red hull a double sphere, with the forward globe smaller than the rear, and seven rapier-blade thermal radiators protruding from its waist. There was no allusion to aerodynamics this time; the Moscow-class was designed purely as a weapons-delivery ship.

“They look imposing,” Patricia said.

“There’s enough weaponry in one of those to destroy every planet in Earth’s solar system, including Jupiter,” Mac told her. “For once, we have the firepower advantage.”

“I hope you’ve got fail-safes to prevent unauthorized launches,” Daniel said.

Mac gave him a funny look. “The Douvoir missiles have tripartite arming codes. Three members of the crew have to authorize a launch.”

“What if a ship is damaged, and you’ve only got two crew left?” Patricia asked.

“Not going to happen,” Mac assured her. “Anything powerful enough to get through the force field which shields a Moscow-class ship will destroy the entire ship.”

“Ah, I see.” Patricia turned back to the massive alien starship that the shuttle was approaching.

Admiral Kime gave his guests a warm welcome as they arrived in his office at the top of Pentagon II. It was night in Babuyan Atoll, leaving the vast crystal dome clear. Icalanise was a slender cadmium-yellow crescent sinking toward the parkland rim. The rest of space visible overhead was packed with the bright silver shapes of the archipelago, whose research labs and shimmering macrohubs were now complemented by all the new navy stations and platforms. Hundreds of shuttles swarmed between them, their ion rockets creating tenuous electric-blue nebula streaks across the void.

After greeting both Kime and Columbia, Patricia sat beside Oscar. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks.” He gave her a wan smile. “Sorry for not getting up. Gravity makes me feel very weak and dizzy right now.”

“Please, don’t apologize.”

“The annoying thing is, I stuck to the exercise schedule we were given, and took all the biogenics. It doesn’t make the slightest difference. Damn, I hate freefall.”

“The President asked me to convey her personal thanks to you and your crew. Discovering the opening to Hell’s Gateway is the vital element which could turn this whole campaign around.”

“Just doing our job,” Oscar mumbled.

Mac came up behind his old friend. “Modesty is also a by-product of freefall exposure. Don’t worry, he’ll be cured by the time we reach the medal-giving ceremony. Do you think the Vice President will award Oscar personally?” he asked with a straight face.

Patricia laughed. “Now I think about it, our good Vice President Bicklu wasn’t his usual joyful self in cabinet when your name was mentioned.”

Oscar managed to smile at that.

Wilson called everyone to order. Dimitri Leopoldvich, who had been talking quietly to Rafael, took a seat next to Anna, while Mac sat on the other side of Daniel. Technically this was the Navy Strategic Review Council, but Wilson thought of it as simply a meeting between his best advisors and the Executive, as represented by Patricia and Daniel. Its job was to come up with policy to forward to the War Cabinet.

“We’ll open with the obvious,” Wilson said. “The location of Hell’s Gateway.” A hologram portal on his desk projected a simple star map. The star system where Oscar had detected the giant wormhole was about three hundred light-years beyond Elan.

“You’ve all seen the sensor log,” Oscar said. “There is no mistake; it’s them.”

“Low possibility,” Dimitri said, “but we have to consider if this is a decoy.”

“An enormously expensive one,” Mac said. “We know the Primes don’t have economics the way we do, but in terms of resources it would be a considerable investment in machinery to duplicate Hell’s Gateway. And for what purpose? At best it would gain them a couple of months’ respite.”

“Or they’ve built a second giant wormhole,” Dimitri said cheerfully. “More than one? We know they are quadralactric; it would be prudent to assume the worst.”

“You always do,” Patricia said in a low voice.

Dimitri’s pale face lifted in a regretful smile. “My job.”

“Are you suggesting we postpone the attack?” Rafael asked.

“No, sir. What I, and the Strategic Studies Institute, are recommending is that the scout flights should continue. In fact, we ought to take another flyby of Dyson Alpha. That would tell us for sure if there are any more giant wormholes operating there.”

“Risky,” Wilson said.

“The same risk as attacking Hell’s Gateway,” Dimitri countered. “Whatever defenses the Primes have developed, you can be sure they won’t be restricted to their home system. Hell’s Gateway is vital to them. It will be defended with the best they’ve got.”

“We’ll certainly fly reconnaissance missions afterward,” Wilson said. “We need as much intelligence about their intent as we can gather.”

“Intent is their one continuing unknown,” Dimitri said. “As Captain Gilbert said, their economic model doesn’t follow any we understand. However you look at it, invading the Commonwealth is simply not cost-effective. Our conclusion is that they are mounting some kind of religious crusade against us.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Daniel said.

“Excuse me, sir, but it is not. Obviously we don’t even know if they have gods or religion, but the fundamental principle stands. They are not doing this out of logic, therefore a degree of fanaticism is involved. Crusades are the human equivalent, whether they have religion or ideology as their starting point. We have had a great many during our history.”

“Is this relevant to considering our assault strategy on Hell’s Gateway?” Patricia asked.

“The implications should be considered,” Dimitri said. “We are striking what we hope will be a significant blow against an enormously powerful enemy. If their motivation for invading the Commonwealth is based on an illogical premise, that their ‘God’ or political leader has decided humans must be swept from the galaxy, they will not be deterred. It will be a setback, not an end to their campaign. They will hit back. We must be prepared for that eventuality.”

“Without Hell’s Gateway it would take them a long time to rebuild and strike at us,” Rafael said. “Every ship orbiting the Lost23, every installation they’ve built in the Commonwealth will be vulnerable to us. We can eliminate them completely before any reinforcements arrive.”

“Pardon me, Admiral,” Dimitri said, “but those Lost23 planets have been well named by the media. They are indeed lost to us, permanently. Right now the troops we have deployed there are absorbing a great deal of the Primes’ resources; but in the event we succeed in destroying Hell’s Gateway the Lost23 become an irrelevance. We should not deploy our ships in battles that will result in any attrition.”

“I’m all for that,” Mac said sarcastically. “We only go in slugging when we know we won’t get hurt in the process.” He gave Dimitri a tight, almost pitying smile. “This is war, man; it gets dirty and we are going to take losses. You have to accept that.”

“We are in the process of developing weapons that will guarantee victory,” Dimitri said. “Wait until they have been built, then use them. Don’t try and knock the Primes down one tiny piece at a time. They are too big. We can’t do it.”

Nobody replied. Wilson took a look around their troubled faces. Everyone here knew about the Seattle quantumbuster, but it was the last resort, the doomsday weapon that you prayed to whatever God you believed in that you’d never have to use. It certainly wasn’t the first thing you reached for. “The only way the Seattle weapon can be deployed to get us that guarantee is if we use it to genocide the Primes,” he said.

“And what do you believe, Admiral, they are doing to us? I have accessed the reports from squads dropped onto the Lost23. On every single occasion when refugees and survivors encountered the Primes, they were exterminated. We cannot assign them human logic and motivation; don’t make the mistake of assuming they care about us. They want us dead and gone. Every analysis the Institute has made boils down to one simple proposition: it’s them or us.”

“Use of the Seattle Project weapons is a political decision which will be taken by the War Cabinet,” Rafael said. “That has already been agreed. It is not part of the strategy we are discussing today.”

“Then we would recommend it should be,” Dimitri said. There was a glint of sweat on his pale brow as he leaned forward in his chair to appeal directly to Wilson. “I’m not saying this lightly, but we have already shown our hand. What the Desperado did was truly magnificent; they slowed down the Prime advance and in doing so allowed millions of people to escape. But the Primes have now seen that application of hyperdrive technology. They will be able to duplicate it. And more, they will be devising countermeasures—I know we are. If we strike Hell’s Gateway with relativistic weapons there is no guarantee they will be successful.”

“Nothing in war is certain,” Wilson replied. “That doesn’t mean we give up.”

“I’m not saying we should give up. I’m saying we should have a complete victory.”

“Prime ships started leaving Dyson Alpha within an hour of the barrier coming down,” Oscar said. “They are out in the universe now, an escaped genie. We have to deal with them on that basis.”

Dimitri pushed back some of his floppy hair. “I’m sorry, we at the StPetersburg Institute do not believe that ultimately there is any other way to deal with them. Whoever encountered them before was clearly of a similar opinion, which is why the barrier was erected. We do not have that luxury.”

“Thank you, Dimitri,” Wilson said. “The Institute’s views will be brought before the War Cabinet. For now, we are planning a conventional assault against Hell’s Gateway. Anna?”

“Manufacture of Moscow-class ships is accelerating,” she said. “Now that we’re mass-producing all the hull sections and components on the Big15 it takes about a fortnight to assemble one from scratch. The process is a lot more modular than it was even with the scoutships. Currently we have twelve of them operational, but that’s due to change rapidly. Our ninth assembly platform is now complete; sections for platforms ten through fifteen are being fabricated, and should be functional within another month. Linking the platforms directly to Kerensk via wormhole has been a real boon as far as construction is concerned. We’ve trodden on Chairwoman Gall’s toes in the process, but she’s been diplomatic enough to keep quiet; she realizes that High Angel can’t insist on a monopoly in these times. Besides, most of the docking station crews are still dormitoried here.”

“How many ships can we send against Hell’s Gateway?” Patricia asked.

“By the end of this week: fifteen. If we wait another week, there will be twenty-two. If you wait a further week, we should have commissioned over forty, and after that we’ll be churning out forty-five every fortnight.”

“How many do you need for a successful strike, one that closes Hell’s Gateway?”

“We estimate a minimum of twenty,” Mac said. “They have a formidable presence in that star system. Hell’s Gateway is only a part of it. There are all the generators for the wormholes leading to the Lost23, which are still transferring a colossal amount of equipment to the Commonwealth. During the invasion, we estimate they deployed over forty-five thousand ships against us. If they’re planning a second invasion, we must assume that at least that many are currently stationed there. Probably a lot more.”

“Twenty of our ships against forty thousand?” Patricia said. She sounded worried.

“We won’t be engaging them the way we did above the Lost23,” Wilson said. “The Moscow-class will stand off and launch their Douvoir missiles from the edge of the Hell’s Gateway star system. No slower-than-light ships will ever reach them.”

“Twenty ships?” Patricia said.

“Minimum,” Mac said.

“Fair enough, another week is acceptable.”

“It must be longer,” Dimitri said. “You cannot throw everything we have at them, there has to be a reserve. The Primes will retaliate.”

Patricia gave him a fractious glance.

“Dimitri is correct,” Rafael said. “This has to be balanced correctly. Much as I hate to say it, we have to take the prospect of failure into account. As I am responsible for defending the remaining Commonwealth planets I must ask for some ships to be assigned to protective duties.”

“Wilson?” Daniel asked.

“I agree, it is the prudent course. I know people are impatient for us to retaliate, but this is not something we should lay open to political expediency. The guerrilla warfare is progressing well. We can take the opportunity to increase the number of troops on the Lost23 while we carry on building ships. We know that strategy is working well, intensifying it should keep the Primes preoccupied.”

“How long?” Patricia asked.

“A fortnight,” Anna told her. “That will give us twenty ships to cover each duty. That should be enough.”

“All right, I’ll take that to the President.”

Oscar remained in his seat as the others said their good-byes and left the office. Trepidation was making his stomach churn, a sensation far worse than any of the aftereffects of freefall exposure. He didn’t like the idea of lying to Wilson just to cover his own ass, not with something this serious. But Wilson certainly had to be told, and he’d probably figure out who else was involved.

Mac and Anna were the last to leave. Oscar caught her giving Wilson a quick little shrug before the door closed.

“Drink?” Wilson asked.

“Yeah, thanks. Whiskey, with some ice, no water.”

Wilson gave him a slightly surprised look, but walked across the white office to the spherical drinks cabinet. “Well, you’ve certainly got me curious. An official and private meeting.”

“We have a problem,” Oscar said.

Wilson gave a distant grin as he poured the whiskey into a crystal tumbler.

“Houston.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Sorry, go on.”

Oscar accepted the drink, despising himself for needing liquid courage. “A little while ago I was approached by someone who was suspicious about various aspects of the Second Chance mission.”

“You, too, huh?”

“They talked to you?” Oscar found that incredible.

“Let’s just say there’s a lot of politics going on around here. What did this someone want from you?”

“It’s easier if I show you. Here.” He told his e-butler to access the log recordings directly from the secure navy database. The portal on Wilson’s desk projected the recording from the shuttle as it started its journey to the Watchtower.

“See the main dish?” Oscar asked as he froze the image. “Someone was signaling to the Prime homeworld.”

“Son of a bitch.” Wilson dropped into his chair, staring at the picture that filled half of his office. “Are you sure?”

“We both know the dish shouldn’t be deployed at this stage in the mission. I did some rough alignment calculations, and that’s the direction it’s pointing.”

“Son of a bitch. Who the hell was it?”

“I don’t know. Our records are quite comprehensive, but whoever ordered the dish to deploy was clearly circumventing our management programs. This is about the only proof we’ve got it ever happened.”

“I don’t understand: a traitor? Why? What possible motive could there be?”

“There’s a lot of fairly wild theories floating around in the unisphere,” Oscar said carefully. “We never did understand why the barrier came down as soon as we arrived. And I think we can be pretty certain now what glitched our communications with Bose and Verbeke.”

“Someone in the crew,” Wilson whispered in shock. “But I picked them all … we picked them. You and I.”

“Yeah,” Oscar said miserably.

“Christ.” Wilson was still staring at the picture of the dish as if it were some kind of physical threat. “This doesn’t make any sense. Nobody benefits from a war. In any case nobody knew what was inside the barrier.”

“The Silfen probably did.”

“No. Not them. I don’t believe that.” He turned to Oscar, eyes narrowing.

“Who asked you to look into this?”

Oscar held his gaze. “The Guardians of Selfhood. Someone I used to know was the contact.”

“Fuck, Oscar! Those bastards tried to destroy the Second Chance.”

Oscar nodded at the picture. “They might have had good reason.”

“The Starflyer alien they believe in? You can’t be serious.”

“Maybe I’m not,” Oscar said warily. “I don’t know. But somebody on board was acting against us in the most terrifying way imaginable. We’re fighting a war because of that flight, a war we might lose, and all that entails for us as a species. As you said: Where’s the motive? It’s not political.”

“No, you’re right, it’s not. There has to be some kind of outside influence. Whoever did this is betraying us as a species. Son of a bitch, that’s just so hard to accept.”

“I know.”

“Have you told the Guardians about this yet?”

“No, of course not. Look, I’ll make this easy for you; I’ll resign.”

“Like hell! We need to find out what the fuck is going on, and do it fast. We’re about to send our fleet to Hell’s Gateway; and God help us if that goes wrong.”

“You don’t think …”

“Somebody betrayed us before while we were flying the Second Chance. If they’re still around, they can do it again, and probably will.”

“Goddamn, I hadn’t thought of that. What do you want to do?”

“Get help. Paula Myo knows everything there is to know about the Guardians. I’ll consult with her.”

Mellanie broke her promise. They didn’t check into a swanky LA hotel; instead she found a cheap three-room apartment just behind Venice Beach. The building was old and worn down, its ground floor given over to small ultra-bargain stores selling T-shirts, handmade jewelry, secondhand domestic bots, powerskates, and sportswear, each of them blaring out tinny music late into the night. The windows on the two floors above had wooden shutters and rows of ancient air-conditioning radiators that whistled and hissed in the sun’s glare.

The apartment next door to theirs was taken by a couple who fought every time their shifts brought them home together; upstairs a hooker who sneaked her clients up the fire escape gave them their hour’s worth of non-TSI entertainment at high volume.

In their own rooms the water supply was erratic. The fridge was stuck on its coldest setting, freezing anything they put inside. Furnishings dated back fifty years. And the purple-painted floorboards creaked badly.

The building’s landlord was only too pleased to take cash. There was no accessible record that they were living there.

Strangely, for an environment that was so unruly, Dudley was at his most relaxed since they hooked up. When she got back from her visits to the Michelangelo studio offices she’d often find him cooking elaborate meals, or sitting outside the building with a beer watching the theater of street life going past. She suspected the fact that Morton was unreachable two hundred light-years away had a lot to do with his newfound contentment.

The evening after Mellanie received the recording of Randtown’s destruction, she slipped into a simple T-shirt dress and walked down to the beach. She carried her sneakers in one hand as she walked along the sand, heading for the Santa Monica pier.

When her virtual hand activated the onetime address, Adam Elvin responded at once. “I haven’t been able to find any trace of the three lawyers from Bromley, Waterford, and Granku,” she told him. “They certainly haven’t contacted their families. The monitor programs my friend installed would have detected that.”

“Don’t be too harsh on yourself, it’s a big Commonwealth out there,” Adam said. “The whole episode proves that the Starflyer funded Bose’s observation. We don’t need to take it any further.”

“But they must have some kind of connection to Baron. I want to find it.”

“We appreciate that, but Baron is more relevant to you than us.”

“I thought you wanted in on the Starflyer’s agents and their network. Does it matter where and who?”

“Ultimately, no.”

“Well then.”

She sauntered past one of the areas marked out with volleyball courts. Overhead lights on tall masts had been switched on, casting a yellow illumination on the two games being played. One of the guys called out to her, begging her to join their team. She smiled back regretfully.

“We still can’t help you with that,” Adam said.

“Okay, how about this: my friend Morton has made contact with an alien that has Dudley Bose’s memories, the ones from his time on the Second Chance.”

“Holy shit, are you serious?”

“Very.”

“Can you get us access?”

“Not directly, no. The SI won’t help me get them off Elan, and I don’t know how to get back to Ozzie’s asteroid on my own. I don’t suppose you have a working wormhole generator?”

“No, sorry.”

“Didn’t think so. If you have any questions for Bose, I’ll be happy to pass them on.”

“I’ll get on to Johansson right away. Does the navy know about this?”

“Not yet. I asked Morty to keep this private. So far, it is.”

“You’re doing a fantastic job, Mellanie.”

“It doesn’t seem to be getting me very far. I feel like a sitting duck waiting for Baron’s people to take a shot at me.”

“I’m sure we can bring this all together before that happens. Have you talked to Myo recently?”

“No. I don’t have any information I can use to bargain with; apart from Morty, and that’s got to be illegal. I’ve been busy trying to trace the lawyers, and doing gigs for Michelangelo. Speaking of which, do you have any inside knowledge about the rich building their lifeboats, especially the Sheldons?”

“Only the rumors in the unisphere. They say the cheapest ticket will cost you a billion Earth dollars. You thinking of leaving us, Mellanie?”

A billion dollars? Christ, does Paul Cramley really think I’m worth that much? The idea was extraordinarily flattering. “Not yet,” she said. “I still want to help.”

“We appreciate it. Three more Starflyer agents you should be aware of: Isabella Halgarth, and her parents Victor and Bernadette. If you see any of them coming, duck.”

“Thanks. How do you know?”

“Bradley has been looking into the shotgun which claimed Doi was a Starflyer agent. It wasn’t one of ours. Isabella helped put it together. She’s now dropped out of sight, which is a sure sign she’s going to become more active. We’ve established small teams to observe her parents; if they spot anything that’ll help with your problems I’ll let you know immediately.”

“I appreciate that. I get … I feel lonely a lot of the time.”

“I probably understand that more than most. I’ve been living this paranoid nonlife for decades now.”

“How do you cope?”

“Not very well, I suppose; that’s the easy answer. I used to believe in what I was doing, I had a real crusade going for my ideals. These days, events have just swept me along. I’m like you, Mellanie, I’m waiting for it all to resolve. If it’s any comfort, I don’t think it will take much longer now.”

“I hope you’re right. Good night, Adam.”

“It’s almost dawn for me. Which is a shame, the night here is quite beautiful.”

Mellanie signed off with a light touch of regret. She wondered where he was that was so beautiful. Talking to Adam always made her feel less isolated. They’d never met, and probably never would, but discussing the business helped her confidence no end. He was a professional, doing what he did out of commitment and belief; he approved of her efforts, offering snippets of advice. It added up to a weird kind of friendship, but in a bizarre way she trusted him a lot more than anyone else in her life right now.

Up ahead the gaudy multicolored illuminations of the Santa Monica pier stretched out over the water as the sky darkened behind it. She gave the fun-fair rides a brief longing glance before turning around and wandering back over the sands. Dudley would start getting agitated if she was away for much longer.

Venice Beach was where LA’s offworld contract workers lived and hung out. Even though it didn’t have the wealth prevalent in the rest of Los Angeles, it was safe, providing she kept to the public spaces. Some of the clubs along the beachfront were coming alive now that the sun had fallen behind the ocean, music and holographic projections seeping out from their doorways. One little part of her mind wished she was coming home to someone like Adam Elvin. Not that she needed a man, any man. But Adam would be a lot less hard work than Dudley with his insecurities and paranoia and jealousies. Adam, she imagined, would be a lot calmer and reassuring; someone she could talk to about all her problems with the Starflyer and worrying about being exposed. He’d have answers and solutions, strategies for coping.

Dudley was sitting on the stone steps outside their apartment building. He smiled as he caught sight of her, and hurried over. “I’ve been doing some research,” he said eagerly.

“That’s good,” Mellanie replied automatically. The swirling projectors issuing out of the stores’ logo holograms sent worms of pink and amber light wriggling over his face. She frowned. “Dudley, is that a new OCtattoo?”

He grinned and stroked his ear. “Yeah. One of the parlors down by the beach etched it in for me.”

She stroked the red and gold swirls with her fingers, her inserts and programs examining the organic circuitry. The OCtattoo was a very cheap sense booster with added TSI functions, expanding his cybersphere interface with a whole range of customization software. There were no buried assets or encrypted code in the management routines. His skin was already turning red around the elaborate spirals, an infection that was the sure sign of an unprofessional application.

“Was it a verified brand? Did you see the license before it was applied?”

“Mellanie! You’re my girl, not my mother. I’ve had enough OCtattoos in my time to know what I’m doing.”

“Okay.” She headed up the stairs. “What have you been researching?”

“Spaceships.” He smiled with all the pride of a schoolkid about to hand in homework that was guaranteed to get an A-grade.

“What kind?” she asked.

He opened the apartment door and gestured her inside, but not before making a furtive glance along the empty landing. “Augusta has several orbital factories for electronics and exotic micro-gee materials. They have spaceplanes and more importantly: inter-orbit tugs.”

“Yes?”

“I looked up the specs and did some calculations. It felt good using my astronomy background for something practical. If we hired one of the inter-orbit tugs, and filled the reaction mass tanks, and carried no cargo except ourselves, it could take us to the Regulus system’s outer gas giant.”

“And why would we want to go there?” she asked. The couple next door was shouting at each other again. Thankfully, it was silent upstairs.

“That has to be where Ozzie Isaac’s asteroid habitat is,” Dudley said. “An asteroid that size is extremely unusual. Trust me, it is far more likely to be a small moon.”

She almost launched into her usual chastisement, but leaving him alone to work on some new obsession would actually reduce the amount of time she spent worrying about what he was up to. So instead she said: “I don’t know …” her voice cautious.

“I’m convinced it’s in the Regulus system. That would provide easy access to Augusta, which is where the construction systems must have come from. Everyone automatically assumes that CST and Augusta belongs solely to the Sheldon Dynasty; they forget that Isaacs was a cofounder, he has an equal share.”

“I suppose so. But I doubt we can afford to hire a spaceship. I don’t have that kind of money.”

“The Michelangelo show would pay. Once we reach the habitat, we can gain access to Isaac’s wormhole. We can take Morton and the motile off Elan.”

Which is what this is really all about, Mellanie knew. Ever since Dudley had heard about the strange alien motile he had been consumed with meeting it. She was thankful he despised the navy and completely distrusted Admiral Kime, otherwise he would have gone straight to them asking for the motile to be recovered. “It would have to be a really good proposal for them to come up with that kind of money,” she said. “You’d have to be very sure of the spaceship performance.”

“I am. We can do it.” Dudley stroked his ear. “A few more upgrades like this, some memory skill implants, and I’ll be able to pilot us myself.”

“All right. If you collect some figures, very detailed figures, Dudley, I’ll think about it.”

“Yes!” He punched one hand into the palm of the other, smiling broadly.

“I’ll get onto it right away.”

Mellanie slipped the T-shirt dress straps off her shoulders, and let the garment slide down onto the ancient floorboards. “I didn’t know Ozzie owned half of CST.”

“Oh, yes.” Dudley was staring at her as if he’d never seen her body before.

“They started the company together. Sheldon was always the director, the commercial half of the partnership. So he’s the one the public and the media always see making statements. It’s an association thing.”

“Interesting.” She unhooked her bra.

It was the signal for Dudley to struggle out of his own shirt, desperately trying to get it off over his head and getting badly tangled up in the hurry.

“You know, he hasn’t been seen for years.”

“Who? Ozzie?”

“Yes. I found that out when I was researching this. Not that it’s unusual—he’s always traveling through the Commonwealth. They say he’s visited every planet, and had a child on each of them.”

Mellanie stepped out of her panties and walked through into the bathroom. She turned the shower on, grateful the water was mildly warm. “If he’s so important, it’s strange he hasn’t said anything about the Primes. You know, there was a lot of pressure on the Baron show not to mention the asteroid habitat. I wonder what’s happened to him.”

“That’s Ozzie for you: one crazy dude.” Dudley was trying to get his pants off; he had to grip the door frame to stop falling over. “I’d like to be like him.”

“If he’s as rebellious as everyone says, he might let us use his wormhole anyway.”

“We’d have to find him first.”

“I’ll ask around the office. Somebody there might know where he is.”

Dudley finally got his pants off, and made for the shower.

“Wait there,” Mellanie said sharply. He came to a halt in the middle of the small bathroom.

She started to rub the thick soapy gel onto her body. “Watch me first. I’ll tell you when you can join me.”

Dudley sucked on his lower lip and whimpered.

Nigel followed his three bodyguards out of the wormhole gateway. It was daylight in Ozzie’s gigantic, hollowed-out asteroid, the balmy air carrying the sweet scent of flower blossom. A wide white canvas awning arched above the gateway, allowing visitors to acclimatize to the bizarre curving landscape as they moved out from under it. As he walked forward, more of the cylindrical cavern was revealed, two green wings sweeping up on either side, becoming steeper and steeper until they began to arch overhead. Sizzling white light shone out of the axis gantry, its glare obscuring the ground directly above him. Tall, impressively craggy mountains jutted out from the curving landscape at all angles around him, disorienting in their fantastical perspective. The sight coupled with the rotational gravity field produced a momentary sensation of motion sickness that made his legs weaken. One of the bodyguards actually stumbled, falling to his knees. His colleagues hauled him up, trying not to snigger.

“This way,” Nigel said, and headed down the gravel path that led away from the cliff where the gateway was embedded. Birds were singing not far away.

The interior was almost as he remembered. It was the trees that had changed; they were all mature now, adding to the elegance of the panorama. He didn’t like to think how many decades it would take to produce such a gap between his last recollection and today; judging by the height and density of the forests it could easily be a century.

Several gardenbots were busy on the grass, tending the rhododendron bushes and little spinnies of silver birch. There was no sign that several thousand people had poured through here like a runaway tide: no garbage, no trampled plants.

At the end of the path, the small bungalow was just as he remembered it. A single deck chair was sitting in the garden underneath a broad copper beech tree, waiting for its owner to return.

Daniel Alster’s call icon popped into Nigel’s virtual vision. He sighed, and opened a connection.

“Sorry, sir,” Daniel said. “There’s a development I thought you should know about.”

“Go ahead,” he said, knowing it would be important. He trusted Daniel to filter most of the output from the Dynasty’s political office.

“The Halgarths have just gone nuclear against the Burnellis in committee.”

“Hmm, which committee?”

“Security Oversight.”

“Really?” As always, Daniel had been right. The Security Oversight Committee was normally immune to the usual political maneuvering and squabbling between Senate factions; and at this time it should have been completely sacrosanct. For any kind of spat to have spilled over into its sessions was serious indeed. “What happened?”

“Valetta Halgarth tried to bump Paula Myo out of Senate Security this morning.”

Nigel was suddenly very interested. The Dynasty had been indebted to the Investigator on more than one occasion; after one case he’d even thanked her personally. Not that she pursued anyone for political reasons. He’d almost intervened himself when the political office told him Rafael Columbia had engineered her removal from navy intelligence; then Gore had stepped in, and there’d been no need. “What’s she done to annoy the Halgarths now?”

“We’re not quite sure, it’s probably ongoing. The Burnellis are worried about the Halgarths increasing their power base within the navy hierarchy.”

“They’re not alone. Go on.”

“The reason Valetta gave was Myo interfering in navy intelligence operations. Apparently Myo made an official request to her old Paris office to put Alessandra Baron under observation.”

“What does Myo think Baron has done?”

“We don’t know.”

“It’s probably not relevant to the Halgarths; as you say, this is a direct power struggle. I’ll talk to Jessica. I think we need to start keeping a closer eye on the Halgarths and their plans for the navy.”

“Yes, sir.”

The call ended, and Nigel came to a halt, considering what he’d just been told. The bodyguards waited respectfully. If there was one thing he knew about Paula Myo it was her honesty; she wouldn’t put Baron under observation on purely political grounds no matter how hard the Burnellis insisted. Then there was Thompson’s shocking murder, which remained completely unsolved. The assassin’s reappearance at LA Galactic was also something that hadn’t been satisfactorily explained. Something was going on at a level that affected the Dynasties and Grand Families, and to his considerable annoyance, he didn’t know what. That was almost unheard of. His virtual hand reached out and touched Nelson’s icon. “Got an information collection job for you,” he told the Dynasty security chief.

Nigel knew the bungalow was deserted before he stepped through the open archway that was its entrance. There was something about an unoccupied home that spoke directly to the human subconscious. Nonetheless, he called out: “Ozzie, you about, dude?” as he wandered through into the lounge.

After an extensive investigation to locate Ozzie, Nelson had drawn a complete blank. Nigel had been girding himself for the news that Ozzie had set up home on one of the Lost23 worlds. But no, the last trace Nelson’s department could find was a ticket to Silvergalde. A team of Dynasty security agents had descended on Lyddington to find out what they could. The town was in chaos from the number of refugees flooding to Silvergalde in the belief that the Silfen would defend their world from the Primes. And there were no electronic records to review. That left money and alcohol to liberate tongues and unreliable memories. Ozzie had been in town; a stable owner claimed to have sold him a horse and a lontras. He hadn’t stayed long. A tavern landlord said he’d set out to walk the Silfen’s deep paths in the woods. No one in Lyddington had seen him come back.

As Ozzie legends went it was credible, suitably mythic and epic. Nigel wasn’t so certain. Ozzie had feigned disinterest in the Dyson Alpha barrier, but that was the usual Ozzie bullshit. Nigel had checked: it was the only time Ozzie had ever turned up at an ExoProtectorate Council meeting. His friend was interested, all right; enigmatic alien Big Dumb Objects were the kind of thing Ozzie loved. For him to then vanish off into a forest full of elves was difficult to understand.

Nigel’s inserts sensed several arrays activating in the lounge. A holographic portal projected a life-size image of Ozzie right in front of him, dressed in a shabby yellow T-shirt and creased shorts; from his bleary eyes it looked like he’d just woken up with a hangover. “Hi, Nige,” it said. “Sorry you’re here. I guess I must have been gone awhile and you’ve started worrying. Well, this is a recording I made to reassure you I’m okay. I love the idea you’re gonna build a starship, man, that’s gonna be so coolio. Hey, I bet you wind up going on the voyage in the end, you’ll find some excuse.”

“Wrong,” Nigel whispered at the image of his friend.

“I’ve gone the other way to find out what’s there. You know me, huh. The whole Dyson sphere thing is really weird, you know? And the Silfen have got to know something about it. I never did fall for all that mystic guru shit. They’re smart and they’ve been around a long time. So I’m doing a bit of exploring myself. I’m gonna track down those paths of theirs, and find out what’s at the center of their forests. I’m betting it’s something like our own slippy tricky little SI. Hopefully it’ll have some answers for me. So don’t go worrying about me, and I’ll see you when I get back. Double sorry if you needed me to solve a biggo problem, just like the old days. You stay chill, now.”

The image switched off.

“Oh, shit, Ozzie,” Nigel said in a pained voice. “You dickhead.”

Paula took a brief look around the large opulent office; as far as she could see, nothing had changed. Every piece of big gold-brown furniture was where she remembered. Even the aides were the same. Which made it all the stranger that it was Justine sitting behind the big desk, framed by a window looking out over Washington’s skyline.

“Thanks for finding the time to see me,” Paula said as the Senator rose to greet her. There was something in Justine’s movements that made Paula study her a little longer than was strictly polite.

“No problem. I bet you got a few stares on your way up.”

“A few,” Paula admitted.

They sat on one of the big leather couches. An aide had already set out a silver coffee service for them. Justine poured a cup of nonmodified Jamaican gold for Paula. Her own drink was water.

“Your father has uncovered a huge amount of financial irregularities in Bromley, Waterford, and Granku’s accounts. The company seems to be a distribution point for a number of individuals and organizations which have no verifiable existence. A lot of money comes in through various unlisted client accounts, and promptly vanishes. There also seems to be an equal amount of illegitimate activity at Denman Manhattan who run the accounts for Bromley, Waterford, and Granku.”

“Excellent. This sort of thing is easy for Gore, he was doing it before I was born, for God’s sake. So what’s your next move?”

“Our preliminary analysis is that Bromley, Waterford, and Granku was acting as a financial distribution center for the Starflyer agent network. They know it’s been compromised, of course. that’s why Seaton, Daltra, and Pomanskie have all vanished. The network funding will have been switched to another distribution center. However, Gore is going to inform the Financial Regulation Directorate; apparently he has a lot of contacts there. The Directorate will subject both Bromley, Waterford, and Granku, and the Denman Manhattan bank, to a forensic accounting evaluation. It’ll be considerably more thorough than anything Senate Security can run. There’s a chance that they might identify both the source of all this dark money, and some of the illusive individuals it was channeled to. It will be difficult; whoever set this up knew what they were doing, and of course onetime accounts remain the bane of law enforcement.”

“I’m sure Bromley, Waterford, and Granku has been shut down, but I know the FRD—they’ll take months if not years to complete their investigation.”

“I am of the same opinion,” Paula said. “But that aspect of the investigation may well soon be irrelevant, which is why I’m here in person.”

“You don’t trust encrypted calls?”

“I was on the East Coast anyway to see your father, and this is extremely important. Wilson Kime has been in touch with me. He’s asked me to visit the High Angel to review some information. His message was very short, but it seems as though he’s uncovered some kind of abnormality which occurred during the Second Chance mission.”

“I’ll be damned, that’s a surprise,” Justine muttered.

“Exactly. Convincing Wilson Kime that something is wrong could well be a turning point for us. In which case we’d need to know how strong our political support is. Are you making any progress?”

“Better than I’d expected. I can certainly defeat the vote against you in committee whenever Valetta Halgarth gets it onto the agenda again. But a full Senate vote is another matter. If we’re to launch an official investigation into the Starflyer, I’ve got to have rock-solid proof not just that it exists, but that it is manipulating human politicians exactly as the Guardians claim. And we both know my fellow senators won’t take kindly to that allegation, especially the Halgarths.”

“What about the Sheldons?”

“I haven’t determined their intent yet. I’m sorry.”

“I’d like to suggest a strategy,” Paula said warily. The idea was one that she and Gore had discussed at their meeting. It wasn’t quite the kind of tactic she approved of, maneuvering someone into a precarious position. Especially given what she suspected about the Senator’s current physical situation. But these were unusual times, Paula reflected, and there was no illegality on their part, which was the one line she would never cross—not even to challenge the Starflyer. Though it is a very blurred line these days. “According to the Guardians, the Starflyer will return to Far Away when the Commonwealth has been destroyed.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s been mentioned in several of their shotguns. I have studied their content intensively over the decades; Johansson seems quite convinced by this. In fact, I suspect that has a lot to do with the unusual equipment they have been trying to smuggle to Far Away recently.”

“All right, so it wants to go back to Far Away; how does that help us?”

“That whole elaborate double wormhole connection to Far Away is massively subsidized by the Commonwealth. You should suggest withdrawing the funding, effectively shutting down the wormholes, and preventing the Starflyer from returning.”

“Ouch.” Justine smiled roguishly into her glass. “That’s going to annoy people.”

“It is intended to, especially the Halgarths and the Sheldons. Their reaction would be informative. It would certainly expose their political allies to us.”

“I could possibly include it as a rider on the navy finance bill that’s coming up next week. It’s justifiable as it would divert money from Far Away to the navy. Let me talk to Crispin. He always has been against subsidizing Far Away.”

“Thank you. I should add there might be some considerable risk in it for yourself personally. Your brother Thompson was killed because he interfered with the transport arrangements to Far Away. You might want to consider asking Senator Goldreich to propose the rider for you, given your … condition.” She couldn’t help the light flush rising on her cheeks, though she held Justine’s stare levelly.

“What condition is that?”

“I believe you’re pregnant, Senator. There are certain signs in evidence. And you did tell me you were going to give Kazimir the one gift still within your ability to grant. I suppose that was the real reason the body was taken to your family clinic in New York.”

Justine looked down. “Yes. You’re right on all counts. If you could keep that to yourself, please.”

“Of course, Senator. But the risk—you would effectively be bait.”

“I assume you and my father had taken that into account.”

“Your personal security would be upgraded and in place before the Far Away proposal is made. Senate Security has several operatives wetwired at a level capable of dealing with the Starflyer assassin.”

“Walk in the park, then.”

“Hardly.”

“I’ll schedule an appointment with Crispin. You can start upgrading my security.”

“Thank you, Senator.”

Justine sat on the couch for a long while after the Investigator had left. The prospect that Kime could come around to accepting the Starflyer was a phenomenal breakthrough. The more she considered the implications, the more worried she became. At the moment she was completely alone in the Senate in her belief, which made her extremely vulnerable. By introducing the prospect that the Starflyer was real she would expose herself to political destruction by the Halgarths, possibly in conjunction with the Sheldons. They really did need undeniable proof before going public.

But then that’s always been the problem.

The icon that represented the code Kazimir had sent her as he died was still a glowing azure point at the edge of her virtual vision. A constant temptation. Her virtual finger reached out and touched it. She blamed hormones.

As befitted the leader of the African caucus, Ramon DB’s office was actually larger than Thompson’s. The walls were hung with ancient shields and skins; holographic portraits showed vast landscapes from every African world. Right in the middle, the largest picture showed a panoramic view of Kilimanjaro, taken a century ago, when the glaciers on the top had expanded again, returning the colossal mountain to its former glory. There was a smaller picture beside it, featuring Ramon at the top of the volcano, dressed in thick thermal walking clothes, standing beside the glacier’s edge, smiling proudly at the camera.

Justine tilted her head to one side as she looked at it. “You know, I could have sworn I was standing next to you when that was taken. How strange, you must have walked up there again without me. And in the same clothes, too.”

“I … er. This is a political office,” he said sheepishly. “Everything in here has to be symbolic of my constituency, those who I represent, who need my help.”

“And what could be more symbolic than you taking a white wife? A union between two cultures and races. Building a bridge. A loving partnership. Showing that we are all above the conflicts of the past. Creating a Commonwealth of equality and fairness. A Commonwealth where skin color simply doesn’t—”

“All right, all right! I take the point. Dear God, woman.”

“So you’ll change it back? You’ll stop me from being an unperson.” Somehow she managed to keep a straight face. It was difficult, he looked so guilty, which brought out that vulnerable aspect she’d adored. She’d always had fun teasing Rammy.

“I will take it under advisement, certainly,” he said with mock dignity.

“Why, thank you, Senator. You can rely on my vote.”

“Was there a reason you came here other than to taunt me?”

The humor faded from her face. “Yes. I need some serious advice.”

“And you came to me? I’m flattered. Is this serious advice political, or personal? I know it can’t be corporate; I remember Gore’s opinions on my ideology. What was it he used to call me?”

“ ‘A whining pinko illiberal without a clue how the real world works,’ is probably the only one I can repeat in an office as symbolic as this.”

Ramon laughed, and kissed her cheek. She was disturbed by how cold his skin was, the little layer of perspiration on his forehead.

“So you needn’t worry, this is definitely political advice I’m after,” she said as they sat on a long teak bench carved with antelope figures. She felt her stomach churn again, and clenched her throat. There was nothing she could do to stop the shiver running down her body.

“Are you all right?” Ramon asked, his face creased in genuine concern.

“Better shape than you.” She gave him a weak smile. “A lot better.” Her hand went to her mouth as her stomach rebelled again.

Ramon was studying her intently. He leaned in a little closer, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “Dear God, you’re pregnant.”

“Yes.”

“I … That’s … Congratulations.”

“Thanks, Rammy.” She was worried she was going to start crying. Damn hormones.

“You’re really pregnant. He must be quite something. You didn’t even do that for me. Our child was grown in a womb tank.”

There was nothing she could do to stop it. The tears just came pouring out. “He’s dead,” she sobbed. “Really dead, Rammy. And it’s all my fault.”

“Dead?” His arms had gone around her, slipping easily into the comfy old position, her head on his shoulder, cheek pressed to his neck. “Are you talking about that boy at LA Galactic?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“So you’re punishing yourself like this.”

“No. It’s our baby, I want it to be safe. This way I can be sure.”

“I know you,” he said soothingly. “This is the penance you’ve given yourself.”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“He must have been very special.”

“He was. And I was stupid to ever get involved.” She drew back, and sniffed, wiping her hands across her eyes. “It’s all so goddamn complicated.”

“He was a young man with a cause he believed in. Everybody over a century old envies that. We might be able to buy youthful bodies with rejuvenation, but the integrity and intensity of youth, that is only ever a fading memory.”

“You don’t understand. He really was killed by the Starflyer.”

Ramon stiffened slightly, giving her a keen glance. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do. That’s why I’m here. Some of us are convinced that it does exist, that the Guardians are right.”

“Oh, Justine, no. You mustn’t do this. It’s a reaction to the loss, just like the pregnancy. You want to believe in what he believed.”

“It’s not just me, Rammy. A lot of us are of the same opinion; and we’re about to be joined by a very major player.”

“You should talk this through with your father. He’ll soon cut through all the bullshit. It’s what he does.”

“Gore believed before I did.”

“Gore believes this?”

“Yes.”

“Dear God. So this is what you wanted advice about?”

“Of course. Exactly how do I go about introducing the notion to the Senate that some of its own members are traitors to the human species?”

Ramon sat back, a slow amused smile spreading across his face. “Carefully. Very, very carefully. So this is the actual issue surrounding Paula Myo? The fight between you and the Halgarths.”

“Yes.”

“I see. Are you going to share any of the proof with me?”

“A lot of it is circumstantial. You have to be on the receiving end to appreciate it properly.” As she said it, she realized how weak it sounded. “I should have absolute proof in a couple of days. That’s why I’m preparing the groundwork now.”

“They accused Doi of being a Starflyer agent. The President herself.”

“She’s not.” Justine recalled the conversation she’d just had with Bradley Johansson. “That was part of a disinformation campaign to discredit the Guardians.”

He clicked his fingers. “Your interest in revisiting the Sorbonne Wood weekend. That’s a part of this as well.”

“We were being manipulated.”

“Preparing us for war. Yes, I see now. Just as the Guardians claim.”

“You say it with such skepticism.”

“And did you blindly follow your father’s belief?”

“No,” she admitted.

“Then kindly allow me to judge the facts for myself. And so far you have provided me with none.”

“If I do, if I show you proof that cannot be argued with, will you help me in the Senate?”

“Justine. Dearest of all my wives. I hate to see you suffer like this. First the shock of Thompson. Now the guilt of your lover being killed. You were there and think you are responsible.”

“I am responsible.”

“All this leaves you so emotionally vulnerable. In such times you cling to the wildest hope of redemption. People like the Guardians know how to exploit that. Cults have refined their recruitment operations down the centuries until they have become masters of extracting devotion and money from their damaged followers in exchange for their own vision of salvation.”

“Well, thank you, my darling; I would never have worked that out for myself.” She gave him an exasperated glare. “Rammy, I was dodging fortune hunters and investment shysters before your great-grandparents ever met. There is no money to be made from this. It is not a scam. It is not a warped religion. It is the most dangerous threat the human species has ever faced, and the most elusive.”

“I could never resist when you were cross with me.”

“Stop that!”

He pouted.

“Rammy, it doesn’t matter if you think I’ve gone right off the deep end with grief.” Her hand slipped down to her belly. “Given my state, that’s perfectly excusable. The least you could do is humor me. It’ll be good therapy. You do want me to recover, don’t you?”

“You diabolical woman. I can never win with you, can I?”

“Marriage was your victory. The greatest.”

“Arrgh, how I hate you.”

“Rammy, focus, please; if this proof does exist, will you help me?”

“I would have to see it before I even consider answering that question. And, Justine, it would have to be absolute proof. I need to see this Starflyer knocking up the Pope’s illegitimate underage daughter; the full in flagrante TSI recording. Nothing else will do. Even then I’m not guaranteeing anything.”

She grinned back at him. “Is she another tall blonde, then?”

“Evil woman!” He held her gently again. “Now I want you to promise me something.”

“What?”

“If this proof is not forthcoming, you will see someone who can help with the grief.”

“You’re kidding. A shrink? Me?”

His gaze remained steady. “An easy promise, surely? You know you are right, therefore you will never have to do it.”

“I taught you well, didn’t I?”

He gave a modest shrug. “Your word?”

“My word.”

“Thank you.” He bent forward and kissed her on the forehead. “And if you need someone there at the birth …”

“Oh, Rammy.” The tears were threatening to return. “It couldn’t be anyone else.”

Justine had just reached the elevators at the end of the Senate Hall’s long east wing when the alarm went off. She turned around to see doors opening all along the wide corridor, staffers looking around in puzzlement. A bright amber strobe was flashing above the door to Ramon DB’s suite of offices. “No,” she breathed. Shock turned her muscles to ice; she couldn’t move. It’s him! The assassin. He’s here.

“Priority call from Senator Ramon DB,” her e-butler told her.

“Authorized,” she gasped through tightened throat muscles.

“Justine.”

“Rammy! Rammy, what’s wrong?”

“Oh, shit, it hurts.”

“What does? Has he shot you?”

“Shot me? It’s my chest. Dear God. I hit my head when I fell. I can see blood.”

“Your chest?”

“Yes. Mitchan is trying to get me to drink water. Damn fool.”

“Let him help.”

“Not if he starts bringing out defibrillator paddles, I won’t.”

Justine started to run, pushing past the interminable number of people flooding out into the corridor. She was halfway there when three paramedics emerged from the freight elevator and shouted at everyone to get out of the way. An automated crash cart sped after them, followed by two nursebots.

“The emergency team is here, Rammy. They’re coming.”

“Oh, good; finally, some decent drugs.”

“How could you let it get this far? I told you, I warned you to watch your diet. Why don’t you ever listen?”

“Nag nag nag. It’s not so bad. At least I remembered to back up my memorycell this morning.”

The paramedics rushed through the door leading to Ramon’s office suite. Justine followed them in, hurrying through the anterooms where apprehensive junior aides and interns stood transfixed in their doorways, their faces locked in to frightened expressions.

Ramon was on the floor in front of the teak bench they’d just been sitting on. He had caught his head on the arm as he fell. Blood from a bruised gash just below his eye was soaking into the carpet. Mitchan, his chief aide, was kneeling beside him, eyes damp with anxious tears. A glass had been knocked over, water diluting the patch of blood.

One of the paramedics propelled the aide aside. Ramon’s robes were loosened. The paramedics began to apply plastic modules to his skin. Small arms unwound from the nursebots and began to press nozzles and needles into Ramon’s flesh.

Justine stood behind the crash cart, trying her damnedest not to look apprehensive. She could see how difficult it was for him to breathe. Every time his chest rose in shallow judders he winced. Bubbly drool was running down his cheek. Their eyes met.

“Toniea Gall will take over as head of the African caucus,” he wheezed painfully.

“Don’t talk, Senator,” one of the paramedics said. She covered his face with an oxygen mask. He pushed it aside. “Watch out for her,” he said, staring intently at Justine.

The oxygen mask was pressed back insistently. The paramedic held his hands down. “Senator, you’ve had another heart attack.”

“Another!” Justine squawked. She was furious with him, and frightened.

Ramon gave her a sorrowful look above the mask.

“We’re going to sedate you, Senator,” the paramedic said. “You will have to undergo rejuvenation this time. Your heart cannot sustain you any longer. Your doctor told you that.”

Text appeared in Justine’s virtual vision. GALL IS NOT AN ALLY. NOT FOR YOU. SHE WANTS THE PRESIDENCY. SHE WILL NOT INVOLVE HERSELF IN CONTROVERSY, NOT ON THIS SCALE.

“I understand,” she said softly.

I’M SORRY, JUSTINE. I WOULD HAVE HELPED, YOU KNOW THAT. GO TO CRISPIN, BUT BE CAREFUL, HE’S A WILY OLD SWINE.

“Yes. I will, Rammy.”

One of the nursebots slid a needle into his carotid artery. He blinked rapidly.

COME AND VISIT ME WHEN I’M YOUNG AGAIN.

“Every day, I promise.”

Ramon gave his office a last confused glance, and closed his eyes. SEE YOU IN EIGHTEEN MONTHS.

He spent a day and a half infiltrating the arrays of the huge Park Avenue apartment block. By himself he would never have managed it; he had to use several cohorts who were more adept at manipulating human electronic systems. Rich humans took their security very seriously indeed, using the most advanced and sophisticated arrays to guard themselves.

With the false data in place, he arrived by taxi at the block. Two doormen stood outside the wide entrance with its gull-wing canopy, wearing traditional uniforms of long coats with brass buttons, and white gloves tucked into their epaulets. They saluted as he went through the revolving door into the vast marbled art deco lobby. The stern-faced concierge behind the curving reception desk was not so accepting. He had to tell the man his current identity and who he was supposed to be visiting, which was checked against today’s list. With his legitimacy confirmed, the concierge permitted a brief smile before escorting him to one of the elevators.

Once the mirror-inlaid doors closed, he quickly placed his hand on the i-spot and changed the elevator’s instructions. It took him all the way up to the fortieth floor.

The door to Senator Justine Burnelli’s apartment had been the most difficult for the cohorts to infiltrate. Her Grand Family had installed their own systems in the apartment, which were even more secure than those of the block. He stood in front of it, waiting patiently for the sensor to scan him. The door clicked, and swung open.

He wandered through the vast rooms with their museum horde of furniture and art. While he was in the dark dining room with its five-hundred-year-old mahogany table the maidbots began their daily cleaning routine. Dozens of them emerged from their alcoves in the utility room just off the kitchen, and started to vacuum, polish, and sanitize. They ignored him, moving around his feet as he continued his inspection. There were no staff in residence to supervise them; the Senator always brought them in with her from their family’s Rye country mansion. Often she would stay overnight by herself.

When she did return, there would be some bodyguards with her, either the family’s or Senate Security. They would be watching for an external threat. He simply had to wait until they had all settled for the night.

Eventually he decided on the Senator’s own bedroom as the best place to wait for her. He sat on the bed to begin his vigil.

He’d been waiting for over twenty-four hours when the apartment management array received an encrypted order from the Senator to permit access to a technical support team from Senate Security. They arrived two hours later, three of them with a pair of cases each, which were full of additional security equipment. He watched them through the apartment block’s sensors as they parked in the underground garage, then took the service elevator.

As they rose up to the fortieth floor he walked into the kitchen. The refrigerator was built into the wall, a metal cabinet two meters tall with double doors. He opened them and swiftly took all the food out, then removed the shelving, leaning it against one side. The food packets were piled together on the bottom. Even then, there was easily enough room to accommodate him. He activated his force field at its lowest level to maintain his body temperature, and sat on the pile of food, closing the doors behind him.

He heard the team enter the apartment, their cases trundling along behind them.

“Christ, will you look at this place,” one said. “It’s like something old royalty would have.”

“Check out the view.”

“Hell, man, I can’t even afford TSIs of anything like this place.”

“Rich bastards, they’re all the same.”

“Come on, guys, we’re here for a job, okay. Less moral superiority, more work.”

“You sound like one of them.”

“One of their aides, more like. The senators I’ve actually met aren’t too bad.”

“They all make me sick. You know Piallani gets through four girls a week? Hookers with like these freaky reprofiled kinks, she ships them in from phase three space. They’re even down on her schedule as an entertainment expense. Taxpayer foots the bill.”

“You’re kidding.”

“The self-righteous ones are worse. Have you seen the way Danwal treats his staff?”

The team moved off deeper into the apartment, making assessments and working out an installation scheme. It took them seven hours to strengthen the apartment’s security. Additional arrays were aligned with the existing ones, and supplementary sensors wired into the apartment’s net. Software was updated.

He couldn’t use his own active sensors to determine the specific nature of the hardware they set up, but he heard enough to understand the basic system parameters. Anyone who used the elevators would immediately have their data files scrutinized by Senate Security. Birds that flew past outside would be examined. Even guests would be constantly observed as they moved around inside the apartment.

The new scanners were all active models; it was only the metal shell of the refrigerator that was shielding him from them. If he climbed out, the alarm would sound immediately. He couldn’t connect to a cybersphere node to tell his cohorts what had happened. The system would detect the emission, and the new software would route any call through Senate Security’s RI.

All he could do was stay in the refrigerator. He didn’t mind, he was in place and concealed, he had food for several days. The person who used to be Bruce McFoster settled down to wait for his target.

That morning, most of the news shows carried the item about Senator Ramon DB unexpectedly going into rejuvenation. Alic Hogan put Alessandra Baron on one of his desktop screens, keeping the sound low. She had three Washington-based analysts in the studio, talking about the political implications. They were being cagy; with the Senate more or less unified in its response to the Prime threat, social and economic policy had essentially been sidelined. The main speculation was on who would take over leadership of the African caucus. Toniea Gall was clearly the front-runner, although the Mandela Dynasty hadn’t publicly come out in her favor.

Tarlo knocked on the door and came straight in. “Something you might want to hear, Chief.”

“Thanks,” Hogan said. His e-butler muted Alessandra Baron. Ever since Senate Security had placed the observation request, Alic had taken to accessing her when she was on. Why Paula Myo wanted her watched was something he hadn’t yet fathomed. Baron’s show was actually quite excellent, with frontline investigative reporting as well as the standard society gossip, and she clearly had some very high-level political contacts. Her researchers were as tenacious as any police detective when they found the whiff of scandal or financial shenanigans. None of which gave him reason for the observation mission. Despite having the confidence of the Admiral, who had ranted about the request being a deliberate Burnelli-inspired provocation, Alic just couldn’t see that. Paula Myo wasn’t the kind of person who acted maliciously. That was one of the reasons he’d actually kept the observation going properly. Despite all the grubby politics, there might be a result at the end of the day; if so, he wanted the Paris office to share in the credit. If it did turn out to be a red herring, he couldn’t be blamed for allocating the resources.

Tarlo sat in front of the desk, a broad smile on his tanned face. “Got a result from the Shaw-Hemmings warrant. This time we may have a more substantial lead. The money came from transferable DRNG government bonds, which are like million-dollar bills; you can carry them anywhere but you need an authorization code in order to redeem them. They were hand-delivered to the finance company offices on Tolaka. According to their records, the authorization code was then downloaded to their manager’s office.”

“I didn’t know people still used methods like that.”

“Chief, the finance industry has more clandestine ways of moving money around than any black market arms dealer.”

“Why not use a onetime account?”

“They’re current, and we can access them with a warrant. So get this, those DRNG bonds were issued thirty years ago.”

“How cold is that?”

“The Guardians think it’s icy, which is a big mistake. The DRNG treasury is notoriously reluctant to grant law enforcement agencies access to its records. But in today’s climate … You’d have to apply to the treasury direct, which you can do through their finance minister. I thought the Admiral’s office could ask. We might also ask if they sold any other bonds to the same buyer.”

“Okay, I’ll get that sorted.” He glanced at the screen showing Baron. She had got Senator Lee Ki in the studio for an interview, the pair of them looking relaxed and comfy, as if they were out on a date. “How long do you think this treasure hunt is going to be?”

Tarlo gave a small shrug. “To be honest, I can’t remember ever getting past three links in the chain before. Maybe we got lucky with the bonds. Too soon to tell.”

“All right.” Alic had wanted to hear they were on the verge of breaking the case wide open, that the Guardians’ entire financial structure would be exposed, neutering them entirely. Childish, he told himself tetchily. He glanced out at the open office, trying to see the various teams at work. Over half the desks were empty. “How’s Renne behaving?”

“Come on, Chief, you know she’s the best Investigator this office has.”

“All right. I appreciate loyalty.” Alic gave the man a sympathetic smile. “So is there any progress on the Martian case?”

“Sorry, not a thing. Nobody can think what they needed that data for. We gave the whole problem to the technical panel we’d assembled to try and make sense of the equipment we intercepted at Boongate. I mean, the two have got to be connected, right? Maybe the Martian data will help them make sense of the weird force field components.”

“Good idea.”

Tarlo smiled. “Renne suggested it.”

“Okay.” Alic grinned in good-natured defeat. “Get your ass back out there to work. I’ll let you know about the DRNG treasury records by end of play today.”

“Thanks, Chief.”

The way he said “chief” almost made Alic believe he meant it.

The alley was in a run-down area of Paris. Narrow and shabby, no different from a dozen others within a square kilometer. Tall commercial buildings lined either side, inset with barred windows and secure metal rollers across the loading bays. Halfway down it there was a door, smaller than the rest, made from solid planks of walnut, and coated in gray paint, e-shielded on the inside. During the day it looked like it might open into some old shop storeroom, though it was always shut. In fact, it was the entrance to a club. There was no sign outside, nothing to say what it was. If you had to ask, you weren’t trendy enough to get in.

At two-thirty in the morning, the queue of hopefuls stretched halfway along the narrow unsanitary alley. The glamorous, the important, the famous, and the merely rich all shuffled their feet together, bitched about the cold and the indignity, ingested, inhaled, and infused a variety of narcotic substances, peed against the walls, and waited for some small miracle to grant them entrance. They weren’t going to get it. The unremarkable gray door was guarded by two huge bouncers, stripped to the waist so they could show off the stylish bulbous chrome scabs of their metallic muscle boost implants, like retro-futuristic cyborgs.

Paula walked straight up the alley to the front of the queue, eliciting murmurs of amazement and hostility in equal measure. One of the bouncers smiled politely, and lifted the velvet rope for her. “Have a good evening, Ms. Myo,” he said in a thunderstorm whisper.

“Thank you, Petch,” she told him as she slipped past. He was nearly twice her height.

Music so loud it was on the threshold of pain; black walls, floor, and ceiling producing a darkness that made you squint, until the rig above the mastermix DJ flared with blindingly intense holographic pulses; bodies crunched up so tight you could feel other people’s sweat rub off on you as you squeezed past; Sahara heat; drinks priced contemptuously high; a dance floor so crowded that all you could do was wriggle in imitation sex—apart from the five people in the middle who weren’t imitating anything. Nobody looked over twenty-five; boys dressed in chic suits; girls in wisps of designer cloth.

Paula shoved her way aggressively to the bar. Thankfully, she didn’t have to shout herself hoarse for a drink. The barkeeper nodded welcome and immediately mixed her a peach sunset.

She sipped it, and stood on tiptoes to look out over the outlandish and expensive hairstyles. In among all the high fashion, Tarlo’s navy uniform was instantly noticeable. Two minutes’ more shoving and she was at his side.

“Hi!” she screeched.

The tall black girl he was grinding up against gave Paula a serial-killer sneer. It didn’t look right on a face so staggeringly beautiful.

“Boss!” Tarlo grinned in surprised delight.

“Need to talk to you.”

He gave the black girl a dirty kiss, and shouted something directly into her ear. She nodded reluctant agreement, shot Paula a final blood-vendetta glare before wobbling off on high heels.

Together they made their way over to the end of the bar. Paula took another peach sunset; she could almost feel herself dehydrating. It was always hellishly hot in here.

“How are you doing?” Tarlo shouted.

“I’m annoying Admiral Columbia.”

Tarlo raised an iced bottle of Brazilian beer, and put it to his smiling lips.

“Best job in the galaxy.”

“Just about. I need a small favor.”

“You don’t even have to ask, Boss, you know that.”

“There’s an old case I want you to look into for me. You remember the Dudley Bose burglary? It was before the Second Chance flight.”

“Vaguely.”

“We checked it out at the time and it seemed to be nothing. Now I’m not so sure. There was a charity involved, Cox Educational, which might be a front for illegal money laundering. I think it was used by a politically connected crime syndicate.”

“Are you sure?”

“Three of its trustees vanished when we started investigating. Could you review the accounts on file in the Paris office for me?”

“What am I looking for?”

“Any form of discrepancy. I have an outside finance expert going over their current files, but I need to know how far back this goes. There might have been some tampering with official records. If that’s right, then the ones on file in Paris will be our only evidence.”

“Okay. I’ll get on it tomorrow for you.”

“Thanks.”

“What put you on to this after so long?”

“I had a tip-off from an informant; it’s also why we’re focusing on Baron.”

“She’s involved?”

“My informer claims she was part of the cover-up. We’re not sure. Not yet. And, Tarlo, keep this from Hogan and the rest of them. Columbia has tried to block me once on this already; I need to get the proof without interference.”

“Hogan hasn’t got a clue what goes on in the office. Don’t worry, you can rely on me.”

She gave him a sisterly peck on the cheek. “Thanks. I think you’d better get back to your friend now. That way I might manage to survive until morning.”

Paula watched him slither back into the sweaty embrace of the crowd where the girl was waiting with edgy impatience. Inside she felt a knot of tension slacken off. He seemed to have swallowed the old favor routine. Either that or he was a superb actor. It wouldn’t be long now before she knew for certain.

Paula had used just about every kind of transport system the human race had ever invented, but the travel pods in the High Angel always unnerved her. The way they turned transparent from the inside, the high speed, the perfectly maintained gravity field, all that combined into an insidious roller coaster disorientation. Nowadays she knew to keep eyes firmly closed from the moment she got in until a quiet ping announced they’d reached her destination.

Two armored navy security guards were standing outside the pod as she climbed out. They saluted sharply. “The Admiral’s expecting you, Investigator,” one said.

Paula nodded and looked up. She was standing at the base of the Pentagon II. Overhead the dome was completely opaque, diffused with a creamy light. The High Angel was in major conjunction above Icalanise, with Babuyan Atoll pointing directly at the local star. She couldn’t see anything outside at all.

The security guards escorted her into the elevator. Anna was waiting outside when it arrived on the top floor. “Good to see you again,” she said.

“Thanks. How’s married life?”

“Busy.” She held her hand out showing off her rings.

“Lovely,” Paula conceded.

“He’s waiting for you. Oscar’s in there with him.”

Paula hadn’t expected that. “Okay.”

With the dome’s uniform white light outside, it was difficult to tell if the windows in Wilson’s office were clear or not. Given this was supposed to be an ultra-secure meeting, she supposed they were sealed. It wasn’t something she asked; it was fairly obvious she’d walked right into the middle of an argument.

Wilson was standing behind his desk, his long features drawn tight by antagonism. Oscar stood opposite, hands on hips, staring him down.

“Problem?” Paula asked.

“A huge one, actually,” Oscar said. The anger fled from him, and he slumped back into the nearest chair. “Fucking hell!”

“What’s going on?” Paula asked.

“I asked you here because we had proof of some very serious treachery on the Second Chance flight,” Wilson said. He still looked furious, fingers rapping on the desktop. “I needed your advice on the Guardians. Jesus, if they’re right …”

“Had proof?” Paula asked. She didn’t like the way Wilson had made the emphasis.

“Let me show you,” Oscar said.

A wide section of the office wall began to project the shuttle flight between the starship and the Watchtower. Oscar gave a commentary as the little craft left its hangar bay, explaining the dish deployment, where it was pointing. Paula watched it all in fascination. It really was concrete evidence, rather than circumstantial, that someone was actively working against the interest of the human race. One of the Starflyer’s agents had to have been on board the Second Chance.

“Thank you,” she said with quiet sincerity. “This is exactly what I needed.” The emotional reaction to the revelation was stronger than she’d expected; it was almost like being mildly inebriated.

“No it’s not,” Wilson said curtly. “And that’s the fucking problem. This is a recording Oscar made from our main records.”

“I reviewed the Second Chance data while I was on board Defender,” Oscar explained. “Someone from the Guardians contacted me and said enough to raise some doubts in my mind. I started going through the old records and found this.”

“You know a Guardian?” Paula asked.

Oscar shot Wilson a guarded look. The Admiral stared ahead, unresponsive.

“They claimed they represented the Guardians,” Oscar said. “I mean, they don’t exactly carry club membership badges. In truth, I’ve no way of knowing.”

“I see. Go on.”

“The point the Admiral is making is that this”—Oscar waved at the projected image that had frozen to show the dish—“is an unofficial copy of the navy secure records.”

“So?” Paula asked.

“Let me play you the official record of the same sensor,” Wilson said. The frozen image flickered and vanished. Then the recording began again, showing the Second Chance superstructure rising into view as the shuttle left its hangar. Reaction control thrusters squirted sulphur vapor, rotating the craft. It began to head out toward the Watchtower, leaving the giant starship behind. The image froze.

“Oh, hell,” Paula said.

“We sat in here two days ago watching this very same goddamn official recording,” Oscar said. “It showed the dish deploying exactly as it does in my copy. When we ran through it today—” His fist came down hard on the arm of his chair. The main communications dish on the Second Chance was still folded down in its recess.

Paula looked from one man to the other. “Who else knew?”

Wilson cleared his throat awkwardly. “Just the two of us.”

“Oscar, did you tell the Guardians what you’d found?” she asked.

“No. There’s been no contact since I returned from my scout mission.”

“Is there an access log for official navy records?”

“Yes,” Wilson said warily. “That was the first thing we checked, of course. Nobody has accessed this recording since we did two days ago. But then …”

“There’s no log entry of Oscar copying the files,” Paula presumed.

Oscar’s head dropped into his hands. “I’d been contacted by the Guardians. The Guardians! And I was making illegitimate copies of sensitive navy data right in the middle of Pentagon II, for Christ sake.”

“You erased the access log.”

“Yeah. With my code authority it’s not difficult. I know a few program fixes.”

“Don’t we all,” she admitted. “I could probably do a better job than you. But at least it does prove that someone can get in and out of your secure records without a trace.”

“What somebody?” Wilson challenged. “There’s just the two of us.”

“Three,” Paula corrected. “The High Angel sees everything that occurs within itself.” She looked up at the indistinct white ceiling, arching an eyebrow. “Care to comment?”

The High Angel’s colorful icon appeared in her virtual vision. “Good morning, Paula,” it said.

Wilson flinched. He’d obviously forgotten just how pervasive the alien starship’s attention was. Oscar’s face was red with guilt.

“Do you know who altered the official recording?” Paula asked.

“I do not. I see within myself, but your electronic systems are independent and heavily encrypted, especially the navy network. I have no way of knowing who accessed the official recordings.”

“Did you see the official recording which Oscar and the Admiral played in here two days ago?”

“I saw the images produced by your holographic projector. I cannot vouch where they originated from inside your network.”

A very legalistic answer, Paula thought, but the giant alien starship was correct. It couldn’t prove the origin of the images. “Thank you.”

“So what does that tell us?” Oscar asked petulantly. “We’re royally screwed.”

Paula took a moment to compose her thoughts. “First option, and the simplest: that this office is not totally secure, and a Starflyer agent found out about your discovery. The records were subsequently altered to remove the dish deployment. Second option: one of you two gentlemen is a Starflyer agent, and altered the official recording. That option effectively means you, Admiral.”

“Now just a goddamn minute—”

“Third option,” she said forcefully. “That both of you have conspired to produce a bogus recording to discredit myself and anyone else opposing the Starflyer.”

“If that’s true, why are we telling you that what we saw got altered on the official recording?” Oscar said.

Paula nodded reasonably. “Good point. I listed them in order of probability.”

“Well, I’ve got another one for you,” Oscar said. “That the Primes, the Starflyer if it exists, and the High Angel are all conspiring against the human race.”

“Yes,” Paula said. “If that’s so, then we’re in more trouble than I thought. A lot more trouble.”

They all paused, waiting to see if the High Angel would refute the claim. It was silent.

“It’s got to be the first one,” Oscar said. “We know the Starflyer infiltrated the navy right from the start. Son of a bitch, any of us could be its agent.”

“But we’re not,” Paula said. “Don’t let paranoia take over. Look at it this way, you know you’re not a Starflyer agent.”

“How does that help?”

“It’s a start. You have to work on the assumption that not everything you do can be sabotaged. Plan your actions very carefully.”

“Right, so we repair the official recording.” Oscar gave Wilson a defiant glance.

“I can’t permit that,” the Admiral said. “It compromises the whole allegation.”

“He’s right,” Paula said.

“But we have to,” Oscar said. “It’s the only proof we’ve got. My copy is the genuine record. You can’t let the Starflyer escape on some smartass lawyer technicality. For fuck’s sake, this is our future as a species we’re talking about.”

“You know for certain that the copy is real,” Paula said. “So does the Admiral because he saw the official recording before it was doctored. I, however, do not know for certain. I suspect it might be real, but that isn’t good enough.”

“I don’t believe this! I have genuine evidence that some bastard traitor was on board the Second Chance, and I can’t use it? The original recording was altered.” He gave Wilson a pleading glance. “You know that all we’d be doing is repairing the Starflyer’s sabotage.”

“If the provenance is faked, the evidence is worthless,” Paula said.

“Son of a bitch, you can’t be serious. We can blow the Starflyer out of space with this. Everyone would know it exists.”

“I would not accept a substitute recording, no matter how noble your intentions,” Paula said. “I would have to inform any authority you went to that it was not genuine.”

“Both of you!” Oscar growled sullenly.

It wasn’t hard for Paula to work out what he was thinking. Option five: he was the only innocent one.

“The Starflyer hasn’t been entirely successful in this venture,” Paula said.

“It might have avoided exposure, but we ourselves now have further evidence it is real.”

“What fucking use is that?” Oscar demanded. “You just said we can’t use it.”

“Not publicly, no.”

“Further evidence?” Wilson asked sharply. “You knew already?”

“I strongly suspected, and have done for some time now. I’ve amassed a great deal of circumstantial evidence; but again the problem is that it’s not sufficient to go to court with.”

“Is that why you wanted me to pursue the Mars case?”

“Yes, Admiral.” She gave Oscar a steady look. “It could have got me closer to them. I still don’t have any access route to the Guardians. If I did, and we shared information, they might be able to help me trace the Starflyer.”

“When they get in contact next I’ll tell them,” Oscar said in defeat.

“They probably won’t want to talk to me,” she told him. “But try and persuade them anyway. Try very hard. It is extremely important that we work together on this.”

“Sure thing.”

“What the hell do I do about the navy in the meantime?” Wilson asked.

“We’re completely compromised.”

“I don’t think there’s much that can be done. Obviously you’ll have to increase security, but there’s no way the Starflyer can prevent the major actions you’re undertaking. There’s too much political, fiscal, and physical inertia behind the navy.”

“But it can tell the Primes everything. We’ve already seen it can communicate with them.”

“Even if the Primes knew the exact time the navy ships are due to arrive at Hell’s Gateway, would it make any difference? Really? They know we will attack them there at some time. Their defenses will be as strong as they can conceivably make them. They’ve seen our weapons technology in action. Nothing has changed.”

“The strength is in the details,” Wilson said. “If they know exactly what we can do, they’ll be able to counter it.”

“They know what we’re doing on the Lost23, yet that insurgency campaign appears to be remarkably successful.”

“Yeah, maybe, but this is one weapon type we’re using. Neutralize that and we’re screwed.”

“You cannot change the attack’s schedule by much, that much is obvious. What you must do now is conduct the rest of the conflict appropriately. Information must be compartmentalized. Internal security procedures need to be strengthened, starting with your network and arrays. Work on the assumption that all information will ultimately leak to the Primes. In the meantime, I will try and identify the traitors.”

“Do you think Columbia is working for the Starflyer?” Wilson asked.

“I’m not sure yet. His actions are certainly detrimental to me personally, but that doesn’t make him guilty of anything other than being a politician.”

Wilson pushed back his hair. “Damnit, I still can’t believe anyone would betray their own species.”

“From what I understand, such an action is not voluntary. The Starflyer exercises some kind of mental control over its agents. I don’t understand the nature of it yet. I am currently tracking down several such people. When they are in custody, we may be able to determine the methodology.”

“You already know the identity of Starflyer agents?” Wilson asked.

“I have suspects, yes.”

“Are they connected with the navy?”

Paula considered the question carefully. She had arrived prepared to share a great deal of information, but the alteration of secure navy records was a nasty surprise. There was no way of telling how trustworthy Wilson and Oscar actually were. Until she was certain, she had to regard option three as highly probable, which meant limiting the information she made available. “I have reason to believe that a legal firm and a bank in New York have been acting as a financial distribution center for the Starflyer. The specialists I’ve had examining their accounts have come up with an interesting connection. A Mr. Seaton, who is one of the lawyers we’re trying to locate, sat as a nonexecutive director on the board of Bayfoss Engineering.”

“They manufacture sensor satellites,” Oscar said quickly. “We used their ground survey models in the CST exploration division to map new planets.”

“They also manufactured the Armstrong-class satellites which the Second Chance carried,” Paula said. “That means the actual hardware integrated into the satellites must be considered suspect.”

“Oh, shit,” Wilson whispered. He and Oscar swapped a horrified look.

“How many did we lose in the Dark Fortress?”

“Nine satellites total,” Oscar said. “Four of them were Armstrong-class.”

“And just after that, the barrier came down.”

“Did the Starflyer know how to switch it off?”

“That depends,” Paula said. “If you take the Guardians’ assumption that this whole war was deliberately engineered by the Starflyer, then it is highly likely that one or more of those satellites contained a device capable of shutting down the barrier.”

“And the traitor on board triggered the damn thing while we were there,” Oscar said. He closed his eyes as if he were in pain. “So we did switch off the barrier and let them out? Oh, God.”

“We, as in humans, did not,” Paula said. “We were, however, manipulated to produce the result it required.”

“How did it know?” Wilson asked in confusion. “If it planned all this out decades ago, it must have known the Primes were inside the barrier, and known how to shut that barrier down. How?”

“That’s certainly something I intend to ask it when I finally catch up with it,” Paula said. “But for now I suggest you concentrate on this information as an exercise in damage limitation. I believe Bayfoss is still supplying the navy with equipment? Their shareholder report certainly claims they’re doing well on military sales.”

“Yes,” Wilson said. “They’re a specialist astroengineering company; we use them extensively.”

“Is it for anything critical?”

He nodded slowly. “Yes, they have contracts to supply several highly classified projects.”

“Perhaps you’d better take a close look at the components they’re delivering.”

Ozzie woke up as slim beams of bright sunlight slid across his face. Their side of Island Two was rotating back to face the sun again after nine hours cloaked within its own umbra. Here in the gas halo, “night” wasn’t anything like as dark as it would be on a planet, but it did give them a reasonable break from the relentless glare. He checked his watch; he really had been asleep for nine hours. It was taking his body a long time to recuperate from those days spent in freefall.

He unzipped his sleeping bag and stretched lazily. A long shiver ran down his body; all he wore in the bag were shorts and his last decent T-shirt. They were enough while he was sealed up, but the air temperature here was that of early autumn. His guess was that Island Two was currently in some convection current that was cycling back from the outward section of the gas halo to the warmth of the inner edge. He scrambled around for his patched and worn cord pants, then pulled on his checked shirt, giving it a dismayed look as more stitches popped along the sleeve. The old dark gray woolen fleece prevented the chill air from getting to his chest.

Ordinarily a cool morning outdoors would be quite invigorating. The time he’d spent trekking and camping across worlds in the Commonwealth added up to over a century now. But he was mistrustful of the reef and its eternal orbit through the gas halo; and all the cold did nowadays was trigger memories of the Ice Citadel planet.

His sleeping bag was in one section of the small shelter they’d rigged up from the broken segments of the poor old Pathfinder. Wood from the decking and flotation bundles had been adapted into low walls; the tatty old sail stretched across it formed the roof. Bunches of dried leaves from local trees had been stuffed into the bigger holes, helping to maintain a reasonable screen, although the sunbeams cut through in hundreds of places. They hadn’t built it to provide protection from the elements; it was just to give them all some privacy. After the extremely close confines of clinging to the Pathfinder, a little private space of your own worked wonders for morale.

He pulled on his boots, which although scuffed were still in pretty good shape. Sadly, the same couldn’t be said for his socks; he really needed a good darning session. His packet of needle and thread had miraculously stayed with him. He’d found it again the other day when he went through his rucksack. It was times like that when you began to appreciate what true luxury really was.

Ready to face a brand-new day, he pushed the crude door curtain aside. Orion had already rekindled the fire from yesterday’s embers. Their battered metal mugs were balanced on a slatelike shard of polyp above the flames, heating some water.

“Five teacubes left,” Orion said. “Two chocolate. Which do you want?”

“Oh, what the hell, let’s live a little, shall we? I’ll take the chocolate.”

The boy grinned. “Me, too.”

Ozzie settled on one of the rounded ebony and maroon polyp protrusions they used as chairs. He winced as he straightened his leg.

“How’s the knee?” Orion asked.

“Better. I need to do some exercises, loosen it up. It’s stiff after yesterday.” They’d walked all the way to the tip of the reef, where the trees ended abruptly and the bare oyster-gray polyp tapered away into a single long spire. They’d edged out cautiously onto the long triangular segment, feeling uncomfortably exposed. Gravity reduced proportionally the farther they went. Ozzie estimated it would finish altogether about five hundred meters past the end of the forest. They turned around and scooted back to the enclosure of the trees.

The spire was a landing point, Ozzie decided, the aerial equivalent of a jetty. Should any of the flying Silfen choose to visit, they would simply glide down onto the far end of the spire and walk in long bounds toward the main part of the reef, their weight increasing as they went.

Other than that, gravity on Island Two was constant. On the third day after the Pathfinder had reached the reef they’d traveled to the other side, which was a simple duplicate of theirs. The rim of the reef was a narrow curving cliff covered in small bushes and clumps of tall bamboolike grasses. Gravity warped alarmingly as they started to traverse the cliff, making it seem as if they were vertical during the whole transition.

Halfway around, Ozzie had looked back to see he was now standing at right angles to where he’d been a hundred meters before. Coming to terms with that was even more disconcerting than orienting himself in freefall.

While Orion dropped the chocolate cubes into their mugs, Ozzie started peeling one of the big bluish gray fruits they’d picked from the jungle. The pulp inside had a coarse texture, tasting like a cinnamon-flavored apple. It was one of eight edible fruits they’d discovered so far. Just like every other environment the Silfen paths led to, the reef was quite capable of supporting life.

Tochee emerged from the jungle, its manipulator flesh coiled around various containers it had filled with water. A small stream ran across the rumpled polyp ground fifty meters from their shelter, its water so clean they barely needed to use the filter.

“Good morning to you, friend Ozzie,” it said through the handheld array.

“Morning.” Ozzie took a drink of the chocolate.

“I have detected no electrical power circuit activity with my equipment.” The big alien held up a couple of sensors it had brought with it. “The machinery must be very deep inside the reef.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Even after all this time spent together, Tochee hadn’t quite grasped the fact that Ozzie liked a bit of peace and quiet at breakfast.

“Where did you go?” Orion asked as Ozzie munched stoically on his fruit.

“Five kilometers in that direction.” Tochee formed a tentacle out of its manipulator flesh, and pointed.

“I think the middle is that way.” Orion pointed almost at right angles to Tochee’s tentacle.

“Are you sure?”

“I dunno. Where is it, Ozzie?”

Ozzie jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “There, nine kilometers.”

“I apologize,” Tochee said. “My instruments do not possess a navigation function like yours.”

“Did you see anything interesting?” Orion asked.

“Many trees. Some small flying creatures. No large or sentient life.”

“Too bad.” The boy cut a big slice out of a purplish fruit with his penknife, and bit into it eagerly. Juice dribbled down his chin, getting caught in his wispy beard. “Were there any caves?”

“I did not see any.”

“There’s got to be a way in to the core somewhere. I wonder if it’s right on the tip of the spires. There can’t be any gravity along the axis, that’s where it all balances out, Ozzie said so. I bet that’s just one long tunnel the whole length of this thing.”

“Logic would dictate the shortest distance. An access passage to the core would surely begin on the surface at the middle.”

“Yeah. I bet there’s a whole load of caves and stuff. It’ll be where the reef’s inhabitants live, like the Morlocks.”

Ozzie took another drink of chocolate, not making eye contact. He was already regretting telling that story.

“Do you still think something lives here, friend Orion?” Tochee asked.

“What’s the point of it otherwise?”

“I have seen no sign of any large creature.”

“No, ’cause they’re underground.”

Ozzie finished his chocolate and retied his hair with a small band of leather so that it didn’t flop down over his eyes. “They are not underground,” he said. “You do not build islands in something like the gas halo, and then populate them with troglodyte species. Nothing lives here.”

“What’s a trogodite?” Orion asked.

“Someone who lives underground.”

“Excuse me, friend Ozzie,” Tochee said. “But this whole gas halo is lacking in logic. We might yet find some life belowground. Why else would you build islands in the sky?”

“Carbon sinks,” Ozzie said. “It’s all a question of scale, which is admittedly difficult to get your head around. Even I’m having serious trouble with this when I look up and see sky that goes on forever. But we know that there is a lot of animal life flapping around inside the gas halo. As it’s a standard oxygen-nitrogen mix it’s pretty safe to say they all breathe oxygen, and exhale carbon dioxide, or some other waste product. Now I’m sure it would take billions of years for all those animals to poison something as gigantic as the gas halo, but it will happen unless the opposite process is active. You can either do it artificially, with machines; or the green way, with plants. And that’s what this reef is, a part of the ecosystem. It probably doubles as a food garden and watering hole as well. The air-desert equivalent of an oasis.”

“You said there was machinery inside it,” Orion said, his tone accusing.

“There is some kind of gravity generator, certainly, man, and that probably has a steering function; I’m pretty sure it was put on a collision course with us. The rest of it is all biological.”

“What’s the point if they can clean the air with machines?”

“I suspect they built all of this just for the hell of it, man, the enjoyment of living in something so utterly fantastic. I know I would if I could. I already did something like this on a minuscule scale back home.”

“Did you?”

“Very small scale, yeah.”

“What?”

“It’s an artificial environment; nothing special, not important. Look, the reason I’m interested in trying to locate the gravity generator in this reef is because I might figure out how to use it to steer us somewhere.” He held a hand up to stall both of them. “And no, guys, I don’t know where yet, but a degree of control would be useful at this moment in time, okay? We really are out of all other options.”

“You said that back on the water island.” Orion’s grin was pure disrespect.

“Shows you how little I know. Come on, Tochee’s probably right about the inspection hatch being close to the center. Let’s go see if we can find it.”

The intricacy of the reef’s jungle fascinated Ozzie; it was a work of art. There was a near-uniform gap between the ground and the first level of branches of about four meters. Just right for a human or a Silfen to walk comfortably in the low gravity without hitting their head on branches. In fact, if you happened to push off too hard the lacework of branches and twigs was dense enough for a simple slap of the hand to help flatten out the arc of your glide-walk. An overhead safety net, basically. Ozzie was convinced that was deliberate. So if the trees weren’t pruned, and he’d seen nothing to indicate they were, they must have been configured at a genetic level to grow like that. Even for a society with the resources to build the gas halo, that was a lot of work.

There was plenty of variety, too, ranging from trees that could have come direct from the forest of any H-congruous world, to the bizarre purple chimneylike tubes, as well as a host of alien species like the flexible globular lattice that Orion had landed in. Ozzie half expected to see a ma-hon growing amid the profusion of exotica.

Covered by the thin layer of loam was an equal diversity of polyp strata, dull ash-gray bands interlocked with stone-brown bulbs and creamy intestinal clusters, knobbly gentian ropes and open-ended maroon cones with puddles of dank water lying at their base. Blue-speckled hazel protrusions in the shape of button mushrooms were common, although they were all over two meters in diameter.

Johansson had been right to call these creations reefs, Ozzie thought. The trees, as they swiftly realized, lived in perfect symbiosis with the polyp. There was no deep layer of soil to support the roots; instead they were supplied with water and nutrients by the coral itself. In return it must slowly absorb the loam formed by their fallen, rotted leaves to regenerate itself.

There were glades, wide patches where no trees grew, filled with bright sunlight. Here the thin sandy soil sprouted a few tufts of grass, or straggly plants giving a curious impression of lifelessness amid the luxuriant growth of the jungle. Each time they came across such a feature they stayed close to the fringe of trees, as if they’d grown afraid of the empty sky.

Ozzie was pretty sure he knew where such uncertainty rose from. Anything could exist in the gas halo, descending on them without warning out of that infinite blue expanse.

“Do you think there are paths here?” Orion asked. “You said Johansson walked back to the Commonwealth from a reef.”

“There could be,” Ozzie admitted. Indeed he was carrying his rucksack in case they did wander onto the start of a path. He’d insisted on the boy and Tochee carrying their essentials as well. They had so little equipment and supplies left they simply couldn’t afford to lose any more. Deep down, he was hoping they really would start the long walk off the reef midway through one of these expeditions. That yearning was a direct reaction to his circumstances. All he was focusing on these days was simple survival. He’d been traveling for so long now he had grown terribly weary of it. The starship had surely flown to the Dyson Pair and returned by now. It was a depressing thought that the answer would be waiting for him when he returned home, a brief historical note within the unisphere.

When he did catch himself indulging in such wistful speculation he grew angry. After enduring so much he deserved to find the adult Silfen community.

“I know when we’re on a path these days,” Orion said. “I can feel it.”

“I believe I may share that awareness,” Tochee said. “There is no logic to the knowledge, which is difficult for me, but I sometimes find an inner certainty.”

Ozzie, who had possessed that particular trait for some time, kept quiet. The really good thing about getting home would be dropping Orion and Tochee off in a decent hotel and getting the hell away from their constant inane chatter.

The handheld array reported they were drawing near to the geometrical center of the reef; it was hard to define the exact point outside of an area a couple of hundred meters in diameter, although they were certainly halfway between the tips of both end spires. A good visual clue was in the size of the trees, which were getting a lot taller. Why, though? Is the center the oldest part? That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Nonetheless, their trunks were massive here, several meters across, leaving the ground directly beneath them arid and dusty. The surrounding polyp had cracked, with long dead flakes lifting up like jagged teeth around the bark. Overhead, the ceiling of branches and leaves was so dense that the light had reduced to a pale uniform gloaming.

“It’s lighter up ahead,” Orion said. A glare of sunlight was filtering past the trunks. They walked toward it, squinting after so long in the gloomy silence of the great trees.

The light came from a clearing over a kilometer wide. For once there was a blanket of greenery covering the ground, a plant as tenacious as ground eldar but with slim ankle-high jade-green leaves that rustled like rice paper. A fence of the purple polyp tubes formed a neat perimeter, towering above the thick trees, each one curving around high above them so their ends were aligned horizontally out across the reef.

“They’re chimneys!” Orion declared. White vapor was oozing out of each one, twirling away above the treetops. Ozzie recalled the odd riverlike ribbons of cloud they’d seen on their approach.

Orion immediately dropped down and pressed his ear to the ground.

“Friend Orion, what are you doing?” Tochee asked.

“Listening for the machines. There must be factories in the caves down there.”

“I do not detect any electrical or magnetic activity,” Tochee said.

“Calm down, man,” Ozzie said. “Think about this: Factories to make what?”

Orion gave him a puzzled look, then shrugged. “Dunno.”

“Okay, then. Let’s not jump to conclusions.”

“There is something in the middle of the clearing,” Tochee said.

Ozzie used his inserts to zoom in. A squat black pillar stood by itself in the middle of the rustling sea of leaves. “Now that’s more like it.”

Orion got there first, leaping on ahead, each giant step sending him gliding three or four meters through the air. Ozzie took more cautious steps, keeping a wary eye out on the sky above, while Tochee slithered along at a modest speed.

The pillar was three meters tall, standing on a broad patch of bluish polyp devoid of any soil or plants A ring of symbols had been engraved halfway up, made from long thin strokes curving at all angles, with several orbital dots. All the grooves and indentations had been filled with a clear crystal. Ozzie scanned them with the handheld array, and whistled at the result. “Diamond. That’s one mother of an expensive anticorrosion application.”

“What kind of runes are they?” Orion asked. The symbols bore a slight similarity to ideograms, but not in any human language. “Is it like a signpost for paths?”

“I don’t have any reference,” Ozzie said. “How about you, Tochee?”

“I regret not.”

Ozzie began to scan the ground, which was solid enough. None of his sensors could detect any kind of cavity beneath the pillar. Nor was there any electrical activity, no circuits buried just below the surface. He gave the pillar an aggravated look as an excited Orion hurried around it, the boy’s eager fingers tracing the lines on all the symbols. Then Ozzie looked back across the open expanse of the glade, an unwelcome conclusion dawning in his mind.

“Shit!” Ozzie spat brutally. “Shit shit shit.” He aimed a kick at the base of the pillar. It hurt his toe, so he kicked it again, harder. “Ouch!” Kick with the other foot. “I do not fucking believe this, man.” All the frustration, all the rage that had been building inside him, was rushing out; vented on this one simple artifact. He hated it for what it was, everything it represented.

“What’s wrong, Ozzie?” Orion asked quietly. The boy was giving him an apprehensive glance.

“What’s fucking wrong? I’ll goddamn tell you what’s wrong.” He kicked the pillar again, not quite so hard this time. “I have spent months in the wilderness, eating crappy fruit when all I wanted was a decent steak and fries; actually, I don’t just want it, I dream of it. I’m walking around in rags like something out of the stone age. I haven’t had sex in, like, forever. I’ve been sober so long now my liver is feeling healthy. I’ve been flushed off an ocean in the biggest cosmic joke there ever was. But I put up with it, all this crap, because I know you—yes YOU—are watching and guiding me along, and manipulating the paths so that in the end we’ll meet up. But, oh no, you’ve got to have one more go at making me feel humble, one more time making me the butt of your stinking lame-ass, so-called humor.” He thrust a finger out toward the pillar. “I do not think this is funny! You got that? Are we clear on the meaning of NO, here?”

Orion gave the clearing a timid look.

“Friend Ozzie, who are you talking about? I can see no one else here but us.”

“It’s watching. Aren’t you?”

“Who?” Orion pleaded.

“The adult community. The real Silfen.”

“Are they?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Orion turned back to the pillar. “So what is this?”

Ozzie sent a long breath rattling out through clenched teeth as he tried to calm down. It was hard. If he didn’t let his anger burn, he knew he’d wind up curled up in a ball weeping in sheer frustration. “Nothing. The most stupid insignificant piece of nothing on the whole goddamn reef. I used to respect the dude who came up with the design for the gas halo, I mean it is like impressive. Now, I think they’re the most anally retentive morons in the whole galaxy. You want to know what this is? Why it’s so completely visible, standing here all by itself, with the sunlight shining on it like it’s some kind of celebrity? It’s the reef’s goddamn serial number, man.”

MorningLightMountain detected the approaching ships while they were still fifteen light-years distant. Twenty of them were approaching the staging post star at four light-years per hour, the fastest human ships it had observed so far. That was to be expected. They had no alternative but to send their best weapons against the staging post.

Part of its main thought routines noted that every time some part of itself encountered human starships, they always flew faster than the previous time. The rate at which humans developed and advanced their technology base was atypical of their society as a whole, which appeared so disorganized, with numerous instances of leadership class and administration class corruption. Study of the mined data and human personality animations it had enacted showed that certain small clusters of individuals were capable of high-level organization within specialized fields. During the frequent outbreak of wars while they were still confined to their original planet, the “weapon scientist” groups were always deferred to by the leadership class, and given disproportional resources to complete their tasks.

It decided the leadership class must have reverted to its old behavior pattern and allowed the weapon scientist class increased access to resources. That development would have to be watched carefully; humans with their wild imagination might be capable of producing very dangerous hazards at a strategic level rather than the tactical level that they had engaged at so far. Fortunately, MorningLightMountain still had weapons capable of devastating entire star systems, which it had so far held in reserve. With preparations for the second incursion almost complete, it was now ready to use them against Commonwealth star systems. This time there would be very little resistance from the humans. The radiation would kill them all off, while leaving their industry and buildings intact.

MorningLightMountain refined and analyzed its sensor data, learning what it could of the distortions generated by each ship, the nature of their energy manipulation process. It began to prepare its defenses, halting the flow of materiel and ships to the new twenty-three worlds. Seven hundred seventy-two wormhole generators on the three remaining original asteroids orbiting the interstellar wormhole began to adjust their configuration; as did the five hundred twenty generators so far completed on the four new asteroids it had established. Force fields were strengthened around all the settlements containing immotile groupings. Weapons installations were brought up to full readiness. Attack ships moved to their departure locations.

The human starships began to slow. They came to a halt twenty-five AUs distant from the interstellar wormhole, and emerged into real space. MorningLightMountain immediately opened twenty wormholes around each starship. Six hundred missiles were launched through each one, followed by forty ships. It then modified the wormholes again to try to prevent the starships from escaping within their own wormhole, a technique perfected during the first stage of its expansion into Commonwealth space.

As soon as the human starships powered down their faster than light drive systems, they became immensely difficult to detect. Missiles were unable to lock on to anything. The sensors on all MorningLightMountain’s ships struggled to pick up any radiation emission; radar was completely ineffectual. Only the wormholes themselves were able to provide some guidance, their distortion waves revealing faint echo traces, though even those were elusive, never giving the same return pattern twice. The entire assault floundered.

Then a new distortion point appeared. Another. Five more. Within twenty seconds, three hundred small human vehicles were approaching the interstellar wormhole at four light-years per hour. As MorningLightMountain had predicted, the humans were using the same attack process they had used so effectively above Anshun.

Thousands of immotile group clusters began modifying the energy structure of the asteroid-based wormholes, aligning their openings on the faster than light missiles, interfering with their own exotic energy structure. Erratic bursts of radiation erupted along the missiles flight path as the conflicting distortions clashed, their overlap leaking back into spacetime.

The great deflection operation succeeded, diverting and disturbing the flight of the missiles, twisting them away from the gigantic interstellar wormhole and its massive supplementary assembly of asteroids, equipment, and installations. As the interference grew stronger, human missiles were torn from their superluminal flight millions of kilometers away from their target, traveling at close to ninety percent lightspeed. It was a velocity that gave even the tenuous solar wind particles a lethal kinetic impact. Furious spheres of plasma spewed out around every emergence point, far brighter than the local star.

A second volley of a hundred superluminal missiles raced in toward the interstellar wormhole. This time MorningLightMountain was more successful in locating their origin coordinates. Its own missiles were redirected. Thousands of fusion explosions saturated space where it suspected the human starships to be lurking. There were dark eddies within the tides of elementary particles. Sensors probed them, seeking the cause.

Three human missiles managed to get close to the interstellar wormhole before MorningLightMountain’s interference forced them out into spacetime. They instantly erupted into spears of relativistic plasma spitting hard radiation that burned out any sensor aligned onto it. A patch of solar wind over a million kilometers wide glowed a faint purple as it was energized. Several ships exploded as they were overwhelmed by the searing tide. Force fields protecting sections of the asteroids strained under the effort of withstanding the colossal energy input. Dozens of localized breakthroughs occurred, allowing shafts of X and gamma rays to slash across the equipment and machinery underneath. Four wormhole generators were immediately vaporized. Thousands of immotiles were irradiated, dying almost at once. Eight group clusters were lost. The interstellar wormhole remained unaffected, its force field holding against the electromagnetic blizzard. Slowly, the purple nebula darkened down to nothing.

Out on the edge of the star system, MorningLightMountain sent hundreds of ships racing in toward the little betraying knots within the nuclear plasma it had unleashed, firing their beam weapons and launching salvo after salvo of high-velocity missiles. The human starships retreated into their self-generated wormholes. MorningLightMountain managed to disrupt three of them, leaving them exposed to the full vehemence of its attacking ships. Their force fields were exceptionally strong, but not even those could withstand the intense assault it directed at them.

Three new explosions blossomed, almost unnoticeable among the deluge of elementary particles ripping through that section of space. MorningLightMountain’s quantum wave sensors observed the seventeen surviving human ships fly back into the void. It watched for a long time to see if there would be a second wave. No more starships came.

More supplies and apparatus came through the interstellar wormhole from its home system. It resumed its preparations for the next stage of its expansion into the human Commonwealth.

Barry and Sandy were so excited they barely ate a thing at breakfast, not even the scrambled eggs with crusted cheesefish that the chefbot had produced. Panda picked up on their mood and barked happily, wagging her tail as she went around the table, pleading for scraps.

“Can you take us up to the starships, Dad?” Barry asked as Liz put his plate in front of him. Sandy gasped, and paid very close attention.

“Oh, sorry, son, not today. The orbital platforms aren’t open to visitors.”

“I’m not a visitor,” he said indignantly. “You’re my dad, I’d be with you.”

There were times when Barry’s simple, absolute devotion brought a lump to Mark’s throat. “I’ll have another word with the boss,” he promised.

“Maybe we’ll smuggle you up one day.”

“And me!” Sandy insisted.

“Of course.”

Liz gave him an accusing glance across the table. He knew exactly what she was thinking: How are you going to keep that promise?

“Don’t do that,” Liz admonished Barry.

“What?” the boy protested, putting on his hurt innocence face. It was a very familiar expression.

“I saw you give Panda toast.”

“Aw, Mom, I dropped it, that’s all.”

“It had butter on it,” Sandy said primly. “And you fed it to her.”

“Snitch!”

“Both of you, shush,” Mark said. He tried to stop grinning as he read the news flowing across the paperscreen that was balanced on his coffee cup. It was difficult; this was a proper family breakfast, the kind he’d loved back in the Ulon Valley, and an increasingly rare event these days. It wasn’t that life here was hard—quite the opposite. The two-story house they lived in was built from shiny carbonsteel composite sections, assembled by construction-bots. But even though it looked low-cost from the outside, the interior was spacious, with luxurious fittings. Its kitchen alone probably cost more than the old Ables pickup he’d driven in Randtown, with every automated gadget known to the Commonwealth, work surfaces of Ebbadan marble, and cupboard doors made from brown-gold French oak. All the other rooms were equally well appointed; and if you lacked any furniture you could order whatever you wanted from a unisphere catalogue site and the project personnel office would arrange for it to be delivered. The same with clothes or food.

No, home life was easy. It was the work that devoured all his time, and kept him away from the children. Except today. This was his day off, the first one in a long time. They’d arranged for the children to skip school so they could all spend it together.

“Can we go now?” Barry implored. “Dad, please, we’re all finished.”

Mark stopped reading the article about the political battle to lead the African caucus in the Senate. He glanced over at Liz for permission. She was holding her big teacup in both hands. Most of her French toast was still on her plate. “Okay,” she said.

The kids whooped and raced out of the room.

“Make sure you use your toothgel,” she shouted after them. “And don’t forget your swimsuits.”

Panda barked happily.

Mark and Liz grinned at each other. “Do we get some time together tonight?” he asked, trying to be casual.

“Yes, I’d like to have sex, too, baby. If we’re not tired after today, that’s a definite.”

They shared a more intimate, playful smile.

Liz wolfed down the last portion of her French toast. “Humm, too much pepper. I’ll have to alter the bot’s recipe.”

He glanced at the broad picture window behind her, checking the weather. Liz always sat with her back to the window, no matter what room of the house they were using. “I hate this landscape,” she’d announced on their third day in the town. “It’s a corpse of a world, a vampire planet.”

“Looks like a good day,” Mark said cheerfully as the sunlight shone on the rock and sandy regolith outside. “The tarn should be warm enough to swim in.”

“Whatever.”

“Something wrong?”

“No. Yes. This place. It really is driving me crazy, baby.”

He held up the paperscreen. News articles were still flowing down it. “We won’t be here for much longer, one way or another. The navy fleet should be hitting Hell’s Gateway any day now.”

Liz glanced at the open door, and lowered her voice. “And if that’s not enough?”

“It will be.”

“Then why is Sheldon building this fleet?”

“Because he had a healthy paranoia back when all this kicked off. In any case, he’ll probably use the starships even if we beat the Primes back to their homeworld.”

“Say again?”

“The Commonwealth is all humans have; we’re all bunched up in one big group. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to set up another human civilization on the other side of the galaxy? It’d probably be completely different to this one. We know how to avoid our mistakes now, to build something new. You’d have enough volunteers to make it viable; look how many people settle weird places like Far Away and Silvergalde.”

“Uh huh.” She sat back and gave him a calculating stare. “And would that include us?”

Mark’s enthusiasm went into an unpleasant nosedive. “I don’t know. How do you feel about it?”

“I feel very strongly that the children are brought up in the safety and security of the Commonwealth, providing it survives. Once they’re grown up, and responsible enough to make their own choices, they can start thinking if they want to go gallivanting off into the wild.”

“Er, right, Sure. But it appeals to me.”

“I can see that, baby. And I’ll be happy to talk about it later, say, in about fifteen years.”

“Ah. All right, I don’t suppose this will be the only intergalactic colonization attempt. I think we’re shaping up to live in a real golden age. The Prime attack might well be the best thing that ever happened to us; it’s shaken us out of our complacency. Just think of it, fleets flying off into the unknown. I bet we even go trans-galactic one day. That would be the ultimate, wouldn’t it?”

Liz gave him a tolerant smile. “I keep forgetting how young you are.”

“You mean you wouldn’t go?” Mark asked, surprised, and not a little upset.

“I hadn’t thought about it, baby, is the honest answer. But do me a favor, don’t mention this to the kids; their world is turbulent enough as it is right now without introducing wild ideas like this.”

“Like what?” Barry asked. He was standing in the door, his coat trailing from one hand.

“Tell you about it later,” Mark said automatically. He winked. “When your mom’s not about.”

“Don’t you dare,” Liz growled.

Barry giggled happily. “Sure thing, Dad.” He pelted off back into the house. “Hey, Sis, I know something you don’t!”

“What?” Sandy squeaked.

“Not telling you.”

“Pig!”

Liz grinned and rolled her eyes. “Gonna be a long day.”

Mark had arranged to borrow a Ford Trailmaster7 from the garage. They all piled in, with Panda in the back, and he headed out of their big housing estate for the perimeter ring road. All the civil construction work had finished now. The town was as large as it was ever going to be, supporting twelve thousand technicians, scientists, and engineers who were busy assembling the starships in their orbital docks, and the crews who would fly them.

A bright sun shone down out of the light purple sky, glinting strongly off the town’s composite buildings. The ground between them was gritty sand scattered with flaking rocks; there wasn’t even a single weed growing anywhere. Nobody had gardens. H-congruous plant life wasn’t permitted here. Hundreds of modified gardenbots were on constant patrol in the town, spraying the sand with biological inhibiters that would prevent any kind of growth. Sewage from every building was simply tanked to Cressat, and from there back to Augusta, as was all the garbage. Nothing was allowed to contaminate the pristine environment.

Liz wrinkled her nose up at the town as they sped along the ring road. “This place is like Gaczyna,” she said as they passed a Bab’s Kebabs franchise at the end of a strip mall.

“Where?”

“A place in Russia that they used to train spies during the Cold War. It supposedly had a perfect replica of an American town, so the agents could familiarize themselves with life in the West. That’s what this is, a replica of the Commonwealth. Everything we associate with everyday life is here, but it’s not actually real.”

“The Dynasty’s doing its best to make things comfortable for us.”

“Yeah, baby, I know. It wasn’t a complaint, just an observation.”

Mark nodded, and concentrated on driving. He was getting quite worried about Liz; the whole lifeboat venture had brought out a despondency in her that he found difficult to deal with. She was normally the sunny one, the one he relied on for common sense and optimism. Given what he had to tell her at some point today, her criticisms and moodiness weren’t good omens. He could see what she meant about Gaczyna, though. He’d never been anywhere with so many bots. The only people the Dynasty allowed here were those involved in building the lifeboats. There was no service economy; bots performed every domestic function; even Bab’s Kebabs along with all the other stores in the strip mall were automated. When a bot malfunctioned, it wasn’t repaired here; that would require a secondary industry, people not connected to the lifeboat project. He’d seen whole trucks full of faulty bots being shipped back to Augusta for maintenance. It was an expensive way of doing things, but it was the only way of sustaining the level of security that Nigel Sheldon insisted on.

They turned off the ring road onto a dirt track that led away into the hills above the town beyond the fusion stations. He actually enjoyed sitting behind the wheel, driving manually. There were no real roads on the planet outside the town and its sprawling grid of industrial buildings. All the tracks out here had been made by residents taking off to explore. Mark turned left at the first fork, then right, following a route he’d been told about. The Ford’s tires churned up a lot of dust, deepening the wheel ruts.

After an hour they came to the tarn. The sand had given way to naked rock kilometers earlier. All around them were the steep rolling slopes of the interlocking mountaintops. There were no streambeds, or erosion gullies; the planet hadn’t had an atmosphere long enough to begin features like that, although rain was busy washing regolith sand down into the lowlands. From there it was creeping steadily into the shallow oceans. Up here, water trickled over the undulations in unbroken sheets until it found basins and nooks to collect in. The tarn was a long oval shape, with water up to its brim. When the rains came it overflowed into a sharp cleft of black granite at the eastern end.

“It’s so clear,” Barry exclaimed as they stood at the edge. Apart from small ripples reflecting the velvet sky there was no movement. They could see the rough rock bottom sloping away toward the center. “Just like the Trine’ba,” he said with a smile.

“Almost,” Liz agreed. “Come on, let’s go get changed.”

The four of them waded in, gasping at how cold the tarn was. Their voices echoed cleanly through the mountain air, bouncing off the high rumpled inclines around them.

“I miss the fish,” Sandy confessed as she swam cautiously farther out from the shore. Mark had insisted she wear inflatable wings on the back of her suit. For once she didn’t argue.

“No fish, no algae,” he said to Liz. It was strange; he normally associated water with life, while this was the complete opposite.

“It’ll come,” she said. “Every time someone comes swimming up here they leave bacteria behind. In a hundred years this tarn will be a proper little vat, the planet’s biggest natural petri dish, leaking its new bugs out across the landscape every time it rains.”

“We always leave our mark, don’t we?”

“Just about. I guess it’s evolution on a galactic scale. A planet that produces life smart enough to figure out star travel will spread its DNA across the stars. And evolution is one tough battleground.”

“That sounds like the Gaia hypothesis.”

“Taken to the extreme, I suppose it is. I wonder if the Primes recognize it at an instinctive level. They were certainly keen to alienform Elan. Remember those images Morton recorded of the biorefinery they built on the edge of Randtown?”

“So whoever built the barriers knew that, too?”

“Yeah. A stellar-sized rabbit-proof fence, like the one they built in Australia once the immigration started. And along we came with the bolt cutters. Damn, we’re dumb. Maybe this is evolution’s way of telling us we’re obsolete.”

Mark stood on the slippery rock, and started to wade out. “We’re not dumb, we’re principled. I’m proud of that, of what we are collectively.”

“Hope you’re right, baby.” Liz waded out beside him, and hurriedly wrapped a big towel around herself. “Five minutes, you two,” she called out to the children. They were several meters offshore now, splashing about with Panda. Barry waved back.

“Here.” Mark twisted the tabs on a couple of hot chocolate cans, and handed her one as it began to steam.

“Thanks.” She gave him a quick kiss.

“They’re moving me,” he said tersely.

“Moving you where?”

“To a different part of the project.” He looked up. One of the spaceflower moons was gliding up over the horizon. Even now, the massive gigalife gave him a thrill. To think that there was a society out there that could afford to produce such things just for the sheer fun of it. That was inspiring. The kind of endeavor that a new human civilization should strive for, rather than the constant commercial rat race the Commonwealth pursued and worshiped.

“What do you mean?” There was a hint of steel in her voice.

“It’s not just lifeboats the Dynasty is building up there. A fleet that big traveling through space we know nothing about … it needs protection, Liz.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Liz spat in contempt. “I might have known: they’re building warships.”

“Frigates, yeah. It’s a new design, smaller and faster than the Moscow-class. There’s something different about the drive, as well. I don’t know what. And nobody will talk about the weapons it carries.”

“No kidding. So what did you tell them?”

Mark took a long drink of the hot chocolate, marshaling his thoughts. He always hated it when they had an argument. For a start she was so much better at it than he was. “This isn’t the kind of job you get to choose assignments. We both knew that.”

“All right,” she said. “I guess not. I just don’t like the idea of you working on weapons.”

“I’m not. It’s the assembly system they want to get up and running. They’re using a different method than on the lifeboats, with their preassembled sections. The frigate assembly bays are combined with the station dockyard. Individual components are shipped in directly and integrated up in orbit.”

“Whoopee, another great technological step forward.”

“Liz,” he said accusingly. “We’re at war. From what I hear, we might not win. We really might not.”

She sat on a big boulder, and looked forlornly at the can in her hands. “I know. I’m sorry I’m being a bitch. I just … I feel so helpless.”

“Hey.” He went over and put his arm around her shoulder. “I’m the one who needs you to support me, remember, that was the deal.”

She grinned weakly up at him, squeezing his hand. “That was never the deal, baby.”

“So, are you cool with this?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Thanks, that means everything, you know that.”

Liz pulled him closer. “I’m so glad I’ve got you. I wouldn’t want to be with anyone else right now.”

“Well, I couldn’t face this without you.” He gestured at the kids. “And them. But the frigates are as far as we can go. We’ve been running ever since we got back from Elan. No farther. There won’t be any more surprises for us.”

“I hope you’re right, baby. I really do.”

The shower nozzles pumped water out at a velocity that pummeled Mellanie’s skin almost to the point of being painful. She didn’t even have to turn around; the water came at her from all sides, the nozzles sweeping up and down. Foam ran down her body as scented soap was mixed in by the management array. Cooler water flushed it away, its temperature invigorating her after the luxuriant heat. The water turned off, and warm dry air gushed out of vents all around the big marbled cubical, snatching the moisture away from her skin and blowing her hair about.

She wrapped a huge purple and cream towel around herself and went back out into the office suite’s bedroom. Michelangelo was still lying on the big bed. He watched her lazily as she began getting dressed.

“Damn, I’m glad you defected from Baron,” he said. “You’d be wasted on her, she’s a cold bitch.”

Mellanie flashed him a naughty grin. “Whereas we have a deep and meaningful relationship.”

“You’re good in bed. We both know that. A real turn-on.”

“You’re a good teacher.”

“Yeah?”

It was almost as if he were the bashful one, seeking reassurance. “I keep coming back, don’t I?” she said. “And we both know I’m doing well enough for the show that I don’t actually have to anymore. But I like it, I like it a lot.”

There was a growling sound from the bed. He rolled off the mattress and pushed his long highlighted hair back. Mellanie couldn’t help the way her eyes lingered on his body. It was like a youthful Apollo had returned to walk among the mortals once more.

“Hell … I don’t understand you,” he complained. “What is it you really want?”

She grinned as she struggled into her asymmetric top. “Your job.”

“You know ordinarily if some intern your age said that I’d just laugh it off as pitifully naïve. But with you it’s truly not funny.”

“Be careful whose face you tread on today, because it could be the one you’re fetching coffee for tomorrow.”

“Duly noted.”

“Admit it, I did good on the lifeboat story, didn’t I?”

“I’ve never seen a senior Halgarth so defensive. Congratulations.”

“Black, one sugar.”

“You’re not that good,” he said with a scowl. “Not yet.”

“I know. I want to get the Sheldon lifeboats. Now that would be a real break while we all wait for the starships to come back from Hell’s Gateway.”

He gave her a pensive look. “How’s the other big story coming on?”

“The New York finance scandal?” she said with a sigh. “Not so hot. The leads are all dead and cold. Besides, the authorities are showing an interest. Where’s the impact of breaking something the rest of the pack all know about? Exclusivity is our goal and god, as you so rightly told me when I started here. See, I haven’t forgotten.”

“Yeah.” He nodded slowly.

“What?” She knew that reluctance; he hated giving away any advantage.

“Please?”

“All right, quick tutorial, you’re not thinking this problem through properly. You’re trying to track down three fairly successful lawyers who’ve been involved in some dodgy finance deals, right?”

“Yes.” She wasn’t telling anyone on the show about the Starflyer. Not yet. That would land her a show of her own, probably a studio of her own.

“You’re trying to chase after them. Wrong. That’s what the police will be doing; but they’re fugitives, they’ll be ready for that and take care to cover their tracks. Any decent hunter will come at their prey from the direction they least expect. So what you should have done is ask where would they go.” He gave her an expectant look.

“A crime syndicate that can protect them?”

“Close. You need a place where you can change your identity completely. And I don’t just mean some decent data registry alterations, a memory erasure, and a new face. If they’ve ripped off as much as you say they have, the Financial Regulation Directorate will chase them right across the Commonwealth for the next ten centuries. They need to be free to fritter away their new wealth in perfect safety without spending the rest of their lives looking over their shoulder. For that you need a lot more than a bit of cellular reprofiling. Their DNA will be on record, the FRD will always be able to identify them. So the thing they need above all else is a baseline DNA modification.”

“What’s that?”

“Damn, I never know if you’re taking the piss or not. That is a treatment similar to rejuvenation, when the clinic alters your DNA in every cell. Permanently. The person who comes out of the tank is literally not the same person who went in. Once you’ve had that done, along with your new birth certification, a decent back history, and all your desourced money, you’re home free. You can live where you want, even next door to your old family, and they’ll never know.”

“Where would they go for that?”

“Unless you own your own biogenetic medical facility, there’s only one place: Illuminatus. There’s a lot of very specialized, ultra-discreet clinics there which offer such a service.”

“I need to go there.”

“I just knew you’d say that. Even if you did, you haven’t got a clue where the clinics are. They don’t exactly advertise on the unisphere.”

“I’ll find them.”

Michelangelo gave an extravagant sigh. “One week ago, three people checked in to the Saffron Clinic on Allwyn Street, two men, one woman. I don’t know their names, but the time frame fits.” He gave a diffident moue. “I have contacts. I am still numero uno here, please remember.”

“Thank you,” she said sincerely.

“Mellanie, take care, Illuminatus isn’t the safest place in the Commonwealth.”

Ozzie woke up as slim beams of bright sunlight slid across his face. He grunted in dismay at the awakening. Yesterday’s disappointment was still churning through his mind, making him listless. It was snug inside the sleeping bag, and he could feel cool air on his face. Getting up was an effort.

“Damnit.”

Lying there moping wasn’t an option. That was too much like defeat, which he wasn’t going to admit. Not yet.

He unzipped his sleeping bag, and stretched lazily before shivering. All he was wearing were shorts and his last decent T-shirt. His hand felt around on the floor for his cord pants that he shoved his legs into. When he pulled on his check shirt there was a tearing sound as stitches popped along the sleeve.

“Not again!” When he examined the sleeve the split didn’t seem too bad.

He slipped into his old dark gray woolen fleece to keep the chill out while he put his boots on. Toes stuck out through the holes in the end of his socks. Today really was going to have to be sewing day. He gave his toes a closer look. The bruising had gone down. In fact, it had disappeared altogether. He couldn’t remember putting any salve on after giving the serial number pillar that very satisfactory kicking.

Outside the little shelter, Orion had already rekindled the fire from yesterday’s embers. Two metal mugs were balanced on a slatelike shard of polyp above the flames, heating some water.

Orion looked up and gave Ozzie a welcome smile. “Five teacubes left. Two chocolate. Which do you want?”

“Oh, what the hell, let’s live—What?”

“Tea or chocolate?”

“I thought we finished the chocolate yesterday.”

Orion rummaged through the various packets he’d spread out around him and held up the cubes in a palm. They were all foil-wrapped: five silver, two gold with green stripes. “No. Bourneville Rich, with double cream. Your favorite.”

“Right. Sorry. Yeah, man, chocolate is good.” Ozzie sat on the polyp bump. He winced as he straightened his leg.

“How’s the knee?” Orion asked.

No fucking way! “Still stiff,” he said slowly. “Where’s Tochee?”

“Gone to get some water. It was scouting around last night, seeing if it could find any sign of the machinery that works this place.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean? You said we should try and track down the gravity generator.”

“But we know there’s no electrical activity on the reef. Not that we can detect.”

“We haven’t looked that hard. Besides, you told Tochee to use its sensor gadget while it was in the jungle.”

“Yeah. Two days ago. But there’s not a whole lot of point now, is there? I mean, if there wasn’t anything at the serial number, then there certainly isn’t going to be anything in the middle of the trees.”

Orion stopped unwrapping the second chocolate cube. “Serial number?”

“Yeah,” Ozzie said sarcastically. “Big black pillar in the clearing. Me in a bad mood. Coming back to you now?”

“Ozzie, what are you talking about?”

“Yesterday. The pillar.”

“Ozzie, we walked to the spire at the end of the reef yesterday.”

“No no, man, that was the day before. We found the serial number yesterday.”

“On the spire? You didn’t say.”

“No, goddamnit. Yesterday. The pillar in the clearing. What’s the matter with you?”

Orion gave him a sulky look, pouting his lips. “I went to the spire yesterday. I don’t know where you went.”

Ozzie took a moment; the boy didn’t normally fool around like this, and he certainly sounded sincere enough.

Tochee emerged from the jungle, its manipulator flesh coiled around various containers it had filled with water. “Good morning to you, friend Ozzie,” it said through the handheld array.

“You didn’t find anything, did you?” Ozzie said. “Your equipment didn’t find any electrical activity. And you’ve traveled about five kilometers in that direction.” Ozzie pointed.

“That is correct, friend Ozzie. How did you know?”

“Good guess.” Ozzie told his e-butler to pull up yesterday’s files. The list that came up in his virtual vision were the visual and sensor recordings of their trip out to the reef’s end spire. “Show all files recorded in the last five days,” he told the e-butler. There was nothing relating to the serial number pillar. “Goddamn.” He unlaced his boot and pulled it off, then began squeezing his toes where the bruise ought to be. There wasn’t even a twinge. “Let me get this straight,” he said carefully. “Neither of you two remember walking to the middle of the reef?”

“No,” Tochee said. “I have not been there, though I believe that if we go, we might have some success in finding an access tunnel to the machinery that lies at the core of this reef. It would be the shortest distance.”

“Dead right, man. So let’s go, shall we?” He shoved his boot back on and stood up.

Orion held out his battered metal mug. “Don’t you want your chocolate?”

“Sure. Hey, have you been having any unusual dreams since we arrived here?”

“Nah. Just the usual dreams.” Orion pulled a morose expression. “Girls and such.”

Ozzie led the way at a fast pace. He followed the route that his handheld array’s navigation function produced, guiding him to the middle of the reef. As before, the trees were taller as they approached the area his virtual vision displayed. Today there were no beams of sunlight sliding horizontally past the thick ancient trunks. “It’s got to be here somewhere,” he said out loud as they began their third sweep of the central area.

“What has?” Orion asked. The boy had been watching him with some concern ever since they set out.

“There’s a clearing right in the middle.”

“How do you know?”

Because I was here yesterday, and so were you. “I saw it on the approach.” He stopped and told his e-butler to display all the visual files from the last couple of hours before the Pathfinder landed on the reef. When he checked through them, the jungle at the middle of the reef was unbroken. There was no central glade.

Ozzie stood motionless at the base of a rubbery globe tree, leaning against its elasticated branches. Not that they bent much anymore, they were so old and wizened. Okay, either I’m hallucinating or someone has done a superb hack job on the handheld array. No, Orion and Tochee don’t remember. So it was a hallucination. Or a vision. But why would I be led here?

He took a good look around the gloomy jungle floor with its cracked polyp and dusty soil. There were no tracks in the thin dirt. Nothing moved, nothing lived here. He activated every sensor he had, and turned a complete circle. Nothing registered in any spectrum.

“I don’t get this,” he said out loud. Almost, he expected some bass voice to answer from the treetops.

“Friend Ozzie, I cannot see a clearing.”

“No, me neither. The files must have been jumbled up when we landed. The array took quite a few knocks.”

“Can we go back now?” Orion asked. “I don’t like it here, it’s all dismal and dead.”

“Sure thing.” He was a lot more cheerful than he had any right to be. Something’s happening. I just wish I could figure out what.

It was a miserable duty, but then Lucius Lee was used to that by now. He’d been granted the rank of probationary detective three months ago in the city’s NorthHarbor precinct, and all he’d done since then was sort out a whole load of data files and reports for the two senior detectives he’d been assigned to for his probationary year. When the three of them ever did venture out of the office he was the one who had to do all the boring stuff like cataloguing crime scenes, directing forensic bots, and interviewing low-grade witnesses; he also got the night shift in stakeouts. Like this one: Sitting in a beat-up old Ford Feisha in an underground garage below the Chantex building at twenty past four in the morning, looking out across a concrete cavern illuminated by green-tined polyphoto strips that should have been replaced years ago. There were fifteen other cars parked on the same level; he knew them intimately by now.

Why the hell they couldn’t use a decent covert sensor for this he didn’t know. Marhol, the detective sergeant who was his official mentor, said it was “good experience.” Which was such bullshit.

The real problem was ancient enough to be laughable. A punk gang had been carjacking luxury models out of NorthHarbor and—big mistake—one belonged to the rich girlfriend of a councillor’s son. City Hall wanted a Result. Automated systems couldn’t do that, not quickly. So here he was waiting on a tip from one of Marhol’s dubious informers, who were actually more like drinking buddies.

Marhol had taken Lucius along to the bar for the meeting, presumably so he could witness the expense claim. So he had to sit there while this zero of an informant who couldn’t have been over twenty and had big dependency problems claimed the cars were actually being ripped off by the Stuhawk gang out of SouthCentral. He should know, he was running with the JiKs, who like owned NorthHarbor, and they weren’t doing it. The Stuhawks had stupidly got themselves into big debt with a professional syndicate who’d simply given them a mechanic and a list. They did the scout, and provided muscle. But they scouted cars around NorthHarbor, not their own district. It was a turf war.

For such crap the Tridelta City taxpayer had to reimburse Marhol’s beer tab for a week.

Four twenty-one. The lift doors opened. A man emerged. He was smaller than usual, for an age when rejuvenation could add inches to anyone’s frame for almost no additional cost. Skinny, too; his shirt had short sleeves showing arms that were mostly bone. His hands were out of proportion, big and covered in grime. First impression was a first-lifer in his fifties. But then Lucius started to pay attention. The guy had confidence, strutting across the concrete as if he were a Dynasty chief walking into his harem. He was wide awake, too; not someone who’d been working a late shift upstairs.

Lucius started to breathe faster. There was no way this guy was part of some punk gang. In fact, Lucius was pretty sure he wasn’t a first-life at all; that cool self-assurance didn’t belong to anyone under a hundred. Maybe the informant had been right. The Stuhawks were muscle for a syndicate. Lucius was suddenly very interested.

The mechanic walked over to a midnight-black Mercedes FX 3000p, a brand-new Hi-range saloon, with a list price of over a hundred thousand Earth dollars. That price included a superb security system; the drive array program was virtually an RI in its own right. It wouldn’t let anyone take control without the owner’s approval.

Lucius was waiting until the man tried to break the car open. That was when he would make the arrest; and he was quietly thankful there were no Stuhawks with him. An arrest swiftly followed by a successful interrogation would be the kind of proactive police work that the councillor wanted to see. Not that Lucius would get any credit; it would no doubt be filed as Marhol’s arrest.

The mechanic made a slow circle of the gleaming vehicle, regarding it with respectful approval. Lucius was amazed at the mechanic’s audacity; he wasn’t really thinking of taking the Merc, was he? Then Lucius remembered some Commonwealth-wide alert for a grade-A mechanic coming into the precinct a while back. This man was certainly A-grade, for arrogance if nothing else. He told his e-butler to find the file.

The mechanic was about to put his hand on the Merc’s front door i-spot when he froze. Lucius held his own breath. The mechanic looked around the near-empty garage until his gaze found the Ford Feisha. His lips moved up in a dry smile, and he started to walk over.

“Ohshit,” Lucius muttered. There was no way anyone could see through the Ford’s secure glass no matter how good their retinal inserts were, but somehow the mechanic had become aware of him. He drew his ion pistol and flipped the safety. It was then he realized he’d probably revealed himself by using the unisphere. Even with the police-secure encryption there had been an electronic emission from the car. In a deserted garage. In the small hours. “Oh, brilliant, Lucius,” he told himself bitterly. “Just brilliant.”

To compound the error, his e-butler delivered the requested file for him. Navy intelligence wanted to question Robin Beard, a known criminal specializing in car crime. A lot of biographical data ran across Lucius’s virtual vision. Several pictures accompanied it. With a few easy differences, they matched the man who was now three meters from the hood.

So far, Beard hadn’t drawn any kind of weapon. Lucius gripped his pistol tighter.

Beard smiled at the nonreflective black glass windshield, and put his hand on the Ford’s i-spot. His whole forearm glowed red and green as OCtattoos turned active.

Lucius jumped as a nasty clunk reverberated around the car’s interior. The locks had all engaged. Three red lights started flashing on the dashboard. There was a nasty burning smell.

“If I were you,” Beard said, “I’d be very careful what you touch in there. Your car’s superconductor batteries are malfunctioning; they’re feeding their power directly into the body frame. So don’t lay a hand on anything metallic. Oh, and anything that ionizes the air will also act as a conductor. To take an example at random: an ion pistol shot fired through the window. Whoever was holding that pistol would be fried in the discharge. Ever see somebody struck by lightning? They say their eyeballs boil and burst while their tongue chars to black meat.”

The ion pistol dropped out of Lucius’s startled fingers, clattering onto the floor. He flinched.

Robin Beard smiled at the faint sound. “Not to worry, the batteries don’t have much charge left. They should be drained by noon.” He turned on a heel and walked back to the black Merc.

A red warning flowed across Lucius’s virtual vision, telling him his connection to the unisphere had dropped out. He watched through the window as Beard put his hand on the Merc’s i-spot. He wasn’t surprised when the door opened. Less than thirty seconds later, the big sleek car slid smoothly onto the garage’s exit ramp and up into the remarkable beauty that was night on Illuminatus.

The day the starships were due to arrive at the star system where Hell’s Gateway was located, the navy increased its observation of the Lost23. Wilson sat in his white office reviewing the information as it came in. Anna was with him acting as communications officer; Oscar qualified for his place as senior staff officer; Rafael completed the navy contingent. Justine Burnelli was there on behalf of the Senate, sitting as far as possible from Rafael, while Patricia Kantil represented the Executive, although President Doi maintained an ultra-secure real-time link; as did Nigel Sheldon, who presumably was in touch with the other Dynasty leaders—Wilson didn’t ask. Dimitri Leopoldvich arrived a few minutes late, and took a seat next to Patricia; he ignored the cool reception he received from the navy officers.

The navy started opening wormholes above the Lost23. They were the same type that were used to communicate with the insurgency troops that were operating against Prime installations. This time, they opened a considerable distance away from the planet, several million kilometers, clear of the heavy Prime orbital defenses. Sensors slid out into spacetime, and scanned for the quantum distortion signatures of wormholes. They detected a total of eight hundred sixty-four wormholes linking the Lost23 back to the Hell’s Gateway star system.

“I thought our troops had blown up several planet-based gateways,” Patricia said.

“Twenty-seven to date,” Rafael confirmed. “On average the Primes take three days to reopen them and assemble a new gateway mechanism.”

“What are our losses?”

“A hundred seventeen reported fatalities,” Wilson said proudly. “That’s a lot better than our projected damage ratio. We’re hurting them badly.”

“We’re tying up resources,” Dimitri said. “I wouldn’t call that inflicting damage, exactly.”

Rafael gave him a very cold look.

An hour and a half before the expected attack time, seven hundred seventy-two Prime wormholes shut down.

“Holy shit!” Oscar exclaimed. He half rose from his chair, as if he could get closer to the data that the holographic portal was projecting across half the room. Wilson’s face lit up in a huge smile.

“Too early to open the champagne?” Rafael inquired lightly. He grinned at Wilson.

“We did it?” Patricia inquired delightedly.

“No,” Dimitri said firmly. He was studying the data in the big display. “There are exactly four wormholes remaining on each planet. We know the Primes use base four; so it is deliberate. They’re maintaining communications with their new colonies. Therefore they shut down the other wormholes, not us.”

“You don’t know that,” Oscar said.

“If our attack had been successful enough to knock out over seven hundred wormhole generators, it would have destroyed the remainder at the same time. This is an organized switch, not the result of a strike by Douvoir missiles.”

Wilson wanted to tell Dimitri to shut the hell up. His hopes had soared with the disappearance of the wormholes. And he needed that boost badly after the shock of realizing the navy was compromised. But what the StPetersburg strategist was saying made uncomfortable sense. Don’t shoot the messenger.

“When will we know for certain?” President Doi asked.

“Not long,” Wilson said with outward calm; it was a polite lie.

Five hours later the wormholes all reopened. A groan went around the office.

“Your interpretation?” Justine asked Dimitri.

“They beat off the attack,” the pale man said. For once he looked nervous, dabbing at the perspiration on his forehead with a handkerchief. “I did say they would use everything they could to defend the staging post.”

“So you did,” Rafael said.

“What now?” President Doi asked. She sounded confused.

“We need to find out what happened,” Wilson said.

“They beat us,” Patricia said in an angry, scared voice. An arm gestured wildly at the display. “That much is bloody obvious.”

“The technical details,” Wilson said. “How did they do it? That’s what’s important if we are to formulate a coherent response strategy.”

“It’ll be five days at the earliest before the ships get back in communications range,” Nigel said.

“If there are any ships remaining,” Dimitri said.

“Enough from you,” Rafael told him hotly.

Wilson held a hand up to his fellow admiral. “I know this is difficult—those were our friends and colleagues out there—but we have to be realistic.”

“We cannot afford five days,” Dimitri said. “Madam President, it is imperative that we arm our remaining starships with the Seattle Project quantumbuster weapons. The Prime aliens retain the ability to launch an immediate strike at us. They now have no reason to delay.”

“Yes,” Doi said. “I’ve seen your earlier recommendations. Admiral Kime?”

“Madam President.”

“We will convene a full War Cabinet by ultra-secure link in thirty minutes. Please be ready to present your plans for using the Seattle quantumbusters in defense of the Commonwealth, and any alternatives.”

“Very well, Madam President.”

“Do we release the failure of our strike against Hell’s Gateway to the media?” Justine asked.

“No,” Patricia said immediately. “We don’t know what happened. People will fear the worst, and we won’t be able to offer any details to reassure them.”

“The news shows are expecting some kind of comment.”

“Tough. We simply say we are unsure of the outcome, and we’re waiting for the starships to return.”

“They’ll know something’s wrong,” Justine said. “If the strike had worked we’d be shouting it as hard as we could.”

“We have five days until we have to admit anything is wrong,” Patricia said. “That’s enough time for me to prepare the groundwork. This had got to be handled perfectly if we’re to prevent panic.”

Wilson couldn’t bring himself to look at Oscar as everyone except Rafael and Justine left the office. Dimitri had argued that the Primes would work out a counter to the Douvoir missiles because they already knew humans were capable of such an application. What if they were told, given exact details? I knew we’d been compromised, and I did nothing. All for fear of looking foolish.

“Just so both of you know,” he told Rafael and Justine, “I’m going to recommend we deploy the quantumbusters as Dimitri suggested.” And pray we maintained some kind of integrity with their development.

“That little shit,” Rafael grunted.

“He’s always been right,” Wilson said. “And he’s only doing his job. Damnit, if we’d listened to him and equipped the starships with quantumbusters to attack Hell’s Gateway we might not be in this position.”

“You can’t play what if, not at this level,” Rafael said. “We have to concentrate on the immediate threat.”

“There wouldn’t be an immediate threat if we’d used the quantumbusters.”

“We don’t even know that,” Rafael said. “Not for certain.”

“It wasn’t the technology which let us down, we suffered a failure of will. We’re too civilized to push the genocide button.”

“I’m glad,” Justine said. “That reluctance to exterminate any creature that might be a difficult problem defines us as a species. We don’t operate at their level. That’s got to be worth something.”

“Not when you’re dead, it isn’t,” Wilson snapped angrily. He knew that he was actually scared and trying to cover, which in itself was pathetic. But the failure to eliminate Hell’s Gateway was profoundly shocking; and the implications even worse. Dimitri was right, they now had to contemplate the unthinkable.

“Do you think Doi will authorize their use?” Justine said.

“Sheldon will,” Rafael said. “He’s a realist. And I know the Halgarth Dynasty will support him, as will most of the others. Nobody was expecting today’s attack to fail so completely. We’re all still reeling from that; but the implication will sink in soon enough, and not just with us.” He shook his head in reluctant acknowledgment. “Dimitri and his nerd think tank were right. We weren’t hardheaded enough; we didn’t want to recognize what we’re actually facing, it’s too frightening.”

Wilson nearly told him about the treachery on board the Second Chance, the existence of the Starflyer. But he retained enough of his political instinct to hold back. Coward, he taunted himself; but he needed Rafael’s whole-hearted support over the next few days; they simply had to work together. The human race couldn’t afford for them to make another mistake. The thought sent an evil shudder down his spine.

It took the War Cabinet fifteen minutes to make its vote. The unanimous decision was to allow the navy to arm all its starships with quantumbuster weapons in readiness for any subsequent attack by the Prime aliens.

On the day two hundred years ago when CST’s exploratory division opened a wormhole above Illuminatus, the sight that materialized shocked the entire Operations Center into silence. They thought they had stumbled across the ultimate high-technology civilization, one that had urbanized every square kilometer of land. Directly beyond the wormhole opening, the planet hung in the black of space, darkside on. Every continent glowed a lambent aquamarine from shore to shore, shimmering softly in long undulations as thin clouds wafted overhead. Only mountains and the polar caps were devoid of light.

The Operations Director extended a communications dish through the wormhole, and attempted to signal the occupants of the planetary city. Strangely, the electromagnetic bands remained silent apart from the warbled harmonies of the ionosphere as it was showered by solar wind. Then the full sensor returns began to build up, providing a provisional analysis. The light didn’t have a technological origin. It was purely biological.

Every time Adam Elvin visited Illuminatus he forgot to pack any decent short-sleeved linen shirts. It was his old city-boy mentality; he just never expected a climate quite so humid in an urban area. Nobody built cities in the middle of a jungle. It wasn’t civilized. Nor was it commercially viable, either. Except here.

Stepping out of the Hotel Conomela’s air-conditioned lobby was yet another unpleasant reminder of his bad choice of luggage. The heat and humidity on the street was already up to sauna levels, and that was with the hotel’s bright scarlet half-moon canopy overhead protecting him from direct sunlight. The semiorganic fiber of Adam’s white suit acquired a silver hue as it struggled to repel heat away from his body. He fanned at his face with his genuine Panama hat. A uniformed doorman gestured to a maroon Lincoln taxi that glided to a halt and popped its door. “Señor Duanro.” His white gloved hand touched the tip of his cap respectfully.

“Thanks.” Adam hurried into the cool dry interior, for once not pausing to consider, all men being equal, the market-enforced indignity of the doorman having to be servile. Today, anyone whose job it was to hasten him into cool comfort was okay by him.

He gave the drive array his destination, and the Lincoln pulled out aggressively into the flow of traffic. The street was jammed full of vehicles, half of them delivery vans and trucks parked on the curb so that angry cars, bikes, and buses were squeezed out into the few remaining lanes. His taxi rolled along at thirty kilometers an hour, its horn tooting about every thirty seconds as pedestrians, powerskaters, and cyclists dodged around it. It was always the same in Tridelta City; twenty-four million people crammed onto a patch of ground barely fifty kilometers across generated a serious amount of traffic pressure.

Eight kilometers and twenty-three minutes from the hotel, the taxi pulled up beside the Anau Tower, a cylindrical skyscraper two hundred fifty stories tall. Its broad metallic silver windows were arranged in a slight step pattern, looking as if the tower skin were twisted around the structural frame in a corkscrew spiral.

Adam took the elevator lift up to the hundred fiftieth floor, the airship docking level, then switched to a local elevator to get up to one-seven-eight. The Agent’s office suite was on the east side of the tower, three modest rooms decorated in cold black granite blocks. The receptionist was an essay in visual intimidation. Her simple charcoal-gray suit was stretched tight around her, illustrating the boosting she’d received, with several seams of muscle wrapped around her original frame. Adam suspected a host of wetwired weapons were lurking in among the dubious additional muscle cells and overstretched epidermal layer. Her neck was a smooth cone of flesh that blended directly into her cheeks. There was no chin, only an eerily attractive set of lips that had been glossed in dark cherry-red. They perked into a smile for Adam when he presented her desk array with his Silas Duanro identity.

“You can go straight in, Señor Duanro,” she trilled in a sweet high voice.

“He is expecting you.”

The Agent smiled in greeting from behind his granite desk. A tall man who kept thin by expending a lot of nervous energy, he had a beak of a nose that came down almost to his upper lip. For some reason he hadn’t modified his scalp follicles; a receding hairline was only partially disguised by a very close cut. “Señor Silas Duanro? Humm.” He smiled at his own humor. “You are allowed to use the same name with me, you know. After all these years, what have we got if not trust?”

“I’m sure.” Adam hadn’t visited Tridelta for several years; yet the Agent always managed to recognize him. Last time he’d looked very different, older and chubbier. Right now he’d morphed his face into that of a forty-year-old, with rounded cheeks, green eyes, and thick auburn hair. The skin was thick and slightly pocked as it finally began its protest at so many hurried cheap and unprofessional cellular reprofilings. He had to apply moisturizing cream every morning and evening now; even so it felt as if he were stretching scar tissue every time he spoke. His cheeks were always cold these days, the capillaries were in such a bad way from constant readjustment. There was a limit to how much reprofiling anyone could undergo, and Adam knew he was fast approaching the time when he’d have to quit.

But not yet.

Becoming Silas Duanro had also involved shedding a lot of fat, and receiving some extra muscle boosting. He hadn’t been this fit and strong for a while now, though it was taking some very sophisticated genoproteins to maintain his heart and other organs at a level where they could support the added muscle. He’d also had to correct his body for the onset of type two diabetes, which had developed over the last couple of years. But whenever the call came through to start the blockade-busting run he was assembling for Johansson, he was determined to be ready for it. No way was he going to see that from some backseat, shouting advice across the unisphere. He fully expected it to be his swan song.

“Drink?” the Agent asked. It was part of their ritual.

“What have you got?”

The Agent smiled and went over to the wall. A long block of granite swung out silently to reveal a brightly lit drinks cabinet. “Let’s see. We won’t bother with the Talotee wines, even though they’re all the rage. How about Impiricus-blue, a local copy, but in my humble opinion better than the original.”

“Hit me.”

The Agent made a show of pouring the thick purple liqueur into a chilled cut-crystal shot glass. “And one for me.” He returned to the desk and slid the shot glass over to Adam. “Salut.”

“Salut.” Adam drained it in a single gulp. A sensation like cold flame burned down his gullet. “Woho, boy,” he grunted, there were tears in his eyes. “Good stuff.” His voice was harsh, as if he’d come down with flu.

“I knew you’d like that. You have class, which most of my customers are sadly lacking. I deal with so many gangsters; bigger guns and nastier viruses are all they know. But you: I was most proud to see the names which came up in court after the attack on the Second Chance, knowing I had provided most of them. Now that was a truly stylish operation, conducted with verve. There are so few of those mounted these days.”

“The ship survived, though.”

“Alas, yes. But to have dreamed the dream is to have flown above the mountains so high in all but deed.”

“Keats?”

“Manby. So now, what can I do for you?” the Agent asked.

“I need some assistance for a new project I’m putting together.”

“Of course.”

“Mostly blunt end troops,” Adam told his e-butler to transfer the list file to the Agent’s desktop array.

“No technical specialists? That’s a shame. I’ll certainly see what I can do to find you the requisite people. I should tell you half of my B-list is currently serving with the navy behind enemy lines. Not all of them were taken out of suspension, either; a lot of them volunteered. It’s the kind of job which appeals to their more base instinct. They’ll come back covered in glory and medals determined to be upright citizens, then in a couple of years they’ll be hammering down my door for a job. In the meantime, I’m embarrassed by such a poor inventory. Is there any way you could delay your project?”

“Not indefinitely, no. If it’s question of money …?”

The Agent looked genuinely aghast. “Good Lord, no. I’ll probably wind up waiving my commission for you. I do value the challenges you’ve given me over the years, and you bring a much appreciated amount of business my way. I’m confident I can rise to the occasion once more. Professional pride and all that.”

“I see.” Adam smiled his best false smile, feeling his abused facial skin distend. It was always about money with the Agent; criminals were the worst capitalists of all. “I will be offering the usual re-life insurance bond in the event of premature bodyloss.”

“That’s good to hear. Right now, the Commonwealth clinics are overflowing with re-life procedure requests from the families of bodyloss victims from the Lost23. The swine are charging extortionate fees. Seller’s market, I’m afraid.”

“After the revolution we’ll put them against the wall and shoot them, eh?”

“Absolutely. I’ll be happy to supply the firing squads free of charge. Until then—”

“Until then, put my list together and send me the bill. There’s a onetime address code in the file.”

“Did you have a time frame in mind?”

“You’ve got one week.” Adam didn’t care how big a disadvantage that put him at. “I will pay a handsome bonus for delivery.”

The Agent raised his eyebrows. “I always welcome incentives. However, given the state of the Commonwealth right now, that might be a little difficult.”

“One week.”

“I see you’re not going to be moved. Very well. To aspire nobly is its own reward. I won’t let you down.” He leaned forward abruptly, and held his hand out.

Adam shook, trying not to let the sneer of disgust appear on his face.

“Excellent.” The Agent walked back to the open drinks cabinet and poured another two shots of Impiricus-blue. He waved a hand, and ten tall slabs of granite pivoted through ninety degrees to reveal a picture window behind. “We’re safer than most here, you know,” he said. “One rich city is easy to defend. And City Hall has spent a great deal of money upgrading our force fields on top of the navy shielding. Yet still the doubt gnaws at my soul. I am blessed to live amid such beauty as only God and nature can create.”

“What doubts?” Adam asked. He was looking past the Agent at the extraordinary vista through the window. Tridelta City shimmered in the midafternoon sunlight, a flat reclaimed island that used to be the flood zone where three rivers merged; the Logrosan, the Dongara, and the Upper Monkira, each large in their own right, united to become the impressive torrent of water that was the Lower Monkira, flowing to the ocean five hundred kilometers away.

Before humans came to Illuminatus, the tridelta area was a sandy marsh that flooded five or six times a year whenever the rivers rose, their torrents ripping out any vegetation that had rooted among the low saturated dunes since the last deluge. With the Commonwealth Council placing an absolute conservation order on the forests and jungles of Illuminatus, preventing any form of clearance, this was the one patch of land other than the mountains that had no trees. CST built a protective three-kilometer-wide groyne wall in the center, and constructed their planetary station amid the tropical heat and moisture. As more construction crews arrived, and the travel companies began to invest heavily, additional walls were built. Huge pumps drained and stabilized the boggy sand, new soil was either dredged out of the rivers or shipped in by train, raising the artificial island’s ground level. Foundations were sunk deep, and big high-rise blocks assembled. From that beginning, Tridelta City had mushroomed impressively, first outward, then when the limits of the flood marsh were consumed: upward.

Everywhere Adam looked he could see skyscrapers: towers of concrete, metal, composite, and glass producing a gothic landscape of sharp pinnacles rising out of the darker conurbation of low buildings. Most were a kilometer high, with the newer skyscrapers reaching even farther into the misted air. The Kinoki Tower, so far just a massive slender pyramid of scaffolding on the Logrosan’s east bank, was due to top out at three kilometers. Nearly every skyscraper had an airship docked to it; the taller ones had several at varying levels. The craft were all big, over two hundred meters long, with observation decks running the length of their undersides. None of them flew during the day; they just sat on the end of their docking gantry arms, rocking slightly in the misty gusts that swirled across the city.

“I deal in the underside of civilization,” the Agent said mournfully, keeping his back to Adam so he could face the window. “I look out at my city every day and I see how inspiringly high we can climb, yet in this room I also witness how low we can go as a species. I never involve myself personally, you understand, I merely survive by making arrangements. Out of this I live the life I want. I have the constant excitement which is the twin of danger; money, women, the thrill of being engaged at levels of politics and corporate enmity which the ordinary citizen doesn’t even know exists. Yet here you are, independent of all this, planning some act of violence on behalf of the Guardians of Selfhood. I find myself wondering if for once I should involve myself.”

“You want my advice: don’t. There’s a chance none of us will be coming back.”

“Honestly spoken. But my dilemma is this: you attacked the navy before, and now here we are, desperately waiting for the return of the starships. Did you know governments have been advised to put their defense systems on grade two alert? Grade one is when you switch them on. And the navy won’t say if it has had any success.”

“They won’t know until the ships return.”

“How wrong that is, and you know it. If the attack on Hell’s Gateway was successful, all the alien wormholes open in Commonwealth space would shut down. Yet they haven’t. Instead we’ve had the confidential warning to make ready. Now you appear, wanting troops inside of a week. I have to ask myself if this is coincidence. I will do many things for money, yet betraying my species is not one of them.”

“This is not betrayal, quite the opposite.”

“Your ideology claims that we are being manipulated by aliens. Is that right?”

Adam was rather surprised to find himself sweating despite the unobtrusive air-conditioning. He’d never considered that the Agent might be a problem, least of all on a moral level. For once he had no emergency exit plans. Stupid. “It is, but it’s not my ideology. I am not a Guardian, I work as their agent from time to time. And the navy didn’t exist when the Second Chance was attacked. Consider this: if it had been successfully destroyed, then there would have been no flight to trigger the barrier’s collapse.”

The Agent turned from the window and held out a shot glass. “If not then: later.” He smiled again. “I see your logic. Your word, then?”

“We’re on the same side.”

“For such tidings grown men weep.”

Adam took the shot glass and knocked back half of the liqueur. He was sure the burn was harder this time. “You take somebody’s word?”

“I pride myself on being an anachronism. Surprised? I know how you judge me. Think of this as a small retribution.”

“Cheers.” Adam finished the drink.

“Are you leaving us? I do truly believe this city to be safe from assault. Our weapons industry is small in comparison to that of a Big15, but we are very sophisticated.”

“One lone fortress holding fast against the barbarian horde? I don’t think that’s for me. Try accessing the records of the siege of Leningrad sometime and ask yourself who really won.”

“You’re going out in a blaze of glory?”

“No. That’s actually what we’re trying to prevent.”

“Bravo. And incidentally, one of the main reasons I accept your word is because I do know who you represent. What concerns me is that there are some strange people walking the darker streets of Tridelta these days.”

“Is that so?”

“Ah, mockery; the righteousness of fools everywhere. We are a microcosm of the Commonwealth, Señor Duanro. Look at us, and see yourself.”

“All right, I’m buying. What strange people?”

“That’s the thing. Despite all my efforts, and to be immodest for a moment, they are not inconsiderable; I cannot discover their allegiance. They certainly don’t belong to any Isolationist movement, nor a crime syndicate as far as I can determine. Yet they have money, enough to gain exclusivity in several of our more surreptitious clinics. Over the last few months many of my clients have been bounced off waiting lists so the affiliates of these new people can receive armament wetwiring and other services. Taken as a group, they are a considerable force.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

The Agent raised his glass in salute, and drained it in one.

Adam stood to leave. He couldn’t resist one last glance through the window. The Agent was right about Tridelta; it was about the most ethnically cosmopolitan city in the Commonwealth. That was why its government was so fractious and radically independent. Contempt for Commonwealth laws and hatred of Senate “interference” were always high on the agenda of any City Hall politician. It made the relocation of specific services and research laboratories to Illuminatus very attractive for companies who could take advantage of the more liberal laws. Its economy accelerated as fast as its population, an atmosphere in which the local crime syndicates thrived. Consternation in the Senate at this burgeoning “crime central” was another cause of antagonism. It had culminated seventy years ago in a local campaign for Isolation. But although they didn’t have much regard for Commonwealth laws, Tridelta’s population did have a lot of respect for Commonwealth cash. Illuminatus remained integrated.

“You’re very well connected with the political class here,” Adam said. “I wonder if I might ask a favor.”

“I’d be interested to hear it.”

“A lot of lifeboat projects have been started in the Commonwealth.”

“Yes, I caught the Michelangelo show last week. That young reporter did an excellent job. I always take pleasure in Dynasty members squirming in public.”

“If you hear of any companies on Illuminatus supplying the Sheldons with components for a lifeboat, I’d enjoy hearing about it.”

“That’s certainly a favor I’d be happy supplying. I will inquire for you.”

“Thank you. A pleasure, as always.”

Adam had been back at the Hotel Conomela for barely half an hour when Jenny McNowak called.

“Thought you’d like to know,” she said. “We’ve just arrived at CST’s Tridelta station.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Following Bernadette Halgarth. She caught the express direct from EdenBurg. We’re standing on the steps outside the Dalston Street entrance watching her taxi drive off. Kaspar is trying to hack its array to see which hotel she’s checked into.”

“Okay, so what’s Bernadette doing here?”

“Who knows? She had a full diary for the rest of the week: lunches, parties, shows, committee meetings, same stuff as she always does. There was nothing scheduled on Illuminatus. And, Adam, she didn’t tell anyone she was coming, she just dropped everything and got on the train. Right now she’s supposed to be having cocktails with a whole bunch of minor Dynasty socialites at the Rialto Metropolitan Gallery.”

“Okay, keep with her and let me know what happens.”

“We’ll do our best, but there’s only the two of us. Any chance we can have some reinforcements? It’s going to be difficult keeping tabs on her in a city like this.”

“I’ll do what I can; we’re stretched a little thin right now. But, Jenny, you’re reconnaissance only, understand? I don’t want you involved in any incidents. Observe and report.”

“I know. Ah, Kanton says the taxi is heading for the Octavious on the Lower Monkira Wharfside Avenue.”

Adam’s e-butler pulled up the local cybersphere listing on the Octavious. It was a medium-size three-star hotel, a hundred fifty years old. Not the kind of place someone like Bernadette would normally stay at. “Definitely interesting,” he said. “I’ll do my best to get some help for you. In the meantime, under no circumstances check in to the Octavious. We don’t know what’s there, and I’ve just heard there are some wetwired people in this town that don’t belong to any local syndicate.”

“Do what we can,” Jenny said. She closed the call.

Adam closed his eyes, trying to think who he could spare from other operations he was running. He hadn’t been making excuses when he said they were spread thin. In the end he called Kieran McSobel, and told him to bring Jamas McPeierls, Rosamund McKratz, and himself along to Illuminatus on the next express to support Jenny and Kanton. After that, he called Bradley.

“I’m glad our little investment in Bernadette appears to be paying off,” Bradley said. “It was something of a long shot.”

“We’ll know for sure soon enough. She wouldn’t have left EdenBurg in this fashion unless it was urgent.”

“Quite. The timing is significant, I believe. It would appear as if the navy assault on Hell’s Gateway has encountered some difficulty. The unisphere news shows are starting to ask if the Prime wormholes to the Lost23 have shut down.”

“If they had, the navy would tell us; if not them, Doi would want to make the announcement to the Senate.”

“Time is not on our side, Adam. It is only two days until the starships are theoretically within communications range of the Commonwealth. If the news is as bad as everyone is starting to predict, our one window of opportunity might be upon us very swiftly indeed.”

“You think the Starflyer will leave?”

“If we have failed to destroy Hell’s Gateway, the Primes will undoubtedly move to annex more Commonwealth planets. Humanity will strike back as hard as we can. After that, the war will not end until one of us has been wiped out of existence, and the other badly damaged. That is the Starflyer’s goal. Once those final events have started the end result is inevitable; it has no reason to remain in the middle of a war zone. Already, we have built weapons of enormous destructive power in the Douvoir relativistic missiles; and those are only the ones the navy has given information on. There will be others in the pipeline; there always are.”

“Wait a minute, are you saying the war will happen no matter what? I thought eliminating and exposing the Starflyer would put an end to all this.”

“I never promised that, Adam. I had no idea the Primes would be so uncompromising, so brutal. I don’t see how they can be stopped.”

Adam stared out of the hotel’s window across the city where dusk was falling. A beautiful rose-gold sun was already touching the skyline of dark buildings, sending its last orange rays through the layers of mist and cloud to stroke the rooftops and skyscrapers. What Johansson had just said hit him like a particularly volatile police stun charge, draining all the energy from his limbs to leave nothing but sharp tingling. “But … what the fuck are we doing this for?”

“Justice, Adam. It has ruined a world that was once full of life and potential. Far Away was reduced to a desert by the mega flare so it could call across the stars. The Starflyer has brought us to the brink of ruin, too. Surely you don’t believe it should be allowed to leave freely? You of all people, Adam, are possessed of a true sense of justice.”

“No,” Adam groaned. He sat heavily on the edge of his bed, his breathing coming in taxing gulps. Just for an instant he thought he was having some kind of stroke. His body was completely unresponsive as he looked back across the decades to see the diverted passenger train racing across Abadan station, trying to make up for time it had lost on StLincoln. It wasn’t supposed to be on that track, not at that time. The explosion—“That’s not justice. Without validation, killing is just murder.”

“Did you explain that to Kazimir? Do the Guardian villages now under attack on Far Away appreciate your lofty elitist rationalizing?”

“Villages?” Adam frowned, shaking his head to pull the world back into focus.

“The Institute mercenaries are raiding every clan village they can find. Not the frontline forts, not the ones with weapons and warriors. They attack our farmers, our shepherds. Our mothers and their children. The Starflyer has released its uniformed gangsters on our weak and old, hoping we will rush to their aid. It is returning, Adam, it is going back to Far Away. Its slaves are preparing the way for it.”

“What will end the war? There must be something?”

“If you don’t believe me, call Stig. He’s still hanging on in Armstrong City while the firebombs are thrown and the snipers strike unseen. But be quick about it. The Institute is offering the Governor aid in restoring ‘civil order.’ They will soon control the gateway. We will be blocked out.”

“I’m not sure I can do this anymore.”

“My poor Adam. Always believing you are the valiant one, that right will triumph in the end. It’s not always like that. The universe was not built on integrity. In the face of weakness, force can and will triumph. All you can do is choose who wields that force. Us or the Starflyer. Don’t give up now, Adam. You have come so far.”

“Shit.” He wiped the cold sweat from his brow, staring at the moisture on his hand, surprised to see it. I should have known there was no clear answer. Maybe I did. Maybe I just keep going because that’s all that’s left of me.

“Adam,” Bradley said firmly. “Without this there is truly no hope. The planet must be allowed to have its revenge.”

“All right.” Adam stood and looked down on the darkening city. “All right, damnit.”

“Get the train ready to break through the blockade. It’s going to be magnificent, Adam. This journey will be legend.”

After the call ended, Adam never moved, watching through the window until night had claimed Tridelta, and he could see the jungle in all its glory for one last time. “Legend, my ass,” he said with a laugh. His voice nearly cracked, but he didn’t care anymore. He told the maidbot to pack his luggage, and ordered a taxi to take him to the CST station. His e-butler booked a ticket on the next train to Kyushu.

Second Lieutenants Gwyneth Russell and Jim Nwan followed Tarlo out of the taxi and into the NorthHarbor precinct house. They’d all left their uniforms back at the Paris office; here in Tridelta they’d be far too conspicuous. Tarlo wore a pale blue sweatshirt with short frayed sleeves and old jeans, with sneakers and a beaded leather necklace. Gwyneth envied him that in the brief dash to the precinct lobby; her more formal cream suit and gray blouse were damp by the time she reached the air-conditioning inside, and the sun was already dropping below the skyline.

Detective Sergeant Marhol and probationary detective Lucius Lee were waiting for them by the processing desk.

“Quite an ordeal,” Jim said to Lucius as the five of them took the elevator up to the fifteenth floor where the detectives had their offices.

“I told him the stakeout was good experience.” Marhol laughed callously, and gave Lucius a hard slap between his shoulder blades. He was overweight, with a belly that rolled over his belt. His clothes were expensive.

A brief expression of contempt flickered over the probationary detective’s face as he rocked forward under the impact. “Your man was good,” he said. “I checked with Mercedes about the FX 3000p. They refused to believe the security system could be broken so quickly. They said it must be an insurance scam by the owner.”

“Did you check with Ford about battery safety on the Feisha?” Marhol laughed again.

Gwyneth imagined she would get very tired of that laugh very quickly.

The precinct detective teams shared identical offices along a central corridor, like glass boxes lined up in a row. It was the end of the day shift, with everyone wrapping up. Quite a few detectives were lingering in the corridor, taking a look at the big-shot navy team as they went down to one of the secure conference rooms at the far end. A couple of people greeted “car-shock Lucius” with grins and cheers. The young probationary detective stood up to it with tight smiles.

“So what exactly have you got for us?” Tarlo asked once they were settled in the conference room. Its tall window blinds were closed and shielded, which Gwyneth resented; she’d never seen night on Illuminatus before.

“The Merc snatcher, he fits your man perfectly,” Marhol said.

A holographic portal projected an image of the man in the underground parking garage. It was taken from Lucius’s retinal inserts, showing Beard as he approached the Ford Feisha. Various file comparisons flipped up beside it.

“Looks like him,” Gwyneth conceded.

“Anybody local capable of pulling this kind of stunt?” Tarlo asked.

“One or two,” Marhol said. “Maybe. As Lucius says, the Mercedes would be hard to crack.”

“None of the local mechanics match the physical profile,” Lucius said.

“That’s your man, all right.”

“Thank you. From now on this is a priority navy case.” Tarlo gave the conference room’s array the file on Beard’s truck. “Please load this into your city traffic management arrays. I want any vehicle even approximating this on your roads to be pulled over and searched by patrol officers.”

“Wow, big overtime,” Marhol said with a smirk. “The navy gonna pay us for this?”

Tarlo grinned. “The navy will have anyone who screws up on this placed into suspension for a hundred years. You want to smartmouth me again, or do you want to survive the next twenty-four hours?”

“Hey, fuck you, hotshot. We cracked this case for you, the least you can do is show a little gratitude around here.”

“I am showing a very small amount of gratitude. We gave you this alert for Robin Beard weeks ago, and you sent out one rookie on a stakeout that matched his operation profile perfectly? And by the way, like the suit. Cost a lot, did it? Had your taxes audited lately, have you? It can be a real bitch when central treasury pulls your file. Happened to an old friend of mine, went on for years when those accountant programs started tapeworming his finance records. He went into early rejuvenation from the stress.”

“You think threatening me is gonna get things done around here?”

“I’m not threatening you, pal, I’m asking for your cooperation. So far I’ve been asking nicely.”

“What exactly are you asking for?” Lucius asked.

“This informant of yours. I want to speak to him now.”

“He doesn’t keep office hours, you know,” Marhol said. “It takes a while to set up a meeting.”

“It used to,” Gwyneth said. “Today, it becomes quick. We either tag his unisphere address with a location fix and send an armed arrest team in to wherever the bleep comes from, or we raid his home with even more firepower, or we meet up in the bar of his choice.”

“We can round up as many Stuhawks as we can find,” Jim Nwan suggested. “Shove them into neurolock interrogation, maybe a memory read, and extract Beard’s whereabouts that way.”

Tarlo nodded appreciatively. “I like that one. That’s got a high probability of success.”

“You can’t lift an entire fucking gang,” Marhol protested.

“Why not?” Tarlo inquired artlessly.

“Every other gang in the city would declare war on the police,” Lucius said. “Right now, with everyone all het up over the navy ships and Hell’s Gateway, we don’t need any more unrest.”

Gwyneth shrugged. “Not our problem.”

“Okay okay,” Marhol said grudgingly. “My guy, he likes to drink at the Illucid bar on Northgate.”

“Thank you.” Tarlo stood up. “Let’s go. I want to be talking to Robin Beard within twenty-four hours.”

Mellanie had rented a tiny apartment in a monolith forty-story block on Royal Avenue, not a kilometer from the Logrosan embankment. It was a lot darker than the one she’d left behind on Venice Beach; her one window looked away from the river and into the city, but the air-conditioning worked, which clinched the deal as far as she was concerned. The humidity in Tridelta was unbelievable.

As the sun went down she had the wall screen access the Michelangelo show while she got ready for the evening. He had Senators Valetta Halgarth and Oliver Tam in the studio, asking them what had happened to the attack on Hell’s Gateway. Even used to dealing with the expert evasiveness of professional politicians, Mellanie was impressed by the varied and inventive ways the senators didn’t answer the question.

She showered to rinse away the clamminess of a day spent out on Tridelta’s streets. Once she’d toweled down she put on a simple white cotton halter, over which she wore a sleeveless micro-sweater of fluffy white wool in a loose cobweb weave that was only slightly bigger than the halter so she could show off lean lines of abdominal muscle and the ruby-spark stud in her navel. She wriggled into a white miniskirt; no tights—she’d spent half an hour massaging oil into her legs, giving her skin an arresting sheen. None of the clothes had a designer label; there wasn’t even a copy of anything fashionable, which was about all Tridelta’s stores sold in their voracious quest for the tourist credit tattoo. All she had bought in town were some long costume jewelry necklaces of wooden beads and lavender-tinted crystalline shells that she looped around her neck.

“But why would the navy embargo any information on the Hell’s Gateway strike?” Michelangelo asked reasonably. “I’m sure the Prime aliens know if we’ve attacked them or not. Surely the only logical conclusion is that our ships have failed and the Executive is trying to avoid a panic.”

Mellanie half turned for the answer.

“Our intelligence-gathering capability must remain veiled for obvious reasons,” Oliver Tam replied smoothly. “I’m sure we do have the ability to see if their wormholes at the Lost23 are open or not. If so, that gives us a distinct military advantage. The navy cannot be expected to expose our assets simply to make the media happy. We will all know beyond any doubt just as soon as the starships fly into communications range. Is it possible, Michelangelo, that you simply cannot stand not knowing? Has the media become too arrogant in its assumption that all secrets must be violated to satisfy your lust for ratings, no matter what cost to us as a species?”

“Was that a joke?” Michelangelo asked; he seemed mortally offended by the insult. Anger in someone so large and powerful was imposing. Oliver Tam did his best to show no fear.

Mellanie grinned at the ludicrous posturing back in the studio, and checked the mirror. Her hair was now raven-black, and alive with short waves that made it frizz out around her head. She pinned it back on both sides with cheap orange and yellow cloth bands. After some thought she applied the darkest purple lipstick she could find. Thanks to a dermal genoprotein her face was now covered in freckles; they made her look so cutesy she wanted to hurl. Instead she threw her arms around her head, and blew herself a flouncy kiss.

Perfect persona.

The face in the mirror certainly wasn’t that of Mellanie Rescorai, ace investigative reporter for the top-rated unisphere news shows, the face that everybody in the civilized galaxy knew. This was some first-life teen ingenue, fresh and keen to be part of the exciting city party scene—yet not quite knowing how. There would be enough volunteers to show her. Men liked that inquisitive youthfulness, and the older and more jaded they were, the more they liked it. She’d known that even before Morty.

The air outside was already noticeably cooler when Mellanie left the apartment, with a modest breeze drifting in from over the water. It had a narcotic effect on the bustling pedestrians, who all shared the same high-spirited verve as they started to search out what the bars and clubs had to offer. Mellanie headed west along the broad avenue, heading for the river. She couldn’t help the happy smile on her face. The streets here were intent on gaudy photonic mimicry of the elegance that resided beyond the water. For the first ten meters above the enzyme-bonded concrete pavements, the buildings were walled in glowing intense neon, sparkly holographics, and the steady burn of polyphoto lighting. Above that, city regulations allowed no light pollution. Looking straight up gave Mellanie an eerie view; it was as if the street had been given a stealth-black ceiling. The brighter stars twinkled directly overhead, when they weren’t shrouded by remnants of the day’s clouds, but the canyon walls of skyscrapers along the city grid were invisible, their glass windows prohibited from transmitting any light from the inside and thus spoiling the view of others.

She could see only one blemish, the brilliantly lit observation deck of an airship as it cast off from its skyscraper mooring. It angled upward to slide into the clear air above Tridelta’s towers, and set out across the river to begin its night-long flight over the jungle.

Mellanie reached the intersection and walked down to the Logrosan south high quay where the ferries docked. The last short avenue leading to the embankment slowly opened out, its buildings reducing in size. There was a large flow of people heading down to the ferries, bustling along together in a carnival atmosphere. Her pace began to slow as she saw what was ahead. Just about all the first-night tourists in the crowd around her had stopped to stare.

In front of her the Logrosan was a kilometer wide, a sheet of black ripples gurgling with quiet power as it raced along the edge of the city. On the other side, the jungle cloaked the undulating mountains. Every tree gleamed with opalescent splendor.

Unlike terrestrial plants that competed to produce bigger and more colorful flowers to attract insects, vegetation on Illuminatus had evolved bioluminescence to vie for the attention of local insects. The dark leaves that had spent the day soaking up sunlight now radiated the energy away in a soft lambent glow. With each tree in the forest cloaked in its own cold nimbus of iridescence the jungle was bright enough to rival the sleepy light of a dawn sun.

An entranced Mellanie hurried forward to the quay with its long row of angled jetties. Her ferry was the Goldhawk, a big old metal-hull craft that chugged over the water once every hour, night and day. On board, she jostled with the other two hundred fifty passengers for a view near the bow as it headed over to the Crossquay. Three more massive airships passed high overhead during the short trip. Mellanie waved foolishly at them, laughing at herself for doing so, but she was in that kind of mood.

Looking at the shimmering jungle ahead of her allowed her to relax. She’d spent the last forty-eight hours on a nervous high as she performed her reconnaissance of the Saffron Clinic. Michelangelo had been right, it was discreet. In the morning she moved between the pavement cafés on Allwyn Street so that the Greenford Tower was always in view. It was a kilometer-high cone of burnished steel and purple glass that housed stores, factories, offices, hotels, bars, spas, and apartments. The top floor was an airship dock, which had one of the big dark ovoids floating passively on the end of its gantry. Set back from the street in its own plaza, the Greenford’s base was made up of tall arching windows that rose to the fifth floor. Each one was an entrance to a different section. Given her purpose, she could hardly walk around them all trying to find which one belonged to the clinic. So she drank herbal teas and mineral water under the café awnings as her programs and inserts slowly infiltrated the Greenford Tower’s internal network.

With her software milking data from the management arrays on each floor, she soon found the Saffron Clinic, spread out over seven floors, starting thirty-eight stories up. When the information came in, she tilted her head back to see the actual windows, her virtual vision designating the blank panes with a slender neon-green outline. It was as near as she could get, visually or electronically. Access to the clinic’s own arrays was securely guarded. She didn’t have the skill to hack them.

A review of the Tower’s registered structural plans showed her the clinic had its own garage in the third level of the big fifteen-level underground garage. There was also an entrance through one of the tall archways on the west side, which led to a private lobby and lift. Mellanie moved to a bar in a side alley just off Allwyn Street that gave her a narrow view of the entrance. That was where she found the one weakness in the clinic’s electronic protection; the Tower’s own security software identified and cleared all authorized personnel going through the outside door to the Saffron’s lobby before they reached the clinic’s modern internal security systems.

She settled back in a chair and bought herself a second hot chocolate. There were several big fountains playing in the Greenford’s plaza, their tumbling jets of foam occasionally blowing across the small clinic door, but apart from that she had a good view of everyone who came and went. Each time the door opened her inserts recorded the image of the person coming through, cataloguing it with the information and name she gleaned from the Tower’s security array. Three hours later, she cocked her head to one side as a bulky figure emerged into the late afternoon. Funnily enough, it was her time with Alessandra Baron that had given her the most insight into people, learning to recognize what they were in the first few moments. Instant stereotyping, Michelangelo had called it glibly, but she knew instinctively that this was the one she was looking for. Data from the security array rolled down her virtual vision, identifying the man as one Kaspar Murdo and confirming some of the things she’d already guessed at. She was already standing, leaving a couple of Illuminatus ten-pound notes on her table to cover the drinks. She began to follow Kaspar Murdo along the street, unleashing a flock of monitor programs into the public arrays around him as she went.

The crowds were thicker on Southside Crossquay, which was nothing but a wide strip of enzyme-bonded concrete holding the river and jungle apart, extending for fifty kilometers. On the central section, opposite Tridelta, eighty stone and concrete jetties bristled out into the water, angled back to provide some protection against the flow for the boats moored along them. Mellanie wandered down the broad avenue along the top, looking for the jetty where Cyprus Island was docked. On her left, Tridelta’s silhouette was a slim band of gaudy light just above the river, topped by the black towers that cut a sharp profile against the sheen of the jungle on the far side of the city. To her right, the trees towered over the walkway, casting a pale ever-shifting radiance across the admiring faces of the tourists as they searched for their jetty.

The Cypress Island was one of a dozen nightcruise boats tied up at the jetty; longer and slimmer than the ferries that plowed across the river from the city, it had a flat, open top deck with a bar in the center. Inside, the upper two passenger decks had transparent bulkheads, so that the restaurant and casino patrons could still have an excellent view of the jungle; only the third deck where the stage was installed had a normal hull. Mellanie walked along the short gangplank amid a gaggle of clubbers barely older than she was. Several of the boys gave her encouraging smiles, which she had to ignore. It was a shame; the kids here all looked terrific, taking a lot of care with what they wore and how they styled themselves.

She confirmed her ticket with the steward as she stepped on board. He took in her appearance with a fast expert glance. “Are you sure you want to be here?” he asked with a mildly concerned smile. “It gets a bit rowdy later on. Can be upsetting if you’re not used to it. The Galapagos will accept your ticket if you want, it’s the same company; they take out a nicer bunch of passengers.”

“I’ll be all right,” she said, practicing a high-pitched giggle. She was privately delighted by his reaction.

“Okay then.” He waved her on.

The first drink was free. She took an imported light beer from Munich and squeezed her way to the top-deck rail.

The Cypress Island cast off twenty minutes later. Out of the lee of the jetty, its engines pushed it against the swift current producing a pronounced rocking motion. The ride changed for the better two kilometers upriver when they turned into one of the hundreds of tributary rivers feeding the Logrosan. A cheer ran along the boat as the water settled down and Tridelta vanished around a curve behind them. The engine noise faded away to a quiet murmur.

On either side of the small tributary trees grew down to the water, with their tangle of exposed, bloated roots caging the crumbling soil of the bank. Despite the light twinkling from each leaf it was dark between the trees, giving the jungle a mysterious aura. Nothing moved on the land; Illuminatus had never evolved anything bigger than its insects.

“You’d think it would be full of Silfen.”

Mellanie turned to see one of the kids from the group on the gangplank standing beside her. “You would?”

“It’s their kind of place. I’m Dorian, by the way.”

She hesitated. “Saskia.” He was handsome enough, tall with a mild Oriental heritage in his features. Small scarlet OCtattoos ran around his neck, dragons and serpents chasing each other. Semiorganic fibers had been woven into his dark hair, sending beads of light flickering through his dainty Roman curls.

“Can I get you another beer, Saskia?”

Her inserts registered a transmission from him directed at the boat’s cybersphere node. It wouldn’t bother her normally, some boy bragging about pulling her to his friends back in the city. But the transmission was heavily encrypted. “Not just now, thanks.”

He tried to cover the hurt expression. “Sure. I’m on for the whole night.”

“I’ll remember.”

The message he’d sent bothered her. She still didn’t have the skill to decrypt it with her inserts, and she wasn’t carrying a handheld array, so she couldn’t work on it. For a moment she toyed with scanning him thoroughly just to see what kind of inserts he was carrying. Of course, if there was any serious wetwiring he’d detect the scan.

Why should he be wetwired? Heavens, I’m getting paranoid. So why don’t I scan him?

Dorian was back at the bar, smiling with his group of friends. Probably getting teased for getting the brush-off.

The tributary grew narrower, branching several times on both sides. Trees began to arch over the water, the tallest ones touching above midstream, their twigs starting to interlace. Cypress Island sailed on through a tunnel of coronal splendor.

Mellanie went down to the restaurant deck and helped herself to the buffet bar. It was dim inside, allowing the eaters to gaze out at the jungle. Her ticket didn’t qualify her for a table by the transparent walls, so she took her plate back up to the top deck, and sat on a bench in front of the bar, watching the intricate lacework of branches above the river. Some of the trees had a luminescence that verged toward ultraviolet, making her white top shine.

She stared down at the wool for a minute, not really registering what she was seeing. “Oh, sod it!” she muttered. Her platinum and purple virtual hand touched the SI’s icon.

“Hello, Mellanie.”

“There’s somebody on board I’m worried about. I need a message decrypted.”

“Very well.”

She’d been expecting to argue her case. The agreement caught her by surprise. She opened the file for the SI.

“Roughly translated, he said: Identity confirmed. It’s her.”

“Oh, God,” she gasped. Alessandra’s goons have caught up with me! She hunted around in a semipanic, but Dorian was nowhere to be seen on the top deck.

“Do you have any weapons with you?” the SI asked.

“No. What about your inserts? Is there anything that I can use to fight him off?”

“Not with any certainty. I might be able to load kaos software into his wetwiring, assuming he has some. Shall I alert the Tridelta police? They can have a helicopter with you in minutes.”

She glanced up at the radiant arch of light they were sailing under. “How would they get down to us?”

Her link with the unisphere ended.

Damnit! Not now. She sent a scrutineer package into the nearest onboard array to check what the problem was. The network management routines reported that the node was no longer drawing power; it had been damaged physically.

OUR CYBERSPHERE NODE IS SUFFERING A TEMPORARY FAULT, the bridge array sent on a general broadcast. PLEASE DO NOT BE ALARMED. A NEW CONNECTION WILL BE ESTABLISHED SOON. THE COMPANY MANAGEMENT WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGIZE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE IN THE MEANTIME.

Mellanie started shaking as the text ran down her virtual vision. “Come back to me,” she whispered into the fluorescent night. “Come on, you got through to Randtown.” Some awful inner voice was saying that Randtown had never been this isolated from the planetary cybersphere; it had landlines, a network. This was a lone boat in the middle of a jungle on a planet with only one city.

She clenched her hands, and pressed them against her legs, forcing the shakes to stop. Think! I can’t beat him by myself. Waiting for the police wasn’t a serious option. She didn’t even know if the SI had called them. She brought her stilled hand up to her face, giving her arm a curious look. It’s still in there.

A fast scan around with her inserts revealed one of the boat’s arrays was installed behind the bar. Mellanie rushed over and ducked under the counter-top.

“Hey,” one of the barmen told her. “You can’t come back here.”

She flashed him a distracted smile as she ran her hand along the shelving. Scrabbling fingers found the array, tucked away behind boxes of snacks; it was a small one, used to handle the bar’s finances, but it had an i-spot. She pressed her palm against it. “Just one second,” she told the barman. “We’ll make out later.”

His jaw dropped. He didn’t know if she was joking or not.

Mellanie’s virtual hands activated a host of inserts, and fed in the code. The SIsubroutine decompressed, and flowed through the i-spot into the boat’s tiny net.

“Below optimum processing capacity available,” the SIsubroutine said. “I am operating in abridged mode. Why am I here?”

“I’m being stalked by a killer. He’s probably got weapons wetwiring.” She stood up and checked around again, half expecting Dorian to be coming for her. The barman moved up close. “Are you serious?” he asked in a low murmur.

“Hell yes, but later.” Mellanie backed out of the bar. She winked. “I’ll call you.”

“Suggest you call the police,” the SIsubroutine said.

Her mouth twisted into a groan of frustration. “I can’t. That’s why I decompressed you. I need help.”

“Do you have a weapon?”

“No. Find out if there are any on board.”

“No weapons listed on ship’s manifest.”

“Can you infiltrate kaos software into the killer’s wetwired armaments?”

“No kaos files in my directory.”

“Crap. What do I do?”

“Suggest you leave the ship.”

For a moment she considered it. The tributary wasn’t a problem; she could certainly swim to shore, or take a lifeboat. Then she’d be alone in the jungle. Kilometers from anywhere. Possibly alone in the jungle. If she jumped over the rail people would see her. The captain would stop. Dorian would come after her through the trees.

“Think of something else,” she instructed.

“Review enabled. Available processing capacity will not run comparative escape option routines at optimum level.”

Mellanie was rapidly losing faith in the SIsubroutine. This wasn’t going to be like Armstrong City where it hovered around her like a guardian angel. I need a weapon, something that’ll give me a chance. That same calm she’d had when she dealt with Jaycee had returned, blocking out everything else around her. There actually was one place on board that might have something she could use. She just had to get to it. God alone knew where Dorian would be lurking. He was certainly a class above the kind of street thugs that had been sent after Paul Cramley. A compliment of sorts.

Mellanie walked calmly to the stairs that led belowdeck. Surely he won’t shoot me in public? But there was no telling. Kazimir McFoster had been in the middle of LA Galactic, for heaven’s sake.

“Can you detect any encrypted local communications?” she asked the SIsubroutine.

“No. The captain has ordered an assessment of the onboard net to see why the boat functions have dropped to emergency default mode. The diagnostic software is interfering with my comparative option routines.”

“I might be able to get a weapon. Incorporate that possibility into your review.”

“What kind of weapon?”

“I don’t know. Nothing very powerful.”

“Complying.”

“And keep watching for encrypted traffic. I want to know where he is.”

The restaurant was crammed with passengers having their meal; long queues snaked back across the floor space from the buffet bars. With all her sensor inserts active, Mellanie couldn’t detect any of the power signatures that would indicate active wetwiring. She took the stairs down to the casino deck. There were only a few devout gamblers here; most of the tables were deserted, which wasn’t what she wanted. Warm air gusted up the stairwell from the third deck. Mellanie hurried down to the club. “Give me a floor plan,” she told the SIsubroutine. “Is there any escape route? Can I get to the lifeboats?”

“Canceling comparative escape option analysis.”

Mellanie clenched her teeth in anger. Then the boat’s schematics flipped up into her virtual vision.

“Lifeboat access is available on all decks,” the SIsubroutine said.

“Can I launch one without the bridge crew knowing?”

“I can block a launch alert.”

“Great.”

“Resuming comparative escape option analysis.”

At the bottom of the stairs a holographic sign flickered like a faulty strobe telling her that the hermaphrodite dance troupe Death by Orgy would be starting their first performance in twenty minutes. This was definitely what she was looking for. Heavy rock music thumped at her as soon as she went through the screened entrance, loud enough to make her bones vibrate. The club was packed solid and absurdly dim. Holosparks flittered through the air like perverted comets, providing the only flashes of illumination as they circled around the denizens writhing on the minute dance floor. She had to switch her retinal inserts to full light amplification mode to see where she was going.

The club sprang into gray-green focus. Fetish gear was in the majority. Semiorganic costumes offered up strangely modified genitalia as she slithered through the menagerie of bizarreos. Additional limbs were popular, several had infant-sized hands grafted on around the crotch area. Specialist cellular reprofiling had produced a lot of animalisms; furry arms groped at lines of teats, pointed ears twitched as they were licked by serpentine tongues, lustful smiles revealed sharp fangs.

In her white girlie clothes Mellanie felt like some virgin sacrifice on her way to the altar. Everyone looked at her as if they were sharing that thought.

Her inserts were picking up a lot of power sources inside the club, most of them too small for her to use, batteries for kinky toys. She needed the real S&M crowd to have any chance of success.

They were up at the bar, a cluster of large bodies clad in black straps, shiny chains, and hoods. Kaspar Murdo was also there, standing at one end, dressed in Spanish Inquisitor robes, with rusted iron chains around his neck, dangling a variety of medieval instruments.

Mellanie detected the largest power source in the club, her virtual vision locking the position in blue brackets, fortunately at the opposite end of the bar from Murdo. It was a cattle prod, one of many items hanging from the thick leather belt of a bizarreo femfeline. Her head had sleek black fur coming down to her eyebrow line, where her modified glistening red-brown nose jutted forward; long whiskers were rooted at the side of the slit nostrils. She wore a tight sleeveless black leather costume that showed off furry arms and legs. A long tail flicked casually from side to side as she talked to two other cat girls with more restrained modifications and a loosely chained boy slave in a toga with a worried expression on his face.

Mellanie shoved herself in front of the femfeline. “I need to borrow your cattle prod,” she shouted against the pounding rock track.

The femfeline yowled at a volume that rose effortlessly above the music. She brought an arm up and extended her paw fingers in front of Mellanie’s face. The polished onyx claws that had replaced her fingertips clicked out, their points a centimeter from Mellanie’s eyes. “Kitty says lick my litter clean, sweetie bitch.”

Her companions mewled their laughter.

Someone with formidable wetwiring, all of it activated, came through the club’s screened entrance.

“No time,” Mellanie said. She froze. Specks of silver appeared on her arms and face, as if she were sweating mercury. The blooms spread rapidly, obscuring her skin. Software flooded out of her, taking control of the organic circuitry that administered the femfeline’s adaptations.

The femfeline gave a start as her own tail snaked up and wrapped itself around her neck. It tightened. Her claws retracted.

“I’m taking the cattle prod,” Mellanie announced, and snatched it from the belt clip.

The femfeline smiled in excitement. “Yes, mistress, I’ll be a good kitty for you.” Her tongue licked out, a long obscenely flexible cord of wet flesh. “Hurry back.”

Mellanie pushed hard through the packed bodies, creating a wave of commotion. Behind her, Dorian caught it and began to thread his way toward her.

“Can you remove the safety controls on the cattle prod?” she asked the SIsubroutine. “There’s a lot of power in it. If I could use it in one burst it should be lethal.”

“Canceling comparative escape option analysis. Reviewing cattle prod systems.”

Mellanie reached the screened doorway at the side of the stage. “Open it,” she ordered.

The door slid aside. The corridor behind it was lined with small private cabins. She could hear moans, some of pleasure, some of pain. A whip made a loud crack. Someone screamed. There was snarling.

“Cattle prod safety systems bypassed. Battery discharge rate set to unlimited.”

She looked around frantically as the door slid shut behind her. Most of the cabins were occupied. There was a single emergency evacuation hatch at the far end. “How can I hit him with it? He’ll never let me get close.”

“Running comparative remote electrical assault option analysis.”

“Oh, hell.” Mellanie dashed for the escape hatch.

Dorian zapped the door’s lock circuitry with a single burst from the maser embedded in his wrist. A small circle of the tough composite smoldered and blistered. He pushed hard, applying the strength of his boosted musculature. There was a creaking sound, lost in the raucous music. The door popped open. He walked through the screening and into the relative quiet of the corridor. His sensor scans were immediately subject to a barrage of interference. Voices yelped and groaned behind the closed doors on either side. At the far end, Mellanie had got the escape hatch open. She jerked around. Half of her skin was silver, inserts and OCtattoos directing the interference directly at him. He scanned what he could of her with interest. She was doing the same to him. More effectively, he knew, but he could see what he needed to.

“No weapons,” he said. “How curious.”

“I’ve got a message for Alessandra.”

He took a step forward. “What?”

Her inserts transmitted an encrypted signal into the corridor’s small array. The sprinkler system went off above him. Water poured down as the fire alarm sounded.

Dorian gave her a pitying look as the deluge soaked his shirt and pants. “Nobody can hear that.” Beyond the shower, Mellanie smiled.

The cattle prod lying on the floor by Dorian’s feet discharged. The water allowed its full current load to slam into him. His body convulsed, steam fizzing out of his clothes and hair. He arched his back, screaming briefly as his eyes bulged and his tongue protruded. The optical fibers woven into his hair melted. Black lines appeared on his skin when organic circuits burned, sending out thin wisps of smoke to mingle with the steam and water. Flesh ruptured volcanically where his weapons’ power cells were implanted. Blood and gore splattered across the walls.

It took five seconds for the cattle prod battery to exhaust itself. When the current failed, Dorian’s juddering corpse crashed to the floor. The SIsubroutine switched off the corridor’s sprinklers.

Mellanie walked over and peered down at the gently steaming body. The legs spasmed a couple of times.

“I’ll tell her myself,” she said.

Kaspar Murdo was enjoying the evening. It was a good crowd in the Cypress Island’s club. He knew a lot of them, and there were several promising newbies. Everyone said Death by Orgy was hot. He was looking forward to seeing them perform.

Then this vision in a fluffy white top and miniskirt sidled up to the bar barely a couple of meters away and asked for a beer. A first-lifer by the looks of her. She appeared slightly shaky, as if she was shocked by what she was seeing and trying not to show it. That meant she was curious, and not instantly repelled. It was a vulnerability he knew exactly how to take advantage of. He’d be able to encourage her at first, drawing her closer, reassuring her until she trusted him. Then with that trust established he could begin her training.

His bulk allowed him to push easily through the eager authoritarian animalists and bizarreos who were gathering like storm clouds around their oblivious prey. He glared any objectors down, snarling back when he was barked at by a canineman. “This one is on me,” he told her as the girl proffered a one-pound note to the barman. “I insist. That means there can be no argument.”

She nodded with nervous gratitude, glancing at the instruments on the end of his chains. “Thank you.”

“Kaspar,” he said.

“Saskia.”

He grinned in a friendly, paternal fashion, and lifted one of his chains to show off the crude iron and leather device on the end. “Crazy, aren’t they?” he asked in a fashion that invited her to share the joke.

She smiled sheepishly. And Kaspar’s evening became the best in a long, long time.

It was close to midnight local time when the express from Paris slipped into Tridelta’s CST station. Renne was secretly delighted about that: it meant they’d get a look at the jungle. “Get us a riverside hotel as close as you can to the Octavious,” she told Vic Russell.

“Absolutely,” he said enthusiastically.

“The closest and cheapest, Vic.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Aren’t we going straight to the Halgarth team?” Matthew Oldfield asked.

“They can handle the rest of tonight’s shift,” Renne said. “Warren will let me know if there’s any status change.”

“Okay.”

“Gives us a chance to settle in before we see what Bernadette is up to. Don’t you want to see the jungle?”

“Hell, yeah.”

“Right then.” She told her e-butler to call Tarlo. “Where are you?” she asked when he accepted the call.

“Stakeout in a garage on Uraltic Street. A police informant we interviewed earlier said Beard would be here tonight.”

“I hope you’re wearing rubber socks. Those car batteries have a lot of current in them.”

“Very funny. What do you want?”

“I’m at the CST station.”

“In Tridelta?”

“Yeah.”

“Why? Has Hogan sent you as backup?”

“No. I’m following Bernadette Halgarth, Isabella’s mother.”

“You’re doing what?”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got Vic and Matthew with me.”

“Does Hogan know? For Christ’s sake, Renne, I thought you’d dropped the whole Isabella thing.”

“I had. But Christabel Halgarth put Bernadette and Victor under surveillance as a favor for me, I didn’t even have to ask her. Both of them have been receiving and sending some encrypted messages, nothing too suspicious; but today Bernadette just dropped everything and came here. Halgarth security has her under surveillance at the Octavious hotel, which again is a strange choice for a socialite like Bernadette. We’re going to join them in the morning.” She waited for Tarlo to answer.

“Got us a hotel,” Vic said cheerfully. “Not very cheap, sorry.” He and Matthew shared a grin.

Renne waved a hand for silence. Her virtual vision showed her the link was still active. “Tarlo?”

“Yeah, hi, sorry. Do you need any help?”

“Not yet. But if we do, I’ll yell for you. And that’s a reciprocal.”

“Sure. Thanks. Okay, good luck.”

“Yeah, you, too,” she told him.

“Paula, we’ve got an interesting situation developing.”

“What is it, Hoshe?”

“I’m with Nadine and Jacob on Illuminatus, running the electronic surveillance on Tarlo while he goes after Beard. Now Gus and Isaiah have joined us; they’re monitoring Renne.”

“So both targets are on Illuminatus?”

“Yes. Renne arrived twenty minutes ago, following Bernadette Halgarth. As soon as Renne got here she called Tarlo, then five minutes later Tarlo called Bernadette. It was an encrypted message and routed through a onetime address, but for once we got lucky; we infiltrated scrutineer software into Bernadette’s hotel node as soon as Warren told me she was here. We haven’t managed to decrypt yet, but the message Tarlo sent is the one she received. It looks like Tarlo was warning her she’s under observation. There’s no other reason.”

“Tarlo. Damnit.”

“I’m sorry, Paula.”

“Not your fault. I knew it had to be one of them.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Keep a close eye on him and Bernadette. I’ll join you in a couple of hours.”

“Are you going to tell Renne?”

“Possibly. Our priority has to be getting Tarlo into custody. But I don’t want to scare off Bernadette until she’s contacted whoever she’s there to meet. This is our first real chance to penetrate the Starflyer agent network. Timing is going to be critical.”

“Tarlo’s going to be wetwired. Bernadette as well, probably.”

“Definitely. Don’t worry, my team will be armed.”

The room didn’t look like anything special, a simple cube of gray walls and a worn carpet. Two polyphoto strips in the ceiling made it brighter than it strictly needed to be. A single air-conditioning grille high above the malmetal door hissed away unobtrusively. There weren’t any sensors visible, but they had to be there somewhere.

Robin Beard sat on a cheap plastic chair with his feet up on the table that was bolted to the middle of the floor. He didn’t look particularly concerned that he’d been arrested. But then, Lucius thought, he’d been in custody so many times he was familiar with the routine. Say nothing and wait for the lawyer.

Lucius followed Tarlo into the interview room. The blond surfer gave Beard a friendly smile.

“You’re not a lawyer,” Beard said.

“Smart,” Tarlo said. “I like that. That’s going to be helpful for both of us.”

“You guys are really going to suffer for this,” Beard said. “I was walking through a garage and you restrained me for no valid reason with undue force. You didn’t even read me any rights.”

“That’s because you don’t have any,” Tarlo said.

Beard smiled.

“Sit down,” Tarlo said.

The smile flickered on Beard’s face. “I am—”

Tarlo’s fist swung fast, smashing into the small man’s nose. There was a crunch of bone breaking as the chair tipped back spilling him onto the floor, limbs all in a tangle. His head caught a nasty crack as he went down. “Jesus fucking Christ!” Beard wailed. One hand was cupping his nose, with a copious amount of blood leaking through his fingers; the other hand was probing the back of his skull. His eyes had watered.

Lucius had taken a half pace forward, then halted, unsure what to do. He glanced to the ceiling corner where one of the visual sensors was hidden. Nobody was calling him.

Tarlo grinned as he squatted down beside the mechanic. “Always hurts like a son of a bich, doesn’t it? Busted my own nose a couple of times on a board, so I know.”

Beard glanced desperately at Lucius. “You saw that. You’re my witness.”

Lucius managed to let his gaze drift away. Tarlo had told him to say nothing, but this wasn’t what he was expecting.

“We couldn’t get hold of a good cop to work this routine properly,” Tarlo said. “They’re all out on the streets helping decent citizens in these troubled times. So we’re just going to have to do the bad cop, worse cop setup instead. Know what? The boys in the office, they’re running a pool on how long you can stand up to the beating before you crack. I’ve got fifty pounds on ten minutes, but I’m gonna be on the level with you here, buddy, I’m not even going to wait that long.” He drew a slim medical infuser patch from a pocket.

“There’s quite a few street names for this; you ever heard of hardbang? No? How about painamp?”

Beard shook his head, giving Tarlo a frightened look.

“The thing is, this is like the opposite of an anesthetic,” Tarlo said. “It makes the pain progressively worse. Really, badly, worse. I mean I’ve see people screaming in agony from a torn nail when they’re tripping on this. So you can imagine what that nose is going to do to you, especially when Lucius here starts thumping it.”

“What the fuck do you want?” Beard shouted. His wide eyes were staring wildly at the infuser patch.

“We’re not police,” Tarlo said. “We’re navy. So there is no comeback for us no matter how bad this gets for you, how many of your rights we stamp on. No lawyer is going to come charging in to save you. Do you understand that?”

Beard swallowed hard and nodded.

“You will do as I tell you. Now do you want me to pump a dangerous dose of this into you? Is that the way I make you cooperate?”

Beard shook his head. The blood was running right down his grubby shirt to drip onto the floor. “No, sir.”

“Hey.” Tarlo grinned around at Lucius. “Haven’t been called sir in a long time. How about that? This man has respect. I like that.” He turned back to Beard. “So do I infuse?”

“No. No, sir, I’ll cooperate.”

“Good man.” Tarlo put his hand out. Beard gave it a mistrustful look, but eventually allowed Tarlo to help him to his feet. “You introduced a friend of yours, Dan Cufflin, to an agent who supplies people for illegal activities,” Tarlo said. “Correct?”

Beard frowned, trying to concentrate. “Yeah, I remember Dan.”

“What was the agent’s name?”

“I don’t know. He’s just the Agent.”

“Where is he?”

“Here, on Illuminatus, I think, this is where we normally meet.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. I’ve only ever met him twice, and that was in different places: bars. We normally use the unisphere.”

“Today you meet him again, in person, on Illuminatus. Fix it up. Now.”

Jenny McNowak had checked herself and Kanton into the Grialgol Intersolar hotel on Lower Monkira Wharfside Avenue, on the opposite side of the street from the Octavious, and two blocks down. After that there wasn’t much she could do apart from load scrutineer programs into arrays in and around the Octavious. The registration array was easy to hack, giving them Bernadette’s room number, 2317, as well as a list of other guests, which they ran through their database.

After that, they’d managed to get up on the Grialgol’s roof, and position a sensor that could zoom in on Bernadette’s twenty-third-floor window. It was dark by then; there was nothing else they could do except wait.

Kieran McSobel arrived a couple of hours later, bringing Jamas McPeierls and Rosamund McKratz with him. There was enough room for all of them; Jenny had booked a suite in the Grialgol. After weeks in Rialto’s rock-bottom economy accommodation, and long stints cramped up in cheap hired cars, the suite with its luxury fittings, especially in the bathroom, was a pleasant interlude. It gave her a lot of satisfaction being in a more expensive room than Bernadette, whom Jenny had come to envy and despise for the ostentation she lived in on EdenBurg. She was looking forward to testing the Grialgol’s room service menu.

“Nothing much to report,” Jenny said as the newcomers began to set up a series of specialist arrays they’d brought with them in the suite’s main octagonal lounge. She and Kanton had arrived with almost nothing other than their standard field operation packs. Bernadette had caught everyone by surprise when she left EdenBurg.

Jamas established an e-seal around the perimeter of the lounge, then switched on a janglepulse in case there were any modified insects spying on the room. “We’re clean,” he announced.

“She’s had no visitors,” Jenny said. “And as far as we know there’s been nothing taken up to her room.”

“What about a visual?” Kieran asked, nodding at the tiny handheld array screen that was showing the grainy gray hash that was the feed from the roof sensor.

“She’s left the window screened,” Kanton said. “It’s just a standard model, twenty years old, but effective enough to keep out any passive scan.”

“So we don’t even know if she’s in there or not?” Kieran said.

“We have accessed civic sensors around the hotel,” Jenny said defensively.

“Nobody with her visual profile has left the building; our characteristics recognition programs would have caught that.”

“Understood.” He turned to Jamas and Rosamund. “That’s your first priority, try to establish if she’s still in there.”

“We’re on it,” Rosamund assured him from a plush leather armchair. Her eyes fluttered half-shut as data began to fill her virtual vision. Small holographic data blocks sprang up from various arrays spread out around her. Her hands and fingers twitched minutely as she began manipulating programs, infiltrating them into the Octavious systems.

“Our database didn’t tag any of the other residents,” Jenny said. “None of the names are known to us.”

“We should maybe try and run a comparison, see if any of them fit Isabella’s profile.”

“Good idea. We’ve got several hours of images from the civic cameras. It shouldn’t take too long to—”

“There’s someone else here,” Rosamund announced.

“What do you mean?” Kieran asked. An ion pistol appeared in his hand.

“In the Octavious arrays,” Rosamund said. “I’ve found a second set of scrutineer programs. Someone else is watching room 2317.”

“Jamas,” Kieran said firmly. “Review this hotel’s arrays, find out if we’re being watched.” He opened the base of a large case, revealing an impressive collection of weaponry. Jenny selected a gamma pulse rifle, while Kanton took a plasma grenade auto-launcher. The three of them moved smoothly to cover Rosamund and Jamas.

“Rosamund,” Kieran said. “Can you see where the other programs are sending their information? And have they noticed you?”

“Get into one of the force field suits,” Jenny told Kanton.

“No anomalous programs in the arrays on this floor,” Jamas said. “Moving the scan outward.”

“What about emissions from non-net systems?”

“Nothing detectable. But if this is the navy, we’re not going to be able to see the kind of systems they use against us. The unisphere has rumors that they’ve modified an insect that’s immune to janglepulse.”

Kanton slipped into one of the skeletonlike force field suits, wearing it outside his clothes. The thick bands adjusted themselves to achieve a balanced coverage of his body, then a thin layer of air shimmered around him as the force field came on. He nodded, and Jenny took another suit out of the case, moving quietly, as if noise alone would trigger an assault by an armed navy team.

“Kieran?” she whispered.

“Not yet.” He waved her back and holstered his ion pistol. “Kanton, open the door.” The lock disengaged, and Kieran stepped out into the corridor, holding a sensor stick casually in one hand.

Jenny had to wait in a fervor of anxiety while he checked around. He returned in less than a minute.

“Some of the occupied rooms have got their integral e-seal switched on,” he said, and held up the little sensor stick. “I couldn’t tell what was inside, not without raising the alarm. In any case, if they have any fieldcraft, they won’t be on this floor.”

Jenny let her breath ease out of her. Kieran was already giving the ceiling a suspicious stare. “We’re moving,” he said. “On foot. Jenny, pick a hotel at random. We’ll establish a safeguard perimeter before we move in.”

“All right,” Jenny said. She put the rifle back in the case and asked her e-butler for a list of hotels within a five-block radius.

Kieran was stripping off his shirt and pants. “As of now, we’re staying hot. I want everyone in force field suits worn under your clothing. Rosamund, how are you doing?”

“I think our programs might have been compromised. If I can expose their programs, they can certainly do the same to ours.”

“Can you tell where the other watchers are based?”

“No, they’ve employed some very sophisticated routing.”

“What about Bernadette? Is she in there?”

“Her room’s drawing power for lights, the air-conditioning, and the bathroom. Power use has fluctuated since she checked in, which is a good indicator of occupation. The door lock hasn’t been used since check-in, either. That’s the best I can do.”

“Fine. You and Jamas take it in turns to get into suits, then we’re out of here. Jenny, any idea who our rivals could be?”

“Other than the navy, no. But why would the navy be following Bernadette?”

“I don’t know.” Kieran sounded dubious as he buttoned his shirt over the dark bands caging his chest. “Mellanie Rescorai was warned about Isabella and her parents. It might be a news show team.”

“Or we were seen by Halgarth security,” Jamas said as he pulled the force field suit on. “Let’s face it, we were operating on their home turf.”

“If they’re watching Bernadette, it implies they’re opposed to the Starflyer,” Jenny said.

Kieran handed the last force field suit to Rosamund, and snapped the case shut. “Don’t bet your life on it.”

It was the small hours of the morning, Illuminatus time. Gwyneth Russell, who wasn’t even back on Paris time properly yet, was wide awake and relaxing in the Almada hotel’s spa bath, with bubbles foaming gently all around her. She’d just got a call from Vic, who was checked in to a hotel a mere five kilometers away. They’d talked about maybe spending a couple of hours together, but it wasn’t going to happen. Both of them were on active duty, and could be called on at any moment. Most of their talk had concentrated on the coincidence of being on Illuminatus. Vic didn’t think it was coincidence, although neither of them could think how Bernadette Halgarth could possibly be connected to the Agent. Gwyneth had suggested it might be Isabella who had the connection, and Bernadette was just here to see her. Of course, that left what Isabella was doing with the Agent.

Gwyneth sighed, and examined her hands. Her skin was starting to wrinkle she’d been soaking so long. She really should try to get some rest, ready for tomorrow. For once she thought the case was actually progressing well. Beard had set up his meeting with the Agent for the following evening. She even quietly admired the way Tarlo had bluffed him into cooperating; that the Californian surfer could actually hit someone had been a mild surprise, but it had certainly produced a result. They were so close now to cracking the whole Guardian case open. Around the office, it was rapidly becoming a mantra; they had so much information that all they needed was the one lucky break that had eluded Paula Myo for a hundred thirty years. Her mouth lifted in a bad girl smile: the break just happened to be Beard’s nose.

Her e-butler told her Paula Myo was calling. Gwyneth grunted in surprise and told the e-butler to accept.

“Gwyneth, would you please acknowledge my authority certificate.”

A file icon with the Senate Security seal popped up in Gwyneth’s virtual vision. Her virtual hand in the colors of the old Welsh national flag reached up and touched it. For the life of her she couldn’t think what Paula was doing. The file opened up, containing Paula’s verified Senate Security authorization. “That checks out,” Gwyneth said. “What’s this about?”

“I am officially reassigning you to my interdiction team,” Paula said. “As of this moment.”

Gwyneth sat up fast, sloshing water over the edge of the big bath. “What interdiction team?”

“Senate Security has been watching Tarlo for some time. He’s just warned Bernadette Halgarth that Renne’s team is observing her.”

“He did what?”

“He’s a traitor, Gwyneth.”

“No. He can’t be.”

“I’m afraid I can’t debate this with you. We are going to arrest Tarlo.”

“You’re here?” Gwyneth slipped and slithered out of the bath, grabbing her towel.

“Yes. I require your assistance. Is there anybody in his room with him?”

“No. I don’t think so. We’re all supposed to be resting. Beard’s in custody at the precinct, and we’re not due to pick up the Agent until this evening.”

“Very well. I suggest you get into your force field suit. Don’t activate it. He’s next door, and will probably sense you switching it on.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No. Once you have it on, please call him. He won’t suspect you, and it will enable us to verify his position. The call may also provide a small distraction.”

“Oh, God.” She hurried back into the bedroom where her case was sitting on the bed. The force field skeleton suit was an awkward bundle of bands that was difficult to put on around a wet naked body. “It can’t be Tarlo; he’s got us so close to the Guardians.”

“I know this is difficult, Gwyneth. Just trust me for a few minutes more.”

Had it been anyone, anyone else, she might have doubted, and Senate Security be damned. But not Paula Myo. “All right,” Gwyneth said. The skeleton bands were chafing badly, but they were all in position and switched to standby mode. She didn’t like to think what she looked like. Surely there had been time to put on some underwear? “I’m in the suit.”

“Leave this channel open, and make the call.”

“What about?”

“Whatever, it only has to last a few seconds.”

Gwyneth took a calming breath. Her virtual hand reached out and pulled Tarlo’s icon from her grid. “Hi, Chief. I was just checking in with you before I go to bed. Any developments?”

There was a long pause.

“Why are you in your force field suit?” Tarlo asked.

Gwyneth jerked her head around to stare at the wall between the rooms.

“Shit!” Her virtual hand swiped at the suit’s activation icon as she dived for the floor.

The middle of the wall exploded in a gout of dazzling white plasma. Long ion flames seared across the room. One of them licked at Gwyneth. Her force field wasn’t quite established; it flared purple around her, allowing a weakened gust of the energized atoms to rake across her bare skin. She screamed at the pain, thrashing around as the force field stabilized, deflecting the rest of the blast. Flames burst out of the furnishings and carpet.

The room vibrated to the bass roar of more weapons being fired. Blinding light flared through the wrecked wall. Gwyneth rolled over, tears blurring her vision. She risked a glance down at the side of her rib cage where the ion stream had penetrated. Her flesh was blackened, with red cracks splitting open to weep blood and fluid. It was an agony so intense it was actually dull. She knew she was going to throw up. The sprinklers came on, spraying a glutinous blue foam. Nozzles automatically sought out the hot spots, directing the foam to the worst of the blaze. Steam and smoke churned into the air, obscuring the room.

More explosions sounded. One actually produced a quake in the floor that tumbled her about. The ceiling sagged, and what was left of the ruined wall collapsed completely. She tried to stand, but somehow her limbs didn’t respond. The best she could do was roll over into a crouch. An alarm was howling.

Three armor-suited figures materialized out of the thick smoke. Two of them pointed fat stubby weapons at her.

“Do not move, lady.”

Gwyneth almost laughed.

The third circled around her warily, and held a hand out flat toward the bathroom door. There was a dull thud, and a pressure wave knocked Gwyneth back onto her stomach. She groaned at the fresh outbreak of pain in her side. The bathroom door had vanished, along with most of its frame.

“Clear,” the suited figure said.

“Did you see where he went?”

Gwyneth blinked in confusion. A galaxy of colored lights that weren’t quite part of this universe were flashing at her through the smog.

“Gwyneth! It’s Paula. Did you see him? Did he come through your room?”

“I … No.” She gritted her teeth in the effort to concentrate. “No, there was just the plasma grenade. He didn’t come this way.”

“Okay, hang on. We’ve got a medic team on standby. They’ll be with you soon.”

“Oh, don’t worry about me, I’m all right,” she said, and fainted.

The sun was just high enough to send a pale light along Tridelta’s long straight streets as Alic Hogan’s taxi pulled up outside the cordon that had been set up around the Almada hotel. He got out of the vehicle with Lieutenant John King and stared at the scene with a rising sense of dismay. Alic wasn’t a religious man, nor even superstitious, but some days it did seem as if the Paris office had been cursed.

Five big fire tenders were drawn up outside the modern concrete and glass edifice of the hotel. Firebots had crawled up the walls to the fifth floor, trailing their hoses after them. They were clustered around a series of holes that had been ripped through the neat mosaic pattern of windows and concrete panels. He recognized them as weapon blasts. The edges were melted, with little soot scarring the wall above, which meant the plasma had punched out horizontally. That was confirmed by the amount of debris littering the street below. Water and blue suppressant foam was smeared all the way down the wall below the holes, spilling onto the pavement to run into the gutters. There were a couple of shallow craters in the road, where plasma grenades had struck, and a number of smaller pocks from ion pulses.

Outside the area where tenders and force field–clad fire department staff were supervising the damping-down operation, the police had established a cordon that they were enforcing with armed officers and patrolbots. Clusters of patrol cars were blocking the street a block back from the hotel, their red and blue strobes bright in the leaden dawn. Several other vehicles were stationary along the road, cars and a few early morning delivery vans halting where the city’s traffic management arrays had injected their emergency stop orders. The hotel residents, a couple hundred people, were all huddled together at one end of the building, wearing their pajamas, or dressing gowns, or less. A lot of them had bare feet. Police officers were moving through them, listening to the questions and protests. Kids were crying.

A couple of ambulances and a medic command bus were parked behind the fire tenders.

“Dear God,” Alic muttered.

“He was determined not to be caught, wasn’t he?” John King said.

“Right.” All Alic could think of was what the Admiral would say.

The first person Alic saw when a police officer led them into reception was Paula Myo. His jaw clenched at the sight of her. She was wearing full assault armor, with the helmet held under one arm. Even in the bulky dark suit she managed to appear orderly, with her hair neatly held back from her face with a blue Alice band. Several of her Senate Security team were positioned around the reception area, also in armor, with their force fields active, and rifles held ready.

A couple of the paramedics were working on Gwyneth, who was lying on a crash trolley with a green medical smock around her. Vic Russell was holding her hand, the big man’s face white with worry and anger. Renne was also there, along with Jim Nwan, both of them standing back a polite distance from the cart, but peering at their fallen colleague. The police precinct captain was talking quietly to Paula, while a detective sergeant called Marhol hovered at his side.

Alic took a breath and walked over to the crash cart. “How is she?” he asked the senior paramedic.

“Heavy burns on her side where the plasma struck. There will have to be some regeneration, but it’s not critical. We’ve cleaned the injury and sealed it in healskin.”

“So she’ll be all right?”

“A few days in the hospital, then a fortnight recuperating. She was lucky.”

“Great.” He leaned over the crash trolley, trying not to look at the stains and flecks of crisped flesh.

“Hi, Chief,” Gwyneth said. Her face was very pale, sweat glinting on her brow.

“Hi, yourself. When you get back, the first thing I’m doing is sending you on a refresher course on how to duck quicker.”

“Fine by me.” Her dreamy smile was mainly due to painkillers.

“Go with her to the hospital,” Alic told Vic. “Take as long as you want.”

“I’m coming right back,” Vic said. “I will be on the arrest team when we track that piece of shit down.”

“Okay.” Alic wasn’t going to argue in public, but there was no way he was going to allow Vic any part of the case. Right now his priority was to get the big man out of the way.

He finally turned to Paula, and smiled like a prosecuting lawyer. “Would you care to brief me now, please.”

“Certainly.” She thanked the precinct captain, who walked off with Marhol. It was just the Paris office team who were left in a group.

“Tarlo is a traitor,” she said flatly.

“I really hope you can prove that.”

She glanced meaningfully around the reception area and through the huge glass doors at the scene outside. Alic reddened slightly, but held his ground.

“I’ve been running elimination entrapment operations on both Tarlo and Renne,” Paula said.

“Me?” Renne yelped.

“Of course,” Paula replied urbanely. “Our observation was both visual and electronic. As soon as Tarlo was informed that Renne had Bernadette Halgarth under observation he called her. We intercepted that call. When we moved in to arrest him, he fought back and managed to elude us. His armament wetwiring is not registered. Next time we will field a more appropriate arrest squad.”

Alic knew what the answer was, but he had to ask, just for the record. “Who do you believe Tarlo has been working for?”

“The Starflyer.”

“Goddamnit. The Admiral doesn’t accept the Starflyer is real.”

“Don’t worry,” Paula said, with more sympathy than Alic was expecting,

“he will have to acknowledge that Tarlo was a traitor. Your conduct has not been compromised; Tarlo dates back over two decades in the Paris office. Your priority now is to launch a review of his cases to see which have been compromised.”

“Right.” Alic didn’t want to think how much work that was going to involve, nor where he was going to get the resources. Another navy intelligence office would probably have to be brought in, and they would put everyone at Paris under review, himself included. “Why was Bernadette under observation?” he asked Renne. “I thought we agreed that aspect of the case was closed.”

“Christabel Halgarth placed her and Victor under observation as a favor to me,” Paula said before Renne could answer. Judging from Renne’s expression, she hadn’t known that.

“So, Bernadette is working for the Starflyer?” Alic said.

“It would appear so. In which case we must assume Victor is also an agent. I’ve informed Christabel about this incident. She will close the net around Victor if he hasn’t already gone dark.”

“And Isabella?” Renne asked.

“Her involvement is even more likely,” Paula said. “You made a good call on that investigation. I’d say the Doi shotgun was Starflyer disinformation intended to discredit the Guardians.”

“All right,” Alic said; he just wanted to draw a line under the botched arrest. At least that was Paula’s responsibility. “What is your recommendation? What do we do next?”

“Obviously taking Tarlo into custody is my principal priority. CST security officers at the Tridelta station will be reviewing every passenger for us. I’ve deployed an armed squad there already. Other than that, the ongoing cases must be kept open.”

“Are you going to arrest Bernadette?” Jim Nwan asked.

“Yes,” Paula said. “But it’s a question of timing.”

“Now we know the Starflyer agents are weapons wetwired, we need to gather a lot more firepower, surely?” John King said.

“I already have more Senate Security combat squads on the way,” Paula said. “But right now, Bernadette is the only Starflyer agent whose whereabouts we are certain of. She cannot be allowed to escape.”

“How long until your reinforcements arrive?” Alic asked.

“Fifteen minutes.”

“Okay then, let’s go.”

Paula shifted her helmet to her other arm. “No. She knows her cover has been blown; she also knows that we are observing her and we have armed squads in Tridelta.”

“So?”

“So, why didn’t she try and break the observation as soon as Tarlo was exposed?”

Alic sagged, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. “She’s waiting for something.”

“Exactly.”

“But the longer she waits, the stronger we can box her in. She must know that.”

“Yes. So whatever she is here for must be very important to the Starflyer. She will try to break our observation, either by force or stealth. We need to let her think she has succeeded; that way she will lead us to whatever she is here for.”

“You can have whatever resources you need from the Paris office,” Alic said.

“I’d like to keep Renne’s team on her for continuity,” Paula said. “Can you give me someone to replace Vic?”

“Sure.” He turned to John King. “That’s you.”

“Yessir,” John said.

“That’s useful,” Paula said. “We’ve got the Paris team, Halgarth Security, and Senate Security. If she can elude all three of us, then frankly we deserve to lose her.”

“What about the meeting with the Agent?” Jim Nwan asked. “It’s set up and ready.”

“That’s our second objective,” Paula said. “The Agent is the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for. He can lead us right into the Guardians. The meeting this evening must go ahead as planned. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to take him into custody.”

“I’ll take charge of that operation,” Alic said. It was the kind of legitimate interception that was part of the Admiral’s agenda. And success there would reflect well on whoever was in charge of the operation; it might even mitigate against the rest of this god-awful mess.

“Good. You understand that Tarlo will also be there if we haven’t caught him by tonight.”

“Are you sure?”

“Whoever gets the Agent will have access to critical information on the Guardians and their operations. The Starflyer needs that as badly as we do; for over a century they have been its only opposition.”

“So … are we still trying to shut down the Guardians?” Renne asked.

Alic had never seen such a troubled expression on Paula’s face, not even that day when the Admiral dismissed her.

“There are a lot of political factors involved,” Paula said slowly. “I can only say that my allies will have to consider our next move very carefully after we have acquired the Agent and reviewed what he knows.”

“Okay,” Alic said briskly. “We all know what to do. Send back to the office for any equipment you need, especially force field suits, given what we know about Tarlo’s capabilities. Paula, a word, please?”

The two of them walked away from the others. “You know I can’t afford to go gray on the Guardians,” he said. “When we acquire the Agent, any information he has must be acted on in a positive manner. They are still classed as our number one terrorist group.”

“I understand. Tarlo will give the Admiral pause for thought. He’s not stupid. If the information is useful, then my allies will be able to change Commonwealth policy.”

Alic whistled appreciatively. “Those are some allies. Good luck for the rest of today.”

“And yourself. My advice would be to strengthen the guard on Beard. He’s the only known route to the Agent. If Tarlo wants to avoid confrontation tonight that would be the obvious method.”

“Right then.” Alic nodded, and headed over toward the apprehensive detectives.

Mellanie spent the morning lying on the small room’s single bed with the floor-to-ceiling curtains drawn, accessing all the Tridelta news. Every show was featuring last night’s fight at the Almada hotel. The level of violence had surprised the reporters, and the police weren’t being very helpful with their bland statements. There was no mention of a body being found stuffed into the lower deck lifeboat escape passage on Cypress Island.

She didn’t understand it, but she slowly allowed herself to relax. After a while she canceled the news and called Dudley.

“Hello, my darling,” he said. “Are you coming back now?”

“Not today.”

“When? I miss you. I want you.”

The familiarity of his neediness was reassuring. Stupid old-young Dudley. A universal constant. “Soon. Maybe tomorrow.”

“I hope so. I’ve done a lot of work on the trip.”

“What trip?”

“To the asteroid.”

“Oh, right.” She’d forgotten. “How’s it going?”

“Very well. I’m busy computing possible Hohmann transfer orbits. We need to have enough fuel left on arrival to explore the gas-giant orbit inside and outside its rings. Though I expect the habitat asteroid has a significant infrared emission. It should be easy enough to locate.”

“Well done, Dudley. I’ll take a look at it all when I get back.”

“I really want you.”

“Dudley. You can always access Murderous Seduction again.”

“No. I hate it. Hate it! That’s someone else having sex with you. I can’t feel that again. It’s awful for me. You should never have made it.”

“Okay, Dudley. But I just want to know if you’re all right.”

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

“I thought someone might be following me. Now don’t get in a panic; I wasn’t sure at all. Have you seen anyone hanging around the apartment lately?” She was sure that Alessandra’s people must have picked her up on Earth, no doubt following her from the Michelangelo studios. So they would definitely know where Dudley was. They’d probably be focusing on him as a way of reconnecting with her.

“No. Do you want me to go outside and check?”

“No, Dudley, that’s all right. I’m tired, I wasn’t really sure.”

“Okay then. What are you doing today? Have you found those lawyers yet?”

“Not yet. But I’ve got a job that should put me close to them.”

“What sort of job?”

“I’m a trainee cleaner at the clinic.”

The image of Kaspar Murdo’s overly friendly face as he acted as her protector and mentor in the belowdecks club filled her mind. All his glib words, his saccharine smile. The deep meaningful conversation he’d wheedled out of her after they went back up to the top deck as the Cypress Island headed home in the small hours, listening sympathetically to Saskia’s ambitions, admiring how she’d left home to strike out for herself. He was good, Mellanie saw; a lot of youngsters would fall for that concerned guru act.

As the Cypress Island turned back out onto the Logrosan he’d said he would see what he could do about finding her a job, and offered to rent her his spare room. His last tenant had “just left” and it was very cheap. She’d accepted after a convincing show of uncertainty. Alessandra’s people would watch her apartment on Royal Avenue when they realized Dorian was never going to be reporting back. They were a complication she really didn’t need.

Murdo’s open plan apartment in the Barbican Marina condo was surprisingly large, with the curving external walls built from glass bricks making it very light and airy. The Scandinavian-style furniture was old but high quality, and every room was spotlessly clean. There were two bedrooms, and one other room that was locked and screened with a commercial e-seal generator.

He’d been the perfect gentleman, giving her a big toweling robe so she could use the bathroom. There were other clothes he happened to have, a sweatshirt and jeans near her own size that she was welcome to use until she collected her own stuff. He bid her good night as he turned in. His shift didn’t start until six that evening.

She’d taken a shower, her OCtattoos detecting sensors all around the limestone-tiled cubical. They were active, allowing Murdo to examine every millimeter of her naked body back in the sanctuary of his bedroom. When she got back to her room after the shower she found its ceiling was inlaid with a high-quality holocamera ring. Murdo certainly liked to keep watch over his possessions.

“How in heaven’s name did you get that job?” Dudley asked.

She smiled in the darkness, wondering what Murdo would make of that. “I made friends with the janitor,” she said.

Following Bernadette Halgarth was a complete nightmare. Jenny McNowak could remember the worst-case training sessions Adam had put her and the other Guardians through, keeping tabs on their designated target through dense cities and desolate countryside on a dozen different worlds, with everyone taking turns at being the target so they could get a feel for procedures on the sharp end. Those were walks in the park compared to this.

The first thing she and Kieran agreed on was that Bernadette knew she was being followed. When she finally emerged from the Octavious just after ten that morning she launched straight into a series of classic evasion maneuvers. The only buildings she went into were crowded malls with multiple exits, or skyscrapers that had vast underground levels that connected to neighboring structures with equally complex layouts. Where she walked along streets, cybersphere nodes and civic arrays suffered kaos attacks that affected any systems that were accessing at the time. She took taxis for a block, then switched as the local traffic management arrays crashed under more kaos. The monorail was a favorite, waiting until the last second as the doors closed before hopping on board.

As a result they had to stay close, which they couldn’t really afford, because that would mean getting spotted by the larger and better equipped navy team. Two times, Jenny was sure she’d caught sight of small aerobots holding station several hundred meters above a busy street. If she’d caught a couple of glimpses, there must have been a whole squadron of the things deployed to patrol the sky above the city’s street grid. They allowed the navy team to keep a long way back, while her own team had to crunch up the distance again whenever Bernadette hit the streets—another maneuver that left them susceptible to discovery by the navy.

“I’ve never known them to use so many people,” Kieran said as they were meandering around the rim of Haben Park. Bernadette was walking through the broad open grassland, staying away from the paths. There was a monorail station in the middle, which they were sure she was going to use. Jamas was loitering around the entrance, ready to scoot up to the platform ahead of her if she should double back.

“It’s unusual for them to have anyone on the ground when they’ve got aerobots covering the area,” Kieran said.

“They can hardly send the aerobots into a building after her.”

“No, but the way they’re deploying is almost as if they want to be seen.”

Jenny had provisionally tagged a couple of the navy team, who were also loafing on the periphery of the park.

“This is becoming farcical,” she said. “They’re going to spot us even if she doesn’t. We can’t keep following her like this all day. Their scrutineers will catch our encrypted traffic if nothing else. We’re trained in avoiding observation teams, not being one.”

“You’re right,” he said as Jamas walked past a woman they suspected was navy. “Everybody disengage. We’re going to change tactics.”

“What are you doing?” Jenny asked.

“I’m going to watch the watchers. It’s the logical choice.”

Jenny bit back on any criticism. It was a risky decision, but carrying on like this simply was not an option. She watched Bernadette change direction quickly, and hurry for the escalator up to the elevated platform. It was a junction station, with four possible directions for the monorail trains to take. The woman they thought might be navy was on the station’s second escalator.

“Rosamund, Jamas, we’re taking this one.” Kieran sent them the visual file of a man who was strolling along a hundred meters ahead of them. “He’s been part of the navy box for fifteen minutes. They’ll rotate him now.”

Keeping the navy operative under observation was considerably easier. Kieran was right, he was being rotated, and he clearly had no idea he was being observed. After Bernadette slipped away along the monorail the man changed direction and caught a cab. The Guardians followed in three separate taxis, grinding their way through Tridelta’s daytime congestion.

The navy was using the Dongara Harbor police precinct as their headquarters. Hanging around the police building added a certain edge to the Guardian team’s operation, but the harbor had a lot of waterside bars and restaurants. They took it in turns to sit at the outside tables, scanning the precinct with retinal inserts.

Halfway through the afternoon Jenny called Adam. “Guess who just drove down into the precinct garage?”

“Tell me,” Adam said.

“Paula Myo.”

“Indeed? What with that and the Almada hotel fracas, I’m almost sorry I left.”

“But surely this is important? The navy is chasing a Starflyer agent. They must know it exists.”

“Paula is Senate Security, not navy, but yes, senior echelons of the Commonwealth political class must be at least aware of the possibility now. I’ll inform Bradley.”

“What do you want us to do?”

“Stay close to the navy team without compromising yourselves, and observe as much as you can. There’s obviously no way you can break into the Starflyer agent network through Bernadette anymore, but I would like to know what she’s doing on Illuminatus. I suspect the planet is where a lot of the Starflyer’s agents are wetwired; heaven knows we use it often enough. If Myo exposes one of their cells it can only act to our advantage.”

“Okay, we’ll follow if we can. Kieran’s hired some cars for us.”

“Good luck in that traffic.”

The sun was starting to sink below the horizon when eight large cars came out of the precinct garage, traveling in fast convoy. They didn’t have sirens and strobes on, but the civic traffic management arrays were obviously shunting cars and trucks out of their way.

Jenny drained the last of her iced tea. “Let’s go,” she told the others.

It was a warm evening again, though the vanishing sun seemed to take the humidity with it. Mellanie traveled with Murdo on the monorail to a station just half a block away from Greenford Tower. The bars and clubs along Allwyn Street were just setting up for the night trade, as yet they had few customers. Even the traffic seemed lighter than usual.

Murdo led her across the Greenford’s plaza where the fountains were pumping their jets high into the darkening sky. Far above them, the airship docked to the top of the tower was preparing for its flight; the lights on the observation deck were shining brightly as servicebots and waiters laid the tables ready for the Michelin-starred meal to be served as it soared over the jungle.

The Saffron Clinic’s private door opened for Murdo as soon as he put his hand on the sensor. It was a small narrow lobby inside, with a single elevator.

Mellanie started to key some inserts as they rose up to the thirty-eighth floor, allowing her to review the electronic environment she was moving through. The elevator had several systems, none of them new or elaborate, dating back to the tower net’s last refurbishment fifteen years ago. Above her, she could sense the clinic’s sophisticated and powerful e-shield. She deactivated all but the most elementary OCtattoos and inserts; the SI’s systems were very hard to detect when they were inert, so it had promised her.

The elevator rose through the e-shield. It stopped and the doors slid open. Mellanie was abruptly the center of a deep scan. It was a bare hallway outside, with pipes running along the walls and bright polyphoto strips on the ceiling. A couple of bored human guards, both of them armed, sat at a desk beside the elevator doors.

“Who’s this?” one of them asked curtly, nodding at Mellanie. He didn’t bother getting up. The deep scan couldn’t have revealed anything about her.

“New trainee,” Murdo said. “I cleared her with personnel this afternoon.”

The guard grunted. “You’re Saskia?”

“Yes,” she said anxiously.

“Okay.” He propelled a handheld array across the top of the desk. “Put your palm on that, we need a biometric. You’re not cleared for the medical levels yet, understand? You don’t go off this floor.”

“Yes.”

“If you try to go up there we shoot you. You do not discuss anything you see in here with anybody from outside. If you do, we shoot you. You do not bring anything into the clinic other than yourself and the clothes you are wearing. You will be issued with a uniform. If you bring anything in, like a sensor, we shoot you.”

Mellanie nodded anxiously. The guards grinned at each other.

“Ignore this lame-ass bullshit,” Murdo said. “These two dickbrains couldn’t hit the side of a skyscraper from twenty paces.”

The guard showed him a vigorous hand gesture.

Murdo gave him the finger in return; he and Mellanie walked off down the corridor. He steered her into a locker room. Three nurses were getting changed to go on shift. They stopped talking at the sight of Murdo and one of them scowled.

“Most of the staff use this place to change,” Murdo said. “Except for the doctors and management; they just wear their own suits.” He walked along one of the locker rows. “This one’s yours. Use your thumb on the scanner to open it. Those morons on the desk should have updated the network by now.”

Mellanie pressed her thumb to the small scanner patch, and the locker opened. It was empty. “I thought I got a uniform?”

“I’ll requisition one from supply. Just wait a minute.” He walked away around the end of the row.

Mellanie took a good look around the locker room while Murdo got changed, bringing her inserts on-line one at a time. There was no active sensor, only a couple of cameras looking down from the ceiling. She fed a scrutineer program into the locker room’s array, cautiously examining the structure of the clinic’s internal net. There were an impressive number of security systems and programs, especially on the upper floors. They were all protected by encrypted gates that she didn’t have the skill to circumvent. However, the reception array with its open connection to the Illuminatus cybersphere was easy to access. Her e-butler rode in on a Trojan finance transfer, and began to search admission records for five days on either side of the date that Michelangelo said the lawyers had arrived.

The three nurses all left. Mellanie instructed the scrutineer to follow their progress and record what it could of the security protocols as they went upstairs.

“Hey, Saskia, come around here, I’ve got your uniform,” Murdo said. “I knew I had a spare somewhere.”

Mellanie was intrigued by the way he’d waited until the nurses had left. She held her hand up, palm outward toward the locker doors as she walked along the row. Her basic scan revealed some very interesting items stored inside.

Murdo was wearing a dark red boiler suit with his name on the chest pocket. “Put this on,” he said. One hand held up a small garment of some shiny black fabric, while the other had a frilly white apron.

French maid’s outfit, Mellanie realized. She almost laughed. Murdo wasn’t just a stereotype, he was an absolute cliché.

“I have located three possible admissions compatible with your search parameters,” her e-butler said. The files popped up into her virtual vision; there was no reference to the nature of the treatments they were receiving, only the cost, which surprised even her. Each file did include the room they’d been allocated, for billing purposes.

“Come on, my dear, this is what all cleaning staff trainees wear,” Murdo said in a reasonable tone.

Mellanie activated a second batch of OCtattoos, then infiltrated a restriction order into the room’s array, preventing anyone from using its communications function. “Humm. I don’t think so.”

She clicked her fingers. One of the lockers she’d just passed popped open.

The scenic cable car station was at the eastern end of the Northern Crossquay. Alic, Lucius Lee, and Marhol escorted Robin Beard through the ticket hall and onto the embarkation platform. They didn’t manhandle him, nor did they say a word, but he was always in the center of the little triangle they formed. If the Agent was as good as Beard claimed, he would have observers in the crowds heading out to Treetops restaurant.

The platform was raised several meters above the top of Northern Crossquay, a simple metal mesh with the cables running above, which intruded against a huge tree whose boughs curved overhead. Alic could look back and see Tridelta City gleaming a few kilometers away on the other side of the river.

A cable car slid out of the radiant jungle, pausing briefly on the disembarkation platform opposite, where a couple of staff hopped out. Then it disappeared into the engine house that loomed above the station, before reappearing a few moments later and coming to a halt in front of the little group of passengers. It swung in slow pendulum motion from the carbon cable as the door slid open. Then the stewards were ushering everyone inside.

There were seats for ten people arranged in a ring around the central load girder. Alic took the one closest to the door. Beard sat next to him.

When all ten seats were filled the steward shut the door, and gave a thumbs-up. The carrier wheels above engaged the cable with a loud grumbling, and the car lurched away into the jungle.

There had been a lot of protests from local environmental groups when the cable car operators were applying for permits. Noninterference with the jungles was actually a part of the Illuminatus constitution, and no matter how much they bent other rules, the citizens of Tridelta respected their unique environment. It was very hard to grow an Illuminatus plant anywhere else due to the complex soil bacteria the trees needed in order to flourish. Potted saplings could be sold in sealed display cases for botanical enthusiasts, but no one was ever going to reproduce the woodlands on another world. So the environmentalists didn’t want big construction machinery chopping down trees to put up the cable car posts, and chainsawing off branches to give the cars free passage through the elaborate canopy.

After a decade of legal battles the operators won their permit, after proving a minimal damage impact assessment. What the environmentalists grudgingly accepted once the cable car was up and running was that the environmental damage was actually reduced. People who used to illicitly walk off the Crossquay and plunge through the jungle, breaking small branches and trampling new shoots underfoot to gain the raw experience, now took the cable car. It was cheap, and allowed them to get a lot closer in considerably more comfort. The jungle along the side of both Northern and Southern Crossquays began to thicken up again after a century of injury and abuse.

There was no glass in the cable car’s windows. Alic could see the glowing leaves skimming past barely a meter away. He did his best not to gawp at the panorama, making sure he checked Beard every thirty seconds. There were also updates from the police team back at the Northern Crossquay, reporting on everyone who got onto a cable car after them. None of them matched Beard’s description of the Agent. Alic had seen the cable car route through the jungle earlier that afternoon, when he and the rest of the team had come out to Treetops to scout around and set up their positions. Jim Nwan was heading up the five-strong arrest team that were waiting around the restaurant, all of them navy officers in full armor suits. Even if the Agent brought wetwired bodyguards there was no way they could stand up to that kind of firepower. Nor was there anywhere to run. The scenic cable car run was ten kilometers long.

It took twenty-five minutes to reach Treetops. Their cable car slid up against a platform that was identical to the one back on Northern Crossquays, and the smiling passengers trooped off. The restaurant and bar was built out of imported wood, big sturdy oak beams from European forests pegged together to form a long raft four meters off the ground. There was no roof, everyone sat directly under the jungle canopy. One side of it was the bar, while the other half was taken up by the restaurant where the tables were booked up weeks in advance.

As agreed, Beard went over to an empty table in the bar and ordered a beer from the waitress. Alic, Lucius, and Marhol sat on stools up at the small bar counter that circled one of the broad tree trunks. Marhol ordered the most expensive imported beer they had. Alic ignored the oafish detective, and sipped a mineral water.

He called Paula and said, “We’re in. Beard’s waiting for contact. The police helicopters are on standby to extract us as soon as we’ve made the arrest. I’ve got Vic with them; he didn’t like it but I made it clear the alternative was to go back to Paris.”

“Good. Sounds like you’re organized. Bernadette has just gone into the Greenford Tower. There is a very expensive clinic called Saffron in there which provides wetwiring and baseline DNA modification among other things. So unless she’s taking the airship flight we think that might be her destination; presumably either to change her identity or to rendezvous with someone who has undergone the treatment.”

“Does she know you’re still following?” Alic asked.

“I don’t think so. We fell back to long-range observation at three o’clock this afternoon. As far as she’s aware she lost us.”

“All right. I’ll call you as soon as we have the Agent.”

“What’s happening?” Marhol asked. Conversation around the bar was drying up fast. People had surprised looks on their faces.

Alic’s e-butler alerted him to a priority news event. He didn’t even have to access it. The barman turned the portal behind the counter to a direct feed from the Alessandra Baron show. Wilson Kime was standing at a podium making a statement to the Pentagon II press corps. “The fleet of Moscow-class starships which were dispatched to attack the wormhole known as Hell’s Gateway have now returned and are in communications range with the Commonwealth. I regret to say that the attack was not successful. Our missiles did not manage to strike their targets. Hell’s Gateway remains intact and fully functional, as do the subsidiary wormholes which link it to the Lost23.”

“Oh, crap,” Marhol grunted.

“The Primes have developed a method of deflecting our Douvoir relativistic missiles while they were still in flight,” Wilson said. “I must emphasize that this setback is by no means critical to our campaign. The navy retains the ability to combat any further aggression by the Primes.”

“Bullshit.”

Alic wished he didn’t share Marhol’s opinion.

“Sir,” Lucius said quietly. “Is that him?”

The Agent walked across the bar as everyone was watching the news. He was wearing a suit of thin leather with a surface that glimmered like crude oil under the soft light of the trees. The girl on his arm was dressed in a small cream outfit with a tasseled hem; she was tall and muscled like a marathon runner.

“Robin,” the Agent said pleasantly, “how nice to see you again.”

Beard looked around from the projected image of the Admiral. His face softened into a forlorn expression. “Sorry,” was all he said.

The Agent’s mouth tightened with aristocratic disapproval. His force field came on, distorting the dark ripples flowing over his suit fabric. The girl extended both arms as small stubby nozzles slipped out of the flesh on her wrists. Blue and green OCtattoos came alight on her face and neck, sending out thin glowing lines to snake down beneath the dress fabric. She started to rotate slowly, covering all the patrons. The ones closest to her gasped and pressed themselves back in their chairs.

“Move in,” Alic ordered the arrest team. His own force field came on, surrounding him in a nimbus of soft scintillations.

“Do you want us, Chief?” Vic asked.

“Wait.”

The girl swung around fast, both her arms lined up on Alic. The skin on her forearms began to undulate in strange patterns. People sitting at the tables between the two of them jumped hurriedly out of the way, creating a wide empty corridor.

“Stand aside,” Alic murmured to the police officers. In a couple of seconds he was sitting alone at the bar. Admiral Kime carried on speaking behind him, voice muted to a buzzing drone.

“No way out,” Alic told the Agent. “Let’s everybody stay calm. Deactivate your weapons. Your bodyguards can walk. You come with us.”

“Was that supposed to be an incentive?” the Agent asked. He sounded truly intrigued.

“I can cut clean through his protection,” the girl said. “It’s just a government-issue suit, after all, weak as piss.” She smiled, showing a long row of silver-white fangs.

“Sounds reasonable to me,” the Agent said.

Jim Nwan landed on the bar’s wooden floor with a loud thump. He was in full armor, carrying a plasma carbine. Its targeting laser splashed a small red dot on the Agent’s forehead. His urbane smile faded. Two more of the arrest team jumped into the bar from their holding positions out in the jungle. Their weapons were leveled at the girl.

At a table a few meters away from a trembling Beard, three men stood up, cloaked in force fields, and targeted the arrest team with their wetwired weapons. The last two members of the arrest team arrived in the bar. And one more lone drinker swiveled around on his stool to aim at the detectives, who had switched on their force fields. The rest of the bar went completely silent as it was crisscrossed with the slender ruby threads of lasers. People were hunched down in their chairs, terrified expressions on their faces; couples clung to each other.

“I believe this is what they used to call a Mexican standoff,” the Agent said. “Now why don’t we all just walk away, and contemplate what the Admiral has been saying. There are bigger issues to consider right now, are there not?”

“No,” Alic said. He couldn’t stop his muscles from tensing up—he’d never known dread like it; during combat, the terror from being shot at lasted mere seconds at most. This was stretching out and out, and he couldn’t see a way to end it cleanly. The bastard Agent just refused to see reason. All he could think about was how long it had been since he’d backed up his memories in a secure store; if everyone opened fire there was no way his memorycell would survive. Even so, backing down just wasn’t an option.

“Chief, we’ve got the firepower to back you up,” Vic said. “We can be there in a couple of minutes.”

“No. You can’t fire while we’re in Treetops, it’ll be a massacre.”

“Just let us get out to you.”

“Wait!”

The Agent’s smile was constant. “Once weapons this powerful are fired, you can expect an easy eighty percent casualties among the civilians,” he said. “Are you willing to take that responsibility?”

“You can’t leave,” Alic said. “There’s only the cable car, and we control that.”

“For fuck’s sake, buddy,” a man shouted. “Show some sense. You’ll get us all killed.”

“I am,” Alic growled out.

“There are many ways out for me,” the Agent said. “I’m going to start backing away from you now. If you try and stop me, then you will be responsible for the subsequent slaughter. Think on that, government employee.”

For a brief moment Alic considered calling Paula to ask what the hell he should do. No! Not her.

“Chief?” Jim asked. “What do we do?”

“Move and I’ll fire the first shot myself,” Alic said.

“Well now, if I couldn’t see the panic in your eyes, I might just …” The Agent frowned and glanced up.

Alic heard a low roaring sound, which was rapidly increasing in volume. The few sensor inserts he had couldn’t detect the origin. “Jim? Can you see what that is?”

“Three large power sources, directly overhead.”

Alic risked a look up at the phosphorescent ceiling of fluttering leaves. “Helicopters? Vic, is that you?”

“No, Chief,” Vic replied.

“Descending too fast,” Jim said. “Those aren’t helicopters.”

“Vic, get out here,” Alic ordered.

“On our way.”

A plasma bolt slammed down into Treetops, blowing through the fragile canopy of branches and leaves to strike the wooden platform directly between Alic and the Agent. The oak planks detonated instantly, producing a lethal shrapnel cloud of hand-sized splinters. Alic’s force field flared bright purple as the smoldering daggers walloped him, their impact shunting him back into the bar. Flame swirled all around, drawing whorls of black smoke in its wake. The floor lurched down at such an angle he grabbed wildly, managing to hook some fingers around the counter.

Both the arrest team and the Agent’s bodyguard fired back up into the night sky at the intruders. The bar’s patrons were screaming, half from shock, half from injury as the scythes of wood stabbed into unprotected flesh. More plasma bolts struck the wooden raft, snapping it into ragged sections. People and furniture were flung about by the blasts. The leaves and branches above began to blaze, sending smoke fountaining down.

Alic saw the Agent on his back as the floor continued to tilt over with a violent creaking, opening a wide gulf between them. Flames licked along the edges. The Agent looked down between his feet, calculating a jump to the dark ground below.

“Don’t even think about it,” Alic shouted. He pointed his ion pistol at the Agent.

The Agent started to laugh. A couple of red lasers played across Alic’s eyes. “Kill him,” the Agent yelled.

Twin plasma shots pummeled Alic’s force field. A storm of seething white and purple vapor clawed at him. Tiny localized overloads allowed hot electron tendrils to gouge at his clothes and skin. The fast stabs of pain were incredible, sending him writhing helplessly. He lost his grip on the counter and wilted onto the dangerously angled floor. Roaring sounds broke out all around him as the arrest team fired back on the bodyguards.

Alic realized he was bent around the base of a bar stool. His retinal inserts filtered the glare away to show the Agent hanging on tightly to his own patch of flooring as he twisted to look above and behind.

Three armor-suited figures ripped through the inferno raging above the wrecked restaurant. They were wearing jetpacks, whose exhaust screeched with the energy of a sonic weapon. One landed on either side of the Agent. Plasma and ion bolts hit them simultaneously, sending out incandescent whip streamers to lash at the smashed tables and chairs. Smoke and jets of flame burst out from the contact points. Several of the flaring whips raked across the Agent’s force field, turning it dense purple. One of the armored figures bent down and slapped a dump-web on the Agent’s back. The Agent tried to push himself off the ground, but an armored boot stomped down on his shoulders, knocking him back down. A dark stain was spreading through his force field as the dump-web expanded.

“Jim, can you stop them?” Alic demanded. His e-butler was printing a list of insert and OCtattoo failures across his virtual vision. It was all in default-mode green text.

“Stop what?”

Alic fired his ion pistol at the armor suit standing above the Agent. It didn’t even strain the force field. “Where are you?”

“On the ground.”

Alic fired again, this time aiming at the wooden floor the suited figure was standing on. The planks smashed apart, and the suit dropped through the hole, arms grabbing at air. “There’s one level with you; take it out,” Alic said. The remaining suit was leveling a grenade launcher at Alic. “Mike, Yan, Nyree, can anyone get a fireline on the suit with the Agent?”

“Got them,” Yan replied.

An explosion sent Alic spinning back up the sloping floor to crack his head against the bottom of the bar counter. The force field only partially absorbed the impact. He choked at the pain. The blazing wreckage of Treetops rotated around him. People were jumping from the remaining sections of floor into the dark space beyond; they were on fire, trailing flames through the night, orange sparks fizzing out behind them. Screams pierced the air, repeatedly overwhelmed by the shot of another rifle, or a plasma grenade detonating. One of the big trees that Treetops was built around was starting to keel over, a ponderous motion that was speeding up.

The Agent’s force field flickered and died. Flames scorched straight through his slick leather suit. He screamed as his skin crisped. The armor-suited figure above him raised one arm. Alic saw a harmonic blade gleam in the garish firelight.

“Yan!” Alic called. “Again.”

The harmonic blade swiped down. A fusillade of plasma bolts hammered the armored figure just as it beheaded the Agent. Alic cried out in horror as the Agent’s head bounced away across the buckled floor planks, blood splattering out of the severed neck, its short hair singed and smoking. He was never going to forget the startled expression locked on the Agent’s face as his head skittered toward the drop.

The armored attacker had been pushed sideways by the carbine shots, losing balance to tumble backward onto the slanting floor. Twisting coils of energy wrapping around the suit grounded out through the fractured oak beams. The miniature lightning blizzard suddenly shifted around to streak upward as the vast weight of the collapsing tree crunched down. Suit, floor, and the Agent’s corpse vanished under a swirling mass of flame that shattered the remainder of the bar. Alic felt the planks finally give way, sending him tumbling through the air, waving his arms and legs frantically. He hit the ground hard, with the force field inflating out around him like a scratchy pillow. It absorbed some of the collision, but he felt several ribs crack. He retched helplessly. The Agent’s head bounced on the damp soil beside him, skin charred and peeling off blackened bone. Even through all the pain and nausea he knew to grab for it. The disgusting thing was nestled in the crook of his arm when an armor suit appeared above him.

“Jim?”

“ ’Fraid not, Chief,” Tarlo’s voice boomed through the bedlam. A plasma carbine was lowered. Its muzzle stopped five centimeters from Alic’s face.

“Fuck you, traitor,” he snarled.

A grenade went off right beside them, flinging both of them through the air amid a cloud of soil and tree fragments. Alic crashed into a tree trunk two meters above the ground and dropped like a stone. His force field was flickering around him on the verge of total breakdown, allowing overheated air to slide excruciatingly over injured flesh; green virtual vision text turned into random horizontal squiggles against the orange inferno. Through a haze of pain he saw the smoking black lump that was the Agent’s head, still rolling along the steaming ground away from him.

Tarlo was walking toward it. Alic tried to get up. His left side was completely numb. “Yan! Jim! Somebody help!”

Tarlo picked up the head. His suit’s jetpack spat out two spears of near-invisible blue flame, and he rose into the glaring conflagration that was consuming the jungle canopy. A cascade of huge blue and white sparks plummeted down in his wake.

“Vic, shoot him, just shoot him out of the sky, don’t let him take it, his memorycell’s in there. Vic, it’s Tarlo. Vic?” His voice fell to a whimper. He rolled onto his back, and pointed his ion pistol into the falling plume of sparks where Tarlo had vanished, ready to blast away. But there was only his empty hand, skin torn and bleeding, two fingers bent back where the knuckles had been broken. “I’ll find you,” he rasped at the swarming flames as the heat beat against him. “I will find you, fucker.”

Mellanie made it up to the Saffron Clinic’s third floor before she noticed something was wrong. The scrutineer programs she’d so carefully infiltrated into the arrays on the two floors below her were no longer responding. In fact, the whole of the net on those two floors was now dark.

She stopped and reviewed the tiny amount of data she could access. So far she’d only infiltrated three arrays on this floor, and her programs weren’t telling her anything. The clinic net certainly hadn’t issued any alarm, which was very strange. Management programs must have noticed the dropout. Not that she could query them.

So far she’d only passed a couple of staff on the evening shift, technicians in deep conversation. They hadn’t paid her any attention. The nurse’s uniform she’d put on was like wearing a stealth suit. There was nobody else in the corridor; she checked along it, uncertain what to do next. One of the rooms she wanted was right at the far end, barely thirty meters away.

Sections of the net on this floor started to drop out. “Damnit,” she hissed. Someone else must be infiltrating the clinic’s electronics, and they were a lot better at it than she was. They were shutting the whole place down one processor at a time.

There was a stairwell three meters behind her. Mellanie gave the Nicholas suite at the far end one last longing glance. She was so near … one of the lawyers was on the other side of the door. But it could well be Alessandra’s newest set of goons creeping up through the clinic. And if they knew she was here, they would have told the lawyers.

Why would anyone working for Alessandra have to creep around? They’re all on the same side.

Mellanie hurried back to the stairwell door. She pushed at the release bar. There was no alarm; all the circuitry around it was dead. It swung open to reveal a vast source of electromagnetic energy in the stairwell. Mellanie let out a shocked gasp as an armor-suited figure pointed a gun at her forehead.

“Do not move,” it said quietly. The voice was male. “Do not shout or attempt to alert anyone that we are here.”

Mellanie manufactured some tears—it wasn’t hard. “Please don’t shoot.” Her legs were shaking. A second armored figure slipped around the first, quickly followed by five more.

If they’re Alessandra’s, she’s really taking no chances.

“Turn around,” the suited man said. “Put your hands behind your back, cross the wrists.”

The armored suits were moving along the corridor. Mellanie had no idea suits that heavy and big could move so quietly. Then a thin plastic cord tightened around her wrists. “Ow!”

“Quiet, or I will use a nervejam.”

She was half sure her inserts could deflect that. But she’d have to activate them—and even if she did get the sequence right, then what? “Sorry,” she whispered.

“In here.” She was pulled into the stairwell.

“Name?”

“Er … Lalage Vere, I’m a nurse in the dermal specialist unit.” She felt something being pressed to her hand.

“The name’s on file, but she doesn’t match the clinic biometric.”

“She wouldn’t,” said a female voice.

Mellanie knew who that belonged to. Even as she let out a long breath of relief she couldn’t help wincing. A hard gauntlet was placed on her shoulder, turning her around. There were about ten more armored people in the stairwell, one of them markedly shorter than the others. “Good evening, Mellanie,” the small suit said.

“Oh, good evening, Investigator Myo. Fancy seeing you here.” It was bravado; she was trying not to sulk at how swiftly Paula had seen past her dark hair and freckles.

“We found the chief janitor downstairs,” Paula said. “He was tied to a bench in the locker room; not that there was any need—he’s got so much narcotic in his blood he doesn’t know which universe he’s in.”

“Really? And they let people like that work here? I’m astonished.”

“I’m more interested why you’re here, Mellanie.”

“Reporting was getting kind of hectic. I fancied a change of profession.”

“Mellanie, people’s lives are at stake here tonight. A lot of lives. I will ask once more, why are you here?”

Mellanie sighed. There really was no way out. “I’ve tracked down the lawyers. All right? It’s not a crime. They’re the criminals, and we both know what they did wrong.”

“You mean Seaton, Daltra, and Pomanskie?”

“Yes.”

“They’re here?”

“Duh. Yes. I just said.”

“When did they arrive?”

“Didn’t you know?” Mellanie said smugly. “They’ve been here receiving treatments more or less since they went on the lam from New York.”

“What sort of treatments? Have they received weapons wetwiring?”

“I’m not sure, you interrupted me. The new DNA thing, I suppose. It wasn’t cheap, whatever they got.”

“Which rooms are they in?”

“One’s in the Nicholas suite, on this floor; the other two are sharing the Fenay suite on the fifth floor.”

“Okay, thank you, we’ll take it from here, Mellanie.”

“What! You can’t just—”

“Grogan, take her down to Renne.”

Gauntlets grabbed her upper arm, metal fingers closing painfully. “Yow! Hey, I found them, you could at least let me cover the arrest for my report.”

“I’d advise against it. This is not a safe environment.”

“I was doing fine until you blundered in.” She paused. If Myo hadn’t known the lawyers were in the clinic, what …?

Grogan pulled her toward the stairs. The suit was too strong for Mellanie to resist. “You’ve got to give me something, Myo.”

“We’ll talk later. A long talk.”

Mellanie didn’t like the sound of that.

“Tactical update,” Paula informed the arrest teams. “We now have three more confirmed hostiles on site in addition to Bernadette. Possible locations: one in the Nicholas suite, two in the Fenay. Be advised, there could be more. This appears to be where Starflyer agents receive their wetwiring.”

The map in her virtual vision displayed the positions of the armor suits. She quickly adapted their interdiction roles, assigning three members to each lawyer.

“Hoshe, can you review the arrays we’ve sequestered? I’d like to confirm what Mellanie told us.”

“We’re working on it now. I didn’t know she was that good.”

“Mellanie is starting to interest me greatly. But we’ll have to deal with the clinic first.”

“Third-floor net shut down,” Hoshe said. “We’re establishing our programs on four and five, preparing to insert on six.”

“That’s good.” Paula examined the map. “Warren, move out into the fourth floor.”

“Acknowledged.”

“Renne, when Mellanie reaches your team I want you to hold her in custody but separate from the rest of the clinic staff; do not let her call anyone. That’s important.”

“Understood.”

“How’s the perimeter?”

“Solid and holding. It looks like half the city police are here.”

“Damn, that’s what I was worried about. Someone up here is going to notice what we’re doing.”

“Confirm the three admissions matching the lawyers,” Hoshe said. “Mellanie was telling the truth.”

“We’ve been exposed,” Warren Halgarth called. “Four staff members, one client walked out in front of us. Can’t contain them all.”

Paula cursed, though they’d got a lot further with their dark incursion than she’d expected. “Everyone, go hot. They know we’re here. Arrest teams move in immediately. And find me Bernadette.” She stood to one side, allowing the rest of the third-floor team to deploy out of the stairwell.

“Shit,” Warren exclaimed. “The client is weapons wetwired. Challenging us.”

“Is it one of the lawyers?” Paula’s map was updating. Teams were deploying along each floor. Matthew Oldfield was leading five officers to the Fenay suite, while John King was closing on the Nicholas. Barely a third of the clinic staff had been taken down to Renne’s team, where they’d be safe.

She heard the dull rumble of an explosion. Small flecks of dust shook free from the pipes running up the concrete stairwell. More explosions began. There were screams. Hoshe used aggressive infiltrators and took complete control of the clinic’s net.

Paula drew her plasma carbines, and moved out into the corridor. People were opening doors, peering out, yelling. Doors were slammed shut. The armor suits kicked them down again, hauling out the terrified staff and clients. John King and his two teammates blew the door to the Nicholas suite. A plasma bolt flew out. The screaming in the corridor reached a crescendo.

“Deactivate your weapons and come out,” John’s suit speaker boomed.

There was a big explosion inside the Nicholas suite. Debris and smoke billowed out into the corridor.

“He blew a hole in the floor,” John called. “Jumped down to the second level.”

“Acknowledged,” Marina called. “We’re deploying.”

John’s team charged through into the suite. Paula was waving the other members of the third-floor team along the corridor as they half carried staff and clients through the miasma. “Do not leave any of them unaccompanied,” she warned. “Medical forensics must clear them first.”

“Visual on Bernadette,” Warren called. “We’re engaging.”

Paula turned and raced back for the stairwell. Another explosion cut the lights. She was seeing the clinic through microradar and infrared. Sprinklers went off, and the fire alarm shrilled. The ceiling bulged down just in front of her, long cracks multiplying down the walls on either side.

“She won’t surrender,” Warren said. “Joined by another hostile. Both wetwired.”

“Can you disable her?” Paula asked.

“Not a chance.”

Paula reached the stairwell as a volley of explosions reverberated around the concrete shaft. Emergency lighting came on, an intense yellow slicing through the cloying gray smog that was swirling down the broad shaft. A long convoy of armor-suited figures was escorting cowering prisoners down the stairs. She pushed past them.

“Two hostiles engaged,” Matthew said. “They were in the Fenay suite.”

“Capture alive if you can,” Paula said.

“Do my best.”

“Got some debris down here,” Renne said. “Glass falling all over the plaza.”

“Any bodies?” Paula asked. “If their force fields are good enough they might try to jump clear.”

“None yet.”

“Watch for it.”

The explosions and sound of plasma shots had ended by the time Paula rushed out onto the clinic’s fourth floor. There were no elegant treatment rooms anymore; half of the walls were gone, opening up the entire level. Wreckage was strewn everywhere, some smoking, the rest saturated with water and blue suppression foam. Most of the ceiling was down as well, exposing the Greenford’s main structural beams. Fortunately, they seemed to be intact. Water was gushing out of several thick pipes to form large filthy pools across the floor. The glass windows had all been blown out.

Several bodies were lying amid the destruction.

“Hellfire,” Paula exclaimed.

“Sorry,” Warren said. “We had to terminate them.”

“Okay. Where are the corpses? We need to run a DNA confirmation.”

“Over here.” He scrambled over the piles of rubble, leading her around the tower’s core. Several armor suits were busy digging injured survivors out.

“We think these two.”

Inside the helmet, Paula wrinkled up her nose at the sight. The two bodies had been badly burned, then crushed by steel beams and concrete sections. Filthy water lapped around their scorched extremities. The remnants of their clothing were wrapped around them, scraps of blackened cloth. Paula recognized a fragment of the deep blue trousers that Bernadette had been wearing as they pursued her across Tridelta for most of the day. Parts of her body were untouched, corresponding to the bands of an insert force field skeleton. Her arms had the ruptures Paula knew came from internal power cells igniting, the kind used to power weapons. She pulled out a small DNA reader unit, and touched the stubby sampler prong against an unblemished segment of skin.

“It’s her,” she said as the data ran down her virtual vision.

The other corpse was slightly larger. Probably male. Paula examined him. Damage to his limbs had all been caused by external force. He certainly hadn’t been using a force field. His burned outer layers were no use to her DNA reader; she had to clench her jaw and push the stubby prong through the damage so it could reach internal organs. “Doesn’t look like he was wetwired.” Then she noticed the shreds of his clothes, the fabric the same dark red of the Saffron Clinic uniform. The DNA wasn’t registered in the Senate Security database. She told her e-butler to access Tridelta police and civic files.

“Are you sure this is the second one?” she asked.

“Not really,” Warren said. “This is the location where all the resistance came from.”

“But you’re sure two people were firing at you?”

“That’s a definite.”

“John, have you got your target?”

“Yes. The DNA is weird. I’ve got variants across the body, but some of it matches Daltra.”

“Thank you. Matthew, what about you?”

“Two hostiles taken out. One positive ID: Pomanskie. We’re trying to salvage the second body. There’s not a lot of it left intact.”

Paula stared down at the unidentified corpse. “Bernadette was making contact with four hostiles. So who was he?” She started to turn a circle, but stopped almost at once. There was a wide rent in the tower’s core, five meters away. Two eyebirds flipped out of their holder on her suit, and darted into the dark gap. “Damnit, that’s an elevator shaft.” The eyebirds’ sensors were showing her the shaft running up for another sixty floors, with every door shut. Twenty floors below, it was blocked by the top of an elevator. She sent both eyebirds plummeting down. The hatch on the top of the elevator had been ripped open. The eyebirds forced their way past the bent metal and into the elevator. There was a hole in the bottom, revealing the rest of the shaft leading down into the Greenford’s subbasements.

“Everyone, we have a breach. One person, maybe more. Time frame, up to seven minutes. That’s enough to exit. Renne, harden that perimeter.”

Renne had fumed at being given the perimeter duty. After all that the Paris office had been through lately she wanted to get into an armor suit and kick some serious ass. But the duty wasn’t just putting up barricades and liaising with the local police. Everyone brought down from the clinic had to be examined and confirmed. A lot of them would be criminals of some kind, it was that sort of clinic, which meant there was a good probability they would be weapons wetwired. Paula kept emphasizing how the perimeter was to be maintained. It was good to be working with the boss again. Renne just wished she were on the sharp edge of the operation. She couldn’t decide if she’d been given the perimeter duty because of Paula’s earlier suspicions. That she’d ever been on the suspect list in the first place had shocked her. But that was the boss for you, logical to the last. Renne was still reeling from hearing about Tarlo’s treachery. They’d known each other for nearly fifteen years.

The holding chambers they’d set up in the subbasement were starting to fill up with the Saffron Clinic people. All the fighting was over. There was no more debris falling onto the plaza, though water was still dribbling down the face of the Greenford Tower from the gaping windows.

Renne walked around the edge of the police barricades, looking up into the dark sky. The clinic’s floors were easy to see; without their glass the shattered windows gleamed a harsh amber against the rest of the tower’s black bulk—the only illumination above ten meters in the whole city.

Police officers and patrolbots stood guard along the barricades, keeping the curious citizens well back. She was pleased to see how vigilant they were being despite the news about the starships.

“Nobody down here, Boss,” she told Paula. “Do you want the police teams to start sweeping the lower floors?”

“Not yet. Hoshe is locking down every floor. We’re going to have to seal up the entire tower and scan everyone as they emerge.”

“Long night.”

“Looks that way.”

“Have you heard the starships are back? The attack was a failure.”

“That’s not good.”

“So was the Starflyer part of that?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask Admiral Kime.”

“You know the Admiral?”

“Yes.”

Renne knew she shouldn’t be surprised. But if the boss knew Kime, how come Columbia had fired her? Or had he? Was it a setup to make the traitor relax his guard? With the boss, anything was possible. She never let go of a suspect.

Renne turned to go back into the Greenford Tower where Hoshe had set up the operation’s command post. Somebody moving away from the crowd outside the barricades caught her eye. She frowned. A girl with a mane of blond hair stepped off the pavement and crossed over Allwyn Street. It wasn’t the hair that made Renne peer after her, it was the walk. The girl almost strutted, holding her head high, hardly bothering to check that traffic had stopped for her. That kind of arrogance belonged to a Dynasty brat, or a Grand Family trustafarian. The kind of integral arrogance Isabella Halgarth possessed in abundance.

Renne swung her legs over the barricade and pushed through the line of spectators. The girl was walking away down the other side of the street. She was the right height. Her clothes were expensively casual, a red sweater and short amethyst wrap skirt with slim metal clips, long black boots.

“I might need some backup here.”

“What have you got?” Hoshe asked.

“I’m not sure. I think I’ve just seen Isabella Halgarth.”

“Where?”

“Allwyn Street, near the Lanvia Avenue turn.”

“Hold please, I’m accessing the civic sensors.”

Renne kept an eye on traffic, and hurried out into the road. Horns tooted furiously at her as cars braked. A cyclist screamed obscenities as he wobbled past. “She’s getting into a taxi.” The girl vanished in a blue and green vehicle, and the door shut.

“Number?” Hoshe demanded.

“I can’t see, damnit. The logo is an orange trumpet, it’s on the doors.” She flagged down a taxi. “She’s heading west.” The maroon Ables Puma drew up beside her. “Just drive west,” she told the drive array.

“All right, I’m filtering traffic control arrays for a match,” Hoshe said. “Murray cabs have that trumpet logo.”

“Renne, you need backup,” Paula said. “Don’t go near her. She’s extremely dangerous.”

“I won’t.” She switched on her force field skeleton suit. “Just observing.”

“Okay, I’ve got a police team in their car,” Hoshe said. “Leaving the Green-field garage now.”

Renne was pressed up against the taxi’s front windshield, retinal inserts searching through the traffic ahead for the blue and green Ables. Her OCtattoos reported a sophisticated scan washing across her, immediately pinpointing the source. She turned quickly to see Isabella Halgarth standing on the pavement, looking straight at her. The girl’s right arm was raised, pointing at the taxi.

“Oh, shit.” Renne closed her eyes.

The maser struck the taxi’s power cells, which exploded with enough fury to lift the disintegrating car three meters off the ground. Renne’s force field was overwhelmed in the first second. But it did provide enough protection that when the paramedics started to pick up the sections of her body that had been flung over a wide radius they found her memorycell was intact. After re-life procedure, Renne would be able to remember her death.

The assembly platform brought back memories of the Second Chance being constructed above Anshun. To Nigel that whole period seemed like centuries ago now, a time when life was a great deal quieter and more leisurely. Giselle Swinsol and Nigel’s own son, Otis, were leading him through the platform’s gridwork maze inside a huge cylinder of malmetal, where the Speedwell was under construction. The Dynasty’s colony ship was much bigger than the Second Chance, a lengthy cluster of spherical hull sections arranged along a central spine. So far, Nigel had authorized eleven of the vast ships, with initial component acquisition consent for another four. In theory, just one ship could carry enough equipment and genetic material to establish a successful high-technology human society from scratch. But Nigel had wanted to begin with more than the basics, and his Dynasty was the largest in the Commonwealth. A fleet would make absolutely sure any new human civilization they founded would succeed. Now, though, he wasn’t sure if that second batch would ever be built. Like everyone else, he’d expected the navy warships to have some success against Hell’s Gateway. The moment when the navy detector network saw the Prime wormholes come back to the Lost23 had come as a savage surprise to him. He really hadn’t been prepared for a defeat of that magnitude.

“We’ve commissioned four now,” Otis was saying. “The Aeolus and the Saumarez should be ready for their preliminary trials in the next ten days.”

“Don’t quote me, but we might not have ten days,” Nigel said. “Giselle, I want you to review our emergency protocols for evacuating as much of the Dynasty as possible onto the lifeboats during an invasion. Coordinate with Campbell. We’ll need to establish hardened wormhole connections to our parties. The exploratory division wormholes will be our principal method, but we’ll need backup procedures ready.”

“Got it.” Her elegant face was slightly puffed in freefall, but she still managed a worried expression. “How likely is that?”

Nigel halted his steady drift by grabbing a carbon strut at the base of a high-mass manipulator. He was looking out at the Speedwell’s drive section, a mushroom hemisphere at the front of the starship with fluted edges that curved backward like a protective umbrella over the forward sphere sections. The outer skin was a smooth blue-green boronsteel, with a sheen that gave it the overall appearance of a beetle’s carapace.

Most of the platform’s robotic systems were folded back into the cylindrical gridwork that encased the vast starship. All of the prefabricated sections from Cressat had been locked into place; the few remaining areas of activity were involved with integrating the spheres to the ship’s power and environmental circuits.

“Only the Primes know,” he said. “But after our failure at Hell’s Gateway I don’t think it’ll be long before they respond.”

“They don’t know where this world is,” Otis said. “They don’t even know it exists; it isn’t on any database in the Commonwealth. Hell, when it comes down to it, Cressat would be tough to find. That gives us a breathing space.”

“I don’t want to evacuate,” Nigel said. “Using this fleet still remains the last option as far as I’m concerned. As of now, I’m prepared to use our weapon to defend the Commonwealth. That’s what I’m here to tell you.”

Otis gave him a tight smile. “Are we using the frigates to launch them?”

“Yes, son, you get to fly combat missions.”

“Thank Christ for that. I thought I was going to wind up sitting this out.”

“Don’t be so gung ho about this. I’m trying to avoid bloodshed.”

“Dad, you’re going to genocide them.”

Nigel closed his eyes. These days he often found himself wishing he believed in God, any god, just some omnipotent entity who’d listen sympathetically to the odd prayer. “I know.”

“The frigates aren’t even approaching readiness,” Giselle said. “And our weapon hasn’t been tested. We’ve only just completed component fabrication.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Nigel said, glad of a solid, practical problem to focus on. “We’re going to have to accelerate our schedule.”

“If you say so, but I don’t see how.”

“Show me what we’ve got so far.”

Frigate assembly bay one was a separate malmetal chamber affixed to the side of the main platform like a small black metal barnacle. Nigel drifted into it through a narrow interlink tube whose bands of electromuscle pulled him along with the ease of a ski lift. His first impression was that he’d emerged into the engine room of some colossal nineteenth-century steamship. It was hot and loud, a metallic clanking reverberating continually through air that was heavy with the smell of burning plastic. Big gantry arms swished across the few open spaces like ancient engine pistons. Smaller robotic manipulators rolled along their tracks, darting out with serpentine agility to peck at some chunk of compact machinery. Circular scarlet hologram signs were flashing everywhere Nigel looked, warning people away from the complex moving parts. At the center of the mechanical commotion the frigate Charybdis was a dark mass of densely packed components. Eventually, it would be a flattened ellipsoid, fifty meters long, encased by an active-stealth composite; but at this point the hull hadn’t been fitted.

“How near are we to completion?” Nigel asked.

“Several days,” Giselle said. “Flight readiness comes quite a while after that.”

“We can’t afford that kind of delay, not now,” Nigel said. He twisted his cuff off a fuseto patch, and drifted in for a closer look. “Where are we with the other three frigate assembly bays?”

“Not as advanced as this one. We haven’t even begun construction in them yet. We were waiting until the bugs are sorted out in number one. Once we’re up and running with all four we’ll be building a frigate every three days.”

Nigel gripped the base of a manipulator track next to one of the holographic circles, peering through the perpetual motion lattice of cybernetics. He could just see the smooth bulge of the crew cabin a third of the way down the naked frigate. Over twenty robotic systems were busy fitting additional elements or connecting up tubes and cables to the ribbed pressure module.

“Hey, you!” a man’s voice yelled. “Are you blind? Stay the hell back from the warning signs.” Mark Vernon slid through one of the scarlet circles five meters away from Nigel as if he were emerging from a pool of red fluid. “It’s goddamn dangerous in here; we haven’t got any of the usual safety cutoffs installed.”

“Ah,” Nigel said. “Thank you for telling me.”

At his side, Giselle was glowering at Mark.

Mark blinked, suddenly recognizing who he was shouting at. “Oh. Right. Er, hi, sir. Giselle.”

Nigel watched the man’s face redden, but there was no apology. He rather respected that; Mark was clearly the boss in this arena. Then his e-butler flipped up Mark’s file, complete with interesting cross-reference. Goddamn! Is there anything in this universe that doesn’t connect back to Mellanie?

“Mark Vernon,” Giselle said in a half growl. “Our assembly bay chief.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mark,” Nigel said.

“Yeah,” Mark said grumpily. “You really have to be careful in here, sir. I wasn’t joking.”

“I understand. So you’re the competent man around here?”

Mark tried to shrug, forgetting he was in freefall. He tightened his grip on an alulithium strut to stop his feet from swinging around. “It’s a hell of a challenge integrating everything in the bay. I enjoy it.”

“Then I apologize, because I’m about to make your life miserable.”

“Er, how?” Mark flicked his gaze to Giselle, who was looking equally perturbed.

“I need a functional frigate in the Wessex system within the next thirty hours.”

Mark gave him a wild smile. “No way. I’m sorry. It’s just not possible.” A hand waved limply toward the exposed shape of the Charybdis. “This is the first one we’ve attempted to build, and we’re encountering a problem every ten minutes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they’re superb ships. And once me and the team finalize the assembly sequence then we can fast-track as many as you want, but we’re not there yet. Not by a long way.”

Nigel smiled back uncompromisingly. “Disconnect this assembly bay from the platform. Attach it to one of the completed lifeboat starships, and continue working on the Charybdis while you’re flown to Wessex.”

“Huh?” Even without gravity, Mark’s jaw dropped open in astonishment.

“Is there any technical reason why that cannot be done? Any at all?”

“Er, well, I hadn’t really thought about it. Suppose not. No.”

“Good. I want it attached and ready to leave in one hour. Take whoever you need with you, but get the Charybdis flight-ready.”

“You want me to go with it?”

“You’re the expert.”

“Umm. Right. Yeah. Sure. Okay. Er, can I ask why you want a frigate at Wessex?”

“Because I’m sure that star is going to be right up at the top of the Primes’ list of targets when they invade.”

“Uh huh. I see.”

“Don’t be modest, Mark; you did a terrific job helping people back in Randtown. I’m proud you’re one of my descendents. I know you won’t let us down.” Nigel signaled to Giselle and Otis, then pushed off from the manipulator track and headed back for the interlink tube. “We’ll move the weapons section onto the lifeboat as well. I’d like to meet the project scientists now. Which lifeboat will be easiest?”

“The Searcher has done two test flights already,” Otis said. “Shakedown’s almost complete. It should be the most reliable.”

“The Searcher it is, then.”

Mark clung to the slim strut as he watched Nigel Sheldon slide away down the interlink tube. Sweat was oozing out of every pore on his body and clinging to the skin to produce a horribly cold, sticky film of moisture. “Top of the invasion list,” Mark whispered forlornly. He glanced back at the incomplete frigate. “Oh, hell, not again.”

It was four in the morning Illuminatus time when Paula finally left for the CST station. Everyone in the Greenford Tower had been evaluated by the medical forensic team. Several criminals undergoing wetwiring had been hauled off by the local police. The city hospitals were dealing with casualties from both Greenford and Treetops. A civil engineering team was inspecting the remnants of the Saffron Clinic for structural damage. Forensics was removing all the surviving arrays ready to perform a complete data extraction.

Paula removed her armor suit in the control center, handing it over to the support team who were packing everything away. She put on a force field skeleton suit, then dressed in a long, plain gray skirt and thick white cotton crew-neck top. Her brown leather belt with its embedded silver chain looked decorative; it had even come from her own wardrobe, but Senate Security technical services had reworked it.

“You okay?” Hoshe asked.

“This didn’t quite happen how I was expecting,” she admitted. Her e-butler was running integration checks on the belt and force field skeleton. “Hopefully it’s not over yet. Are we ready for the journey back?”

“Teams are in position, equipment all set up”—he glanced down at the four black cases containing their cage equipment—“and activated.”

“Good. Let’s go.”

They went out into the subbasement garage where the holding areas had been set up. A single pen of wire mesh was left, with twenty guardbots surrounding it, weapons out of their recesses. Two local police officers stood on either side of the gate. There was only one person left inside.

Mellanie waited in the middle of the pen, still in her nurse’s uniform, arms folded huffily across her chest, an incensed expression welded into place.

Paula told the police to open the gate. Mellanie remained resolutely in place.

“I thought we could talk on the way back,” Paula said. Somehow she didn’t have any scruples about setting the girl up. Mellanie, she guessed, had involved herself in a great deal of illicit activity to get into the Saffron Clinic.

“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting here?”

“To the second, actually. Why?”

Mellanie glared at her.

“If you prefer, you can stay here,” Hoshe said generously. “The police will process you in due course. They are quite busy after tonight.”

Mellanie let out a dangerous growl. “I can’t access the unisphere.”

“We have blocker systems active down here,” Hoshe said. “They’re quite effective, aren’t they?”

Mellanie switched her stare to Paula. “Where?”

“Where what?” Paula asked.

“You said we’d talk on the way back. Back where?”

“Earth. We have tickets for the next express. First class.”

“Fine. Whatever.” Mellanie stomped out through the open gate. “Where’s the car?”

Hoshe gestured politely to the ramp. “Outside.”

Mellanie flounced in disgust at their incompetence. She headed for the ramp with long impatient strides. Paula and Hoshe exchanged a bemused glance behind her back, and set off after her. Hoshe’s four black cases trundled along behind him.

The ramp came out directly on the street beyond the Greenford Tower’s plaza. Mellanie paused in confusion at the scene outside. Paula and Hoshe stood on either side of her. The remaining reporters flocked toward the nearest section of the barricades, and started shouting questions.

Paula’s virtual vision showed her several heavily encrypted messages arriving in Mellanie’s address port as they emerged from the blocking field. The girl sent two.

Tridelta police still had Allwyn Street sealed off for six blocks around the skyscraper. All the ambulances had departed, leaving the fire department crews and bots to clear up the aftermath of the explosion. The eight cars closest to Renne’s taxi were burnt-out wrecks, shunted across the road to smash into the buildings; a further twenty vehicles were buckled and broken. A big crane was lifting them onto waiting trailers. Civic cleaning bots were washing the blood off the pavement. There had been a lot of people in the open-air bars nearby. GPbots were moving along the facades, sweeping up the piles of broken glass.

“Oh, God,” Mellanie mumbled. She stared at the devastation, then twisted around to look back at the Greenford Tower.

“I told you it was an unsafe environment,” Paula said.

A big police van pulled up beside them. The door slid open, and they climbed in. The cases rolled into the luggage compartment.

“I remember Randtown,” Mellanie said in a quiet voice as the van drove off. “I hoped I’d forgotten, but that just made it all come back. It was awful.”

Paula decided the girl was genuinely upset. “Death on this scale is never easy.”

Hoshe was looking out of the window, his face expressionless.

“Did your people get hurt?” Mellanie asked.

“Some of them, yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“They knew the risks, just like you did. They’ll all be re-lifed.”

“If there’s anything left to be re-lifed into.”

“We’ll make sure there is.”

The police van got them to the CST station in plenty of time before the express was due to depart. A cool breeze blew through the cavernous structure, coming straight off the Logrosan, which ran along the side of the smallest marshaling yard Paula had seen in the Commonwealth. Illuminatus didn’t export any bulk products, it only manufactured small high-technology items. The marshaling yard was set up primarily for receiving food imports; without any arable land on the planet, every meal had to be brought in on the goods trains. She wondered what would happen if the Primes struck here. Or worse, on Piura, the Big15 world to which it was connected. If Illuminatus was cut off from the Commonwealth, it would go bad very quickly for the population of the trapped city.

When she looked along the platform, the other waiting passengers scrupulously avoided eye contact. The station wasn’t exactly busy, but there were more people than usual for this time in the morning. Several families stood huddled together, complete with drowsy children. After the news of the starships, they’d obviously been thinking hard about the consequences of a Prime attack.

Mellanie rubbed at her arms; the cool air was raising goose bumps. “I feel stupid in this,” she muttered. Her nurse’s uniform had short sleeves.

“Here.” Hoshe took off his sweater and held it out to her.

She flashed him a grateful smile. “Thank you.” It was baggy on her, but she stopped shivering.

The express slid silently into the station along its maglev track. They boarded the first-class carriage, where they had a reserved compartment.

“Which Earth station are we going to?” Mellanie asked.

“London,” Hoshe said.

“I thought you were based in Paris.”

Paula gave her an enigmatic smile. “It depends.” She told her e-butler to open one of the pouches in her belt. A Bratation spindlefly dropped out and began to scuttle up the wall. Its gossamer thread extruded behind it as Paula walked along the carriage’s narrow corridor, maintaining the secure connection. The compartment contained thick leather couches on either side of a walnut-veneered table. Mellanie flopped down into one with a hefty sigh, curling her legs up and pulling the sweater down over her knees. She had her face up close to the window, like a child peering into a shop display. Paula and Hoshe sat opposite her. The black cases arranged themselves on either side of the door.

After a couple of minutes, the express eased out of the station and began to pick up speed as it headed for the gateway.

“What happened to the lawyers?” Mellanie asked.

“Bodyloss,” Paula told her. “Our medical forensic teams will try to recover their memorycells, but given the damage level it doesn’t look good.” She checked the image she was getting from the spindlefly, which showed her a black and white fish-eye-lens view of the corridor from the ceiling. Her skin tingled as they passed through the pressure curtain. A warm salmon-pink light shone in through the compartment’s window, and the express accelerated hard across Piura’s massive station yard.

“They were the one lead I had back to the Cox,” Mellanie said.

“Yes, me, too.”

Mellanie looked surprised. “You did believe me!”

“I do now. We uncovered a Starflyer agent in my old Paris office. He’d been manipulating information for quite some time. The Cox case was one of them.”

“Did you catch him?”

“No,” Paula said. It was a heavy admission, but she’d talked to Alic Hogan before the paramedics put him under. Treetops had been worse than the Greenford Tower.

“So we still don’t have any proof that the Starflyer exists,” Mellanie said.

“The case against it is building.” Paula’s virtual vision flashed a small square of text. The management routines in the carriage arrays were shutting down all their communications functions. The spindlefly showed her the door that led through to the next first-class carriage being opened. She exchanged a glance with Hoshe, who nodded subtly.

“But not conclusive,” Mellanie said sullenly. “That’s what you’re going to say.”

“No. And we’re running out of time.”

“How do you figure that?”

“The war is not going well for the Commonwealth. Our starships were defeated at Hell’s Gateway.” A girl was walking along the carriage’s corridor toward their compartment. Paula’s heart began to speed up. A tactical grid flipped up into her virtual vision; she prepped several icons for immediate activation.

“Yeah. I guess the rich will be taking off in their lifeboats pretty soon.”

“I expect they will. More importantly, according to the Guardians, the Starflyer will leave once it has arranged for our destruction. Unless we can move against it soon, it will have gone.”

“So just stop it going back to Far Away,” Mellanie said. “Put a guard on the Boongate gateway to Half Way.”

“I would have to convince my political allies such a move was justified.” Through the spindlefly’s artificial senses, Paula saw the girl standing outside their compartment.

Mellanie took a deep breath. “I know about some more Starflyer agents, if you’ll believe me this time.”

“You are very well informed.”

A focused disruptor field hit the compartment door, which instantly shattered. Mellanie screamed in shock, flinging herself down. Paula and Hoshe activated their force field skeletons. Isabella Halgarth stepped in through the dagger shards of the door frame. A force field sparkled around her.

“It’s her,” Mellanie yelled. “It’s Isabella! She’s one of them.”

Isabella raised her right arm. The flesh on her forearm flowed, parting in several places like lipless mouths.

Paula triggered the cage. Curving force field petals sprang out of the cases on each side of Isabella, closing around her and squeezing tight. She grimaced, as if mildly puzzled. Then she tried to move, squirming inside the constricting petals. Her movements were mechanical as each boosted muscle tried to push her body free. A series of apertures opened in her skin along both arms, allowing dark stubby muzzles to protrude. She started firing ion bolts and masers.

Streamers of energy lashed across the cage, grounding out in the floor of the compartment. Smoke began to leak upward. The shimmering petals slowly brightened to a threatening azure.

“Ready?” Paula shouted above the screech of the wild discharges. She held up a dump-web, and as Hoshe nodded she slapped it against Isabella’s back. The cage petals rearranged themselves to let it through. Her face was centimeters from the girl’s, and that was when she knew with absolute certainty they were confronting some kind of alien. Isabella’s eyes looked at her with malignant fury. Whatever intelligence stared through them was studying her, and judging.

Isabella’s force field failed.

Hoshe rammed a nervejam stick against her. It slipped easily through the cage petals to press against her chest. Her imprisoned body began to shake violently. She slowly peeled her lips back to reveal a furious snarl. All of her embedded weapons fired simultaneously. Sparks burst out of the gleaming cage petals as they began to whine dangerously.

“Jesus!” Hoshe exclaimed. He twisted the nervejam stick’s trigger to full power.

Isabella suddenly looked surprised, her eyes opening wide. Her weapons stopped firing.

The cage petals held her immobile, pressing tight against the skin, freezing her posture and expression. Paula looked at the girl’s feet. They were suspended a couple of centimeters off the smoldering carpet. “Is she out?”

“I don’t know,” a sweating Hoshe said. “But I’m not taking any chances.” He continued to push the nervejam stick hard against her.

“Okay.” Paula called the rest of the team in. Vic Russell, in full armor, clumped along the corridor, leading Matthew and John King.

“You get all the fun,” Vic complained.

“Next time, it’s all yours,” Hoshe said sincerely as Vic took over the nervejam stick.

With Isabella surrounded by the three armor suits, Hoshe switched the cage petals off. The girl crumpled into John’s arms.

“Is she alive?” Paula asked.

“Heart slightly erratic, but calming,” John assured her. “She’s breathing unaided.”

“Good, get her into the suspension shell.” Paula switched off her force field skeleton and ran a hand over her brow. She wasn’t surprised to find her fingers damp with perspiration.

“Just what the fuck is going on?” Mellanie yelled.

Paula turned to face the furious, frightened girl, and blinked in surprise. Mellanie’s skin had turned almost completely silver.

“It was an entrapment,” Paula said, trying to stay calm; she had no idea what Mellanie’s inserts were capable of. The only reassurance she had was that if Mellanie had been working for the Starflyer she would have pitched in with Isabella. “You and I have both been causing a considerable amount of trouble for the Starflyer. Together we presented what I hoped would be an irresistible target. I was correct. Although I was hoping it would be Tarlo they sent.”

“You!” Mellanie gasped the word out, a trembling finger pointed at Paula. “You. We. I. The police van. Everyone saw.”

“That is correct. Everyone saw us leaving the Greenford Tower together, and the event was released into the unisphere. This compartment was booked in my name. It gave them a perfect assassination opportunity.”

“I haven’t got a force field suit,” Mellanie wailed. The silver was fading from her skin, withdrawing in complex curling patterns.

“You were relatively safe. The cage is capable of absorbing high-level weapons fire from its captive.”

Mellanie sat down hard, staring at nothing. “You piece of shit. You could have told me.”

“I wasn’t completely sure of your loyalties. And I wanted you to behave in a natural fashion. I apologize for any alarm.”

“Alarm!” Mellanie appealed to Hoshe, who gave her a sorrowful little smile.

“And now,” Paula said, “would you please explain to me how you knew Isabella was a Starflyer agent?”

Justine arrived back in New York just after midnight eastern standard time. It was later than she expected; the War Cabinet session had overrun by an hour as they discussed the briefing from Wilson Kime. Seattle Project quantumbusters were now being carried on twenty-seven Moscow-class starships. The seventeen surviving ships in the Hell’s Gateway fleet were on their way back to the High Angel, where they’d also be equipped with quantumbusters once they were recharged.

Nobody knew if it would be sufficient to ward off any further Prime attacks. Even Dimitri Leopoldvich was being guarded with evaluations.

The War Cabinet was also undecided on carrying the fight back to the Primes. Sheldon, Hutchinson, and Columbia wanted to dispatch several ships to Dyson Alpha while the Primes remained ignorant of quantumbusters. Columbia believed they could inflict an incredible amount of destruction on the alien star system, hopefully weakening the Prime civilization catastrophically. A second wave of ships could then go in and finish the job, he said.

The genocide option again. Justine had taken their side, which had clearly surprised the remainder of the cabinet, including Toniea Gall, its newest member. She’d done it because of the Starflyer. Bradley Johansson had told her it wanted to destroy both species, that it was carefully playing them both off against each other so that it could rise victoriously in the ruins. Genocide was the only way she could see the Commonwealth surviving.

By contrast, Wilson hadn’t been keen, pointing out the sheer size of the Dyson Alpha civilization, the undoubted fact it had now spread to other star systems besides the Lost23 and Hell’s Gateway. The remnants could strike the Commonwealth equally hard, he claimed; we might trigger a double genocide.

“They’re trying to exterminate us anyway,” was Columbia’s reply.

If the genocide option was out for the immediate future, Alan Hutchinson said, then why not launch a second raid against Hell’s Gateway, this time using quantumbusters?

“You’ll be giving away our advantage,” Kime replied. “Quantumbusters are the only weapon we have that they don’t know about.”

“But if they work, we can stop the Prime advance completely, and push them off the Lost23,” the bluff Dynasty leader said. “They can’t launch a second wave against us without Hell’s Gateway. With that knocked out, we can go right ahead and take out their home system.”

“I don’t think we can afford to divert starships from defense right now,” Kime said. “When we have more in service, then such a course becomes viable.”

Hutchinson clearly wasn’t happy. The rest of the War Cabinet was conscious of the growing rift between Kime and Columbia. President Doi closed the session by instituting an ongoing review. They would reconvene at any time the strategic situation changed.

As soon as they rose, Justine had taken an express straight back to New York with three aides and her Senate Security bodyguard team. The next morning had her scheduled to meet an informal group of Wall Street executives to discuss the worsening financial conditions brought on by increased taxes, the exodus, and the latest navy failure; the markets were in freefall, and they needed reassurance that the Executive was firmly in control with policies that would ultimately resolve the problem. As if I can convince them of that. At least Crispin would be with her at the working breakfast; she could rely on him for general support.

When the express pulled into Grand Central Station, her aides took a taxi to their hotel, while Justine was ferried to her Park Avenue apartment by a family limousine. As she got into the big car, her e-butler was tagging news reports from Illuminatus for her attention. She let some of them through her filters, and immediately sat up in the limo’s deep leather seating. Images of the Greenford Tower filled her virtual vision, with reporters covering the Tridelta fire department’s efforts to cope with the taxi that had exploded just outside. The civilian casualties were appalling.

“Call Paula Myo,” she told her e-butler.

“Senator?” Paula said.

“Are you all right?”

“So far, yes.”

“What does that mean?”

“We have failed to capture any of the Starflyer agents we discovered in Tridelta. However, we have exposed one of its agents working in the navy intelligence Paris office. It will give you some valuable leverage to use with Admiral Columbia, and the Halgarths.”

“That’s excellent news.”

“Yes. I’m now initiating a further entrapment scenario involving myself and Mellanie Rescorai as we travel back to Earth; I hope that will be more successful.”

“Mellanie is with you?”

“Yes. She is getting very heavily involved in the anti-Starflyer movement. I suspect she is somehow involved with the Guardians.”

Justine nearly told her that Mellanie was in contact with Adam Elvin, but that would mean explaining how she was in touch with Johansson, and she wasn’t prepared to give that to the formidable Investigator, not yet. “Perhaps we should try and convene a meeting, pool our resources.”

“Very well, but I would like to establish Mellanie’s true sympathies. She could be a very elaborate trap for us set by the Starflyer.”

“As you wish. Let me know once you’re satisfied about her. Good luck, and be careful.”

“Thank you, Senator.”

The limousine drove down into the apartment block’s underground garage. Justine and her three bodyguards took the elevator up to the fortieth floor.

Despite the apartment’s new beefed-up security apparatus, the bodyguards insisted on doing a physical appraisal of all the rooms as well as reviewing the array logs. Justine stood in the big living room, waiting for them with an outward show of patience. It was the kind of social facade she’d learned centuries ago, but even so it was a strain tonight. Her feet ached from swelling ankles, she had heartburn that was becoming more frequent, her morning sickness was now lasting for fifteen hours a day, and she had a headache. Just get on with it, she thought darkly as they moved from room to room, taking their time, being professional and thorough.

“The apartment is clear, Senator,” Hector Del, the team commander, told her.

“Thank you.”

“I’ll be staying here with you tonight,” he said.

“Whatever, yes.” She went into her bedroom and shut the door just as the other two bodyguards left. The apartment’s housekeeper array had started to fill her big sunken tub as soon as the limo parked. It was now full to the brim with scented water, and foaming richly. Justine looked at it in exasperation and groaned. A decent wallow in the tub was the one thing she’d been looking forward to the whole journey home. She’d completely forgotten she shouldn’t be taking long hot baths when pregnant.

She hissed crossly and told her e-butler to switch the shower on. As the tub drained away she took her clothes off and left them on the floor for a maidbot to clear away. It is true, your brain packs up and goes on vacation when you’re pregnant.

The warm jets of water played over her skin. Nice, but not as nice as a good soak. Her e-butler pulled some twenty-second-century organic-synth jazz from the apartment memory, and played it at high volume as soap began to mix into the water.

Sheldon’s behavior during the War Cabinet had bothered her. She didn’t understand why he was so keen for the genocide. Unless he knew that it would provoke an equal reaction from the Primes. Which was what the Starflyer wanted. Or am I being really paranoid? The only evidence against him was Thompson saying that his office had continually blocked the examination of cargo to Far Away, something Justine was still unable to confirm.

She wiped an exfoliator sponge across her legs and stomach as the foamy water sluiced over her. Red icons flashed into her virtual vision. INTRUDER ALERT. The newly installed alarm system showed her a dark image of an unidentified person walking through the kitchen.

How the hell did they get in there without triggering a perimeter alarm?

She wiped the water frantically from her face and reached for a towel.

SENATOR, Hector Del sent, PLEASE DO NOT EXPOSE YOURSELF. I AM INVESTIGATING NOW. THE REST OF THE TEAM IS RETURNING IMMEDIATELY.

Her heart was pounding wildly, which was exacerbating her headache. She wrapped the towel around her waist and hurried out into the bedroom, dripping all over the carpet. On the other side of the door, Hector Del shouted: “You. Halt. Now!”

There was the high-pitched crack of a weapon discharge, which made her jump in shock. It was swiftly followed by two louder blasts. A man screamed. There was a crash. Something heavy thudded onto the floor as white light flared through the gap under the door.

HECTOR? Justine sent. WHAT HAPPENED?

Her virtual vision showed her the bodyguard’s inserts had dropped their link to the apartment’s array. She put her hand on the door handle. Hesitated. There was no sound on the other side. When she tried to access the apartment’s security net, it reported that a very powerful jamming signal was interfering with the sensors. Her e-butler told her the bodyguard team was in the elevator, coming back up.

Justine opened the door a crack and peered out into the apartment’s central corridor. It was dark, with light shining in from the hallway at the far end. Thin stands of smoke layered the air; some flames were licking up from the smashed remnants of an antique table. Hector Del was crumpled against the wall, his clothes smoldering, skin red and blotchy. From the angle of his neck she knew he was dead.

Someone stepped into the hall’s archway.

“Bruce!” Justine gasped.

The Starflyer assassin raised his arm.

Justine wailed in terror, hands instinctively clutching at her belly, protecting the unborn.

The corridor’s ceiling ruptured in a cloud of dust and concrete fragments as it was hit by a powerful focused disruptor field. Gore Burnelli dropped through the rent to land lightly between Justine and Bruce. He looked very dapper in a perfectly tailored tuxedo. “Hey, pal,” he said to Bruce, “want to try picking on someone your own size for a change?”

Both of Bruce’s arms were raised. A near-solid torrent of plasma bolts struck Gore, cocooning him in an incandescent nimbus. His tuxedo burst into flames. The floor and walls around him started to blacken. Justine shielded her face from the fearsome light.

Bruce lowered his arms. Gore stood in a circle of scorched concrete that was edged in flame, the last ashes of his ruined clothes dropping from him. His naked body was completely gold, reflecting the flames in little orange ripples. He smiled waspishly. “My turn.” He started walking toward Bruce. A focused disrupter pulse slammed out from him, filling the corridor’s smoky air with a ghost-green phosphorescence. Bruce’s force field flashed purple as he staggered backward from the blow. He struggled to stand upright. Gore fired another pulse that knocked the assassin off his feet and sent him skidding back across the hall’s polished parquet flooring, arms and legs waving like an upturned turtle. He rolled himself onto his front, and scurried away.

“Come back and play, motherfucker,” Gore called. He sped along the corridor and into the living room after Bruce. Plasma bolts, maser beams, and ion bolts hit him as soon as he was through the open doorway. Wild ribbons of energy exploded around him as his integral force field deflected the assault, sending them lashing into the building’s structure. The strength of the attack started to push him back as if a watercannon was striking him head-on. He expanded the force field behind him, pressing it up against the wall to hold himself against the power of the assassin’s weapons. His feet halted their backward slide as the wall cracked and bent inward. Another focused disruptor shot at Bruce’s legs sent the assassin tumbling over again. The assassin hit the wall beside the balcony doors as the glass shattered across him. He rebounded and assumed a wrestler’s crouch. Gore jumped.

The two of them collided in a maelstrom of whirling energy streamers and disintegrating furniture. Gore’s nerves were saturated with accelerants, speeding up his reflexes as he chopped at the assassin with a series of karate blows that would have sliced an unprotected body into pieces. The impacts couldn’t quite reach through Bruce’s force field, though Gore saw the telltale scarlet flicker of an approaching overload each time he connected. He was managing to inflict a degree of harm on the body it enveloped, though it was hardly debilitating. Bruce’s face grimaced silently in the bursts of red light. His own nervous system was accelerated, but not as fast as Gore’s. He never quite managed to block the chops. As the force field weakened, it left his clothes exposed. Cloth either tore as Gore’s hand ripped across it or singed from the residue of weapons fire. Then Bruce twisted around, and managed to kick Gore’s legs with a savage judo lunge.

Gore let the momentum carry him, and then amplified the movement, somersaulting backward to land on his feet like some gymnast coming off the bars. He immediately advanced again, unleashing a barrage of focused disruptor shots.

Bruce had flipped the other way, recovering gracefully. As he straightened up, ragged clothes flapping against him, he was standing directly in front of the shattered balcony window. The disruptor field punched him back. He extended his force field wide, producing an angel wing configuration to try to secure himself to the walls framing the balcony door. Gore fired plasma bolts into the scorched plaster and concrete, blasting the solid material from either side of the assassin. Bruce answered with his own focused distortion field. They leaned in toward each other, as if shoving their way through a hurricane. The apartment began to break up around them as the focused disruptor fields clashed. Deep fissures snapped through the walls. Whole sections of the floor shifted like tectonic faults. Plaster, concrete, wood, and carbon-wrapped steel reinforcement strands rained down from the ceiling.

Gore crouched down, and sprang with the full power of his boosted muscles, amplified by a perfectly timed expansion of his force field. He flew through the air like a golden missile, outstretched fists ramming into Bruce’s chest. The assassin left the ground, flailing backward. His back hit the stone balcony rail, which buckled badly. Gargoyle heads shifted around as the stonework juddered.

Bruce looked at Gore for a moment, then vaulted over the rail. Gore never even hesitated: he leaped after his opponent.

It was completely silent in the air forty floors above Park Avenue. Gore heard nothing as he fell. His full-spectrum senses locked on to Bruce’s plummeting body below him; shrouded in its cloak of energy it shone like a star in his virtual vision target grid. He fired several plasma bolts down, but his own plunge was too unstable to provide him any reasonable accuracy. Explosions blossomed on the street below, orange and violet flames flowering up and outward to welcome both of them.

The few cars and taxis using the road emergency-braked, their headlights skewing across the street as they skidded to a halt. Passengers pressed their faces to the windows to see what was happening.

Gore stretched out his arms and legs like a skydiver, then expanded his force field into a wide lens-shaped bubble. Air rushed against it, braking his speed sharply. When it reached twenty meters across he was barely moving. He rotated to an upright position. The force field’s lower section touched the sidewalk, and folded carefully back against him, lowering him onto the ground. He stood motionless for a moment, hands resting on his hips as he watched Bruce.

The assassin’s impact had left a human-shaped indentation in the Park Avenue tarmac close to the smoldering craters of the plasma bolts. There was a lot of blood in and around it. Bruce was staggering away across the road, weaving unsteadily around the stationary cars. Blood soaked the charred, tattered rags that he wore, splattering a wide trail behind him. Each step produced a strange crackling sound. It came from the spikes of bone sticking through his shins that were grinding against each other at every motion. The integral force field was holding his legs together, which was the only reason he was lurching forward; even so the jerky movement was that of a late-night drunk.

Gore grinned in satisfaction, and jumped. He soared effortlessly over the cars to drop in front of Bruce. As he landed, he bent forward and kicked back in one smooth motion, his heel smashing into Bruce’s chest. The assassin was flung backward as his force field cloaked him in a pale crimson light; he rolled over and over until he thudded into the front fender of a yellow taxi, denting the bodywork. One shin was bent at a right angle. The force field strengthened around it, trying to straighten it again. It emitted a loud squelching sound as the mangled flesh was further abused.

Bruce’s head was shaking as he tried to look around at Gore; dark blood gurgled out of his mouth. He raised an arm and fired a plasma bolt at the nude golden human. The intense globe of energized atoms simply splashed off Gore’s metallic skin without even straining his force field. The taxi’s terrified passengers were yelling frantically; they ducked down below the windows.

“This is not a good day for you, is it?” Gore sneered. “First Illuminatus, now here. How many of these corrupted humans have you got left? I wonder.”

Bruce rolled onto his chest and started to crawl. Gore moved fast and clamped a hand around his neck. Their clashing force fields buzzed like a high voltage cable shorting out.

Bruce was hauled off the ground, and turned so Gore could study him in profile.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Gore told him. “From a tactical point of view I should take you in and try to break your conditioning. We’d probably learn a lot from that, Bruce.”

Bruce McFoster’s eye twitched.

“But you tried to kill my daughter and my grandchild. So fuck that.”

Bruce’s jaw opened, sending out a spray of blood, as he tried to say something. Then his contorted face calmed. “Do it. Kill the alien.” His force field switched off.

“Good for you, son,” Gore said in benediction. His hand closed around the man’s neck, snapping the spine.

The last time Hoshe had visited the High Angel there had been a couple of bored Diplomatic Police reviewing the ID of everyone who entered the transit station, and scanning their baggage. Today it was a little different. There were now eight transit stations, all of them a lot bigger than the single original. All of them were guarded by a squad of fully armored navy troopers.

Hoshe, who had seen quite enough of armor suits in the last twenty-four hours, eyed them warily as he approached the entrance to a transit station marked CIVILIAN PERSONNEL. The big trollybot carrying Isabella’s suspension shell rolled along quietly behind him, screened from any scan by an e-shield. He called Paula while he was still fifty meters away along the white concourse. “I’m being chicken. I think I need help already.”

“Okay, Hoshe,” she told him. “I’m calling the High Angel now.”

The navy troopers watched him approach, and moved to form a protective cordon around the entrance. Two of them walked out to meet him.

One of them had a captain’s star, and the name Turvill printed on his chest. He held out a hand, stopping Hoshe. “What the hell is in that?”

Hoshe stared at the captain’s helmet, seeing a curving reflection of himself in the gold-mirror dome. “Luggage.”

“What’s in it?”

“That’s not your concern, Officer.”

The squad around the entrance raised their plasma rifles.

“Oh, yes it is. Open it.”

Hoshe gave him a pleasant smile. “No.”

“We are taking you into custody. Sergeant, get a team to scan the box.”

Hoshe stood his ground, smiling in what he hoped was a natural fashion, while praying he wasn’t sweating too obviously. The squad started to advance, their rifles still raised. Some were covering the trolleybot and its large oblong shell.

Captain Turvill suddenly became very still. The squad halted. Their rifles were lowered. The captain saluted. “Sorry, sir. There has been a misunderstanding. Please go through. Your shuttle is waiting. Can my men be of any assistance?”

“No. Thank you,” Hoshe said. “I’ll just, er …” His hand waved at the entrance to the civilian transit station. He felt like tiptoeing past the squad. A schoolboy smirk was trying to break out on his face; it was hard not to laugh.

Poor Captain Turvill would never know what happened, but Paula had spoken with the High Angel, who called Toniea Gall and rather pointedly asked that a prearranged shipment to the Raiel should not be subject to interruption or examination. The alien starship had never been so blunt with her before. A furious, and frankly worried, Toniea Gall immediately called Admiral Columbia, who told the captain to back off. Now.

Hoshe was the only passenger on the shuttle. The stewards helped him float the suspension shell along the connecting tube, then strapped it securely to some seats for the duration of the flight. They docked at the base of the New Glasgow stalk, where all the airlocks were compatible to human ships. When they were inside, Hoshe’s e-butler connected him to the High Angel’s internal information net. His virtual vision filled up with strange fluid graphics in dusky colors. He thought it was a guidance display of some kind. Fuseto patches on his cuffs secured him to the wall, and he looked around the corridor. The tapering ribbons of light in his virtual vision undulated into new patterns as his head moved.

“What is this, exactly?” he asked.

“Detective Finn, welcome back,” the High Angel said. “I am showing you which direction to take.”

The ribbons undulated again, ushering him along a small corridor. Hoshe beckoned the stewards, who tugged the suspension shell along for him. A door opened to show a small elevator capsule, and Hoshe drifted in along with his cargo. He used the fusetos on his soles to keep his feet on the floor as the elevator began to move.

Several minutes later the elevator rose up the stalk into the Raiel dome. “Can you send whatever the equivalent of a trolleybot is for me, please?” Hoshe asked. The dome’s gravity was eighty percent Earth standard; there was no way he could lift the suspension shell, let alone drag it through the streets.

“That will not be necessary,” the High Angel said. “Your cargo will accompany you.”

“Right. Thanks.” The elevator doors opened. Hoshe looked out onto the Raiel city—if that’s what it was. The light was the same gloomy gray he remembered from his earlier visit. Ahead of him was a street made from walls of unbroken matte-black metal. Lines of tiny red lights glimmered along the base of each building.

The ribbons in his virtual vision waved about like seaweed fronds, aligning themselves onto the street. He took a breath and walked out. The oblong shell that contained Isabella Halgarth slid out after him, its base half a meter off the floor.

“Oh, neat,” he muttered. It wasn’t particularly impressive, even though such a feat was currently beyond human technology. But then every High Angel dome had artificial gravity; if you could generate it you could certainly manipulate it.

With the virtual vision display guiding him, Hoshe Finn walked along the dim alien streets. There were more curves, this time, he thought, and the junctions weren’t all right angles. Other than that it was the same interminable featureless metropolis, illuminated by row after row of small colored lights set along the bottom of the walls.

He wound up facing a sheer cliff of metal, identical to all the others. The lights along the foundation were purple, as before. A vertical line split open in front of him, widening to allow him through. Inside was the same circular space with a glowing emerald floor, and a ceiling lost in the overhead shadows.

It was Qatux waiting for him, of that there was no mistake. The Raiel’s health hadn’t improved since they last met. Several of its medium-sized tentacles were coiled up tight; the large pair at the bottom of its neck rested on the floor, as if they were helping to prop it up. Given the way the big body was sagging on its eight stumpy legs, Hoshe thought that might be a correct assessment. Not that it should have any trouble holding its own weight; judging by how tight the brown hide was stretched over the skeleton platelets it was suffering from the Raiel equivalent of anorexia. One of the five eyes was permanently shut, with a blue rheum leaking from the clenched eyelid; the remaining four eyes were twisting around independently.

Hoshe bowed to the creature, feeling enormously sorry for it. You poor desperate thing, if you had to get addicted to anything, it should never be humans, we’re not worth it. “Hello, Qatux, thank you for seeing me,” he said formally.

Qatux raised its head. “Hoshe Finn,” it sighed as air gusted through the pale wrinkles of flesh that made up its mouth region. “Thank you for returning.” Two of its eyes turned in sequence to gaze at the shell. “Is this her?”

“Yes.” Hoshe’s e-butler sent a code to the shell’s array, and the top dilated. Isabella was floating in a clear gel, eyes closed, slim tubes reaching in through her nostrils. Hundreds of fiber-optic strands had been inserted into her shaven skull, forming a white gossamer crown. Long incisions on her arms, legs, and torso were covered with strips of healskin that were even paler than her Nordic skin. She looked so peaceful she was almost angelic. A vicious contrast to when she’d last been conscious.

“Her power cells have been removed,” Hoshe said, “and the weapons neutralized. She’s perfectly harmless now.”

“I understand.”

“The suspension shell array can raise her consciousness to whatever level you want. If you need her to be awake, nerve blocks can prevent her from moving.” Somehow, he felt as if he were betraying the human girl by surrendering her to the alien in such a helpless state.

“That will not be necessary. A neural cycle approximating deep sleep is all I require.”

“Very well. We need to know what is in her brain, why she did what she did. Paula suspects there is some kind of alien presence, or conditioning.”

“A valuable thing to learn. I have never tasted the memories of a living human brain before. I thank you for this gift.”

“It’s not a gift,” Hoshe said sternly, marveling that he found the courage to be so forthright. “This is a service we ask you to provide, which benefits you in kind. Even so, we need complete reliability from you in this case.”

“And you shall have it, Hoshe,” the soft voice wheezed.

“How long do you think it will take?”

“That cannot be answered accurately until I have begun my examination. From what Paula has told me, the method of subornation does not appear to be a subtle one.”

“Is there …” Hoshe scratched at the back of his neck, embarrassed to ask. “Any danger it could take you over?”

“A mental virus? Moving from host to host, replicating and spreading. No, Hoshe, you need not worry. We Raiel have faced such incorporeal entities before. Our mentalities are not susceptible to such assaults. Even so, I will take care.”

“Thank you.” Hoshe bowed again, suddenly desperate to ask when and where the Raiel had encountered such things. The wall behind him parted to let him out into the funereal street. And that was it. He just wished he had more faith in the alien junkie.

It was dawn at the Tulip Mansion. Justine sat in the big octagonal conservatory in a mauve sweatshirt and baggy jeans, curled up on her battered leather couch as if it were a child’s comfort toy. She couldn’t stop her hands from stroking her belly, giving reassurance. To herself or her child, she wasn’t sure which.

Gore walked in, dressed in a simple white shirt and dark brown pants. He leaned over the couch and gave Justine a light kiss. She gripped his forearm. “Thanks, Dad.”

He gave a shrug, as close to embarrassment as she’d seen him in the last two hundred years. “Nothing to it. His wetwiring was all cheap black market shit. You could have beaten him off with a wet towel.”

“I was in a wet towel,” she said sardonically.

“Well, there you go then, you didn’t even need me.”

There was a small cough, and Justine looked up to see Paula standing at the entrance. “Senator, I’m glad to see you’re all right.”

“No thanks to your bunch of asshole incompetents,” Gore snapped. “What kind of piss-poor operation are you running? I’m not surprised Columbia kicked you out of the navy if this is an example of your results.”

“Dad,” Justine scolded.

“Your father is correct,” Paula said. “The lapse in security is completely unacceptable. It appears that the Starflyer agent was waiting in your fridge; most of the food inside had been consumed. He must have been in there when the Senate Security team installed the upgrade. They will be suspended pending a disciplinary hearing.”

“And that will help how, exactly?”

“Dad, just drop it.”

“Ha.” Gore waved a hand in disgust. “Thanks to the Investigator’s screwup I’ve got to put up with every news show on the unisphere showing the recording of me walking around Park Avenue with my dick hanging out.”

“And executing the assassin,” Paula said.

Justine gave the mansion’s array an order, and the octagonal room’s glass walls vanished behind a gray haze.

“That motherfucker was trying to kill my daughter; he’s already killed my son, and countless others. You think I’m upset about killing him?”

“No. But the NYPD must show due process.”

“I talked to the detectives on the scene. If they want to know anything else they’ve got my lawyer’s unisphere address.”

“Enough,” Justine snapped. “Both of you. I’m shaky enough without you two shouting at each other in front of me. The big question is if we now have enough evidence to force the Senate to take notice of the Starflyer.”

“The proof is certainly building,” Paula said. “We’ve exposed Tarlo, which will help convince the Halgarths that this is not some personal power struggle. And people will be curious who sent the assassin against you, Senator.”

“Damn right,” Justine said. She’d already had several calls from her fellow senators, and one from Patricia Kantil, who’d expressed the President’s concern at the incident. “They’ll expect a report from Senate Security.”

“So what are you going to say?” Gore asked.

“It still depends on Nigel Sheldon,” Paula said. She peered in at the crescent-shaped aquarium, watching the fish gliding around. “If we announce the Starflyer’s existence based on the evidence we have, we have to have at least one Dynasty supporting us. If the Sheldon Dynasty goes against us, we’ll have lost every advantage we have. I know Admiral Kime believes it is real, but he has his hands tied by corrupted evidence.”

“Wilson knows it’s real?” Gore asked. “That’s got to be a big bonus.”

“But I don’t understand Sheldon’s position,” Paula said. “Everything he has done points to him being concerned for the Commonwealth. Yet Thompson was convinced it was his office that had blocked the Far Away cargo inspections I’d been pressing for.”

“I’m sorry,” Justine said. “But I still can’t lock that down.”

“Confront him,” Gore said. “Put him in a position where he has to make a hard choice. That should tell us who he’s playing for.”

“That seems reasonable,” Paula said. “We still don’t know exactly how the Starflyer controls humans. I’m expecting an answer to that shortly.”

“I hope you’re not relying on Senate Security to supply it,” Gore said.

Justine gave him a fierce look.

“No. We secured Isabella Halgarth. Her mind is being examined by the Raiel for me.”

“Oh,” Gore said, slightly taken aback. “Okay, that’s a decent pedigree.”

“Do you have any ideas how we can approach Sheldon?” Paula asked.

Gore gave Justine a hard look.

“Me?” she asked.

“Yeah, you. Nobody in the Commonwealth is going to say no to meeting you right now.”

“I’m not sure we should be exposing the Senator to any further possible confrontation with Starflyer agents,” Paula said.

“Hear hear,” Justine muttered.

“Campbell,” Gore said quickly. “Use him. He’s senior enough to get a direct line to Nigel.”

“All right,” Justine said. “I can probably arrange that.”

“Have you got any idea what the Starflyer’s next move will be?” Gore asked.

“Not specifically,” Paula said. “I can only go by earlier Guardian releases. If they are correct it will return to Far Away. I already have a Senate Security covert observation team in place on Boongate watching for just such an attempt.”

“I’ll reinforce it with our own people,” Gore said. “If we don’t gather enough open political support to force Doi into acknowledging the threat we may have to shut the wormhole down by ourselves to prevent it going through.”

“That’s risky,” Justine said.

“Better than being dead, girl.”

“Where is Mellanie right now?” Justine asked.

“She went to LA with a Senate Security escort,” Paula said. “She said she had to collect Dudley Bose. She was worried about him.”

“The reporter whore has got her claws into Bose?” Gore said. “Christ!”

“I think she should be brought in,” Justine said. “Investigator, if you’re finally satisfied she’s not working for the Starflyer, she could be helpful to us. She obviously has connections of her own. We need information as much as we need allies, however unlikely they are.”

“I’ll certainly suggest that to her,” Paula said.

“And I’ll call Campbell,” Justine said.

Stig rolled out of bed just before dawn. His e-shielded room at the top of the rental house was almost empty; whitewashed plaster walls, bare carbon floor panels, a crude dresser with a big china bowl and a jug of water on top. Shuttered doors opened onto a tiny Juliet balcony that gave him a view over the red tile rooftops of Armstrong City’s Scottish district. Grime-laden solar-charged globes rested in a series of alcoves at shoulder height around the walls, their glow diminished to a moonlight spark after eight hours of darkness. As he always left the balcony doors closed during the day, there was never enough light to fully recharge them.

He crossed the room and swung the thick burgundy curtain away from the arch that led to the tiny bathroom. A couple of polyphoto bulbs came on as he stepped in, filling the room with green-tinted light. Because of the city’s lack of basic infrastructure, the toilet was a self-contained unit, an algaereactor made by an EcoGreen company on Earth over a century ago. Whatever biological processes went on in the compostor chamber behind the wall, the algae and bacteria certainly needed refreshing. The smell that drifted up made Stig’s eyes water every morning. He peered at himself in the mirror, not liking the face he saw. It had been reprofiled after the Oaktier to LA run, giving him small flat ears, a squashed nose, and skin that was a couple of shades darker than his original tone. The thick stubble was now ebony, while his close-cut hair remained mouse-brown. His own mother really hadn’t recognized him when he returned.

The rental house got its water from big semiorganic precipitator leaves that hung from the eaves, which was heated by a row of solar panels up on the flat roof. Half of the hot tank had been emptied by his fellow residents last night, but Stig was always among the first to rise in the morning, so the water that squirted out of the shower nozzle was reasonably warm.

He stood under the spray and started to wash himself down. Water on Earth had always fascinated him, the speed it fell, the hard strike of droplets on skin. Here on Far Away water was a much gentler substance.

Olwen McOnna squeezed into the small cubical. She was only a few centimeters shorter than he was, with a lean slim body that made her heavy breasts even more prominent. Red star OCtattoos glowed on her round cheeks sending trailers coiling down her neck, which made her gaunt face even more hawkish. She pressed up against him, and he felt the rough scar tissue on her belly where the healskin had recently come off the burn she’d received when her force field skeleton was overloaded by a plasma shot. There were other scars he knew of on her body, acquired over the last few weeks. He had his own personal reminders of the increasing violence in Armstrong City; his left arm was still difficult to move.

“The morning,” Olwen said, “the one and only time men can always be relied on.” Her hand slid down to his erection, guiding the tip of his cock between her legs. He gripped her buttocks, lifting her feet off the shower floor, pushing her back into the tiled wall as he impaled her. She snarled in rough delight; her arms twined around his neck to hold herself in place as he thrust repeatedly.

They clung to each other for a while after the climax, water splashing over both of them as tingling nerves returned to normality.

“Do you think that finally got me pregnant?” she mumbled, lowering her feet. “It certainly felt good.”

“Well, thank the dreaming heavens for that.”

“If I was pregnant, you’d have to take me off active duty.”

“Is that why you’re fucking me?”

She grinned. “You got a better reason?”

Actually, he didn’t, but he could hardly say that. They’d started sleeping together weeks ago. The constant danger, the adrenaline buzz, the fear, it all kicked the primal urges into high gear. And he knew damn well she didn’t want to quit active duty.

Olwen turned around, letting the spray wash down her back. Stig finished soaping himself down, and stepped out. She joined him a minute later when he was almost finished toweling himself dry.

A long list of messages had arrived in his hold file overnight. He started working through them, building up a summary of events. The Institute had attacked another two clan villages in the Dessault Mountains, with thankfully few casualties. The clans were watching the movements of the Institute troops closely now; they’d been caught out too many times when the raids started, suffering awful fatalities. Surprise ambushes were becoming rare, although combating the Institute forays was using up a lot of clan members, members who should be helping to prepare for the planet’s revenge right now. Stig didn’t have as many people working in his teams as he would have liked.

There had been a couple of disturbances in the city during the night, not quite large enough to qualify as riots, but news about the navy ships had stirred up the general level of anxiety. Shops had been looted, some fires started, cars stolen and used as barricades. Sparky residents flung missiles at police and Institute troops.

The teams that Stig had on duty during the night had been busy tracking Institute troop movements. On the map in his virtual vision it was clear what they were doing, consolidating their hold along a broad passage between First Foot Fall Plaza and the start of Highway One outside the city.

An Institute-assisted police team had raided a warehouse in the docks. Stig recognized it as one he’d been using to store equipment in right up until three days ago. The Institute was definitely picking up its intelligence-gathering operation.

There had also been arrests in the Chinese district on various warrants. Three of those taken into custody worked for the Barsoomian residence. The Institute wasn’t yet challenging the Barsoomians directly, but they were definitely chipping around the edges.

The Governor had certified another three police precinct assistance contracts with the Institute.

“Shit.”

“What’s the matter?” Olwen asked.

“The Governor signed over 3F Plaza.”

“To the Institute? Fuck it!”

“Yeah.” He pulled a fresh set of shorts and a T-shirt from his small bag, then put his force field skeleton suit over them and covered that with a checked shirt and baggy jeans. The long leather biker jacket he’d bought in StPetersburg on Earth went on top. He slipped a slim harmonic blade into the top of his hiker boots. His ion pistols and high-velocity machine carbines slotted into their holsters to be covered by the zipped-up jacket. Grenades clipped into his belt. His arrays with their sophisticated sensors went into his chest pockets. Steel sunglasses with enhanced display functions hung on a purple surfer band around his neck.

Olwen finished dressing for the day in a similar fashion, with baggy sulphur-yellow pants and a green rainjacket with North Sea Power Surfers printed across it.

They left the apartment block together. The streets were virtually deserted, with shopfronts still covered in fine carbon grilles. Ancient civicbots rolled slowly along the pavements, gathering up rubbish and washing away yesterday’s grime. A few early delivery vans raced along the empty roads. Buses with the first shift workers slumped into their seats rumbled past in clouds of diesel fumes.

When Stig looked east, Far Away’s sun was rising above the horizon, sending a rosy glow to soak the city. He stopped at a mobile stall that was just setting up on a corner three hundred meters along the road from the rental house. The owner smiled happily at them as Stig ordered some bacon sandwiches and coffee for breakfast. They drank some fresh-squeezed orange juice while the man flipped their bacon slices on the griddle.

Stig called Keely McSobel, who was on duty in the room above the Halkin Ironmongery store. “Anything near us?” he asked.

“No, you’re cool, the Scottish quarter’s pretty quiet. But they’re really pouring their people into 3F Plaza. It’s not just troops, either. Some tech types are in the gateway control building.”

“Damn, that’s not good. Can you snoop around inside?”

“That’s the second problem. The city net’s links to CST’s center are being eliminated. I think they’re physically cutting them.”

“Dreaming heavens, are we going to be able to get our calls through?”

“I’m not sure. I managed to get a scrutineer inside CST’s arrays. It can’t send much back without being detected now they’ve cut the bandwidth, but from what I can make out the Institute is setting up censor programs on all the Half Way channels. Any call going out through the link to the Commonwealth unisphere will be examined, same for anything coming in.”

“Bloody hell.” Stig finished his orange juice and pulled out a pure-nicotine cigarette. “Good job, Keely. We’re going to scout around 3F Plaza.”

“Be careful.”

They collected the sandwiches and coffee, and he started to tell Olwen about the Institute’s latest accomplishment as they walked along toward Mantana Avenue, which was the quickest route to 3F Plaza.

“That’s very provocative,” she said carefully. “Especially on top of everything else this city is putting up with.”

“Yeah.” He lit the cigarette. “They’ve already armor-plated the route from the gateway to Highway One, now this. It can only mean one thing.”

“The Starflyer’s coming,” she said it with a knowing gleam in her eyes. It was the moment every Guardian dreamed of. The showdown with their enemy. The planet’s revenge.

“Yeah.”

They were very visible going down Mantana Avenue, the broad thoroughfare that linked First Foot Fall Plaza with the main government district. With a little uncharacteristic flourish of ambition, city planners had laid out a three-lane road as a transport centerpiece between the biggest commercial market and storage zone in the city and the civil servants who sought to regulate it. Then a wealthy Russian émigré had gifted the city with a thousand saplings of newly sequenced GM maple fur poplars. The trees were all planted along Mantana, growing fifty meters tall, with leaves that resembled woolly magenta catkins. For nearly a century the arboreal avenue had been one of the city’s grandest sights, with the thick tall trees screening the road from the pavement.

Now, over half of the trees had withered and died from a native fungal virus that had reestablished itself in the southern hemisphere and swept through the city a couple of decades back, spoiling the beautiful wall of drooping leaves that separated traffic from pedestrians. The Barsoomians had provided resistant saplings as replacements, but the uniformity of the avenue would never be regained now, and a lot of the saplings had been vandalized. It left long segments of the pavement exposed.

Stig assumed an innocent, absorbed expression as yet another convoy of six-wheeled Land Rover Cruisers roared along the road toward 3F Plaza, hooting crossly at any other vehicle impertinent enough to be on the same route. The buildings set back from the avenue were three or four stories high, their elaborate faux-Napoleonic facades making them the most sought after addresses in Armstrong City. Their ground floors were individual shops, as exclusive as anything could be on Far Away; the offices above were mostly inhabited by lawyers and the local headquarters of big Commonwealth corporations, the only organizations that could afford the rent.

“Where in the dreaming heavens is everyone else?” Olwen complained as the Cruisers disappeared ahead of them. Even for early morning, there were remarkably few pedestrians abroad; the traffic was reduced as well. Normally there would be a stream of vans and trucks and carts going in and out of 3F Plaza in preparation of the day’s commerce.

“Bad news travels fast,” Stig told her.

Half a kilometer from the Enfield entrance to 3F Plaza they took a side road off the avenue, and made their way through the clutter of secondary streets to Market Wall.

“Stig,” Keely called. “Muriden says he’s seen a couple of guys loitering around the end of Gallstal Street; it’s the third time they’ve walked past.”

“Damnit,” Stig exclaimed. Gallstal Street was only a few hundred meters away from the Halkin Ironmongery store. He and Olwen were now fifty meters from the base of Market Wall. The merchants in the archways were starting to open for business. Everyone seemed a lot more meek and restrained than usual. “Tell him to keep watching them; I want to know what they do next, if they’re just on a loop. And tell the other sentries to scan around.”

“Aye, will do.”

“And, Keely, prep for a crash evacuation.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah, do it.”

“What’s up?” Olwen asked as he scowled.

“Possible reconnaissance on the store.” He was angry that he wasn’t there to make a proper evaluation. I ought to trust the others by now.

“It was only a matter of time,” she said.

“Right.”

They reached the bottom of Market Wall, and started up one of the broad stone stairs that led to the raised souk. On the top, the stalls with their canopies of solarcloth and worn canvas shared the subdued air that infected the vendors at the base. He and Olwen did their best to blend in, but this hour was given over to chefs and owners of cafés and restaurants buying fresh food from bulk suppliers. It was like a massive extended family, with everybody knowing each other. So they wove through the ramshackle layout of tables and counters, ignoring the welcome smiles and promised bargains, trying not to be too obvious. When they reached the thick stone parapet, it was lined with cautiously curious people staring at events below. Stig edged through and glanced over. “Bloody hell.”

It was as if an occupying army had landed in the middle of Armstrong City. A curving line of Range Rover Cruisers was parked in front of the gateway, their mounted kinetic weapons deployed and sweeping from side to side to protect the shimmering force field. More Cruisers were parked to block every entrance, except Enfield, where barriers and concrete cubes turned away all civilian traffic. The wide expanse of the Plaza was empty, something Stig had never seen before. The three big fountains were actually audible from the top of Market Wall as they pumped their white plumes into the air. Squads of Institute troops in flexarmor were going around the base of Market Wall, ordering the stallholders in the archways to shut up and go home. There were a few loud protestations, swiftly followed by the sounds of a brutal beating, screams, sobbing. The Institute was now in complete control here.

“Keely, give me status on the link to Half Way, please,” Stig asked.

“There are no links. They’ve cut every cable into the CST control center except two, and those both have monitor programs that I wouldn’t know how to circumvent. I’m sorry, Stig, there’s no direct line back to the Commonwealth anymore.”

Stig clenched his jaw as he stared down at the dark armored figures strutting across the dusty plaza below. “What about Muriden?”

“His two observers have gone, but Felix reports a possible in his zone.”

“Okay, get out now, that’s an order. We’ll regroup our headquarters at fallback location three. Got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

The connection ended. Stig waited a few moments, and told his e-butler to connect him to the Halkin Ironmongery store. The address was inoperative. He smiled in grim satisfaction. Keely and the others were acting professionally.

“Let’s go,” he told Olwen.

They retraced their path through the stalls, and started back down the broad stairs. “What do we do now?” Olwen asked.

“I don’t know. And don’t tell the others that.”

“Sure.”

“Damnit, I should have seen this. I screwed up completely. If Adam makes his blockade run now, they’ll come out into the biggest concentration of Starflyer firepower on the planet. And we can’t even warn him.”

“You’ll find a way.”

“Don’t say that, don’t just wish that everything will be all right. The Starflyer just secured the only route onto the planet.”

“Johansson will see we’ve dropped out of communication; he’ll know the Starflyer is on its way back.”

“There’s a difference between knowing and being able to do anything about it.” He glanced back at the sturdy stone and concrete edifice of Market Wall. “We might have to attack the Starflyer ourselves when it comes through.”

“But … the planet’s revenge,” she said it in almost reverential tones.

“The planet will be revenged if the Starflyer dies. I need to get our heavy-duty weapons ready. Just in case.”

Like most senior Dynasty members, Campbell Sheldon kept a private residence on Earth. His was on an artificial island, Nitachie, that had been built in the Seychelles several hundred years ago when the natural archipelago was threatened by rising sea levels. The greenhouse effect never did achieve the worst-case scenarios that the more evangelical environmentalists claimed it would. Some of the smallest islands were swamped by exceptional high tides, but the relocation of the population to protected land never happened. Once the worst industrial polluters moved offplanet to the Big15, and the UFN Environment’s Commissioners introduced their onslaught of regulations, the climate began its turnaround toward the benign nineteenth-century ideal that was the goal to which the EcoGreen campaigners had dedicated themselves. The worst damage to the Seychelles in ecological terms was the coral bleaching, which had killed off thousands of reefs. Even that was being countered as new polyp was planted, allowing the magnificent coral to expand again.

From her private hypersonic, Justine could just see the odd glimmer of light that indicated an island. The rest of the sea was pitch-black, there was no moon to shine off the water, and precious little starlight.

They began to decelerate hard, the nose pitching up as the delta-wing plane began its long curve toward the ocean twenty kilometers below. Justine accessed the sensors in the needle nose as they descended. Nitachie was just visible against the dark water, a warm patch against the cooler sea. The island was square, five kilometers to a side; with long breakwaters extending out from the steep concrete walls, where white sand was building into deep curving beaches. Several lights twinkled around the solitary house, set above the northern side. As they swept in close she could see the glowing blue-green patch of a big oval swimming pool.

Red and green strobes were flashing on the landing pad, a metal grid standing a couple of hundred meters offshore. The small hypersonic settled with only the slightest bump.

Two of Justine’s Senate Security bodyguards walked down the air stairs. Only when they gave the all clear did she and Paula step outside. It was warm, even for the middle of the night. Justine breathed in the clean salt air, feeling quite invigorated after the cabin’s air-conditioned purity.

Campbell Sheldon was standing at the side of the pad, flanked by his own security staff, dressed in a white and gold toweling robe. He yawned, trying to cover his mouth with his hand. “Good to see you,” he said, and gave Justine a small kiss on the cheek. “You okay? I accessed the reports from New York before I turned in.”

“I’m fine.” She was amused to see he had threadbare slippers on his feet.

“Sure.” Campbell was giving Paula a curious look. “Investigator. Always a pleasure.”

“Mr. Sheldon.”

“Do you mind if we go back into the hut?” Campbell asked. “I’m not even on Seychelles time yet.”

“That would be nice,” Justine said.

There were a couple of small carts parked on the edge of the landing platform. They drove the small party back along the causeway and up to the house. Architecturally, Campbell’s beach hut was all curving arches and glass bubbles. Even though the larger outside arches appeared to be open, they framed pressure curtains; a subtle air-conditioning cooled the interior, extracting the worst of the humidity. He led them into a big living room full of casual chairs. Justine sank down into soft white leather cushions, and nodded dismissal to the bodyguard team. Campbell’s own security team withdrew. An e-shield came on around the room.

“Okay,” Campbell said, rubbing at his dark blond hair. “You have my full and complete attention. You get shot at by the most lethal assassin in existence, and the first thing you do is come and see me. Why?”

“I came in person to emphasize how important this is to us. We need to know where the Sheldons stand on certain points, and I don’t have time for the usual Senate Hall talking-in-bullshit routine. I’m only a senator by default.”

“A damn good one, I’d say. I access our Dynasty’s political office bulletin.”

“Thanks.”

“So ask away. I’ll answer whatever I can, and if I can’t I’ll tell you. We know each other well enough for that.”

“Very well.” Justine leaned forward slightly. “There’s going to be a vote in the Security Oversight Committee, engineered by Valetta, to dismiss Paula from Senate Security. I need to know which way the Sheldons will vote.”

Campbell gave her a strange look. It was clear the request wasn’t what he was expecting. He glanced at Paula, then back to Justine. “You came here for this?”

“It’s the strategy behind it which is crucial,” Justine said. “And, Campbell, the answer must come from Nigel himself, I don’t want some aide in Jessica’s office to trot out a standard response.”

Campbell gazed at Paula, clearly confused. “I don’t get this. Does the Senator know about Merioneth?”

“No,” Paula said.

Justine turned to the Investigator. She knew she’d just lost a considerable amount of momentum. “What’s Merioneth?” she asked in annoyance. Her e-butler flipped a file up into her virtual vision that told her Merioneth was an Independent world, which had left the Commonwealth over a century ago.

“An old case,” Paula said.

“For which our Dynasty was, and remains, deeply indebted to the Investigator,” Campbell said.

“That’s the problem,” Paula said. “And why I’m here to back up the Senator. I do need to know your current policy toward me.”

Campbell remained silent for a moment, his eyes studying data in his virtual vision. “This is connected with Illuminatus, not the assassination attempt. Right? One of your old team was some kind of infiltrator.”

“Tarlo, yes. But this is connected with the assassination, too, and your Dynasty’s political strategy. The question about my future is the key to that.”

“This is why I chose the development side of CST, not politics,” Campbell said. “The intrigue and backstabbings that you people …” He shuddered.

“Can you get us the answer?” Justine inquired.

“You want me to ask Nigel personally if the Dynasty is trying to fire Paula?”

“Yes please.”

“Right,” he said briskly. “If that’s what you want, then that’s what you get. Hang on a moment.” He closed his eyes and sank back in the thick cushions of his own chair.

Justine turned to Paula. “Merioneth?”

“Long story from a long time ago. I took a holiday from the Directorate to finish up a case on the planet after it went Independent.”

“After?” Justine couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice.

“Yes.”

“Oh.” Not for the first time, Justine considered how totally boring her own life was compared to that of the Investigator. Until recently.

Campbell’s eyes opened. There was a bad boy smirk on his face. “Well, that’s me out of favor for a week. I interrupted Nigel while he was, er, busy.”

“What did he say?” Justine asked; it came out uncharacteristically needy. She was trying to keep calm, though she saw her hands were trembling.

“The Sheldon Dynasty has every confidence in Investigator Myo, and will be happy for her to carry on her job with Senate Security unhindered. The Senator for Augusta will make that very clear to the Halgarths. We will oppose any removal proposal.”

Justine let out a long breath, almost a sob. Her eyes were watering. She knew it was hormones, and didn’t care that Campbell was seeing her like this. But the relief was incredible. She’d been too frightened to consider what would have happened if Nigel had been in league with the Starflyer.

“Jesus,” Campbell said as he stared at Justine. “What the hell is going on here?” He rose from his seat and took her hand. She sniffed, wiping away some tears.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m a bit of a mess right now.”

“This isn’t the gorgeous Justine I remember,” he said softly. “Perhaps you should stay and get some rest, recover from your ordeal. I can’t think of a more relaxing place than Nitachie. There is a spare bed. There’s also my bed.”

She smiled weakly at his playfulness.

“We need to see Nigel Sheldon,” Paula said. “Could you please schedule a meeting with him for myself and the Senator?”

Campbell’s expression was close to indignation at the Investigator’s lack of tact. Justine’s grin broadened. “I’m afraid the Investigator’s right, we do need to see Nigel. It’s very urgent.”

“Very well,” he said with remarkable dignity. “I’ll call him again and—” He broke off, his eyes widening in surprise at the priority data sliding down his virtual vision.

Justine was seeing the same thing. An ultra-secure alert from the navy was flashing up details about hundreds of new alien wormholes opening in Commonwealth star systems.

“Mark!”

“Huh?” Mark snapped his eyes open. He hadn’t been sleeping on the job. No. Just quietly resting while the engineeringbot ran its new program cycle. He blinked some focus into his eyes, and concentrated on the junction between the force field generator and its secondary phase alignment module. The bot’s instrument arms had withdrawn after establishing a seal. “Yeah, looks good. Run the power test.”

“Okay, activating main circuitry now,” Thame said. He was the Charybdis technical officer, another Sheldon, a ninth-generation grandson of Nigel. It had always been difficult for Mark to work out the hierarchy the Sheldons employed. Basically, the lower the number in your connection the more important you were. Or thought you were. Though Mark had to admit, everyone involved in the lifeboat project was certainly competent. It was that little nuance of superiority they had whenever they said their name that irritated him.

A row of red LEDs set into the module’s casing came on, flashing in sequence before steadying to a permanent glow. Corresponding schematics slid across Mark’s virtual vision, complete with green icons. “Okay, we have functionality,” he said. A yawn made him pause for a moment, then he confirmed the engineeringbot’s new sequence, the fifth they’d tried, as valid to the assembly bay’s RI.

Despite every misgiving, transplanting the frigate assembly bay to the Searcher had worked. Locked up inside the mechanical labyrinth, working constantly, he hadn’t even been aware of the flight. Now they were holding station in the Wessex system’s cometary belt, waiting for Mark and his team to complete the Charybdis. None of them had slept for the last twenty-four hours, and most of them had worked their full shift before that.

The engineeringbot slid away from the generator. Mark let himself drift back behind it, watching out for girders and struts. He knew he was starting to make mistakes; his bruised face was only one reminder, result of a simple collision with a gantry junction that should never have happened. Wouldn’t have happened if he wasn’t so exhausted. “What’s next?”

“Thermal coupling to the backup quantum fold initiator, portside.”

“On my way.” Mark didn’t have a clue what the initiator was, nor what it did. Frankly he didn’t care. He just concentrated on plugging the damn components into their power and support services. A schematic appeared in his virtual vision, showing him the initiator’s location. He started to crawl over the hull. Two-thirds of the active-stealth covering was now in place around the frigate. Even in its powered-down state it was eerily black, a pool of darkness rather than a surface that was simply nonreflective. The gaps waiting to be filled allowed access to systems that weren’t yet operational and needed human supervision. Bots and manipulator arms were clustered over them, along with technicians from Mark’s team. The Charybdis crew—Otis, Thame, and Luke—had taken up permanent residence in the frigate’s cabin to run diagnostics from there.

As he hauled himself along he passed the weapons scientists. He couldn’t help glancing at them, eleven ordinary-looking people in padded freefall overalls and helmets, floating around the missile. There had been quiet rumors about what the frigates would be armed with back at the assembly platform and down on Gaczyna. Superweapons capable of protecting the fleet from any threat. Mark hadn’t paid a lot of attention, even with Liz hungry for gossip each evening. Since the Searcher left, his team had talked of little else. Every time one of them had drifted by him on their way to another job they’d shared a few words; to his surprise, Mark had even joined in with the speculation, passing on what he’d heard in turn.

The assembly bay didn’t have a mechanism for loading missiles into the frigate. That was supposed to happen in another facility. So the scientists were having to improvise. The missile was strapped to a medium-mass manipulator arm, which was inching it slowly down into the magazine chamber. It looked ordinary enough, a smooth, steel-silver cylinder five meters long, with a thick central bulge. The extremely nervous respect that the scientists treated it with made the hairs along his spine creep. He no longer believed the rumors of mere planetsmashers and warped-quark bullets; whatever they’d built was insanely lethal. You only had to see their faces to know that.

That warhead was going to make genocide possible. Back on Elan when they were running from the aliens he would have happily pressed the button. Now he wasn’t so sure. It was the kind of thing that people like him never, ever, got involved with.

He arrived at the open section of hull his schematic indicated, from which an access interstice led deep inside the guts of the frigate. The initiator sat halfway along the narrow gap, a golden sphere with peculiar green triangles jutting up from it. There was a nest of unconnected thermal conductor filaments wrapped around it, with their manufacturer tags still attached. “Okay,” he told Thame. “I’m here. What have the bots tried so far?”

Oscar’s starship, the Dublin, was orbiting a thousand kilometers above the Finnish world Hanko when the alert came through. It had been a miserable duty so far, five people spending ten days crammed into a single circular cabin. In theory the cabin wasn’t too bad; it was a good eight meters wide, with three meters between the flat bulkheads. Then you took out the partitioned-off sleeping section, and the laughably titled bathroom facility, and the remaining available volume was considerably reduced. In zero gee such a space was a little less cramped, but that was a relative thing. The five flight couches—bulky padded shelves that had plyplastic secured i-pads, built-in human waste management tubes, and fluid food dispensers—were lined up along the rear bulkhead. Once you’d strapped yourself in, while trying not to jam knees and elbows into the person next to you, the couch slid back neatly into the operations segment. Oscar likened it to lying on the tongue of a dinosaur as it pulled you into its mouth.

Once in place inside the operations section, there was a half-meter space between your nose and the matte-black curving control console with its high-rez display portals that filled the gap with projections of the tactical display and ship-status schematics. Oscar’s first officer, Lieutenant Commander Hywel, claimed that coffins were a lot less claustrophobic, although admittedly not as colorful.

Hywel on Oscar’s left, where he monitored the sensor feeds, left the other three couches for Teague, the engineering officer; Dervla, who had recently qualified as their FTL drive technician; and Reuben, who had been seconded from the Seattle Project in charge of weapons.

Dervla was in the sleep section, and Hywel was eating his meal of microwaved stroganoff goo out in the main cabin as red icons flashed up in Oscar’s virtual vision. Detector stations down on Hanko and in high orbit had detected seventy-two wormholes opening, forming a loose sphere at three AUs distance from the star.

An adrenaline surge quickly banished Oscar’s lethargy and mild depression. “What the hell are they doing out there?” he demanded. Data from their secure link to Base One through Hanko’s unisphere showed that several Commonwealth worlds were now under a similar pattern of invasion. “Dervla, Hywel, get in here now.”

“Ships coming through,” Teague said. “God, they’re fast. The wormholes aren’t switching location like last time.”

“Right.” Oscar watched the graphics unfolding around him, then concentrated on one wormhole. The Prime ships were coming through nose to tail. Ten in the first minute. It was a quantity duplicated at each of the other seventy-one openings.

“Ships identified as space combat type three,” Teague said. “They’re accelerating at eight gees, broad dispersal pattern. Damnit, we’re never going to intercept those wormholes with our Douvoir missiles.”

“Clever,” Oscar muttered. He watched the graphic showing him Douvoir missiles leaping out of Hanko’s ten orbital defense stations, neon-green lines streaking straight out from the planet, aligned on the Prime wormholes. It was going to take them a good eight minutes to reach their targets. “They’ll just switch locations before impact. Damnit!” His virtual hands were racing over icons and speed-control activators, synchronizing with Reuben as they brought the Dublin up to combat readiness. “What’s the planet status?”

“City force fields powering up,” Teague said. “Combat aerobots launching. We have command of orbital defense stations.”

“Much good it’ll do us,” Oscar grumbled.

“The Douvoirs can take out the ships,” Reuben said. “They can’t dodge.”

“Check the dispersal,” Oscar told him. “One Douvoir missile per ship is not good. This deployment is designed to flood the system with their ships, and we don’t have anything like the capacity to knock them out. The Douvoirs were designed to hit strategic targets.”

“The planetary defenses can cope with any approaching hostile,” Teague said.

“Not an armada. They can send ten thousand an hour at us.”

“We can’t evacuate,” Hywel said. “Not again. There’s got to be a way of keeping them back.”

Oscar said nothing. He couldn’t think of any way to repel the bulk of the Prime ships. Dublin could probably take out a hundred or so, but there were already more than that in-system. When he summoned the navy’s overview, he saw that forty-eight Commonwealth worlds were under attack. The Primes were using the same long-range injection strategy in all of them.

As the Douvoir missiles launched from Hanko’s defense stations closed in on the Prime wormholes, they began to switch location.

“Do we send the Douvoirs chasing wormholes?” Reuben asked. “Or are we going to knock out some ships?”

When Oscar checked the tactical display, he saw there were already more than two thousand Prime ships in-system. “Keep harrying the wormholes for now. Fleet command will let us know if they want us to switch tactics.”

“Captain,” Hywel said. “More wormhole activity.”

“Where?”

“Our hysradar is picking up an emergence … four hundred and eighty thousand kilometers out from the star’s corona.”

“Where?” Oscar thought he’d misheard.

“Directly above the sun.”

Oscar focused on the tactical display that was reconfiguring to show the latest development. Sure enough, a wormhole had opened close to Hanko’s G-class star. As he watched, ships started to slide through. “Fire a pair of Douvoirs at it,” he ordered, even though he knew it was pointless; it would take the Douvoirs a couple of minutes to reach the new invasion point. “What the hell are they doing there?”

“I don’t know,” Hywel said.

The level of tension in Wilson’s office was actually higher than it had reached during the first Prime invasion. Five minutes in, and Wilson was already contemplating doing his deep breathing exercise routine.

All of the Big15, as well as the fully developed worlds, had been mass-producing components for the missiles ever since the first invasion. The cost had been phenomenal, as much as the entire Moscow-class fleet. Even Dimitri had been satisfied about the level of protection they’d wrapped around Commonwealth planets over the last few weeks. Now it looked as though once again they had seriously underestimated the Primes.

The Douvoirs were taking too long to get out to the wormholes. Fleet Command, operating from a center several floors below his office in Pentagon II, was working on eventual scenarios the Primes would use to attack the planets, massed waves or an all-in-one blitz. With the ships still flooding through, they were reserving judgment; but either way there were serious limits on how many the planetary defenses could fend off, even when assisted by navy ships.

Evacuation had already been proposed several times. Wilson hated having to suggest that to the planetary governments and CST, but he was fatalistic enough to see that was the way the invasion was shaping up.

Physically, Wilson had been joined by Anna, of course, and Rafael. Dimitri had also been on standby in Pentagon II, and was slouched in one of the chairs, watching the holographic specks of light whirl around him. So far he’d said very little, occasionally contacting his team in StPetersburg to discuss the pattern of the attack. From the Seattle Project, Tunde Sutton and Natasha Kersley were attending via an ultra-secure link. Holographic images of President Doi and Nigel Sheldon had also materialized on either side of Wilson. So far the President had said very little; Nigel’s worried expression was almost accusatory.

“Confirmed forty-eight points of attack,” Anna said. “They’re all in phase two space except for Omoloy, Vyborg, Ilichio, and Lowick.”

“Roughly the distribution we expected,” Dimitri said. He didn’t press the point. It was his team that had been instrumental in deciding the distribution of the planetary defenses and allocating starships to complement them, choices that had so far proved remarkably accurate. Only nine of the worlds under attack were without starship coverage.

Wilson took a moment to study the strategic display. The office projectors were showing Commonwealth space as a rough sphere just over two hundred light-years across with a very erratic boundary. The Prime invasion was a hemispherical scarlet stain, centered around the Lost23, and intruding nearly ninety light-years inward.

“They’re trying to gain Wessex again,” Nigel said.

“Can you use CST wormholes to deflect them?” Rafael asked.

“I’ll look into it,” Nigel said. His image froze.

When Wilson flicked his attention to Wessex, the display expanded, showing him the Tokyo above the Big15 world, and Douvoir missiles chasing after Prime wormholes, never to catch them. Over four thousand ships were already in-system. There at least they would meet a formidable resistance. The industrial facilities in orbit around Wessex were all heavily protected with force fields, atom lasers, and their own close-range interceptor missiles. Multilayered force fields had roofed over Narrabri. Big aerobots patrolled at high altitude. It had more orbital defense stations than any other planet.

“When are you going to use the quantumbusters?” the President asked petulantly.

“When the tactical situation allows for it,” Wilson told her. “It’s designed to use against primary targets or close-clustered ships. Neither of which we have at the moment. The Prime ships are all flying away from each other. They’ll regroup eventually, as they close on our planets.”

“You mean it’s useless?”

“In these circumstances it is of limited effectiveness,” Natasha said.

“Somebody tell me we will be able to use it effectively.”

“When their ships begin to congregate again, then we’ll be able to deploy them with some success,” Dimitri said.

Doi gave him a vicious look.

“I’d emphasize that even switched to a minimal effect radius, we shouldn’t activate a quantumbuster within a million kilometers of any inhabited world,” Natasha Kersley said. “That’s the absolute minimum safe distance. Even if it only has the mass of a single Prime ship to work with, the radiation output would be seriously detrimental to the biosphere. They are doomsday weapons, Madam President. They were never intended to be used in dogfights.”

“You think we shouldn’t have issued them to the navy starships for this?” Doi asked.

“I designed them, I advise on their use,” the physicist said. “Ultimately, the situations in which they are deployed are a political decision.”

“Thank you, Natasha,” Wilson said before the argument and recriminations got out of hand.

“Additional wormhole activity,” Anna said. “Prime wormholes opening near the stars of the planets they’re invading. Damn, they’re emerging close; approximately half a million kilometers above the corona. Seventeen of them have appeared so far.”

“Above the stars?” Tunde asked, frowning. “I don’t understand. What’s coming through?” The faint waves of color surrounding him rearranged themselves quickly, displaying the hysradar returns of starships scanning the new development.

“Plenty of ships,” Anna said. “Everyone is launching Douvoir missiles; the wormholes will be closed down in minutes.”

“Moved,” Dimitri said. “They’ll be moved in a few minutes.”

Tunde and Natasha exchanged a few words. “I don’t like the positioning,” Tunde said. “It’s constant, look. The wormholes are all opening above the equator of the star, and they are directly in line with the habitable planet of the system. In other words, it’s the closest part of the star to the planet.”

“Meaning?” Rafael asked.

“I don’t know, but it cannot be coincidence. Admiral, we really need to know what’s being sent through.”

“Could it be something like a quantumbuster?” Wilson asked. The question generated a few moments of complete silence in the office. Wilson glanced at Nigel’s frozen image; the Dynasty chief was still dealing with Wessex. Wilson wondered what the hell he was doing there that was more important than this.

“I can’t answer that,” Tunde said. “Obviously it is a possibility.”

“What could a quantumbuster do to a star?”

The physicists looked at each other, neither of them willing to take the lead. “It would cause quite a disturbance to the photosphere,” Tunde said. “There might even be some impact on the top of the convective zone. But the overall damage would be minimal.”

“Radiation emission wouldn’t be minimal,” Natasha said. “That would be extremely dangerous.”

“It’s hardly an efficient use of a quantumbuster.”

“What else could it be?” Wilson tried to keep his voice level and calm.

Tunde raised his hands in an awkward gesture of doubt.

“We have diverted-energy-function nukes,” Natasha said quickly. “As do the Primes. This could well be a large-scale application of that process, powered by the star itself.”

“Those planets are an AU from their primaries,” Rafael protested. “More in some cases. And you’re saying this could be a beam weapon?”

“You wanted alternatives,” Natasha said in an accusing tone.

“Our detector network has now found thirty-eight wormholes close to the target stars,” Anna said.

Wilson’s virtual finger reached for the Tokyo’s icon. He stopped. He hated, absolutely hated, himself for doing this. But this whole attack was pivotal. Any and every action he took today could decide the fate of the Commonwealth. He had to have information he could trust implicitly. That meant the source must be someone he knew he could trust. He touched the Dublin’s icon. “Oscar?”

“Hello, Admiral.”

“We need to know what’s coming through that wormhole close to the star.”

“Hysradar is picking up returns consistent with class-four and class-seven Prime ships. We launched a pair of Douvoir missiles to close it down.”

“I know, but we need confirmation. Take a flyby. Stay in hyperspace, but get us a high-definition picture of what the bastards are up to.”

“You want us to leave Hanko orbit?”

“Yes, the planetary defenses can insure no wormholes open close by. If the invasion pattern changes you can return immediately.”

“Acknowledged, leaving orbit now.”

“Boongate reports a wormhole near its star,” Anna said. “That’s completion, all forty-eight stars. Whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it to each star system they’re invading. Large numbers of ships coming through.”

“The Prime ships must have damn good force fields to operate at that distance from a star,” Rafael said. “It’s hellish close.”

“Can the Moscow-class fly in that close?” Wilson asked. He’d automatically assumed the Dublin would be in trouble if they were in real space a mere half-million kilometers from a G-class star.

“Yes,” Tunde said. “But I wouldn’t recommend an extended combat time in such an environment. The stress level on the force field would undoubtedly lead to overload.”

“Same for the Prime ships, then,” Rafael said.

“Undoubtedly.”

“What are they up to?” Wilson whispered. His virtual hands rearranged the imagery icons, and the office’s tactical display shrank slightly to accommodate the hysradar return from the Dublin. Four hundred eighty thousand kilometers above Hanko’s star, the Prime wormhole was holding steady. Over fifty ships were through now. The pair of Douvoir missiles Oscar had launched were closing fast. Ten seconds from impact, the wormhole closed.

“It’s opening again,” Tunde said, scanning the projection. “Twenty million kilometers away.”

“Douvoir missiles locking on,” Anna said. “Nothing’s coming through yet.”

The Dublin’s hysradar return was showing sixty-three Prime ships accelerating hard from the point where they’d emerged. Each of them was firing a flock of high-acceleration missiles. The expanding globe of hardware was already five thousand kilometers across. Nuclear explosions began to blink around the periphery. The hysradar image immediately broke up into an uneven hash.

“What’s happening?” Wilson asked.

“Interference,” Oscar reported. “The nukes are somehow pumping out exotic energy pulses. It’s screwing with our hysradar.”

“That’s certainly one diverted-energy-function we haven’t got,” Tunde said. “A direct inversion to an exotic state. Natasha?”

“Well, it’s obviously possible,” Natasha said; she sounded more intrigued than alarmed. “I don’t understand how the mechanism holds together under those conditions.”

“You’re missing the point,” Dimitri said.

“Which is?” Natasha asked with cool politeness.

“They’re going to a great deal of effort to hide something from us above those stars.” He indicated the image from the Dublin, which showed the star’s vast curvature. The uniformity of the image was broken by a shimmering patch of silver and yellow particles that obscured over half of the surface. “This is the only sensor blind spot in the star system. Something is going on behind that interference, something they clearly consider extremely important to their attack.”

“The Primes are generating identical interference patterns in the other systems,” Anna said. “It’s a constant pattern.”

“Oscar,” Wilson said, “we have to know what they’re covering up.” He hoped the tension wasn’t showing in his voice. But if the Primes did have something equal or even superior to quantumbusters this war was already over. A lot of his family would leave on the lifeboats that were in the last stages of assembly above Los Vada. If they have time to reach them. He assumed he’d be relatively safe on the High Angel, though God alone knew where it would fly away to.

“Roger that,” Oscar said. “Standard sensors are useless this close to a star. We’re going in closer.”

“Good luck,” Wilson told him.

The first tremor caught Oscar by surprise. His heart jumped in response. “What the hell was that?”

The others were all lifting their heads from the flight couches, checking around the cabin. For what, Oscar couldn’t imagine. A crack in the hull that was letting in solar wind? Crap. He’d always known and accepted that any attack powerful enough to have a physical impact on the starship would simply destroy it. Now another judder ran through the vessel, stronger this time—and they were still intact and alive. “Somebody talk to me.”

“I think the exotic energy blasts from their diverted-energy-function nukes just hit our wormhole,” Dervla said. “I’m certainly seeing a lot of unusual fluctuations around our compression dynamic wavefront.”

“Oh, great,” Oscar said. “A new threat. How badly can that hurt us?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “We never covered anything like this in training. It don’t think it can break our boundary.”

A shudder made Oscar tense his whole body as the couch straps vibrated against him. It was like riding a white-water raft. The hologram display wobbled as his eyes tried to focus. He switched to virtual vision for primary information. Just in time, as the next judder shook his body. Curses were mumbled through the narrow operations segment.

“Ten seconds to the missile formation,” Hywel said.

Oscar consulted the navigational grid. They were flying toward a star at nearly four times the speed of light. He wanted to say something to Dervla about making sure their course was correct, but harassing people at inappropriate moments wasn’t the sign of good captaincy. So he trusted her with his life.

She was taking the Dublin in a long curve to solar south of the Prime incursion, heading past them to an altitude of four hundred thousand kilometers above the star. The shaking began to reduce as they left the explosive umbrella behind.

Their hysradar image began to sharpen as Hywel and the RI brought filter programs on-line. Now the exotic energy pulses were displayed as black circular wavefronts, fading as they expanded. “The ships are still in there,” Hywel said. “And they’re expending missiles at a phenomenal rate even by Prime standards. Oh. Wait—” The image shifted drastically as he instructed the RI to shift the main focus a hundred eighty degrees. “What’s that?”

In the middle of the projection, a lone dot was rushing headlong into the star.

Oscar read the associated figures. “Dear God, that’s a hundred-gee acceleration.”

“Two minutes until it reaches the corona,” Hywel said. “What is that?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t like it at all. Wilson, are you receiving our hysradar data?”

“Yes,” the answer came back. “Can you hit it with a Douvoir missile?”

“Not that close to a solar mass,” Reuben said. “The gravity curvature is too strong.”

“He’s right,” Dervla said. “Our wormhole generator is having trouble maintaining boundary integrity this close. There’s a lot of gravitonic distortion.”

“Oscar, we have got to know what that device is going to do,” Wilson said. “Can you drop out of FTL and observe with standard sensors, please.”

Oscar heard at least two sharp pulls of breath inside the operations section. “Roger that, stand by for full sensor observation.”

“Just how good is our force field?” Hywel muttered.

“It can stand this proximity,” Teague said. “But we need to avoid combat with the Prime ships.”

“I’ll try and remember that,” Oscar said dryly. “Okay, Dervla, take us out of the wormhole. Hywel, full sensor scan as soon as we’re in real space.”

“Aye, sir.”

Oscar couldn’t help himself; his body braced as the FTL drive opened the wormhole and the Dublin slid out into real space. Nothing happened. No blinding white light and intolerable heat flooding through the cabin. Damn, I’m twitchy. He blinked, and started to study the sensor imagery.

Visual sensors showed a universe of two halves. One white, one black. For an instant he was back above the Dyson Alpha barrier in the Second Chance, where space was divided into two distinct sections. This time, there was nothing passive about the sheer white surface four hundred thousand kilometers away. The star’s corona was in constant turbulent motion with waves and surges radiating a gale of particles outward; ghostly prominences danced above the seething gas, flexing and twisting in the intense magnetic field. Space above them was dotted with the neon graphics tagging Prime ships and missiles.

“They’ve seen us,” Hywel said. “Missile flight changing course. Accelerating at twenty gees.”

“How long have we got?” Oscar asked.

“Five minutes until they reach nominal engagement distance.”

“Okay. What about the device they’ve fired into the star?”

The imagery expanded as Hywel tracked the device with as many sensors as he could. It was still accelerating into the corona at a hundred gees. A long wake of swirling plasma stretched out for thousands of kilometers behind it. Shock waves rippled away from its protective force field, creating violet circles that were immediately torn apart by the raging solar wind.

“That is a very powerful force field,” Teague said. “I’m not sure we could withstand that kind of environment. It had to be built specifically for this flight.”

“So what kind of device do you send into a star?” Hywel asked, his voice edgy.

“A bad one,” Reuben said. “And I don’t care how good its force field is, it won’t survive much longer. The coronal density is picking up, and that speed will generate impacts that could puncture anything.”

“But there’s no kind of—” Hywel began. “Oh, the fusion drive has switched off.”

Oscar watched the dark speck as it drilled through the super-velocity plasma. He realized he was holding his breath. “If it’s a quantumbuster?” he asked.

“Then we’re probably dead,” Reuben said. “But even if its force field holds out until it’s within range of the chromosphere, the effect of the blast will be minimal as far as Hanko is concerned. If you’ve got them, use them against the planet directly. Don’t screw around letting them off an AU away like this.”

Oscar waited as the device streaked downward. He wondered if he had time to update his secure store. Probably not. He’d done it this morning, and decided that he probably didn’t want to remember this time in the Dublin anyway. Although … should he leave his future incarnation a message from now saying he didn’t want to remember? Stupid idea.

“Here we go,” Hywel said tersely.

Oscar was surprised to see it was the quantum signature scan that was changing. It was as if petals were unfurling from the device, giant thousand-kilometer-long ovals of altered quantum fields, overlapping and twisted. They began to rotate.

“Magnetic effect picking up,” Hywel warned.

The star’s massive flux lines were curving around the ephemeral quantum wings. Plasma followed, dragged into an elongated eddy curving around the device’s rigid wake.

“What the hell is that?” Dervla asked with quiet unease.

“Wilson?” Oscar asked. “Anyone from the Seattle Project got an opinion?” The quantum effect radiating out from the device was now five thousand kilometers in diameter. It began to speed up. The knot it was stirring up in the corona was visible to the Dublin’s heavily filtered optical sensors.

“Not yet,” Wilson replied.

“Captain,” Reuben called, “the Prime missiles are getting close. If we have to ward off some kind of energy strike from the device as well as dealing with them, we’re going to be in serious trouble.”

“Launch a countermissile salvo,” Oscar ordered. “We have to stay here and report on this.” He knew it was critical.

“One minute until it hits the upper corona,” Hywel said. “It’s having a hell of an impact on the solar wind.”

“Are you sure it can’t survive impact?”

“I don’t know. It’s changed so much, the quantum fluctuations at the core are significantly altered. I’m not sure what it is anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“It might not qualify as pure matter anymore. That distortion is very weird. It seems to be incorporating the force field, and that quantum signature—I’ve never seen anything like it.”

When Oscar consulted the sensor projection, the device’s rotating wings were now close to seven thousand kilometers wide. The operation section’s display superimposed them on the corona as black ellipses. Plasma writhed around them, hurling off dense vortices that leaped up into space, dissipating as they rose. The scale of the effect was unnerving. “If it’s not matter, then what is it?”

“Some kind of energy nexus, I think. I’m not sure. It’s having an unusual effect on the surrounding mass properties.”

The Prime device spun down into the corona. It was like watching a comet striking the atmosphere of an H-congruous planet. The star’s million-degree outer layer ruptured in a crowned plume that rose higher than any of the prominences. Continent-sized cataracts of plasma curved back down only to be warped by the twisted magnetic flux. A secondary plume rose inside the core of the first, the cooler chromosphere matter streaking up to escape from the astonishing deformation produced by the device’s impact.

“Holy shit,” Oscar grunted.

“So what good did that do them?” Dervla complained.

“That quantum effect is still functional, and growing,” Hywel reported. “The device is agitating the corona, probably the photosphere, too. It’s big enough.”

“Holding the wound open,” Oscar muttered. The blemish on the star’s surface was apparent in just about every spectrum: quantum, magnetic, visible. “Radiation,” he said sharply. “Hywel, what’s the radiation emission like?”

“Rising, and fast. Christ. Captain, we’ve got to move, we’re directly above it.”

“I second that,” Reuben said. “One minute until missile engagement.”

“Dervla, take us a quarter of a million kilometers, up and out.”

“Aye, sir.”

The Dublin dropped into FTL for thirty seconds, time mostly taken up by Dervla confirming their relative position before emerging from the wormhole again.

When the ship’s sensors lined up on the strike zone, the turbulence in the corona was a tight-packed cone spewing streamers from its open crest. They could see it growing.

“The device is still active in there,” Hywel said. “Quantum fluctuations are registering at the same level as before. Magnetic activity is increasing. The damn thing is tightening the flux lines like a tourniquet.”

“Oscar,” Wilson called. “Tunde and Natasha believe we’re seeing a flare bomb at work.”

“A what?” he asked, startled. “You mean something like the one used at Far Away?”

“Could be.” Wilson’s voice was perfectly level. “The disturbance in the corona is producing a huge particle discharge, and it’s still building. The radiation is going to saturate Hanko, and we have no idea how long it will go on for. The Far Away flare lasted over a week. Oscar, the biosphere won’t survive that.”

“Oh, shit.” Despite the catastrophe facing the planet he was supposed to be defending, Oscar was trying to think how the Primes had wound up with a flare bomb. Somehow, the Starflyer must have given them the information how to build one. Was that what the Second Chance dish was transmitting?

“They’re going to sterilize each of the new star systems they’re invading,” Wilson said. “We’ll be forced to evacuate forty-eight worlds.”

“And that’s just so far today,” Reuben grunted.

“What do we do?” Oscar asked. “Do Tunde and Natasha think a quantumbuster will work against the flare bomb?”

“We don’t know. But we’re going to have to find out. We want you to take the Dublin as close as you can to the star and fire a quantumbuster into the flare. Switch it to maximum effect radius.”

“Understood.”

“Admiral, if you use a quantumbuster against a star at that rating, you’ll just be adding to the quantity of energy it’s pumping out,” Reuben said. “It’ll make the radiation deluge even worse.”

“We understand that, Reuben,” Natasha said. “But even on maximum effect radius a quantumbuster mass to energy conversion is very short-lived, and if it knocks out the flare bomb, then only half of the planet will be subject to the radiation. We have no choice. We have to pray that this works.”

“Acknowledged.”

“All right,” Oscar said. “Reuben, arm a quantumbuster, and set it to maximum effect radius. I’m loading my authorization code now. Hywel.”

“Entered,” the first officer said.

Oscar’s virtual vision showed him a quantumbuster was now active. “Thank you. Dervla, take us in as close as you can. We don’t have much time.”

“Aye, sir.”

“We can survive for five seconds at a hundred thousand kilometers,” Teague said.

“Then that’s the distance. Let’s go, people.”

“Mark, we really need those flux shunt regulators integrated.” Thame was trying to keep his voice level and calm, but there was too much stress creeping in; the croak of a man who’d survived the last forty hours on no sleep and way too much caffeine. A man who was getting desperate. Not far from the Searcher, Prime warships were massing. A flare bomb was descending into Wessex’s star. The beginning of the end of the human race was happening right outside.

No pressure.

Mark didn’t bother answering. Didn’t dare concentrate on anything but the job. His sight was half bloodred blotches. Hands were trembling. Not that the shakes were obvious; he was in a space suit, with thick gauntlets tipped by micro-sensitive patches. The frigate assembly bay was in a vacuum. Ready to go, to send the warship out into the void where battle could be joined. Except the regulators still wouldn’t function properly. Mark was actually working on the power feed on the frame next to one of the nine units. All the high-capacity cables were locked into place on the power feed; now he was working his way down the management program registry. Lines of faint emerald text stretching higher than a skyscraper flowed through his virtual vision. He altered and modified the lines as they passed by. It was instinct only now, the echoing memory of power supply systems he’d handled in the past, simple fixes and patches stored in old insert files that he edited into the new instructions, reformatting, molding the software into something he simply felt might work.

“I’m sorry to ask, Mark, but can you give us any kind of timescale?” Nigel Sheldon asked. His voice was a lot more controlled than Thame’s, but there was a real need burning in there.

“I’m trying,” Mark whimpered. “I’M TRYING!” His vision blurred completely as tears swelled across his eyes. He blinked them away. The last few luminous green lines were running across his virtual vision. A patch he’d written to monitor feedback anticycle safety directives in Ulon Valley auto-pickers was slipped in. He could smell the moist air, the sugar scent of the vines as he told the program to run.

Something turned from red to green.

“It’s working!” Thame screamed. “Power initiation sequence enabled. Mark, you fucking did it.”

In front of Mark’s visor, red lights on the power feed casing were turning to green. A judder of relief ran down his body. His e-butler routed copies of the program into every regulator power feed on the frigate.

“Fantastic job.” Dutton-Smith patted Mark on his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

Mark didn’t move. Couldn’t. His muscles had packed up. He was curling into fetal position.

“Okay, Mark,” Dutton-Smith said kindly. He tugged his boss out of the tiny crawl space. They only just got clear as a heavy manipulator arm slid the hull section into place. Eight identical sections were being fixed by the assembly bay RI over the frigate’s other flux regulators.

Dutton-Smith clung to the gridwork as it slowly retracted from the Charybdis, holding Mark’s inert form away from the umbilical bridges as they telescoped back. The frigate slid past them in a smooth, aquatic motion out into open space. There was no exhaust, no crude rockets roaring flame from bell-shaped nozzles; the Charybdis moved by direct gravospacial manipulation. Its perfectly black bulk blotted out a few dim stars. Then it vanished.

The response of the human navy class to the start of the second incursion matched MorningLightMountain’s predictions. Their missiles and beam weapons were more than adequate to protect the planets in the star systems had it opened its wormholes in close orbit again. Instead, it sent its fleets of ships into the star systems a long way clear of the human-colonized worlds. They launched their superluminal missiles at once, but the flight time enabled MorningLightMountain to send hundreds of ships through before there was any danger of interception. When the missiles did get close, it switched the wormhole locations and sent more ships through.

With the fleet dispersal proceeding as planned, MorningLightMountain began stage two.

Wormholes opened as close as possible to the stars of each new incursion system. Strong beams of light shone back through, brightening the asteroids and equipment that orbited the interstellar wormhole at the staging post. Ships were dispatched through to the dangerous environment, forming a protective perimeter. As predicted, the humans had not thought to station any defenses around their stars.

MorningLightMountain began firing its corona-rupture machine at the forty-eight new stars. The covering ships began their interference strategy.

Only at one star, Hanko, did the humans dispatch a starship to investigate. MorningLightMountain could do nothing more now but watch and wait. The corona-rupture machines were the most heavily automated apparatus it had ever built. It would never be able to place an immotile cluster in one of the small vessels, so it had to rely on electronics, which was a point of concern.

Several rival immotiles had developed their own versions of the corona-rupture technique during the centuries before the barrier imprisoned them. None could ever test it; to do so would be to kill all Prime life on the homeworld. It had remained a theory for over a thousand years, until the imprisonment ended.

When it wiped out the other immotile groups, MorningLightMountain was surprised that several of them had actually built and maintained corona-rupture machines. Investigation of their dwindling thoughts showed they were concerned about its own dominance, and believed the machines to be the last deterrent. With wormholes open to other star systems, MorningLightMountain had begun a comprehensive research project, firing the different kinds of corona-rupture machines at its disposal, and observing the results, using them to refine the design. It was gratifying to discover its own design was among the best.

Now it watched as the ruptures began, evolving into solar flares that jetted out vast clouds of particle radiation that would soon envelop the Commonwealth worlds. All the non-Prime life dwelling on the planets would sicken and die. It was the simplest, most effective solution to the problems it was facing. MorningLightMountain had suffered unexpected setbacks as it began to grow its crops on the new twenty-three worlds. Often it would see the seeds germinate, only for the young shoots to suffer some unknown malaise and wither away. The malady was different on every planet, and often varied from continent to continent.

Strangely, it was data that it mined from human sources that gave it the reason. Soil bacteria was different everywhere: non-Prime. Something it hadn’t realized, but it was obvious with hindsight. In addition, there were a myriad of spores and viruses, micro-organisms, and insects that would consume or clash with Prime-life plants. Humans countered this problem with genetically modified terrestrial crops that could grow on their newly acquired worlds. They twisted their food symbiosis plants into nonterrestrial versions; crops looked the same but their cellular biochemical functions were subtly different. Nothing humans did surprised MorningLightMountain anymore; but it was unable to understand how they could betray their biological heritage so casually. Did the integrity of their evolution mean nothing to them? Apparently not.

The human starship at Hanko had jumped away from the growing flare, but now it returned, emerging so close to the star that MorningLightMountain had trouble tracking it. A sensor on one of its covering ships detected a pulse of electromagnetic energy that might have been the starship firing something with a fusion drive. Then the ship jumped clear again. MorningLightMountain waited to see what would happen. It could not envisage a weapon capable of destroying a corona-rupture machine.

After the flare radiation had scoured each of the new forty-eight planets clean of its antagonistic alien life, MorningLightMountain would introduce Prime life onto all of them. It would be the true beginning of Primeforming the galaxy. With their food dead and rotting, the humans would be forced to abandon their worlds, leaving their valuable industrial equipment behind them. Should they choose to stay and fight for possession of their dead planets, the fleets were ready to overwhelm their defenses without any risk to itself. This was an economic method of incursion. MorningLightMountain had expended an inordinate amount of resources to rebuild and salvage from the wreckage of conflict on the new twenty-three, as well as countering all the guerrilla sabotage. Human equipment and technology were useful, but it was paying too high a price for acquiring it. And this second incursion included the Big15 world, Wessex, with its expansive industrial facilities. This time, MorningLightMountain would not be beaten back.

The violence of the explosion was extraordinary. MorningLightMountain thought the sensors on its ships were simultaneously malfunctioning. The surface of Hanko’s sun heaved. A titanic crater bulged downward into the photosphere, overwhelming the still-rising flare. From the center, a gigantic sphere of plasma leaped upward, as if the star were giving birth to an infant of its own kind. Hard radiation from the middle of the explosion sliced clean through the force fields on every ship MorningLightMountain had sent through to provide cover, vaporizing them instantly.

For a moment MorningLightMountain had no way of knowing what was happening to Hanko’s star. When it reopened the wormhole five million kilometers away and cautiously extended sensors through, it saw the photosphere crater wall collapsing, sending a circular wave racing out across the star’s surface. The plasma sphere had separated from the corona, racing into space at near-relativistic speed and expanding fast. MorningLightMountain could no longer detect the flare amid the conflagration raging within the corona. Nor was their any indication of the quantum effect that its machine produced.

MorningLightMountain was shocked by the scale of the event. It had no idea that humans had such a powerful weapon available. They were far more dangerous than it had ever suspected. For the first time since the barrier came down, it began to question the advisability of its actions.

“It works,” Tunde said, a cautious grin on his face. “The flare’s been wiped out.”

“Lost under a much greater radiation discharge,” Rafael said.

Everyone in the office was riveted on the sensor imagery provided by the Dublin, which was now standing off ten million kilometers from Hanko’s star. Wilson watched sluggish waves spreading out across the corona from the quantumbuster detonation, then the size registered, and he realized they weren’t sluggish at all. The star’s prominences were writhing wildly as the magnetic field oscillated. Two million kilometers above the dissipating depression, the sphere of plasma had now reached the same diameter as Saturn, and was cooling rapidly. Its cohesion was breaking down, allowing it to spew off ephemeral rivers of waning ions as bright as a comet’s tail. The hard radiation emission from the center of the explosion was also reducing. Even at ten million kilometers, the Dublin’s force field had been badly strained to maintain cohesion under the impact.

“But a shorter one,” Tunde countered immediately. “And the inverse square law works to our advantage here. Hanko is an AU away, after all.”

“There was no alternative,” Natasha said. “This way the planets get a chance at overall biological survival.”

“I know,” Rafael said grimly. “I’m sorry, I wanted a solution that was less damaging for us.”

“But it is a solution,” Wilson said. “And the only one we’ve got. Anna, I want the starships to launch quantumbusters at every flare. Snuff them out.”

“Yes, sir. There are nine star systems out of the forty-eight which don’t have starship coverage.” She sounded upset at having to remind him.

“Damnit. Send ships in from wherever you can.”

“Fleet Command is working out the quickest flight patterns now.”

The office tactical display showed starships going FTL to leave their planetary orbits. Wilson allowed himself to believe they would all be in time, that the flare radiation damage would be minimal. He knew that even if it was, even if the majority of the biosphere on each world survived, the inhabitants would want to leave. People would be terrified. Quite rightly. There would be a flood of refugees to the other side of the Commonwealth. Planetary governments would be unable to cope. There were still huge problems housing and supporting the existing refugees from the Lost23.

“Can we shut down the CST network?” he asked the President. Nigel Sheldon still hadn’t returned. His stationary image lurked in the office like a ghost at the proceedings. Wilson was starting to wonder if the Dynasty chief was running for his lifeboat.

“Excuse me?” Doi asked.

“We have to block any kind of mass panic escape from the worlds under attack. The rest of the Commonwealth won’t be able to deal with the population of forty-eight planets on the move. I doubt even CST can transport that many people.”

“If they stay they’ll suffer radiation sickness. You can’t make them endure that, and I’m certainly not going to enforce it.”

“Nobody inside a force field will come to any harm.”

“And what about people outside?”

“We’re getting reports that the CST stations have closed on most of the worlds under attack,” Rafael said.

“What?”

“It looks like Wessex has cut off all its links to phase two space.”

Both Wilson and Doi turned to Nigel Sheldon’s image. Wilson tried to send a message to the Dynasty chief’s unisphere level two private address, which was rejected. “Damn you. What are you doing?”

“Using CST wormholes to interfere with the Prime ones, I expect,” Rafael said.

“Have we got any information on that?” Wilson asked Anna.

“Admiral,” Dimitri said, “with respect, this is not relevant right now. You have to focus on Hell’s Gateway and how it can be disabled. While the Primes retain the ability to open wormholes into Commonwealth space, they can drop flare bomb after flare bomb into any of our stars. We have just shown them we possess doomsday weapons; and we have enough evidence that they are conducting a pogrom against us. Their retaliatory strike will be swift and utterly lethal. You must stop them. The next hour will decide whether there will even be a Commonwealth for people to move through.”

Wilson nodded slowly as he began his feedback breathing exercise. He could feel his hands shaking in the unnatural silence. The refugees had been a classic displacement diversion. Truth was, he didn’t want to make the next round of decisions. This is too much to ask one person. I’m not ready. A little self-derisive guffaw slipped out of his lips, bringing him strange looks. Exactly how long does it take to prepare? I’ve had three hundred years, goddamnit.

“Anna, tell the Cairo and the Baghdad to fly directly to Hell’s Gateway. They are to use quantumbusters against the Prime facilities they find there. I want those force fields broken, and the gateway generators destroyed.”

“Yes, sir.” She began to relay instructions to Fleet Command.

He studied the tactical display. Now he’d gone and done it, committed himself to accepting the responsibility, the decisions and orders were actually quite logical and easy. His heart was beating away normally inside his chest again.

“How long?” Doi asked.

“It’ll take them three days to get there, which might be too long, but then again it might not. And if they can’t get close to Hell’s Gateway they can kick the shit out of that star with quantumbusters. That should cause some damage to the Primes stationed there.”

“I understand,” Doi said. She sounded defeated, as if it were all over.

Wilson didn’t want to look at her. If the Primes started firing flare bombs at other stars, then the Commonwealth was as good as dead already. They had three days to implement such an action. I’ve given them three days.

The tactical display was showing him quantumbusters detonating to extinguish the flare bombs already active. The flares and the explosions combined were sending lethal torrents of radiation toward the hapless Commonwealth planets.

“Warn the planetary authorities,” Wilson said. “Tell people to get under cover.”

“They’re already doing that,” Rafael said. “Wilson, I’m sorry, but this has to be done.”

“Yes.” He took a deep breath, reviewing the tactical display as it showed him the radiation gushing out from the quantumbuster explosions that would ultimately result in the deaths of millions of people. On his order.

“Bad day,” Nigel Sheldon murmured. “And getting worse.”

His expanded mentality slipped into the arrays governing CST wormhole generators on Wessex. Traffic in and out of the station had already shut down on his earlier order, leaving the wormholes empty. He disconnected eight of them from their remote gateways, and pulled their exits back into the Wessex system. Sensors above the Big15 world located the Prime wormholes for him. Over three thousand ships had already come through. The Primes had also fired a flare bomb into the local star. Tokyo had launched a quantumbuster to knock it out.

“We’re going to lose the planet’s entire bloody harvest,” Alan Hutchinson groaned. “The force fields will protect Narrabri, but the continents are completely exposed.”

“I know.”

The quantumbuster detonated.

“Jesus fucking wept.” Alan Hutchinson spat. Sensors revealed the full damage that Prime and human weapons inflicted on the tormented star. “That’s more than quadrupled the radiation emission. All they have to do is keep on firing flare bombs at us. The cure is as bad as the problem.”

“Hang on, Alan. I might be able to stop this.” Nigel was tracking the Charybdis through a directional TD channel created by the ship’s drive. The frigate was closing fast on one of the Prime wormholes, and there was no sign of it on any hysradar in the system. So let’s hope the Primes can’t see it, either. “Are you ready?” he asked Otis.

“Yes, Dad.”

“Here we go.” Nigel issued a stream of instructions into the wormhole generators he commanded. This time he didn’t need help from the SI. CST had upgraded the Wessex RIs to manipulate the open-ended wormholes in an aggressive mode.

MorningLightMountain watched the human starships launch their superbombs into the stars where it had planted corona-rupture machines. In every case, the massive explosion eliminated its machines. It had not expected such retaliation. If they had such weapons, why hadn’t they used them against the staging post or its own homeworld? Surely their ethics wouldn’t prevent them?

One of its wormholes in the Wessex system was abruptly subjected to exotic interference as eight human wormholes transected it. MorningLightMountain was expecting that; it diverted power from reserve magflux extractors to help stabilize its wormhole. After analyzing the nature of the attack humans had used last time, it believed it could now counter them effectively. Certainly, it had modified its generator mechanisms to make them less susceptible to the instability overloads. Thousands of immotile clusters focused their attention on the wormhole, ready to counter whatever interference pattern was inflicted on the exotic fabric.

There was none. This was different. The human wormholes were somehow merging with its own, their energy input helping to maintain the fissure through spacetime. For a moment, MorningLightMountain didn’t understand at all. Then it realized it was now unable to close the wormhole. The humans were injecting so much energy into it they were stabilizing the fabric; they were also locking the exit in place within the Wessex system. There was a hole open directly into its staging post that it didn’t control.

MorningLightMountain tried to introduce instabilities, inducing resonances, modifying power frequency. The humans countered it all with ease. Sensors located a relativistic missile racing for the wormhole exit. MorningLightMountain strengthened the force field that covered the exit, and started pulling back the ships that had just gone through, clustering them in a defensive formation. Force fields inside the staging post area were strengthened. It had prepared for a relativistic explosion like last time in case the humans managed to engineer a strike. The damage should be minimal.

A starship materialized inside the force field covering the wormhole exit. It was difficult to detect: the hull was completely black, absorbing all electromagnetic radiation. MorningLightMountain knew it was there only because it partially eclipsed the drive contrails of its own ships outside. There had been no warning of its existence, no detectable superluminal quantum distortion waves that were the signature of human ships and missiles. They had built something new.

The ship moved swiftly into the wormhole exit. MorningLightMountain switched every available power source it had into the generator in one last frantic attempt to destabilize the wormhole. Nothing happened; the wormhole fabric remained perfectly constant as the humans countered every power surge. MorningLightMountain gathered its own ships around the generator, ready to fire. Sensors were also aligned in an attempt to learn something about the nature of the new drive.

The human ship emerged from the wormhole. MorningLightMountain’s ships fired every beam weapon they had at the intruder. It vanished.

“Second batch of flare bombs coming through,” Anna reported.

“Oh, Jesus,” Wilson exclaimed. The display showed him over thirty new devices had emerged, accelerating at a hundred gees toward their target stars. “Natasha?”

“If you can’t intercept the devices with Douvoir missiles, hit them with quantumbusters.”

“Son of a bitch.” Wilson nodded at Anna. “All right, authorize that; divert every Douvoir we have in proximity. Some of them must be able to hit a flare bomb.”

“Yes, sir.”

“One of us will run out of superweapons before the other,” Dimitri said. “That will decide who wins today.”

“That decides who wins, period,” Rafael said.

“Yes, Admiral.”

Nigel’s image flickered back into life. “I’ve done what I can,” he said. “We should see a result in the next quarter of an hour.”

Wilson quickly checked the Wessex section of the tactical display. One of the Prime wormholes had vanished. One? “What did you do?”

“Sent a ship through to Hell’s Gateway.”

Wilson looked at Anna and then Rafael, both of whom looked equally perplexed.

“What sort of ship?” a fascinated Dimitri asked.

“Warship,” Nigel said. “Heavily armed.”

“With what?” Natasha asked.

“Advanced quantumbuster.”

“Advanced?”

“You’ll see.” He paused. “If it works.”

MorningLightMountain could not detect the human ship anywhere within the staging post system. Most of its sensors had recorded nothing as it emerged from the wormhole. The visual images were strongest, and most informative, showing a black ovoid sucking in light. There was no quantum signature, nothing on the mass detector. Most puzzling and alarming, there was no detectable wormhole. Whatever the human scientist class had come up with, it was radically different from anything they employed before.

Now MorningLightMountain was left wondering what the ship would do. Some kind of attack was surely imminent. It couldn’t understand why the humans hadn’t simply set off a superbomb as soon as the ship was through. What could be more damaging than that? Certainly a large proportion of the equipment and ships at the staging post would have been destroyed. Even the interstellar wormhole would have been threatened.

Why did it never truly understand humans?

Sensors on several of the star-orbiting missile platforms spotted a strong magnetic source emerging from nowhere a hundred thousand kilometers above the corona. MorningLightMountain had placed four thousand such platforms around the star to protect its magflux extractors. Without them, it couldn’t power the wormhole generators into the Commonwealth. But this missile wasn’t fired at any of the magflux extractors, it was heading straight down into the star, and its position had already put it beyond any feasible interception. Given its location and course, there were only two possibilities: either humans had developed corona-rupture devices, or it was one of their superbombs. There was no way to tell until the impact.

MorningLightMountain calculated what damage a flare would inflict on the magflux extractors as they passed above it. With adequate warning, it should be able to use the attitude thrusters to alter their orbital inclination, and steer them clear of the radiation stream. Surely humans would know that. A superbomb would do a lot more damage, though even an explosion of that magnitude could only destroy a small percentage of its magflux extractors. Perhaps the ship was going to launch a series of superbombs. That would seriously degrade its immediate ability to continue expanding into Commonwealth space. Considering this from a tactical angle, MorningLightMountain launched another batch of its own corona-rupture devices at the forty-eight systems it was invading. It also began reviewing the location of the remaining Commonwealth stars. A gradual, measured absorption of human planets was preferable, weakening them and utilizing their discarded industrial infrastructure, but they were now forcing its responses.

The tens of thousands of group clusters managing the staging post wormhole generators began to compute new exit coordinates. Towers loaded with corona-rupture devices were prepared; immotile group clusters analyzed and prepared guidance electronics on all the remaining devices. MorningLightMountain didn’t have as many as it would like. They were extremely difficult to build, even with its technological ability and resources.

Sensors in the star-orbiting missile platforms closest to the human missile caught a sudden burst of quantum field activity just as it reached the chromosphere. Then their communications links ended. Power from all the magflux extractors around the impact zone failed simultaneously, forcing MorningLightMountain to switch to emergency power reserves to maintain over a hundred fifty wormholes into the Commonwealth. Platforms farther away showed the distinctive blast crater of a superbomb starting to form within the corona. Then something else happened. Quantum signature detectors recorded activity leaping off their scale. The star’s magnetic field multiplied in strength by orders of magnitude, producing a pulse effect strong enough to shove a fifth of MorningLightMountain’s magflux extractors and missile platforms out of their orbital track. As they tumbled away with every electronic system burnt out, MorningLightMountain switched to platforms still farther away from the missile impact point to try to understand what was happening. Around the crater zone, a solid plane of brightness was swelling up and out across the chromosphere. Ultra-hard radiation poured away from it, a wavefront powerful enough to slice through the strongest force field.

More missile platforms and magflux extractors failed. MorningLightMountain didn’t have anything left that could scan the impact zone directly; its only remaining platforms were on the other side of the star. Sensors at the staging post still showed the star as it was six minutes ago, passively normal. Power reserves were now insufficient to provide an alternative supply for all the magflux extractors it had lost. It concentrated on maintaining two wormholes to each of its captured Commonwealth planets.

The first flotilla of missile platforms to slide out of the initial blast umbra showed what looked like the crescent of a blue-white giant appearing behind the staging post star. And MorningLightMountain finally realized what the humans had done.

The star was going nova.

Ozzie woke up as slim beams of bright sunlight slid across his face. He lay motionless for a while, eyes shut, a smile playing across his face. Let’s see. He opened his eyes and brought his hand around in front of his face. His antique wristwatch told him he’d spent nine hours asleep. “Oh, yeah?” His voice was a contented challenge to the universe.

He unzipped the sleeping bag and stretched. The cool air gusted over him, and he reached for his cord pants. Once he’d fastened the belt around his waist, he picked up his checked shirt and grinned knowingly. Very carefully, he slipped his arms into the sleeves. There was no ripping sound from any of the stitches. “Man, some progress!” Both of his large toes stuck up through holes in his socks as he shoved his feet into his boots. “Ah well, then again, maybe not.” They definitely still needed darning. He patted the pocket on his old dark gray fleece where his small needle and thread packet was stashed. “Maybe tomorrow.”

He was pressing down on a giggle as he pushed the curtain aside and stepped out of the crude shelter. “Morning,” he called out cheerfully to Orion, who was sitting beside the fire he’d just rekindled. Their metal mugs were standing on a shard of polyp above the flames, wisps of steam rising from the water inside.

“Five teacubes left,” Orion said. “Two chocolate. Which do you want?”

“Variety is the spice of life, man, so let’s go for tea today, shall we?”

“Okay.” Orion gave the little gold cubes of chocolate a wistful look.

“Fine, thanks,” Ozzie said. He sat down on one of the ebony and maroon polyp protrusions, wincing as he straightened his leg.

“Excuse me?” Orion said.

“The knee, thank you, it’s a lot better, but I’m gonna have to keep up with the exercises to loosen it up. It’s still plenty stiff after yesterday.” He gave the perplexed boy a happy look. “You remember yesterday, right? The walk down to the end spire.”

“Yes.” Orion was becoming petulant. He couldn’t figure what the joke was.

Tochee emerged from the jungle, its manipulator flesh coiled around various containers it had filled with water.

“Good morning to you, friend Ozzie,” it said through the handheld array.

“Morning.” Ozzie took the mug that Orion proffered, ignoring the boy’s scowl. “Did you find anything interesting?” he asked the big alien.

“I have detected no electrical power circuit activity with my equipment.” Tochee held up a couple of sensors. “The machinery must be very deep inside the reef.”

“Yeah, if there is any.”

“I thought you said there was,” Orion protested.

“Something generates gravity. My guess is, it’s too sophisticated to be anything like a machine. Specific quark lattice, folded quantum fields, gravitonic-molecular intersection assembled at a subatomic level, something like that. Who knows, who cares. It’s not why we’re here.”

“What are we here for, then?” Orion asked in exasperation.

“The Silfen community.”

“Well, they’re not here, are they.” The boy waved his arm around in a broad half circle to illustrate the absence of the humanoid aliens. Tea sloshed out of his mug.

“Not yet.” Ozzie picked up one of the bluish gray fruits they’d gathered and started peeling it.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Okay, think on this. Nobody here believes we crashed here on Island Two by accident, right? I mean, what are the odds, man? The gas halo is big in anyone’s language. And the old Pathfinder, face it, we’re not talking Titanic here.”

“A natural collision was unlikely,” Tochee said.

“So we’re not here by accident. And what did we find yesterday? What’s at the end of the reef?”

“Spires,” Orion said doubtfully.

“Which we all decided would make excellent landing areas for flying Silfen.” Ozzie bit into the coarse fruit, grinning at his companions.

“They’ll come to us!” Orion smiled brightly.

“That is an excellent deduction, friend Ozzie.”

“Many thanks.” Ozzie wiped some of the juice from his beard. “It’s worth a try, anyway. I can’t think of any other reason for today.”

The tiniest of frowns flickered over Orion’s face, but he let the comment go. Ozzie couldn’t quite work out if the boy and Tochee were real or not. Temporal reset was not something he believed in. There were many ways of manipulating spacetime within a wormhole so that time appeared to flow faster around the observer, but traveling back in time was a fundamental impossibility. So if this day on the reef was an artificially generated reality, it was a perfect one, which logically meant his companions would replicate their real selves down to the last nuance. Then again, they might be sharing the dream—in which case why didn’t they remember the yesterdays? Of course, maybe there was some kind of closed temporal loop subsect operating inside the gas halo, a microcontinuum operating in parallel to the universe but with different time flow laws. He wasn’t sure if such a thing was possible. Intriguing idea to try to analyze, though it was a very long time since he’d attempted math that complicated. And today, he decided, wasn’t the day to begin again.

After breakfast he made sure Orion and Tochee gathered their belongings to carry with them on the trek through the reef’s forest. Without understanding if what was happening was real or not, he couldn’t risk them losing the few essential items they still possessed if they did find a path and move on to somewhere else. So the tent and water filter pump, the few tools remaining, all came with them.

“Should we be picking fruit?” Orion asked as they wound through a section of trees that were nearly all laden with grapelike clusters of scarlet berries. “We normally pick fruit.”

“If you want to,” Ozzie said. He was concentrating on keeping his head clear of the ceiling formed by the lowest branches as he bounce-walked his way forward. The trees were large and old, producing a wide interlocking lacework of branches and twigs. Sunlight around the trunks was a gentle twilight glimmer, complemented by dry air smelling faintly of spice.

Orion gave a victorious whoop, and immediately shinned up the closest trunk. Ozzie could see him walking along the branches overhead as twigs snapped, and the occasional leaf fluttered down.

“Are you not using your sensors, friend Ozzie?” Tochee asked.

“I’ve got a few running,” Ozzie said defensively. He didn’t fancy trying to explain to Tochee that right now they might both be nothing other than figments in the Silfen Community’s dream. If they weren’t, he’d be facing a serious credibility crisis. “We’ll save the complex ones for something interesting.”

“I understand. I will continue to record the general background, it may help us determine—”

“Hey!” Orion yelped.

Ozzie couldn’t quite tell if the boy was in pain or just startled. There was a flurry of motion in the forest’s lower ceiling five meters away from him. Broken twigs and a small crowd of leaves plummeted down. Orion’s legs appeared in the rent. They swung from side to side a couple of times, and he let go, falling slowly to the thin layer of sandy soil covering the polyp. Several clusters of the red berries fell with him. He looked directly back up, a flustered expression on his face.

“What’s the matter?” Ozzie went toward the boy with an easy bounding motion. Tochee speeded up to match him, its locomotion ridges spreading out for better traction.

Orion was scrabbling backward, his eyes fixed on the tear he’d created. Stronger slivers of sunlight shone straight down through it. “There’s something up there,” the panicked boy gasped. “Something big, I swear it.”

The front of Tochee’s body lifted off the ground as the alien aligned its pyramid eye on the gap. “I see nothing, friend Orion.”

“Not right up there, more off this way.” Orion pointed.

“What sort of size are you talking about?” Ozzie asked nervously. The boy’s behavior was making him jittery. Was that intentional? Or were they out of the illusion now? If so … His hand slipped down toward the sheath where his knife hung.

“I don’t know.” Orion clambered to his feet. “It was this shape moving, that’s all. A dark shape. My size, maybe bigger.”

Tochee had begun sliding in the direction Orion indicated, winding slightly from side to side in short economic movements. Its colorful fronds were standing proud from its hide, waving slightly in sympathy with its body motion. Something about the alien’s intent and confidence reminded Ozzie of native American hunters. When he looked up again at the ragged ceiling of branches and leaves there was nothing to see, just the occasional flutter of the leaves, the chiaroscuro dapple in perpetual random motion.

“What’s—” Orion began.

Ozzie closed a hand about the curious boy’s pointing hand, lowering it. “Why don’t we just keep on going to the spire?” he said, trying to be casual as he put a finger to his lips. Orion’s eyes bugged.

Tochee reared up, an impressive action even in the reef’s low gravity. The front edges of its locomotion ridges curled into hooks that fastened around a branch, holding it vertical. The manipulator flesh on its flanks lunged out, flattening into two tentacles that shot up into the forest’s vegetation. For a moment nothing happened. Then Tochee let go of the branches, and tugged with its tentacles. Its heavy body fell smoothly. A humanoid form came crashing down through the forest’s low ceiling.

Ozzie was already leaping forward. He landed right on top of the figure struggling on the ground next to Tochee. The pair of them rolled over and over as Ozzie tried to get his opponent in a wrestling lock. Whoever he was holding writhed like an electrocuted octopus. Every time Ozzie grabbed a limb, it was torn from his grasp with above-human strength. Something like a thick leather cloak kept batting against his face. They wound up rolling into the bottom of a tree, with Ozzie on top. The tough dark fabric was slapping into his face again. So he just lashed out with both feet. He was no street-fighter, never had been, so the toes of his boots just connected with the polyp; the follow-up bounce meant his knees landed hard.

“Ow. Sheesh, that hurts.”

“Then stop fucking kicking, you moron,” a harsh voice said in heavily accented English.

Ozzie froze. The leathery wing fell away from his face, and he was looking right at a male Silfen, whose narrow feline eyes stared back with impatience.

“Huh?” Ozzie blurted.

“I said, cool it with the hardass routine. You’re crap at it anyway.”

Ozzie let go as if the Silfen burned. “You can talk.”

“You can think.”

Surprise battled with resentment. “Sorry, man,” he said meekly. “You startled us, you know, creeping around up there.”

Orion had come over to stare down in amazement. He slowly pulled the pendant out of his shirt, blinking at the intense green light. He looked at it, and back at the Silfen who was now gracefully climbing to his feet. There was a rustle as he flapped his wings, sending out little puffs of the dusty sand, before folding them back so they formed neat creases below his arms. His tail did a quick whiplike flick before settling into a shallow U-curve that kept it off the ground.

Ozzie patted at his own clothes, mildly embarrassed.

Tochee slid up beside Ozzie and Orion to look at the Silfen. “I believe you said these creatures would not speak your language?” the array voice said.

The Silfen turned to look at Tochee. Ozzie’s inserts caught it, but only just: the humanoid’s eyes flashed with ultraviolet light. A ripple ran along Tochee’s manipulator flesh ridges as it began to project its speech images in reply. They began to speed up, the two of them conversing very fast. If this is a simulation or a dream, why does it need to talk with Tochee?

“I didn’t know they could speak English,” Orion whispered breathlessly to Ozzie.

“Me neither.”

The Silfen finished communicating with Tochee, and bowed slightly, blinking. The ultraviolet faded from his eyes.

“Who are you?” Ozzie asked.

The Silfen’s circular mouth opened wide, allowing the long slender tongue to vibrate between his rows of teeth. “I am the one who dances in the endless wind streams which flow along the tumbling white clouds as they circle in eternal orbit within the star of life.” He gave a sharp whistle. “But you may call me Clouddancer. I know how you humans have to be so quick and shallow.”

“Thanks.” Ozzie tipped his head to one side. “Why the German accent?”

Clouddancer’s tongue quivered. “Authority. I look like one of your legendary demons. If I start talking like some stoner hippy then I’ve got a serious credibility problem, right?”

“Absolutely, man. So are you here to tell me what I want to know?”

“I don’t know, Ozzie. What do you want to know?”

“Who threw the barriers around the Dyson Pair, and why?”

“Long story.”

Ozzie gestured at the dusky forest with both arms. “Do I look like I’m going somewhere?”

They walked back through the forest to a clearing half a kilometer away that they’d passed through earlier. Ozzie wanted a less oppressive environment to concentrate on the details. Orion was totally fascinated by a winged Silfen who could speak English.

“Where did you learn it?” the boy asked.

“Common knowledge where I come from, kid.”

“Where’s that?”

“Here. Where the hell else do you think someone my weight can flap their way around? Jeez, what is it with neurons and your species? Is it a natural shortage or do you molt them as you grow up?”

“Here? The gas halo?”

“Is that what you’ve named this?”

“Yeah. We were on one of the water islands.” Orion grimaced with the memory. “We fell off.”

Clouddancer’s tongue quivered as he whistled.

Ozzie had heard Silfen laugh before; he put this down to something equivalent to a derisive snort. “You need to put a few warning signs up, man,” he said sharply.

“You fell off because you were hasty, you schmuck,” Clouddancer said. “You should take time off, observe your environment, work out any problems in advance. That’s the smart thing to do.”

“Bullshit. You dumped us there. You have a responsibility.”

Clouddancer stopped. His wings rustled, the tail snaking from side to side. “No we don’t. We are not responsible for anyone but ourselves. You chose to walk our paths, Ozzie, you decided where they would end. Take responsibility for your own actions. Don’t blame everyone else; you’ll turn into a lawyer. You want that?”

Ozzie glared back at him.

“How could we decide where the paths take us?” Orion asked. “How do they work?”

“The paths are old, very old. They have grown apart from us of late. How they work is up to them. They try to help as much as they can, they listen to those who walk them. Some of the time, anyway.”

“You mean they deliver you to where you want to go?”

“Oh, no. They rarely change; they don’t like change. Most simply remain closed. It’s kinda sad when they do that, but there are always new ones opening. You’ve always got to go forward, right? That’s something we’ve all got in common.”

“Do you mean …” Orion shot a glance at Ozzie for reassurance. “If I wanted to find Mom and Dad, they’d take me there eventually?”

“They might. That’s kind of an elusive goal you’ve got there, kid.”

“Do you know where my mom and dad are?”

“Long way from here, that’s for sure.”

“They’re alive!” the incredulous boy cried.

“Yeah yeah, they’re still knocking around.”

Orion started crying, tears smearing the dirt on his cheeks.

“Friend Orion,” Tochee said, “I am pleased for you.” It reached out with a tentacle and touched Orion’s shoulder. Orion gave the manipulator flesh a quick grateful squeeze.

“Good news, man. The greatest.” Ozzie put his arm around the boy’s shoulders, hugging him. “I hope you’re right,” he said in a warning tone to Clouddancer.

The Silfen shrugged, ruffling his wings.

“When this is over, I’m going to set out again and find them,” Orion announced. “I know what I’m doing now. I can survive out here. I’ll get myself some decent equipment first, though.” He looked down at his feet. “And boots.”

“I’ll buy you the best,” Ozzie said. “Promise, man.”

The clearing had a covering of thick mossy grass. Strong sunlight from the overhead star shone down, dappling the edges. Ozzie slung his pack to the ground, and sat with his back against it. Orion was too excited to sit; he paced about, grinning every time he looked up at the vast sky.

Ozzie held his water bottle out to Clouddancer. “Drink?”

“Water? Shit, no. You got any decent booze?” The winged Silfen crouched on the spongy ground opposite Ozzie. His tongue flicked out with reptilian speed.

“I didn’t bring any. I figured I needed to stay sober for this.”

“Okay, good call. You want to start the twenty questions routine now?”

“Sure. I’ve earned that right.”

Clouddancer managed a very human-sounding snort without using his tongue.

“Did you put the barriers around the Dyson Pair?” Ozzie asked. This wasn’t quite how he’d envisaged the end to his journey, the historic moment of contact with the real Silfen. There was a certain daydream that had him in an ancient cathedrallike alien library, maybe an abandoned one, where he roamed the aisles, reactivating computers with huge banks of flashing lights. Now that would have been cool, rather than getting his ass damp on the grass while he chatted away to a demon as if they were a pair of old barflies. Yep, definitely didn’t see that coming.

“No, it wasn’t us,” Clouddancer said. “We don’t go around judging other species like that. We don’t have the ego some people in this universe have.”

Ozzie ignored the slight. “What do you mean: judge?”

“The barrier makers were a race younger than us, with a technological proficiency approaching us at our peak. The dickbrains believed that gave them responsibility. In that, they were very like humans.”

“So who were they?”

“We called their star Anomine—a short version of the true name, but accurate.”

“You’re speaking of them in the past tense.”

“So I am; glad someone’s paying attention. As they were then, they no longer exist. They were always faster, always hungry to advance. Again, just like you guys. They evolved from that stage and went off down a whole new route away from the directly physical; they fused with their machines, which in turn transcended. Not universally, mind you; some of them disagreed with the direction their techheads were headed. Those are the ones who still exist in their old physical form. Now they’ve calmed down some and rejected their technological culture and its outcome, they farm their original homeworld like regular folks, they rejoice in their young, they ignore the stars—though they welcome visitors from across the galaxy. I know you, Ozzie, I can see that hunger in you; you’d like them. We did.”

Just for an instant, Ozzie saw them, or at least their planet, the way to walk there. His mind had lulled itself into the pleasant warm reverie amid dreams and awakening. Ahead of him, a long road took him down many glittering paths like gold strands stretched between the stars.

Dream inside a dream. “Groovy,” he said contentedly. “So why the barriers?”

“The sentient species that evolved on Dyson Alpha lust after individual empires and dominance. Think of them as the ultimate self-obsessed power freaks. Real bastards, from your cultural perspective, I guess. In their basic state they would think nothing of obliterating every other life-form in the galaxy and beyond to guarantee their own immortality.

“When the Anomines found them, they were rapidly approaching the kind of technology level where they could have carried that particular mal-adapted evolutionary route across the galaxy at the point of a gun. So the Anomines, being the kind of bleeding heart liberals they were, decided to isolate them. They feared genocide would be committed if the Dysons were ever to reach another star system. Not exactly a difficult prediction, that one. Turns out they were right. The Dyson slower than light starships did reach a neighboring star while the Anomines were busy building the barrier generators. They all but wiped out its indigenous sentient species, enslaved the survivors, and absorbed their knowledge, exploiting it to further their own military strength. That is why barriers were established around two systems.”

“Ah ha!” Ozzie chortled delightedly. “Everyone was wondering about the motivation behind the barriers. Damnit, man, you’re right, I would have liked to have met the Anomines when they were at their height. Sort of like the old Greenpeace movement on Earth, but with teeth. They must have helped save a lot of species. Hell, we would probably have been in the front line by now.”

“So the Dyson people were, like, put in prison?” Orion asked.

“That’s right,” Clouddancer said. “They were in prison. The Anomines had hoped that if they couldn’t expand they would be forced to evolve away from their imperial mindset. For your information, they haven’t.”

“What do you mean, were?” Ozzie asked. The feelings of unease that accompanied those recent bad dreams of his suddenly came rushing to the front of his conscious thoughts. He closed his eyes.

“Well, guess what happened when somebody’s starship went poking around? The goddamn thing was packed full of scientists desperate to see what was inside. I mean, why you dumbasses see curiosity as one of your overriding virtues is anyone’s guess. Ever heard of caution?”

“Oh, shit. What did we do?”

“Your starship interfered with the barrier generator around the original Dyson world. The barrier fell.”

“I don’t believe it. You have to be wrong.”

“You calling me a liar? You want to make something of it?”

“There is no way humans would attempt to switch off a barrier. I know the way our governments work. They would have had to fill out eight million forms in triplicate and have the request reviewed by a hundred subcommittees before they were even allowed to read the generator’s instruction manual.”

“They disabled some of the generator functions. I don’t know how. We weren’t paying close attention, and we don’t go whizzing around the galaxy in fancy rocketships to find these things out. But it wasn’t an accident, no fucking way. Those generators should have lasted as long as the stars they closed off, probably longer.”

“What happened after the barrier fell?”

“The Dysons used knowledge captured from you to establish wormholes of their own. Twenty-three Commonwealth planets were invaded in the first stage of their expansion.”

“Son of a bitch!” Ozzie shouted. “Nigel, you total asshole, how stupid are you? I told you this space cadet crap was gonna wind up busting everyone’s balls. I goddamn told you!”

“Did they invade Silvergalde?” Orion asked fearfully.

“No, our world remains untouched.”

“And the rest?” Ozzie asked. He knew it was going to be bad, just needed it confirmed.

“The Commonwealth abandoned them. They suffered enormous ecological damage, and they are still subject to acts of violence between humans and Dysons.”

“Goddamnit. So the Anomines were right?”

“Yes.”

“Are they going to help?”

“Help what?”

“Humans. You said the generator was disabled. Can it be restarted? Can we push the Dysons back inside?”

“Haven’t you listened to a fucking thing I’ve been telling you? We don’t intervene. Never have, never will. And the technologically advanced Anomines are past the time when they interfere in the events of other species. Like us, they now let evolution flow where it may. If you want to restart the generator and shut the Dysons back inside the barrier, do it yourself.”

“You mean you’re just going to let the Dysons attack humans?”

“You’ve already seen the answer to that, Ozzie.” Clouddancer lifted his arms briefly, allowing the thick membrane of his wings to flutter in the gentle breeze. “The death of any species is to be regretted, but we have experienced many. I’ve embarked on pilgrimages to the memory of them myself, and I feel a great sorrow when I know them. We will remember you, should you fall.”

“Well, that makes me feel one whole hell of a lot better, thanks. For a minute there I thought our friendship meant nothing at all.”

Clouddancer peeled back his lips to expose all three rings of teeth. “This is an argument that we ended millennia ago. You let the Dysons out. You are responsible. This is macro-evolution at its worst. Watching it is always painful for us.”

“What about the Anomines, the advanced ones; can I appeal to them directly? Do any of the paths lead to them?”

“Not a path, no. We can talk to them when they wish it. That has not happened for over three centuries now. We thought the fall of their old barrier might stir them. But it hasn’t. We’re not even certain they exist in their primary transcendent state anymore. We have known species such as theirs which have kept on evolving into entities which simply cannot connect with those of us who remain rooted in the physical.”

“All right, instead of a few battalions of Silfen storm troopers, how about giving us information?” Ozzie asked. “Is there something, some weapon, you once built that could defeat the Dysons? Just the blueprints would do.”

“I’m kind of surprised that you of all people ask that, Ozzie. In fact, I’m quite hurt by the implication we’d ever waste our time on crap like weapons.”

“Oh, really? I’d be interested to hear what you say if your species ever gets threatened with extinction. Of course, you wouldn’t go alone. We’d help if you asked, we’d stand beside you.”

“I know. We admire you for that, for what you are. We don’t expect you to change. Do you expect that of us?”

“No. I just thought you were different, that’s all.”

“Different, how? More human? You built legends around us. They were not entirely correct. It’s too late to come blaming us for your mistakes.”

“Screw you.”

“But I’m your friend,” Orion insisted. He held up his pendant. “Look. Other humans are, too. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“Of course it does, kid. If you stay here with us, we will keep you safe.”

“I want all of us to be safe.”

“That is a wish to be proud of, but it is only a wish. You’re going to make a grand human when you’re all grown up. Best of the species.”

Orion dangled the pendant in front of him, giving it a wretched stare. “Then what’s the point?”

“Life is the point. To have joined with others and to have known them. We know you, Silfen friend Orion. That makes us glad.”

“I used to be glad to know you.”

“Yeah, sorry, kid. We had fun playing in those woods, back then, didn’t we? I hope that one day you will be glad to know us again.”

“Am I right about you?” Ozzie asked. “Is there some SI equivalent you all download into? Is that what I’m really speaking to?”

Clouddancer laughed. “Almost, Ozzie, almost.”

“How do I know you speak with authority?”

“You don’t. But I name you a Silfen friend, Ozzie Fernandez Isaac.” He held up a pendant identical to Orion’s. “You have the freedom of the paths. Go where you will with our blessing. If you think I’m just a lying son of a bitch, seek those who you know will speak the truth.”

Ozzie stared at the pendant, almost ready to throw it back at Clouddancer. That’s what Orion would have done with all his magnificent teenage fury. But then this whole event was being staged for his benefit, not Orion’s; telling him what he wanted to know even if it wasn’t what he wanted to hear. The pendant was obviously the culmination of that; it was significant in some way even if he couldn’t see how yet. “Thank you, Clouddancer,” he said formally, and accepted the pendant with a small bow.

When he put the chain around his neck, his vision was momentarily wiped out by a foggy emerald sparkle. It was as if every sense were stretched raw. The feel of the air blowing on his exposed skin scraping hard enough to bruise, the heat of the sun threatening to singe his raggedy hair, sound of rustling leaves the cacophony of an orchestra. He could smell the scent of every berry and flower on the reef combining together like volcanic sulphur. And in his mind he sensed the thoughts of the Silfen Motherholme all around him, an immense realm of life whose size alone brought complete comfort to any entity it touched. A size that surely made it invincible. It pervaded the gas halo, twisting through the physical and biological elements like a nuclear spiritual force. Intangible connections slipped away through the smallest interstices of spacetime binding the Silfen wherever they roamed through the universe. A family that surpassed any possible human dream of connectivity and love.

Ozzie envied them for that. But for all the sense of belonging the Motherholme exuded, it was alien. The Silfen really wouldn’t help humans in their struggle against the Dysons. They didn’t see that as a flaw in their character. It was correct, essential, because that was how the universe functioned.

“Wow.” Ozzie was glad he was sitting. The emotional impact wasn’t quite as great as when he’d looked into the memory of the world that had died. Even so, it was a glimpse into a heaven that was achingly beautiful despite its imperfections.

The moment passed, though he would know it forever.

Clouddancer was staring at him, slim face held straight with cheek muscles slightly dimpled, mouth half widened, tongue stilled, an expression Ozzie knew was one of compassion and sadness. “One day,” he promised the alien, “we will forge a bridge across that gulf between our hearts.”

“I will embrace you that day, friend Ozzie.” Clouddancer turned to Orion, who had slipped back into his usual petulance. “So long, kid. I hope you find your mom and dad.”

Ozzie could just see the insolence about to find its way through the boy’s mouth. “Be big, man,” he told the boy. “Nobody’s perfect.”

“Sure,” Orion grunted with a textbook teenage shrug. “Thanks for letting me know about my parents, anyway.”

“Easy.” Clouddancer turned to Tochee. His eyes sparkled with ultraviolet light. The big alien answered in kind.

“I have to go,” Clouddancer said. “There’s a long wind coming. I need to stretch my wings.”

“Have fun, dude,” Ozzie said.

The Silfen walked back to the forest.

Ozzie looked at Tochee, who had aligned its eye on the forest where Clouddancer had gone. “You okay?”

“It had the same shape as you. But it was very different.”

“Yeah. I’m just beginning to realize that myself.”

“So now what do we do?” Orion asked.

“Get back to the shelter, gather some food, and darn my socks.”

“Why?”

“Because tomorrow we’re out of here.”

Morton was scouting on the lower ridges that made up the eastern edge of the Regents, high above the Trine’ba. It was drizzling again, icy droplets making the moldering boltgrass treacherous underfoot even for his armor suit with its terrain-adaptive boot soles. His sneekbot swarm scuttled around him in a wide perimeter line, searching for any traces of the Primes. They’d seen increased activity in this area recently, more overflights, and several troop patrols. Not even the Bose motile was sure why. There was nothing here. Nothing could be built on the sharp ridges and long talus falls. No crops would grow on the poor, saturated soil.

“Can’t find a bloody thing,” he said. “If they’ve planted any sensors around here they’re too advanced for us to find.”

“I don’t believe that for a minute,” Rob answered. “Their electronics are still back in the stone age. I’m just about finished myself. I’ll meet you back at the rendezvous point.”

“Gotcha.” Morton’s virtual vision map showed him Rob’s icon positioned on the high ground above the fused-glass crater where Randtown used to be. Not far, in fact, from the clapboard house where they’d found the Bose motile.

The small green glow that indicated the Cat’s position was coming from the back of the valley along the side of Blackwater Crag. MorningLightMountain was still using it as its main transport route back into the wider valleys. Motiles were preparing a lot of ground for cultivation, plowing up the sodden human fields and acres of virgin boltgrass on the foothills. There weren’t many Prime-life plants that grew in such a climate, so the Bose motile claimed. The fields that had been sown earlier in the invasion had produced the most feeble-looking shoots. A big percentage had drowned in the waterlogged furrows. A plague of Elan native tal-fungi had spread over the remaining shoots, furry milk-white blooms erupting along the limp leaves.

The Cat was supposed to be cataloguing the tractor-vehicles that MorningLightMountain was using to spray the newly prepared land with fungicide. Over the last few weeks, a vast pharmacy of venomous chemicals had been spread across the land by an army of Prime agricultural machinery. Simon Rand had analyzed the samples they’d collected, and announced that the fungicide would be of limited use against tal-fungi. The pesticides, also, would have little effect on Elan’s insects.

“I can see foundations going in at the end of the Highmarsh,” the Cat announced. “From the look of the equipment they’ve got piled up waiting, I’d say some kind of chemical plant. Makes sense; they’re importing a hell of a lot of chemicals. Cheaper to produce them on-site.”

Cat’s Claws had watched through sensors and sneekbots as the big tanks full of toxic agricultural chemicals arrived through the gateway that MorningLightMountain had established in its new settlement a mere two kilometers along the shoreline from the radioactive hollow where their nuke had detonated. The construction had begun while they were still celebrating their success. Fusion drive ships had descended out of the sky once again, bringing a huge number of soldier motiles and their flyers. MorningLightMountain simply repeated its initial landing operation, establishing an armed camp, then putting up a force field. Inside that a wormhole gateway was constructed, industrial machinery was assembled, big power generators brought through. Roads were bulldozed between the new hub and the route around Blackwater Crag. Inside a week, its operation was the same size as before, with the one difference: its garrison of soldier motiles was four times greater. Congregation pens were built out into the waters of the Trine’ba, and a replacement refinery once more began pumping out the thick black liquid that was saturated with base cells. At which point, the Prime resumed its agricultural operations.

That was what MorningLightMountain did, the Bose motile explained. That was all it did: expand.

“How far?” Morton had asked.

“Infinite,” the Bose motile said. “Think of it as a sentient virus. It has a continuity which goes back to its evolutionary origins, possibly even before. All the Primes ever did was grow and compete against each other. Now this one has achieved total dominance, eradicating the rest of its kind, though in truth there was never much difference between them. You ask why it does this, it wouldn’t even understand the question. It is growth.”

After the beautiful success of wiping out Randtown, the truth had brought them down hard. Ever since, they’d performed low-level acts of sabotage, kept the survivors alive, and kept quiet about the Bose motile in their reports to the navy. Mellanie’s messages kept promising she was trying to get them off, but so far she hadn’t managed to give them a time frame. Rob was getting very antsy about that.

“Is there a force field around the foundations?” Morton asked the Cat.

“No. But there are a lot of soldier motiles stationed down there. I count sixteen flyers patrolling above it. Wait … that’s strange.”

“What’s happening?” Morton asked.

“The flyers. They’re stationary. They’re just hovering.”

“I’ve got that, too,” Rob said. “The bastards came to a full stop. Why would they do that?”

Morton looked along the shore of the Trine’ba toward the new Prime settlement. The cloud base was scudding low over the water as it always did these days. Sheet lightning flickered through the bulbous underbelly over toward the invisible southern shore, with the odd rumble of accompanying thunder echoing around the surrounding mountains. The lake itself was dying. Fusion fire from the ships and the base cell pollution had finally killed off the delicate unique ecology. Dead fish floated on the surface, their rotting bodies sticking together to form large mats of putrefying gray flesh. Underneath them, the lifeless coral was slowly decaying, producing a dank scum that washed up on the shore to form fizzing dunes of thick umber bubbles.

Flyers were constantly in the air above the desolate lake, circling around the shore in search of any hostile activity, and keeping the land around the force field under constant observation. MorningLightMountain usually had at least sixteen on patrol at any one time. This morning, there were twenty. Now, Morton couldn’t see one of them moving. Their force fields were on, their engine exhausts rotated to the vertical position.

“Motiles are stationary as well,” Rob said. There was a worried edge to his voice. “Shit, that’s spooky. They’re just standing there. Even the soldiers.”

Morton’s virtual hand touched a communications icon. “Simon, what’s the Bose motile doing?”

“Dudley is fine. Nothing wrong.”

Morton manipulated his communications icons to give him a direct link to the Bose motile. “Something is happening out here. All the motiles have frozen.”

“I don’t know why. The only reason they have for doing anything is that’s what they’ve been ordered to do.”

Morton used his suit’s electromagnetic sensors to sweep the bands that MorningLightMountain employed. The alien’s signal traffic had dropped to about ten percent of normal. “Hang on, I’m going to patch you in to what it’s saying. Tell me what you can.” His virtual hands routed the sensor reception into the link. He didn’t like exposing the Bose motile to the Prime communications. None of them were sure if MorningLightMountain would be able to move the motile around as if it were just another of its puppets. There was absolutely no way they could ever confirm the story that the Bose motile was telling them, either, though Morton suspected it was true. As a precaution, they’d agreed it should be isolated from all Prime communications. This was a justifiable exception, he felt.

“Oh, Christ,” the Bose motile said.

“What?” the Cat asked.

“MorningLightMountain has launched another invasion into the Commonwealth. It’s using something called corona-rupture bombs against our stars. We’ve got a superbomb of our own, which can knock them out, but that only makes the radiation spillage even worse.”

“Is that why they’ve all stopped? Is it concentrating on the invasion?”

“No. One of our ships has got through to the staging post star. It fired something into the star which … Oh. The destruction is enormous. MorningLightMountain is losing all its magflux extractors. Wormholes shutting down. The one into the Trine’ba settlement is gone. Its local group clusters are having to maintain contact through a wormhole in orbit. I don’t understand what we did to the staging post star. Surely—My God, it’s going nova. We triggered a nova! Nothing will survive. It only has minutes left.”

“Ye-hay! We killed it?” the Cat asked.

“The staging post, yes,” the Bose motile replied. “All the wormhole generators leading into the Commonwealth will vanish.”

“So we’ve won?”

“The invasion has been halted. MorningLightMountain still exists. As does the generator for the interstellar wormhole. This is not good. It now sees humans as a very real and immediate danger to its continued existence.”

“But it’s got to realize that if it attacks us again, we can wipe it out completely,” Rob said. “It’s not stupid.”

“No, it isn’t,” the Bose motile said. “Nor is it reasonable and open to negotiation as a human would be at this point. I’m not sure we did the right thing, though I admit I don’t see an alternative.”

“We can turn stars nova.” There was a trill of admiration in the Cat’s voice. “How wonderful.”

“The navy will need to do it to Dyson Alpha now,” Morton said. “That’s the only solution left to us.”

“Go, Navy!” Rob shouted.

“Here it comes,” the Bose motile said. “I can see the light growing. The radiation is reaching the staging post itself. MorningLightMountain is withdrawing the interstellar wormhole. All remaining wormholes are gone.”

Morton turned his attention back to the flyers hovering above the Trine’ba. They were holding steady. Prime signal traffic was almost nonexistent. “What are the immotiles it left behind going to do?”

“I’m not sure,” the Bose motile said. “All the immotiles are independent again. For the moment they’re unified copies of MorningLightMountain, but that won’t last. They’ll revert to autonomy, and try to carve themselves territories. Those on the ground will make alliances with the groups that control the big lander ships.”

“Will they fight among themselves?” Simon asked hopefully.

“Not for centuries,” the Bose motile said. “They occupy a lot of territory; there is no need to compete for a long time. But this is assuming the Commonwealth allows them to grow in the Lost23 systems.”

“That won’t happen,” Morton said. “We’ll probably be withdrawn, and they’ll nova the stars.”

“That is inadvisable,” the Bose motile said. “The radiation which novas release can quite easily sterilize all life on neighboring star systems. You’d wipe out this whole section of the Commonwealth.”

“Who gives a shit about details?” Rob said. “We can win. The immotiles left behind can be wiped out one at a time while we whack MorningLightMountain on its home star.”

“The remaining immotiles still present a formidable force,” the Bose motile said. “They have thousands of ships and several wormhole generators remaining in the Lost23 systems. They will probably seek to move beyond human reach.”

“None of this affects us,” Morton said. “All we have to worry about for now is how the local boys react. Any clues on that yet?” As he spoke, he saw the flyers moving again. They were all heading back toward the force field.

“The local immotiles are agreeing to cooperate, and remain linked into a group cluster. Without the supply route to Dyson Alpha, all expansion of existing operations will cease. They will concentrate their resources on strengthening their border against any assaults you make, and from any navy bombardment. Communications will be resumed with the other groups and clusters on Elan to decide what to do. It will mainly depend on what action the Commonwealth takes against them.”

“We should find that out soon enough. The next wormhole communication is scheduled for seven hours’ time.”

“They’ll take us home,” Rob declared. “There’s no point to all this sabotage bull when you can wipe out entire stars. How about that? Home free. And we didn’t spend half the time they threatened us with.”

“Home free?” the Cat asked sweetly. “So how exactly were you thinking of explaining why we’ve held on to our version of Dudley?”

“Shit!”

Morton watched Rob’s blue icon change to amber as he switched to a secure encrypted channel.

“Morton, you’ve got to think of some way to square that with the navy. Maybe just leave it here and pretend nothing happened. The survivors owe us big time, they won’t rat us out.”

“Could be. I want to hear what Mellanie says in the next message.”

“Goddamn,” Rob swore. “You are so pussy-whipped. Well, you make it clear to that little witch I’m not going to let her and her conspiracy theories stand between me and my clean record. That applies to you and the psycho bitch as well. When the navy lifts us, I want my release. I’ve fucking earned it.”

Niall Swalt had been cycling to work at the Grand Triad Adventures office when the Prime attack started. He still came in every day, even though the tour operator hadn’t seen a single client since Mellanie returned from her short vacation. For some reason, head office on Wessex hadn’t canceled his employment contract. Every Friday night their accountancy program paid his wages; so every Monday morning he arrived back at the office for another week of doing whatever he wanted on company time. That was mainly accessing TSIs. He went through Murderous Seduction at least once a week.

It was the silence he noticed as he cycled along the last stretch of road toward the employee gate. With the office sitting on the end of the CST station’s main terminal, he was used to the constant mumble of the crowd that besieged the main entrance. According to local news shows, over a third of Boongate’s population had now left, with everyone else anxious to join them. Niall wasn’t so sure about the official numbers; he thought it was more than that. Every day he cycled to work from his two-room flat, going the long way around the massive station yard. That way he didn’t get caught up in the huge jam of people arriving on the highway. There were so many cars driven into the verges along the approach roads that the government employed seventeen crews towing the abandoned vehicles away, not that they could keep up. It wasn’t just the sides of the highway that were clogged, of course. A lot of people drove through the same maze of streets he used in the commercial district surrounding the station, and parked on any clear spot before walking around to the front. Some mornings he’d find hundreds of cars had appeared overnight, turning the roads into quite an obstacle course for him to weave his way around.

Anyone who arrived and dumped their car then had a wait of nearly two days as the massive throng of people slowly shuffled their way forward toward the haven of the terminal’s main entrance. Niall didn’t know how many people there were between the highway and the entrance; it looked like the entire population to him. They wore expensive semiorganic coats, or draped plastic sheets around their shoulders to protect themselves from the miserable rain of Boongate’s early winter months. There had been plenty of days when Niall turned up and it had been sleeting. Once it snowed for thirty-six hours. It subdued the crowd, made them miserable, made them bad tempered, but nothing had ever made them fall silent before.

Niall was only three hundred meters away from the employees’ gate when he realized the sound was missing; most days you could hear it over a kilometer away. He steered around a big Toyota ten-seater Lison that was parked across a warehouse delivery bay, and braked to a halt. When he pushed his goggles up, he found it had stopped raining. Good news, yes, but not enough to stop that constant growl of barely restrained anger. He looked up. The force field had come on over the city; dark clouds slithered around its shimmering surface. A second force field was covering the station, deflecting the mists that were trapped under the city’s dome. “Oh, hell,” he whispered in fright. He’d never allowed himself to believe that the aliens would return.

His e-butler’s news filter let through an alert telling him that wormholes were being detected in a lot of star systems across the Commonwealth. His instant response was to glance over at the giant terminal building with its long, curved glass roofs. Instinctive self-preservation kicked in, and he started to work out routes in his mind. As an employee, he had access to several restricted zones inside the station complex; there were a number of ways he could reach the platforms without ever having to join that horde outside.

He let go of the brakes, and began pedaling again. Today, there were eight guards outside the employee gate, all dressed in flexarmor and carrying weapons. Normally, there were just two security staff inside their cabin, who always waved him on when he showed his company pass. This time they made Niall put his palm on a sensor pad one of them was carrying to check his biometric pattern.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” the guard snarled from inside his helmet. “A tour company rep?”

“We’re still active,” Niall protested. “It’s genuine. Check my record; I’ve been in every day for weeks. I’ve got groups left on Far Away that are coming back. Somebody’s got to be here for them.”

“I’ve got news for you, sonny, they ain’t going to make it. Look around you.”

“And if they do?”

There was a long pause while the guard referred back to his superior. “Okay,” he said eventually. “You can go through.”

“Thanks.”

The reinforced barrier across the pavement swiveled up. Niall pushed his bicycle through, feeling his skin tingle as he went through the force field. Just as he was mounting up on the other side, the guard said, “Son, if you’ve got any sense at all, you’ll go straight to the platforms and catch a train to Gralmond or one of its neighbors.”

“If my group comes back, I’ll do it.”

Not even the thick armor could mask the man shaking his head.

Niall pedaled as fast as he could to the office. His e-butler was supplying situation updates the whole way. Alien ships were pouring into the Boongate system, out around the third gas-giant orbit. Thousands more were emerging in other systems. Local news told him that the wormhole to Wessex had been temporarily closed by CST. “Hellfire.” There’d be a riot. He knew there would be.

When he got to the office he wheeled his bike in through the reception area and parked it against the counter. There was a bag he kept in the back with some spare clothes. He fetched it out, and looked around the small room. Grand Triad Adventures had a floor safe to keep the petty cash and various travel vouchers. Mr. Spanton, the manager, had granted Niall’s biometric print a temporary access authority when he went “on holiday” right after the first Prime attack. Niall put his hand on the lock pad, and internal malmetal bands pushed the door up. The cash was all piled in different currencies. He didn’t bother with anything from Boongate or the neighboring stars, figuring those Treasuries wouldn’t be able to back the national currency for much longer. Out of the money that came from planets farther from this new attack, he had roughly fifteen thousand Earth dollars’ worth. He stuffed it into his jacket pockets and turned to the office array that had a direct link to the CST ticket and travel information system. Surprisingly, his access authority still got him in; not that there was much information available. Wessex seemed to have closed half of its wormholes to traffic, and there were heavy restrictions on the remainder. There was no indication when they would open again.

Only if the navy fights off this invasion, Niall thought. But if by some miracle it did, he was going to be ready. He used the Grand Triad Adventures account to buy a first-class ticket to Gralmond, just like the guard suggested. It was four hundred fifty light-years away, right across the other side of the Commonwealth, about as far away from Boongate as it was physically possible to go. He held his breath as the CST system processed the application, but after a few seconds it assigned his identity tattoo with the first-class ticket.

Someone knocked on the office door. Niall jumped, mostly from guilt. There was a man standing outside. Tall and quite handsome, with floppy blond hair. The type of guy who played a lot of sports; certainly his square-shouldered build put Niall’s rather more flabby frame to shame. He was talking, jabbing a finger at something in the office.

“Sorry.” Niall tapped his ear, and put his hand on the door’s lock pad. “Couldn’t hear you,” he said as the door opened.

“Thanks for letting me in,” the man said. His voice had a distinctive Earth-American twang.

“We’re not busy.” That was a dumb thing to say. Niall wanted to look at the door leading to the back room; he was pretty sure the man wouldn’t be able to see the open floor safe.

“I need some help. Ah … I don’t know your name.” His grin was the kind that took you straight into his confidence.

“Niall. What kind of help?”

“It’s like this, Niall. Some friends of mine have been stuck on Far Away for a while, but they’ve just sent me a message saying that they’ve managed to get off. They’re on their way back. How’s that for god-awful fucking luck. Coming back into the middle of an alien invasion. Anyway, I need to get out to the platform and meet them. Once we’re all together again then we’ll try to get off Boongate.”

“There aren’t any trains off Boongate right now. I was just checking that.”

“I know, but they’ll start up again as soon as the invasion is over. I’m not worried about that. My problem is my friends; I can’t let them down. Can you take me over to the Half Way wormhole gateway? I’d go by myself, but there are a lot of security systems around it; I’m worried I’ll never be allowed through to meet them what with everyone being so jumpy right now. They’ll get back and be stuck here. That would be serious bad news for all of us. If it helps, I can make it worth your while. Seriously worth your while.”

Niall liked the guy even more; he was obviously a regular dude, and rich, too. Everyone who went to Far Away was rich. And he was right about security: look at what happened at the employee gate this morning. Niall could come out of this very well if he played his cards right, maybe add a couple of grand to his newfound wealth. “Well, yeah, the company Mercedes is authorized to go right out to the Far Away transit area. I can take you through, no sweat.”

The man’s confident grin became even wider. “That’s what I wanted to hear.”

Hoshe had just reached the London office when the Prime attack began. Vast force fields came on over the ancient city, turning the sky a murky gray. Looking out over the Thames he saw the dark shapes of aerobots rising from their silos. They were bigger than any flying machine he’d ever seen before.

His e-butler told him Inima was calling.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’m at the office. What about you?”

“We’re safe here, aren’t we, Hoshe?”

“Safest place in the Commonwealth, I promise. Shall I come home?”

“No. You stay there. I don’t want you worrying about me.”

“I don’t worry. I love you. I’m leaving now.”

“No, Hoshe. I’ve got the news summary in my virtual vision. The attacks aren’t anywhere near Earth. You stay at work.”

“I want to be with you, in case.” In case of what, he didn’t know. If Earth fell, it would all be over. And not even Paula could get them places on a Dynasty lifeboat.

“Should you travel now?” she asked.

“Of course. If anything gets through that force field it won’t matter where you are. I’ll get a taxi.”

“I don’t want to be trouble.”

“You’re not.”

Hoshe grabbed his coat from the hook on the back of the door. A red priority icon flashed up into his virtual vision; it was Captain Kumancho, who was leading the Senate Security detail following Victor Halgarth. “Damn!” Hoshe touched the icon with his turquoise virtual finger.

“We’ve just arrived on Boongate,” Kumancho said. “Victor went to one of the warehouses out in the station marshaling yard. It belongs to a company called Sunforge, local transport and courier outfit. We’re datamining it now.”

“Okay. Are you emplaced?”

“As best we can. Hoshe, it’s chaos here. There’s half the planet’s population camped outside the station. CST has just closed the wormhole. We must have been on the last train in. My people are worried we won’t be able to get back.”

“Shit. Right, leave it with me. Is the Halgarth team with you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, that’s good. I’ll get in touch with Warren Halgarth; we’ll coordinate our approach and put a process in place to extract you as soon as CST reopens the wormhole. I’ll try and get information on that as well.”

“Thanks, Hoshe.”

“Do you know what’s in the Sunforge warehouse?”

“Not yet. We’re going to start running an infiltration operation once we’re properly established.”

“Do you need help from the locals? I can run the request from this office. It’ll carry more clout.”

“I think we’re on our own, Hoshe. Government here has just about collapsed. CST’s station security teams and the city police force are still hanging together, almost, but they’re not going to be assed about a bunch of spooks asking for cooperation. Don’t worry, we can handle Victor and the warehouse.”

“Okay, keep me updated on an hourly basis. I’ll be in the office.” Hoshe stood perfectly still for a moment as he cursed every god he knew about, then hung his coat back on the hook. His turquoise finger touched Inima’s icon. “Darling, I’m sorry. Something’s come up.”

“Don’t worry,” Anna said. Her small mouth tightened into a smile as she straightened the shoulders on Wilson’s dress uniform, brushing away creases. “You know and I know that you did everything you could. There were no alternatives, no smartass answers. You told it to them as it was, and they gave you the budget they wanted to.”

Several people were looking at them as they stood nose to nose outside the Senate Hall’s underground chamber, aides to the other War Cabinet members who were in session, and had been for thirty minutes. It was as if Wilson and Anna were radioactive; nobody said hello, nobody swapped idle chat, not even Daniel Alster and Patricia Kantil. For Wilson not to be in a War Cabinet meeting was a clear indication of what was being discussed inside. There wasn’t any informed, measured debate going on in there; it was an open power struggle.

“Damn Nigel for not telling us what he’d got,” Wilson muttered. His voice carried just far enough to provoke some glances from the nearest aides. “Damn him for not sharing.”

“They only just got their ship operational in time,” Anna said, patting his arm.

“So he claims,” he hissed. “Hell, listen to me. Nobody trusts anyone else anymore.”

“How can we?” Anna looked around, and pulled him farther away from the immaculately dressed, polite, obedient aides. “We don’t know who is working for the Starflyer.”

“This isn’t just because of the Starflyer. Look at them all.” He tilted his head at the aides. “All the Dynasties and Grand Families see here is an opportunity to put one over on the rest. They’re concentrating on internal politics while the human race is faced with extinction.”

“That’s not quite fair.”

“Yeah yeah.” Tension and dismay were giving him the shakes. Being made to wait outside like a schoolkid hauled up before the principal; it’s not right. I did a good job. “Damn, I feel sorry for myself.” His virtual vision was showing a tactical display from Pentagon II, where the navy was keeping watch for any further sign of Prime activity. It was only seven hours since the wormholes into Commonwealth space had shut down. He didn’t have time for this bullshit. They had to organize the navy’s response immediately. That’s if he was going to be organizing it.

“Hey, stop it.” She nuzzled his face. “They’re probably just deciding which medal to give you.”

He gave her a tired look. “Thanks.”

“You know I’ll stay with you, don’t you?”

He kissed her. “Couldn’t have got this far without you.”

“It’ll be nice to have a real life together. I’ve never had a rich husband before. I still haven’t seen your home on York5.”

“You’ll love it. We’ve got an area the size of Oregon which I’ve been shaping and planting. And the Chateau needs refurbishing.”

“Sounds good. Me, an unlimited credit tattoo, and every interior designer on that side of the Commonwealth.”

He held her tight. “It will be good. It will.”

The doors to the conference room opened. Rafael Columbia strode out. He was also wearing his full dress uniform; immaculately tailored, it made him the perfect authority figure. Even the aides straightened up as he appeared.

Wilson hadn’t known Rafael was in the War Cabinet. It could only mean one thing. “Shit.” At least he didn’t have to wait anymore; he knew for sure now. I don’t even have to go through with this humiliation, not really.

“Wilson.” Rafael put on a suitably sober expression of greeting. He extended his hand.

I could just tell him to shove it.

Anna made a small sound at the back of her throat.

Wilson shook hands. Like a proper officer would, with dignity. They’d be proud of me back at the academy—if it still existed.

“I’m sorry,” Rafael said. “They called me in after they asked for you.”

“It’s okay.” As Caesar said to Brutus. “I don’t think either of us is in an enviable position.”

Rafael nodded sympathetically. “They’re ready for you.”

“Sure.”

Anna squeezed his hand. He walked with Rafael into the conference room to face the War Cabinet. Surprisingly, it was only President Doi who met his eye as he stood at the head of the table. Heather Antonia Halgarth simply looked bored, while Nigel Sheldon had a thunderous expression on his face. It was a hugely telling sight, that the man whose family warship and private weapons project had just saved the entire Commonwealth could suffer a political defeat directly afterward.

Rafael came to stand just behind Wilson.

“Admiral,” President Doi said, “we have reviewed the performance of the navy and yourself before and during this latest disastrous invasion. To say that we find it lacking would be the understatement of this century. In view of the catastrophic loss of life, we require your immediate resignation.”

Argue. Tell her to fuck off. Nobody could have done better. “As you wish,” he said coolly.

Rafael came up to him. “Admiral, your navy authorization codes have now been revoked. You will be placed on our inactive list, effective immediately.”

Wilson clenched his teeth. “Right.”

“Thank you for what you did, Wilson. The navy staff appreciate it,” Rafael said with emphasis.

Wilson turned to face the navy’s new chief admiral-in-waiting. “I want you and everyone else in here to know something.”

“If you have anything to say, please place it in your debrief report,” Doi said formally.

He smiled at her, enjoying the way she wanted him out of the room with a minimum of fuss. She didn’t yet have the confidence to try to snap an order at him. “The Starflyer is real.” He made sure he was looking directly at Rafael, seeing the small start of surprise in the man’s otherwise composed features. “It’s been manipulating us for a long while.”

“Enough! Mr. Kime,” Doi said.

“Its agents were on board the Second Chance. They switched off the barrier generator.”

Rafael was looking embarrassed now. Wilson glanced around the table. The only person who held his attention was Justine Burnelli. She appeared guilty rather than surprised. Interesting.

He shrugged at the War Cabinet, as if he wasn’t bothered anymore. “Check it out,” he told Rafael as he turned to leave.

Nigel watched Wilson’s back as he left the committee room. The man’s outburst was fascinating. He was amused by the reaction of the others around the table. Doi, predictably, was mortified at Wilson’s claim. Heather seemed bemused, Rafael concerned, while Justine was doing the same as him, checking around. He met her gaze and gave her a smile. She deliberately returned a blank expression.

He could hardly forget Campbell’s urgent call less than twenty-four hours ago, asking on her behalf what the Dynasty policy was toward Myo. After the Prime attack, Campbell had also told him the Senator and the Investigator were requesting an urgent personal meeting. He wasn’t sure what it was about, but given what Nelson’s observation team had told him about Mellanie’s activities on Illuminatus, it wasn’t a request he was about to refuse. Only now was he starting to wonder what sort of connections Justine had with Wilson. One thing was for sure, that meeting was going to be a lot more interesting than this one.

“I think we can move forward now,” Doi said once the doors were shut and the screening back around the conference room. “I would like to propose Admiral Columbia to assume overall command of the navy, effective immediately.”

“I second that,” Toniea Gall said.

You would, Nigel thought. He caught Heather’s smile of approval.

“All in favor?” Doi asked.

Nigel languidly raised his arm along with everyone else. Alan Hutchinson gave him a fierce, sympathetic grin, which he ignored. If Heather was surprised, she didn’t show it. The argument that the Dynasties had engaged in three hours ago via ultra-secure links had been ferocious. Only a small part of the bad feeling had spilled into the first part of the War Cabinet meeting. Even the intensity of that had mildly scandalized the likes of Crispin Goldreich and Toniea Gall. But then, behind strong seals, Heather always did swear like a construction worker.

“I would like to thank you for your confidence,” Rafael said. He sounded most sincere. “I want to assure you that I am determined to end the Prime threat once and for all. Mr. Sheldon, you said you will make your weapon available.”

They all turned to Nigel. Even now, he thought wearily. For a moment he felt like storming out, catching up with Wilson, putting his arm around the man’s shoulder and the two of them heading off to a bar together.

The Commonwealth he’d created and led for so long now wanted his weapons. That’s not how it was supposed to be. The day he’d stepped out on Mars to laugh at Wilson and the other astronauts was the day he broke the old system: he and Ozzie had set everyone free. And now, I’ve helped build the most revolting weapon anyone has ever dreamed up. I wanted us to live among the stars themselves, not snuff them out. “Yeah,” he said contemptuously. How very like the old military officers Rafael was, audacious in their smart uniforms, sounding positive as they gave their briefings on precision attacks and minimal collateral damage. “Unless the Primes agree to negotiate a cessation of hostilities, I will use our weapon against their homeworld.”

“Will that guarantee their eradication?” Hans Braunt inquired.

“The weapon when fired into a star releases a nova-level energy burst, and destroys the star in the process. Such an event will envelop the entire Dyson Alpha civilization. As they have undoubtedly spread beyond their original star by now, my Dynasty tacticians have proposed a firewall strategy. We will run scout missions centered around Dyson Alpha, and nova every star where we detect their presence. It will, of course, sterilize all life on neighboring star systems.”

There was complete silence around the table.

“You wanted to win,” Nigel told them uncompromisingly.

“We have been reticent about genocide in the past, and rightly so,” Rafael said. “For that is what makes us human. But we can no longer indulge ourselves in this case. If the Primes are allowed to survive, they will forever be a threat to our existence. They have flare bombs, and no reluctance to use them. They have wormholes, and from that will be able to develop FTL ships. If that happens, they will spread through this galaxy like a virus, and endanger even more species than ourselves. We cannot allow that to happen. It boils down to a very simple equation: them or us.”

“Very well,” Doi said. “It is the recommendation of this War Cabinet that every means possible is used to rid ourselves of the Prime threat, up to and including their complete extermination. I propose this motion.”

“Seconded,” Rafael said.

“Please vote, ladies and gentlemen,” Doi said.

It was unanimous.

“Thank you,” Rafael said.

“How are you going to deal with the Primes left in Commonwealth space?” Crispin asked.

“The Lost23 will be the easiest,” Rafael said. “They have very few ships in those systems. We will simply pull our insurgency troops out, and use a quantumbuster against each planet. They will not survive that. The New48 are more problematical.”

“You reckon?” Alan Hutchinson snapped. “For a start, you’re not classing Wessex along with the rest of the invasion. Drop a quantumbuster on my world, and I’ll fucking nuke your Dynasty back into the stone age.”

“Nobody’s going to wipe out Wessex,” Heather said. “Calm down, Alan. It’s a Big15, it can recover from the flare radiation. Narrabri is protected under force fields, and the farmland can be replanted easily enough. The rest of it, the land you’ve left uncultivated, doesn’t count; it has no economic value, and no one living there.”

“You still need a functioning biosphere,” Justine said.

“Half of the land mass will be completely unaffected,” Hans said. “The flare activity lasted for less than an hour in total. And the impact the radiation will have on the ocean is completely minimal. The biosphere remains essentially intact on Wessex as it does on the other New48.”

“It’s not that simple,” Justine said. “The particle swarm will spread around the planet. You’ll get fallout everywhere.”

“By far the worst impact is the hemisphere facing the star during flare time. The rest is manageable. Look at Far Away; the flare lasted for weeks there, and we managed to regenerate the continents. That whole planet is alive again. You’re not going to have people running out of oxygen. The time it’ll take to restore the carbon cycle is insignificant on a planetary scale.”

“I’ve actually been to Far Away,” Justine said. “It is minimally habitable, and that’s after over a century and a half of grueling effort. It’s a huge mistake to class it among normal H-congruous worlds. These New48 will not be habitable; we have to get the populations off. I don’t know about Wessex, that’s exceptional, but the rest must be evacuated.”

“I am not proposing abandoning Wessex,” Rafael said. “However, there are now four and a half thousand fully armed Prime ships in the Wessex system. We don’t have four and a half thousand Douvoir missiles in our inventory, let alone the hundred seventy thousand we’ll need to eliminate Prime ships throughout the New48.”

“Did they really send that many through?” Toniea Gall asked.

“Yes,” Rafael said. “Which means we will have to evacuate the majority of these systems. The navy cannot deal with forty-eight armadas.”

“How many can you deal with?” Doi asked.

“Assuming the Moscow-class production continues unabated, we estimate we can clear five star systems before we face a loss of containment. We don’t yet know what kind of threat the ships pose. They have two options, both of which present unique difficulties for us. Firstly, they can head in to the H-congruous planets, and breach our defenses through sheer numbers, then land and establish an armed colony. It does of course mean that we can use quantumbusters against them when they are down and concentrated.”

“And the second option?” Crispin asked.

“They make a break for it. With an average of three and a half thousand ships in each system, they’ll possess enough equipment and manufacturing capability between them to put together an FTL drive eventually. Again, they will have to rendezvous to begin a manufacturing process, which will leave them vulnerable to a Douvoir missile.”

“How long will it take to manufacture a hundred and seventy thousand Douvoir missiles?” Toniea Gall asked.

“We could probably get them completed within nine months, providing we authorize a super crash-priority project. I’m not sure we have that kind of time available. If they are still planning on colonizing the New48, they could be in orbit around each of them within a week.”

“You’re talking about evacuation regardless of the Primes,” Justine said.

“Yes. That is our preferred option. Let them all land and take them out with a quantumbuster.”

“We’ve already got a monstrous refugee problem from the Lost23, and most of them were low-population worlds. How many people live on the New48?”

“Not including Wessex,” Nigel said, “about thirty-two billion people.” This time the silence was even more profound.

“It can’t be done,” Hans Brant said. “Can it?”

“Physically removing them through the wormholes is possible,” Nigel said. “However, accommodating a diaspora of such magnitude within the remaining Commonwealth is totally impractical. There is nowhere for that many people to live; feeding them on basic rations alone would virtually bankrupt the rest of us.”

“Then we have to face that prospect,” Justine said. “I for one will not even consider any proposal that includes abandoning these people. Wars inevitably instigate societal change; it looks like this is shaping up to be ours.”

“A noble sentiment, my dear,” Hans Brant said. “But even if the Senate were to assume draconian powers, and force the refugees on the rest of the Commonwealth, some planets would resist.”

“We cannot turn our backs on thirty-two billion lives!” Justine stormed.

“There is an alternative,” Nigel said quietly. “A risky one, of course.” This time he felt almost nothing but contempt at the way everyone turned to him with hope and desperation in their eyes. “We open up forty-seven fresh planets, and simply transfer the populations over directly so they can rebuild their societies.”

“For Christ’s sake, man,” Alan said. “You can’t dump billions of people on undeveloped worlds. They need cities, and infrastructure, government … food!”

“I know,” Nigel said. “That would all have to be prepared beforehand.”

“But … we’ve got less than a week,” Toniea Gall spluttered.

“As Einstein once said, time depends on the relative position of the observer.”

When President Doi officially closed the War Cabinet session, Justine waited in her chair while the other Dynasty leaders went over to Nigel to offer their thanks and congratulations. Even Heather was conciliatory enough to congratulate him. As for Doi, Justine had never seen the President so pathetically happy; she almost ran across the anteroom to tell Patricia Kantil the outcome. Patricia’s face was soon beaming a huge, incredulous smile.

How stupid, Justine thought. It was as if declaring something were possible had made it happen. And everything they’d agreed in cabinet was dependent on nothing else going wrong. How’s the Starflyer going to react?

“You wanted to see me, I believe?” Nigel said. He’d come over to stand beside her chair. Justine looked up at him. And exactly how do I tell if I’m looking at the Starflyer’s number one agent in the Commonwealth? Her hand went to the slight bump in her belly. I need to secure a place on one of the lifeboats, just in case.

“I do,” she said.

“Excellent. On one condition.”

“What’s that?” she asked in trepidation.

“You and Investigator Myo bring Mellanie with you.”

Justine’s jaw dropped. “Huh?”

“Mellanie Rescorai. I’ve been wanting to meet her for quite a while now. She’s with the Investigator, isn’t she? They traveled back to Earth together from Illuminatus.”

“Yes,” Justine said, struggling to regain her poise. How does he know that? More important, why does he know that?

“Excellent. We’ll do it after we’ve all made this stupid public announcement. The CST offices at Newark should give us some privacy.” He smiled. “I’m glad you’re okay after the assassin’s attempt on your life. Tell Gore I’m impressed, as always.”

“I’ll let him know,” Justine promised.

Edmund Li knew he was being stupid staying on. He should have left Boongate weeks ago, when the loose collection of relatives and friends that made up his family all departed on a train to Tanyata. They’d called him every time a connection to the unisphere was available, a schedule that was even worse than the link to Far Away, showing him images of the tent they were living in, scenes from everyday Tanyata life. So he got a good sketch of them and fifty thousand others spread out in a makeshift township not far from the ocean, one of eight such townships centered around the CST station. Everybody was helping to lay down the grid of their new city, building up the infrastructure, doing the work normally left to bots. They all helped out, they all knew their neighbors. There was a pioneer spirit there that human worlds hadn’t possessed since the very first planets were opened up three hundred years ago. Despite the hardship, it looked like a good place to live.

Still, Edmund hadn’t left. The really stupid thing was, technically, he didn’t even have a job anymore. The Far Away freight inspectorate division had nothing left to do. Nobody on Far Away was importing anything. There was nothing for his team to scan and analyze; besides, the others had all left a couple of days after the navy intelligence people had visited; it was just him now. He’d watched all the other offices in the small administration block thin out and dwindle to nothing, which made him the de facto Boongate government official in charge of all travel to Far Away.

At first he kept doing it because of the navy’s Paris office, which had asked him to keep monitoring traffic to and from Far Away. It was important, Renne and Tarlo had said. After a while, he became intrigued by Far Away and what was going on there—that wasn’t a good enough reason to stay, he knew, and yet … The people leaving Far Away were nearly all the same; every Carbon Goose flight was packed full with migrants who’d sold virtually everything they had to buy a ticket. They arrived bowed under the weight of a world with a standard gravity, and burdened further with pitiful expectations of the Commonwealth. Edmund was doing well if he managed to collect all their names before they disappeared into the station terminal where they believed they’d find sanctuary. By talking to them he did manage to gather a picture of the strange turmoil afflicting Far Away, the criminal sabotage, the rise of the Institute in enforcing law and order in Armstrong City.

But it was the people who were still traveling to Far Away who sparked his real interest. Why anyone should choose to go there at this time was incomprehensible. Yet they kept turning up with their return tickets: technical staff for the Institute, security staff for the Institute, managers for the Institute. No Institute staff were on the flights coming back from Far Away; yet they would be the only people left on the planet with return tickets.

In his zeal to understand more of that benighted planet, he ran innumerable searches through the unisphere for information. For the first time ever he began to pay attention to what the Guardians were saying. Yes, they were a bunch of psychopathic terrorists, but put into the context of everything he was witnessing, their claims made unpleasant sense.

Last week even the Carbon Goose flights had stopped as the pilots and crews deserted to head for safer parts of the Commonwealth. Then the CST technical support staff began to slip away from the station. He was mildly surprised that the wormhole to Wessex remained functional, there were so few maintenance personnel left to operate Boongate end. A lot of everyday engineering was being carried out by remote from the Big15 world.

That should have been the right time to leave, Edmund knew. The RI controlling the gateway to Far Away would no doubt shut it down when enough components expired and preset safety limits were reached. It might last a day, or six months; Edmund was hardly an expert. Not that it mattered; without the Carbon Goose crews there was no way to get to Far Away anymore. He felt almost guilty thinking such thoughts; by now he considered himself the only person who cared about the fate of that remote planet, the lone watchman on the border looking out across the void.

Then three days ago something else changed. The communications link between Half Way and Far Away opened at the correct time, but the message traffic flowing into the Commonwealth unisphere wasn’t even one percent of normal, and all of it was encrypted. Any messages or calls going to Far Away were bounced back, including his own official request for information to the Governor’s House. Far Away was now completely isolated.

For three days Edmund Li kept a solitary vigil in his lonely office, waiting to see what was going to happen. Then the Primes attacked.

He followed the invasion through the news shows and official government information feeds. The swarm of ships emerging three AUs out from the star. The flare bomb fired into the star. A secret navy superweapon that was terrifyingly powerful, extinguishing the flare bomb, but with such a high price. Then another flare bomb was fired into Boongate’s star. The navy was forced to blow it up again. Sensors on the satellites orbiting Boongate captured the oceanic waves raging through the star’s corona; they also recorded the sudden and deadly rise in solar radiation playing over the planet.

Without warning or explanation, every Prime wormhole into the Commonwealth shut down. Humans had won—if you discounted the thousands of warships gathering like stormcrows around forty-eight Commonwealth worlds.

It was the weather that probably saved Edmund. He’d spent a couple of hours sitting at his desk accessing reports and firsthand accounts of the invasion, with the occasional foray over to the vending machine for cups of tea. After the wormholes vanished, he started tracking Boongate’s satellite sensor data, seeing the direct impact the radiation gale was having on the planet. Electromagnetic energy was absorbed and weakened to some extent by the atmosphere before it reached the ground. Even so, the dosage was far greater than most animals and plants could comfortably withstand. The first wave of particle radiation arrived not much later, virtually wiping out the ionosphere in the first few minutes. It was much worse than the news studio experts predicted. Power supplies outside the cities and towns protected by force fields became erratic or failed altogether under the surges. All the civil satellites dropped out as they were exposed, leaving sensors on the planetary defense platforms as the only source of information. Borealis storms swept down from the poles, their pale dancing colors bringing a weird beauty to the destruction falling silently across the world.

Edmund went outside to watch the first of the aural lightshows swirl around the city’s force field. The parking lot still had puddles left over from the night’s rainfall before the station and city force fields deflected the clouds. There was only one car standing on the concrete, his own, a fifteen-year-old Honda Trisma. He stood beside it as the mauve and apricot phosphorescence came rippling out of the horizon at supersonic speed. Even the winter clouds had retreated before the elementary tide, producing a clear winter sky. When he squinted up at the sun, he convinced himself he could see small bright spots on the glaring disk.

Sheet lightning flickered over the city. For a moment it outshone both the sun and the borealis lights. Small rivulets of purple ions skated down the curvature of the force field dome. Then the aurora was back in full, reflecting its hot luminescence across the wet concrete.

The unisphere was telling everyone still outside a force field to seek shelter immediately. Lightning flashed again, a longer burst this time. Edmund started counting for the thunder, until he realized how useless that was. There were long sparkles mingling with the borealis streamers now, adding to their intensity, helping to drown out the ordinary sky. Lightning snapped between the varied undulating color bands. It was a strangely beautiful death cloak for a planet to throw around itself, he thought.

His e-butler told him there was an emergency address to the Commonwealth by the War Cabinet. The planet’s cybersphere would carry nothing else. He didn’t even know the managing RI could do that. About time, he thought, we could do with knowing what’s going on, and what happened in the battle. CST still hadn’t reopened the wormhole to Wessex, though the parallel zero-width wormhole was obviously keeping Boongate connected to the unisphere.

The image that rose up into his virtual vision showed him President Doi sitting at the head of an imposing table, flanked by Nigel Sheldon and Heather Halgarth. Edmund pursed his lips: Impressive indeed. Captions labeled the other cabinet members for him; the amount of political power gathered together was an indication that whatever had been decided was definite. He leaned back against his Honda to listen to his fate.

“My fellow citizens,” Doi said, “I will start by telling you that the Prime incursions into Commonwealth space have now ended, at least for the immediate future. A frigate managed to get through to Hell’s Gateway and destroy the wormhole generators there. I cannot give you details about the ship or the weapon used for obvious security reasons, but suffice it to say we now have at our disposal a weapon of truly formidable power. Sadly, as I’m sure you are all aware, this does not eliminate the Prime threat entirely. There are many thousands of Prime warships already in Commonwealth space which will have to be dealt with. In addition, the Primes deployed flare bombs whose effects are still being felt on the Second48 worlds. There is nothing we can do to deflect the radiation saturating those planets. In short, their biospheres will in all probability be rendered uninhabitable. Even if a regeneration program were possible, as it may be on Wessex, all these worlds will see battle again as the navy combats the remaining Prime ships over the coming weeks. It is therefore with huge regret that I have informed the planetary leaders we have no choice but to evacuate their worlds.”

“Shit,” Edmund muttered. He’d known in his heart that the address was going to say something like that, but even so the enormity of what the President was saying was only just registering. But where are we all going to go?

“As accommodating an estimated thirty billion dispossessed people is a practical impossibility even for our society,” Doi said, “we will have to adopt a rather novel solution.”

Edmund didn’t like the sound of that at all. Then his e-butler told him a vehicle had just passed through the level two security cordon around the Far Away gateway section. He frowned. Who the hell was visiting this part of the station, especially now?

Nigel Sheldon leaned forward, taking over from the President, his expression earnest and supremely confident. “When we were building our first wormhole, Ozzie came up with some math for manipulating the internal temporal flow dynamic of exotic matter. We ran a small test a couple of centuries ago using one of CST’s exploratory division wormholes, and the concept worked. It hasn’t been used since, because we haven’t had a practical or commercial application for it. Until today. What we will do is modify the wormholes leading to the planets whose biospheres are dying. Within a week, they will be opened to the entire population in an exodus that will be organized by your national government. You will not be using trains to travel through; instead you will be asked to walk or drive, or take buses—you can even cycle if you like. The other end will emerge on a fresh H-congruous planet in phase three space; however, it will not emerge for another ten or fifteen years, or even longer if necessary. For you, only a few seconds will have gone past, but outside, the rest of the Commonwealth will have had enough time to build new basic cities and towns with a functioning infrastructure to accommodate you. I know this will seem shocking, but the worlds you are on now are dying, and we have to move quickly to insure against further loss of life.”

The car was a Mercedes registered to Grand Triad Adventures. Edmund stood up, staring out across the vast station yard to the road leading away to the terminal. He could actually see the car, a sleek burgundy-red limousine speeding along. It was under manual control, and it drove straight past the junction where it should have turned toward the single passenger platform. Not that anyone was using the Half Way wormhole anyway. Instead it was heading for the office block and the parking lot where Edmund was standing. Something was very wrong about that. He retained enough of his policeman’s instinct to check the small ion pistol he carried, then hurried toward the far end of the building.

“All of us pledge ourselves to seeing this rescue operation through to a successful conclusion,” President Doi said. “Senators, planetary leaders, the Dynasties: we are united in our determination. No matter what the cost or the effort, we will not fail you.” She sighed in compassion. “Godspeed, all of you.”

The Merc turned into the parking lot just as Edmund cleared the end of the building. He peered around the corner to see the big limousine pull up next to his Honda. A door swung open and a tall blond man stepped out. Edmund gasped as soon as he saw the face, recognizing him instantly. Tarlo. The Commonwealth-wide police alert had come through twenty-four hours ago. At first Edmund had thought it was some kind of mistake, or joke, but when he checked the warrant’s certificate it was genuine enough.

Tarlo stared at the Honda for a moment, then he turned his head slowly, scanning the deserted parking lot. Edmund ducked back around the corner. The warrant had said Tarlo was heavily wetwired, and extremely dangerous. He counted to five, then risked another look. Tarlo was walking into the office block. The door to the Merc was still open. Edmund used his retinal inserts to zoom in. A body was lying on the limousine’s carpeted floor, a young man whose neck had been snapped. His dead eyes stared up at the magnificent moiré scintillations that now veiled Boongate’s sky.

The Five Stop Café was at one end of the Rocher strip mall, squeezed between a Bab’s Kebabs franchise and Mother Blossom, a budget maternity clothes shop. Highway B77 ran past outside, leading directly to Narrabri’s planetary station four kilometers west. Even now, with the borealis storm seething through the sky outside the megacity’s force field, thousands of alien ships loose in the system, and half of the station’s gateways still closed, the traffic was as thick as always.

Bradley Johansson and Adam Elvin paid little attention to the racing vehicles. The portal over the serving counter had just started to repeat the War Cabinet’s announcement.

“Dreaming heavens,” Bradley muttered. “I never expected that. What an ingenious solution. No wonder Sheldon looks so pleased with himself.”

Adam gave the portal a skeptical glance. “I think smug is more like it.”

“Now, now, Adam, you should learn to be more charitable, especially in times of crisis. Besides, building the infrastructure for forty-seven worlds is a massive centralist state project. Exactly the kind of thing you approve of.”

“Don’t stereotype me. I’m not a fan of centralist government; the tendency there is toward corruption and remoteness. An inclusive society should see a devolution of power down to local committee level.”

“Humm, remind me: How many angels have we counted on that pinhead now?”

“You started this. And it’s forty-eight worlds. Damn, how the hell are they going to transport all these factories to a new planet?” He stared out of the window. Beyond the highway, the megacity rolled away into the smoggy horizon, vast housing estates alternating with industrial precincts, stitched together by the curving lines of the railway tracks and highways. Every few kilometers, the really big structures of refineries or smelter plants rose up out of the low-level sprawl, like the cathedrals and castles of a medieval landscape. Dusk was creeping over the protective force field dome, giving an extra potency to the iridescence that besieged the sky outside.

“Forty-seven,” Bradley said firmly. “Hutchinson won’t move this; he’s already terraformed this world once. Even if the flare kills off every living thing outside the city, the tractorbots will just replant it all for him. In any case, the whole time travel enterprise will have to employ the wormhole generators at Narrabri’s planetary station. No, this world will remain no matter how much damage it suffers. Thirty-two billion people depend on it.”

“Yeah. Those bombs we have … I knew the navy must be developing stronger weapons than the Douvoir missiles, but hell, something that can damage a star? Do you think the Starflyer expected that?”

“No, I don’t.” Bradley smiled into his plastic cup of coffee. “Once again, it has underestimated us. This war was intended to wreck both species; now a decisive victory is within our grasp. Doi and Sheldon will use these weapons, whatever they are, against Dyson Alpha.”

“It wasn’t so clever on Illuminatus, either. Jenny reported that Bernadette was finally cornered by Paula Myo.”

“Really?” Bradley’s eyebrows rose. “How fascinating. Myo must be convinced that the Starflyer is a genuine threat by now. And the failed assassination attempt against Senator Burnelli will also add weight to our story. I wonder if we should attempt one last shotgun message to the Commonwealth.”

“Nobody will listen, not today, not for a long time.” Adam indicated the portal, which was now showing Michelangelo back in his studio. Even his composure had been shaken by the War Cabinet; the commentators he’d got with him seemed almost lost for words. “I’m more concerned that Starflyer agents captured the Agent’s head. Once his memorycell is analyzed, we’ll be looking at a major security breach.”

“I agree it’s upsetting, Adam, but I feel our time frame is measured in days if not hours. Even if the Starflyer worked out where we are and what we’re doing, it would take time to launch an offensive against us. If it was smart, it would have left the Agent to the charms of the navy. They’ll come in guns blazing at the slightest opportunity.”

“Maybe, but we have to watch for the possibility. And with Kime removed, we’ve lost a major potential asset. Oscar won’t have anything like the same influence with Columbia.”

“Has he uncovered anything in the Second Chance logs yet?”

“I don’t know. He’s spent so much time on board his ship, I haven’t been able to contact him.” Adam’s e-butler told him Marisa McFoster was calling. “Yes?” he said.

“We’re on Boongate,” she told him. “Victor Halgarth has gone into a station warehouse belonging to the Sunforge company. Sir, there’s a lot of police-type observers following Victor as well as us.”

“I’m not surprised. The authorities were watching Bernadette on Illuminatus. You’ll find some of them are from Halgarth Security. Can you fit yourselves into a secure location?”

“I’m not sure. It’s a real mess here. The station is nearly in anarchy. After Doi’s announcement, everyone left on the planet is heading right for the terminal building; but the rest of the station is deserted. We’re not going to be able to do much without being seen.”

“I understand. We’ve got several teams on Boongate. I’ll authorize them to contact you and provide as much backup as they can afford. In the meantime keep me updated.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Victor Halgarth on Boongate, and the whole planet about to be evacuated,” Bradley mused. “This is a remarkable opportunity for us, Adam. We might be able to intercept the Starflyer here in the Commonwealth. It hasn’t returned home yet, and it has only the shortest of times to get back to Boongate. CST won’t risk opening the wormhole for ordinary transport again for fear that there’ll be a stampede through.”

“Mellanie left Illuminatus with Paula Myo,” Adam said. “Shall I try calling her again, and see if she can convince the Investigator?”

“No, we’ll use Senator Burnelli; she’s better placed than Myo, and she has the necessary political strength to place a complete block on the Boongate wormhole.”

“How long do you think it will take CST to modify the wormhole generator to do this time travel trick?”

“Sheldon spoke of a week. I suspect it’s a question of programming rather than any physical modification—everything important is a software problem these days.”

“Okay, while you do that, I’ll prepare our train. We might need it yet.”

“Of course.” Bradley stirred the dregs of his coffee. “You know, it’s highly probable that the Starflyer is also in the Narrabri station, preparing to crash through the Boongate wormhole, just as we are. How ironic is that? I wonder if it has rented the warehouse next to ours?”

“It hasn’t.”

“If you say so, Adam. But we must reorganize our teams to watch the Boongate gateway ourselves.”

“I’ll put some people on it.”

“Have we got any? I understood we’re short, post-Illuminatus.”

“I can spare enough for a simple operation like this. We’re only going to notice the lack of muscle if we do have to crash through.”

“Well, as of now, you have one more piece of ‘muscle.’ I shall be joining your team permanently now. There is little else I can do in the Commonwealth anymore. And it is time I went home to face our nemesis.”

“That’s good; having you on board will be a big morale booster for the Guardians. They need a pick-me-up now we’ve lost contact with Far Away.”

CST’s Newark station had wormholes connecting it to over twenty planets in phase one space, including three wormholes to Augusta. Its terminals and marshaling yard squatted on the site of the old airport, sending out an arterial maze of road and rail connections into the surrounding sprawl of urbanization. Nigel gazed out of the manager’s office on the top floor of the station’s administration skyscraper, seeing the New Jersey Turnpike curving around the station’s perimeter. The ancient route still carried huge amounts of freight and passengers in and out of the station, though it was now being supplanted by the new tunnels that CST had drilled to carry trains directly to Manhattan and along the East Coast. Beyond the road the cold gray waters of Newark Bay surged against the shore of Staten Island. Today, the shimmering dome of the force field arched above the island’s buildings and parks, giving the air a filmy hue, as if a faint sea fog had settled over the land.

Nigel’s e-butler showed him security sensor images of Campbell greeting his visitors down in the lobby. Justine Burnelli unbuttoned a snow-white fur-lined coat and gave Campbell the demure kiss of a trusted friend. Nigel had only just realized Justine was pregnant when she arrived for the emergency War Cabinet meeting; now the little bump was quite visible under her stylish gray cashmere dress. It surprised him; someone of her age and status nearly always used a womb tank. When he checked with Perdita she hadn’t known either, let alone who the father was—also unusual—the Grand Families always had strong financial agreements concerning their children, yet nothing had been filed in the New York legal registry. The security sensors showed him her inserts were maintaining a heavily encrypted link to the unisphere, which he guessed led directly back to Gore.

Investigator Myo was exactly as he remembered, her lovely face forever cursed with a slightly melancholic expression, wearing a well-cut charcoal and blue suit with a salmon-pink blouse, her hair brushed to a gloss. Nothing to indicate that less than thirty hours ago she’d been crammed into an armor suit, in the thick of a firefight on Illuminatus.

His real attention, though, was reserved for Mellanie. Her wavy golden hair had been given a cursory brush, leaving it mildly unkempt; that and the way she kept clenching her jaw in a resentful fashion gave her an aggressive appearance. A dramatically short white skirt, long suede boots, and simple thin blue denim shirt managed to be both trendy and trashy. Dudley Bose stuck to her as if there were some kind of membrane holding them together. The petulant anger leaking out over his youthful face was exactly the same as Nigel recalled from the notorious “welcome back” ceremony.

Nigel faced the office door as the lift arrived. He noticed that Campbell had managed to stand as far as possible from Mellanie during the ride up in the small lift. Perdita was right, then.

“Ready?” Nelson asked. The Dynasty security chief had also picked up on the implications of the meeting, but then he’d been observing events on Illuminatus a lot more closely than Nigel.

“Be nice to get a few answers, finally,” Nigel said. He pulled his suit jacket straight. Stupid vanity.

He greeted Justine and Paula formally, then turned to Mellanie. “At last.”

She gave him a puzzled look. “Excuse me.”

“I’ve been following your recent activities with a lot of interest. It’s very exciting for me to finally meet you in person.” Which was an understatement. In the flesh she was fabulously attractive, great figure, slightly wild appearance, as if she’d just finished having sex—and wanted more. He held on to her hand. She didn’t try to pull it back, just twitched her lips roguishly as she reviewed him.

“Me, too,” she said; her voice must have dropped a couple of octaves.

“Hello again,” Dudley said. He somehow slid in front of Mellanie to stick his own hand out.

“Dudley; glad to see you’re recovering.” Nigel avoided any inflection in case the neurotic astronomer picked up on the irony.

“That’s all thanks to my Mellanie.” His hand went around her shoulders. She didn’t try to hide her look of disapproval.

Nigel offered them all seats as the e-seal came on around the office. “Well, this is all very serious, Justine. It can’t just be about your committee battle with Valetta.”

“In a way it is,” Justine said. “The Halgarths now have control of the navy.”

“Yes, but I have the nova bomb. And the rest of us have a great deal of input into the navy budget. Heather is balanced. That’s the way the Commonwealth works.”

“I have a question,” Paula said.

“I imagine you do,” Nigel said lightly. “I’ve spent most of the last few hours trying to work out what it’s going to be.”

“For the past century, I’ve been pressing the Commonwealth Executive to impose inspections on all cargo being shipped for Far Away, with no success whatsoever. That kind of examination would have enabled me to restrict the Guardians’ weapons shipments, and possibly even shut them down altogether. Just before he was assassinated, Thompson Burnelli discovered that you have been opposing me for all that time. I’d like to know why.”

Nigel couldn’t help the way he sneaked a help me out look at Daniel Alster, who was in his usual position, a helpful couple of meters to one side. “Have I? I had no idea, or memory …”

“There’s no policy file on that,” Daniel said quickly.

“This is critical,” Paula said. “Thompson believed it to be true.”

“Find out,” Nigel told Daniel. “Call Jessica right now.”

“Sir.”

Nigel stole a glance at Mellanie, who gave him a playful wink and crossed her legs. He wondered what the best approach would be for a girl like this. Just come straight out and ask her to bed. Probably. Though the one thing he didn’t understand was: Why Dudley? What could she possibly see in him?

“Er, our political office has been pursuing that policy,” Daniel said; he sounded embarrassed.

“Why?” Nigel asked.

“Ozzie ordered it.”

“Ozzie?”

Some of the tension went out of Paula’s pose. “I had no idea Mr. Isaac had an input into your Dynasty’s political office.”

“He doesn’t, normally,” Nigel said. “Actually: ever, as far as I’m aware. But Ozzie has an equal share in CST, so as far as I’m concerned he’s entitled. Are you sure?” he asked Daniel.

“Yes.” Daniel gave Paula a curious look. “He instructed the political office to adopt that strategy in 2243.”

“Oh, my,” Paula said. “The year of the Great Wormhole Heist. The year Bradley Johansson formed the Guardians and stole enough money to begin their operations. So the Starflyer never had anything to do with it. The Guardians stopped any examinations. I knew they had high-level access to the Executive, but I never considered Mr. Isaac was behind them.”

“Okay,” Nigel said; he wagged his finger at them. “Explanations, please. Now.”

“Simple enough,” Justine said. “Wilson Kime is quite correct. The Starflyer is real. It funded Dudley’s observation of Dyson Alpha through a bogus educational charity. It had agents on board the Second Chance.”

“It has also infiltrated the navy,” Paula said. “Wilson uncovered evidence that its agents were on board the Second Chance, but that was subsequently tampered with by someone inside Pentagon II. He couldn’t go public with it. We believe a modified sensor satellite was responsible for interfering with the barrier generator and letting the Primes out. The whole mission was a gigantic con trick designed to start a war between us and the Primes, weakening both our species.”

Nigel finally knew how Wilson had felt when he landed on Mars. Today, he’d turned a star nova to neuter the greatest threat the human race had ever faced, then gone on to work out how to save thirty-two billion human lives; now he’d found out the war that had destroyed their stars was mostly his fault to begin with. “Oh, holy fuck.” He shot an appealing look to Nelson, but the security chief was struggling with his own shock.

“If you’re correct about this—” Nelson began.

“We are,” Mellanie said primly.

Nelson gave her a short annoyed smile. “Then the Guardians are probably right about the Starflyer infiltrating the Halgarth Dynasty.”

“Essentially, yes,” Paula said. “Our showdown with its agents on Illuminatus confirmed this. The majority of Halgarths are completely unaffected, of course. But those in strategic positions have been taken over. Christabel is slowly acknowledging something is wrong; she’s discreetly helping us keep track of suspects. It won’t be long before she takes her suspicions to Heather.”

“And Columbia?” Nelson asked. “Is he one of them?”

“We don’t know.”

“Son of a bitch,” Nigel grunted. “Well, that settles it, we do not release our nova bombs to the navy. Jesus! And Doi? What about her? The Guardians said she was one of them.”

“We believe that was simple disinformation,” Paula said. “Isabella Halgarth, a confirmed Starflyer agent, helped put that shotgun together. However, Isabella also had a relationship with Patricia Kantil.”

“She helped engineer the political decisions to form a navy,” Justine said. “We’ve all been played to some extent.”

“Alessandra Baron is one of its agents,” Mellanie said. “The bitch.”

Nigel felt numb as his expanded mentality began to examine the problem. There was a lot of anger building in his mind, the kind of straight animal antagonism that came from being fooled. But it was countered by the surprise and sheer worry of the situation. Goddamn, we were blindsided! “Whatever we do, we can’t make this public,” he decided. “Not right now. We need the public’s complete confidence in government for the immediate future. The populations we’re trying to save are dependent on the rest of the Commonwealth unifying behind the time travel strategy. That has to be our number one priority. Rooting out traitors can be done quietly in parallel. You guys must have some ideas how to do that; that’s why you’re here, right?”

“Primarily, yes,” Paula said. “To begin with, simply being aware of the manipulation effectively nullifies it.”

“What exactly does the Starflyer hope to achieve?” Nelson asked. “It’s got its war, what more can it achieve?”

“I’m uncertain,” Paula said. “The Guardians say it wants to destroy or at the very least weaken both species, leaving it to become the dominant power in this section of the galaxy. I would speculate that your nova bomb has upset those plans; humans are now capable of destroying the Primes. The Commonwealth will remain, and we will be considerably stronger. From a military point of view it has already failed.”

“Only if the navy and ourselves continue to press the attack,” Nelson said. “That’ll be where it concentrates its influence now. I would. After all, the Primes aren’t exactly helpless yet. They still have the Hell’s Gateway generator, and flare bombs. If we hesitate, thanks to the Starflyer, they could still manage a devastating blow against us.”

“Then we have to launch a strike against Dyson Alpha right away,” Nigel said. “That’s where the Hell’s Gateway generator is. Don’t tell the navy, don’t consult anyone else. Just do it.”

“The Charybdis should be back in communications range in another day,” Nelson said. “And the Searcher is already home. Frigate construction is already under way. We can launch within forty-eight to seventy-two hours.”

“See to it,” Nigel said. “You personally, Nelson. God knows if it’s infiltrated our Dynasty as well. Is there any kind of test?” he asked Paula.

“We have to wait until the results from Isabella come back. Once we understand what was done to her, we might be able to recognize it in others. But don’t expect it to be quick or simple. It could well take decades to find the last of them.”

“You’re reading her memories?” Nelson asked.

“I have a Raiel doing that for me, yes.”

Nigel couldn’t help an admiring smile. Investigator Myo was always one unexpected step ahead. “Do you think Ozzie is a Starflyer agent?”

“Difficult to say. From what I’ve just heard, I’d say he was helping the Guardians. We will need to read his memories to be sure. Do you know where he is?”

“We lost track of him on Silvergalde,” Nigel said. “His last message said he was off to ask the Silfen what they knew about the Dyson Pair barriers. He hasn’t been seen since.”

“I see,” Paula said.

“Do you have any idea what this Starflyer is?” Nigel asked. His expanded mentality began to access the Dynasty files on the Guardians. They weren’t a lot of use, summaries of investigations launched by the Serious Crimes Directorate.

“It’s the survivor of the Marie Celeste arkship on Far Away,” Paula said. “Which is about as much as we know. Bradley Johansson claims it took over the humans investigating the arkship, so any data from the Institute is obviously suspect. We have no idea where it came from, what it looks like, its size, even if it’s an oxygen breather. Even now its existence can only be deduced from the behavior of its agents. It is the perfect bogeyman myth.”

“Son of a bitch,” Nigel muttered angrily. He was indignant—no, actually affronted—that an alien like that could move humans around like chess pieces. An unseen malign influence creeping around his Commonwealth, subverting and corrupting whatever it touched, like some medieval demon. Small wonder nobody wanted to believe in it. “How could it have gone unnoticed for so long?”

“Because it’s cautious, and works on a long timescale,” Paula said. “Which actually gives us our first clue as to its nature. It is obviously long-lived. Given this strategy to eliminate us and the Primes so that its own kind can expand unhindered into this section of the galaxy, it thinks in terms of centuries if not millennia.”

“But it must have a base somewhere, a physical presence. We have to be able to track it down.”

“Bradley Johansson and Adam Elvin are both physical and real,” Paula said with a regretful smile. “I’ve never managed to arrest them. Which gives me a theory as to the Starflyer’s location.”

“Where?” Justine asked sharply.

Paula stood up and walked over to the office window where she was silhouetted by the blurry gray sky outside. She beckoned Nigel over. Together they looked down on the station marshaling yard, where long trains snaked their way along the silver and white rails.

“Johansson and Elvin know and understand the covert activity game very well,” she said. “They are always on the move, they have no permanent home, they avoid relationships, attachments, friendships, anything that can tie them down. That’s why I was always chasing them; they were never in one place long enough for me to catch up; that and their political cover from Mr. Isaac.”

Nigel felt as if the cold sea air trapped under the force field was permeating the office as realization dawned. Goose bumps pricked the skin along his forearms. Below him trains slid in and out of the tunnels that led to the cities of the East Coast states, from New York all the way south to Miami. The cliff face of gateways shone light from distant stars across the ground in long pale ellipses. “Oh, dear God, no.”

“It’s the logical conclusion,” she said. “The Starflyer is alien. At the very least it will require food proteins from its native world, either grown or synthesized. Its body would attract attention if it were ever seen. What could be easier than having its own freight wagon? It would always be traveling, always be free to go where it wanted, always have its own environment.”

“Our control RI can search the records, look for trains that never stop,” Nigel said with a dry throat. It was hopeless, and he knew it.

“The wagon will switch engines and even companies, it will spend months or years on a siding, or inside a warehouse, it will roam over planets wherever there are rails; the Starflyer will even change and modernize the wagons over the decades.”

“It could be anywhere,” Nigel said in an aghast voice.

“According to the Guardians it will go back to Boongate and from there Far Away.”

“The Boongate gateway is closed. And it will be kept that way now.”

“I hope so.”

“What do you mean by that? I won’t allow it to be opened.”

Paula glanced over at Nelson, then turned back to Nigel. “You and Nelson do realize that someone very well placed in your Dynasty has to be a Starflyer agent, don’t you?”

He inclined his head slightly, clearly loath to say anything. “If it travels the way you claim, that’s painfully obvious. It’s been given a lot of help over the years. I only hope it hasn’t subverted my Dynasty the way it has Heather’s.”

“There’s no evidence of that. And Johansson has never claimed it.”

“The ultimate approval,” he muttered sarcastically.

“I’d like to suggest we pull the Guardians in from the cold,” Justine said. “They know more about the Starflyer than anyone else. If we’re going to try to capture it, we could do with their help.”

“How?” Paula asked as she walked back to her seat. “We don’t know how to contact them. The navy lost their last serious lead, the Agent, on Illuminatus.”

Justine gave the Investigator an apologetic little shrug. “I’ve been in touch with Bradley Johansson for a while now.”

Nigel actually managed to chuckle—gallows humor. He broke off hurriedly when he saw the Investigator giving him a somber stare. “I like it,” he said as he slumped back into his chair. “A conspiracy within a conspiracy. Funny: I always thought I’d be on the receiving end of a secret resistance movement, not actually taking part in one. Contact Johansson for us, Justine; ask if he’d like to meet and pool resources. We should call Wilson in as well, he can help keep an eye on the navy for us; he’ll have enough sympathizers inside Pentagon II to stay on top of Columbia.”

“There’s someone I’d like to bring in as well,” Mellanie said.

“I’m sorry,” Nigel said. “I don’t entirely trust the SI, especially not after its lack of assistance today.”

Mellanie gave him a pitying look. “Me neither. And don’t be so patronizing.”

“Trust me. After what happened to Dorian on the Cypress Island, I wouldn’t dare.”

“How did you …”

Nigel gave the astonished girl a winning grin. “Told you I followed your activities.”

Mellanie sat back for a moment, then she recovered and flashed him an evil smile. “What I actually want is for one of your wormholes to recover the Bose motile for me.”

“What’s the Bose motile?” Nigel gave Dudley Bose a suspicious glance.

“The alien you’re calling the Primes is in fact a single consciousness distributed through billions of individual bodies,” Mellanie said. “The Bose motile is the one that contains Dudley’s memories; they were downloaded into it after he was captured. That’s who warned the Conway. It then managed to escape and make its way to Elan. My friends are guarding it for me.” She looked around the silent, startled faces in the office, before giving Nigel a sardonic grin. “I think that’s game to me.”

Morton’s e-butler woke him. The sensors that Cat’s Claws had emplaced all over the Randtown district were picking up a signal from a point two hundred kilometers directly above the Trine’ba. It was a repeated message on the same channel-hopping sequence that the navy used, yet the encryption was the one Mellanie had given him. When he used the key, text printed across his virtual vision. MORTY, I’VE GOT A WORMHOLE OPEN FOR YOU. PLEASE RESPOND. MELLANIE.

“Jeez!” He sat up fast. His body was stiff from sleeping in his armor suit. It was dark in the cave they were using. A couple of lights were showing a pale yellow glimmer, enough to reveal the slushy frost dripping down the rock. Rob was on duty, dressed in full armor, sitting up by the jagged entrance like some nightmare obeah idol. The Cat, who was supposed to be asleep, was in Moon Palm position on top of her sleeping bag. She stared at him wordlessly, which made him shiver despite the semiorganic fabric of his own sleeping bag maintaining his body temperature at a perfect level. The survivors were bundled up in their own bags and blankets like giant pupae lying together on the other side of the cave. They were motionless, apart from David Dunbavand, whose whimper would carry across the cave every time he quivered inside his thick wrappings. The medical kits had helped to stabilize him, but he’d made little progress recently.

Standing by the pile of equipment in the middle of the cave was the Bose motile. It had barely moved from that position since the day they’d marched up to the shelter. They had cloaked it in various sheets of semiorganic fabric to keep it warm and reasonably dry. Every couple of days one of them would drive a bubble down to the Trine’ba and load up with the polluted water for it to eat. Morton thought it was in pretty bad shape, despite Bose’s own protestations that it was fine.

“So what’s in the message?” the Cat asked.

Rob’s helmet had turned toward Morton.

“It’s Mellanie. She’s opened a wormhole for us. I knew it. I knew she’d come through.”

The Cat exhaled calmly. “I hope you’re right. The navy was very clear about its timetable.” She started pulling her armor on.

“Yeah yeah, screw you.”

The navy communication had come in that afternoon, telling them they were to be lifted off in three days’ time. Until then they were to cease all combat missions, and simply observe the Primes. It had been a big morale boost, and sparked an instant argument about what to do about the Bose motile. Rob had been all for shooting it there and then, pretending the whole episode had never happened. Even the survivors had objected to that.

Morton’s virtual hands moved quickly over communications icons, routing his reply through their network of sensor disks, so that the transmission wouldn’t come from anywhere near the mountain saddle where their cave was located. Just in case.

“Mellanie?”

“Morty! Hi, oh God, darling, are you okay?”

“Sure. Fine. How about you?”

“Good. We don’t have much time. This wormhole can take you off, all of you. Where are you?”

“Mellanie, what was the name of your stylist when we were living together?”

“What? Oh, I see, very paranoid. Sasha used to doll me up for you. Okay?”

“Okay. So what’s going to happen? Are we clear with the navy? My colleagues don’t exactly fancy going on the run after we get back.”

“You’re clear. I have some allies now, the best, you’ll see. Please hurry.”

“All right, this is the location.” He sent a file with their coordinates.

“Give us thirty seconds.” The signal cut off.

Morton stood up, and clapped his hands loudly. “Okay, people, we’re out of here. Let’s move! We don’t have long.”

The four survivors stirred as the lights were switched up to full brightness, blinking sleepily.

“Rob, get outside,” Morton said. “See if you can locate the wormhole. It’ll open any second now.”

“Right.”

“Dudley. You’re going to have to walk to it.”

“I can manage that, thank you,” the Bose motile replied through its array.

“I’ll just stay by your side when we go through,” the Cat purred smoothly. She was already standing at Morton’s shoulder, holding her helmet in one hand, a pack slung over her shoulder.

“Highlight of my day,” Morton retorted. He gave Simon and Georgia a hand lifting up David’s stretcher, and put his own helmet beside the injured man’s legs. The Cat simply walked alongside without volunteering any help as they picked their way over the slippery rock.

“Fuck me,” Rob said. “It’s here!”

“What’s on the other side?” the Cat asked sharply.

“Some kind of big room. Hey! I can see Mellanie. There are some troop types in there with her.”

Morton smiled to himself. He resisted the urge to say: Told you so.

It was sleeting heavily outside. Morton screwed his face up against the bitter cold striking his skin as he emerged from the cave’s narrow entrance; he wished he’d put the helmet on. The wormhole had opened a few meters beyond the cave entrance, a silver gossamer circle poised above the dirty slush, resembling a full moon. Dark shapes were just visible inside. Rob was standing directly in front of it, a tall black figure striding forward purposefully. Then the silver glow splashed around him and he was through on the other side.

“So Mellanie has pulled it off again,” Simon said. “You have yourself quite a lady there, Morton.”

“Yeah,” he drawled, suddenly very eager to see her again.

He picked his way over the awkward surface, paying more attention to his feet than to the glowing silver circle ahead of him. The cold was bitter, stinging his ears and cheeks. Then the air tingled around him, and he was through the force field. He blinked against the bright light. Warm air immediately started to melt the ice that had settled on his hair and suit.

They were in a CST exploratory division environment confinement chamber. He’d accessed news reports of their missions enough times to recognize one instantly: a spherical chamber fifty meters in diameter with black, absorptive walls. Yellow and red striped lines marked out airlocks and instrument recesses, while broad windows halfway up allowed the Operations Center staff a direct view of what was going on. A ring of lights shone down on him and the reception party. Morton didn’t even notice the rest of them. Mellanie stood out in front, wearing an agreeably short white skirt, and a blue denim shirt open virtually to her navel. Her hands were on her hips, and she was staring right at him, eyes shining and mouth smiling wide.

“Morty!” She ran forward.

He almost dropped David Dunbavand as her arms hugged him. Someone took the stretcher pole from his grip, and he hugged her back. Then they were kissing passionately, and he was ready to tear that shirt off and have sex with her on the floor of the chamber right there and then.

She pushed back, tossing her head. Golden hair floated about. Her tongue was caught coyly between her teeth. “Missed me again, huh?”

“Oh, Christ, yes.”

Mellanie laughed. It was close to mockery, certainly triumphant.

People were moving past him. Medics clustering around David Dunbavand. Security personnel with activated force fields carrying stumpy carbines helped Rob out of his armor, were taking the Cat’s bag and helmet from her, led the other survivors away from the wormhole. Three of them stood around the Bose motile, while another pulled off the sheets of cloth it had draped over its body. Mandy was crying, comforted by a medic.

The wormhole closed silently behind them.

“Please remove your suit, sir,” one of the security team said.

Morton did as he was told. The Cat stripped off her own armor, deliberately taking her time.

“All clear,” the security team chief finally announced.

An airlock door split open. Dudley Bose stepped into the chamber. It was the first time Morton had seen the re-lifed astronomer. He wasn’t impressed. Bose was a harried youth with a nuclear furnace of nervous energy that made his movements jerky, anxiety and incredulity pulling at his face like a heavyworld gravity field.

Morton braced himself for a small scene. After all, he was still smooching up against Mellanie. But Dudley ignored everyone else in the chamber to race over to the Bose motile. His speed almost tripped him; perfect coordination was still definitely lacking. He came to a shaky halt a meter in front of the tall alien. Two of its sensor stalks bent around to keep the man in view.

“GIVE ME MY MEMORIES BACK,” Dudley screamed at the motile. “Make me ME again.” His fists rose uncertainly.

“Of course,” the Bose motile said from its array. “What did you think I was going to do with them? We are one, Dudley, more than brothers.”

“I … I …” Spittle was shooting out of Dudley’s mouth. “I have to know. What happened? What did they do to me?”

“They killed us, Dudley. Shot us in cold blood. Our original human body died at Dyson Alpha.”

Dudley swayed about, on the verge of apoplexy.

“You didn’t tell him?” Morton asked her.

Mellanie shook her head. “I’d better calm him down,” she murmured; she sounded exasperated, a parent running after a particularly troublesome child.

Morton looked from her to Dudley. What in Christ’s name does she see in him?

“Come on, Dudley,” Mellanie said, holding him by the hand. “We can sort all this out later.”

“No!” He yanked his hand free, leaving her startled. She winced at the strength he’d used. Morton took a pace toward them. Rob and the Cat suddenly appeared on either side of him. The Cat’s hand rested on his shoulder. “No,” she purred.

“Just fuck off,” Dudley bellowed. “Fuck off and leave me alone with myself, you stupid little tart. I’m here, do you understand? I’m here, all of me. I can be me again. Don’t try and stop that, don’t interfere. Nobody interfere.”

Mellanie’s face hardened. “As you wish, Mr. Bose.”

“They … they have somewhere we can use,” Dudley said, looking up at the alien’s sensor stalks, his face pleading. “A medical facility. We can start right away.”

“Very well,” the Bose motile said.

Dudley’s head moved around in short jerks as if it were robotic. He focused on one of the medical team in the hugely attentive audience. “You. You said there was a treatment room.”

“Yes.” The woman walked over, and tipped her head up to gaze at the alien’s sensor stalks with an awed expression on her face. She took in the electronic module merged with its flesh, the optical cable linking that to the array. “I don’t know if this will work.”

“Trust me,” the Bose motile said. “This body is built around the concept of memory transfer. It’s just a question of modifying the interface.”

“Okay, then. This way.” She led the human and motile Bose toward one of the airlock doors. Five of the security personnel fell in around them, carbines not quite pointing at the motile as it waddled along, but close. Just before it reached the door, the Bose motile bent a sensor stalk around toward Mellanie. “Pleased to meet you, by the way. I can see I’m a lucky man, if somewhat ungrateful at this moment. I would enjoy talking to you later.”

Mellanie gave the alien a pleasant smile. “I’ll look forward to it, Dudley.”

“What do you mean, ungrateful?” Dudley’s whiny voice asked as they went through the door. “And what business is it of yours?”

“Never a dull moment with Mellanie,” a voice said cheerfully in Morton’s ear.

Morton turned, and did a fast double take. Nigel Sheldon was standing beside him.

“She said she had allies,” Morton said sardonically.

“She wasn’t joking.” Nigel gave the closed wormhole a nostalgic glance. “You might want to go back when she’s finished explaining what’s going on.”

“I doubt it. Where are we, exactly?”

“Augusta.” He gave Simon a short bow. “Mr. Rand, I’ve heard good things about you. I’m sorry for your loss. Randtown was a lovely concept.”

“Mr. Sheldon,” Simon replied gravely. “Thank you for your assistance.”

“Thank Mellanie. Now, we have baths, food, and answers waiting for you. Take them in any order you want.”

“All at once,” Morton said. He went over to where Mellanie was staring at the open airlock, and put his arm around her. She grinned distantly, then glanced over at Nigel with an expression that was as confused as it was worried.

“Give me an answer when you’re ready,” Nigel said to her. There was a slight edge to his voice.

Rob turned to the Cat as everyone started to move out of the big chamber. “I don’t get it,” he complained. “She’s got Morton wrapped around her little finger. That looked like Sheldon has the hots for her, too. They say Michelangelo beds every assistant on his show, male or female. So what the fuck does she see in Bose?”

Alic Hogan had stopped wincing and sighing each time he squirmed in his seat. Every part of his body was in some kind of pain; movement created innumerable additional twinges. He couldn’t take too many drugs if he wanted to retain his mental acuity. Healskin wasn’t nearly the soft cushion its manufacturers claimed.

Just being alive was awful.

Nobody in the Paris office paid any attention to his misery. Half of them had suffered worse injuries than he on Illuminatus. Except Vic, of course. Vic was in a very different kind of pain. The big man sat at his desk for hour after hour, ripping through data like a metavirus. All of them were back reviewing Tarlo’s files, hunting for any clues that might lead them to him. A forensic team was going through his apartment, analyzing everything from his toothgell to the DNA in hair; just something—anything—that would tell them how he had been taken over by the Starflyer.

Jim Nwan handed cups of coffee around to the people working at the nest of desks they’d shoved together in the middle of the room. Alic took his without looking up from the results of the DRNG bonds; Tarlo had been quite diligent about tracing them, working up files on the buyers. None of which had been shown to Alic. But I bet the Starflyer got them all.

His coffee was just right, no sugar and a dash of cream. Acceptance was the one decent result to come out of Illuminatus; he was one of the Paris team now. Strange how much that meant to him. Strange the way loyalties shifted. Alic accepted the Starflyer’s existence now. So much of what had happened made sense once the alien’s influence was factored in. Not that he’d told the Admiral yet. The way Wilson Kime had been fired by the War Cabinet had sent a real shock wave through the navy. Even the Paris office that had always been under Columbia’s command thought the way in which Kime had been turned into a scapegoat was despicably shabby. Though the only real subject they talked about was the time travel project.

“I can’t find a damn thing on the Baron observation,” John King complained. “He must have wiped them.”

Alic glanced over at the big wall-mounted portal that was playing the Michelangelo show. Senator Goldreich was the guest, explaining how the fresh worlds would be prepared for the refugees. His e-butler changed the access to Alessandra Baron. Her guest was a pale man called Dimitri Leopoldvich, who was discussing what tactics the navy should use to engage the thousands of Prime warships remaining in the Commonwealth.

“Call the observation team direct,” Alic told John. “Get them to send copies of their reports.”

He gave the portal an evil look. God alone knew what harm Baron was causing in the long run. Now that he listened to her, really listened, he was sure he could hear nothing but contempt and mockery for everything the navy had done. She was hacking away at people’s confidence, undermining authority. All under the disguise of tough interviewing.

His e-butler told him a secure call was coming into the office for Renne. A file ran down his virtual vision, giving him Edmund Li’s record. The fact that he was from Boongate was enough to interest Alic. “Give it to me,” he told his e-butler.

“I was trying to reach Renne,” Edmund Li said.

“She’s not available,” Alic told him. Morale in the office hadn’t been helped when they all found out that there wasn’t a clinic place anywhere in the Commonwealth to re-life her; the most optimistic estimate was seven years before a slot became open. Everyone was backlogged with bodyloss victims from the Lost23; and that was before the new invasion. “I’m her commanding officer. What’s the problem?”

“Tarlo’s here.”

Alic snapped his fingers for everyone’s attention as he opened the call to a general link around his team. “How do you know?”

“Because he’s up in my office right now.”

“Where are you? What’s your office?”

“I’m at the Boongate planetary station, in the Far Away section. Right now I’m holed up in the Carbon Goose flight office in the administration block, ground floor. Tarlo is in the security office on the third floor. I managed to get a shadow scrutineer program loaded so I can follow what he’s doing.”

“How many people have you got with you?” Alic asked.

“None.”

“What?”

“There’s nobody else here. Just me and him. As far as I know, we’re the only people in the whole Far Away section.”

“Christ!” Alic could see his own dismay mirrored in the faces of the team around him. “What’s he doing?”

“Taking over the security systems which guard the perimeter. There are a lot of weapons here; they were installed in case anything hostile ever got through from Far Away. Old-fashioned stuff, but it still packs a punch. And he’s established complete control over the force field; there’s no way in and no way out. I’ve disabled a couple of the sensors in the room I’m using so he can’t see me; but if I move from here the building’s internal sensors will pinpoint me instantly.”

“I thought you said you’d got a shadow program loaded in the security arrays?”

“I have.”

“Then you must have copies of his codes. You can take command of the section’s network, shut it all down.”

“Not a chance. Now he’s in the network, he’s installing his own management routines. The shadow program is gradually being locked out.”

“Shit!” Alic thumped his fist down on the desk, wincing at the burst of pain from his burns. “All right, Edmund, are you armed?”

“Yeah, an ion pistol, Colt8000, eighty percent charge. I don’t think it’ll be much use against him. I accessed the warrant you issued. That wetwiring he’s got is heavy duty.”

“Listen, we’re coming to get you.”

“Ha! The wormhole to Boongate is closed. CST isn’t going to open it now; people would get back into the Commonwealth, Sheldon and Doi want to force everyone into the future. The only way you’re going to get to me is in twenty years’ time.”

“Unacceptable,” Vic said. The finality in the big man’s voice was intimidating.

“We’ll get you out of there, I promise,” Alic told Edmund, “even if we have to take a starship to Boongate. Now listen, I want you to keep this link open permanently. Transfer through all the data your shadow program has captured. Then I’m going to connect you up with someone in our technical department; they’ll see if there’s any way you can use your ion pistol to physically disable the force field generator.”

“You’re kidding. It’s in a building about three hundred meters from this one.”

“Okay, what about armor and force field suits? The security department must have some?”

“Sure. Up there where he is.”

“Then we’ll bring in a tactical expert to analyze your situation. Stay calm, we will get you through this.”

“If you say so. But I’d like to download my memories into a secure store if you don’t mind.”

“Of course, we’ll set one up right now.” He clicked his fingers at Matthew Oldfield, who gave a hurried nod.

“Do you know why Tarlo’s here?” Edmund asked.

“No, we don’t.”

“You can tell me, you know. It’s not like I’m going to be leaking classified information to anyone right now.”

“We genuinely don’t know, but it must be connected to Far Away somehow.”

“Yeah. I figured he’s here to help the Starflyer get home.”

“What do you know about the Starflyer?” Alic asked in surprise. Am I the only one who didn’t know it was real?

“Nothing much, really. There’s been some weird things happening on Far Away lately. It would make sense, that’s all.”

“You’re probably right. Listen, I’m going to leave you with my team now, okay? I’ll start working on a way to get to Boongate.”

“How?” Vic asked.

Alic stood up. “The Admiral. He’s got the clout to get us through.”

“Ha! He’s not going to accept this.”

“If he doesn’t accept this, then I quit.” He looked around at their startled faces, the faint smiles of approval. “It’s not much of a threat, I know. But it’s the only one I’ve got.”

“Then you tell him we quit with you,” John King said. The rest of them said, “Hell yes” and “Me, too.”

Vic put his hand on Alic’s shoulder. “Good luck. And thanks, Boss.”

When the door to Alic’s office shut, he had to sit down quickly and blow out a long breath. There was only so far impetuosity could carry you. The team was looking in at him through the glass. It actually felt very good indeed.

Oh, what the hell. That bastard Tarlo tried to kill me. That makes it personal.

His virtual finger touched the Admiral’s icon. No hesitation, he was pleased to see. The Admiral’s e-butler told Alic that his access level had been reduced to grade seven. “I’ll wait,” he told the program.

It took two and a half hours before Rafael Columbia responded. “I can give you five minutes,” he told Alic.

“We’ve located Tarlo.”

“Then arrest him.”

“He’s on Boongate.”

“Screw. It’ll have to wait, Hogan. We’ll grab him when he comes out wherever Sheldon sends him.”

“We need him now, sir. He’s a Starflyer agent.” Alic closed his eyes, half expecting a lightning bolt to slam down out of the sky and roast him behind his desk.

“Christ, not you, too? I thought you were reliable.”

“I am reliable, sir; that’s why I’m telling you this. Think about it. Tarlo’s a traitor, a double agent, that’s beyond question; I was one of the people he was shooting at on Illuminatus. Who is he working for, sir? If not the Starflyer, who is trying to destroy the Commonwealth? Tell me. Give me another name, and I’ll chase them for as long as it takes.”

There was a long pause. “You can’t get to Boongate,” the Admiral said. “This is classified, but the wormholes to the Second48 will not be reopened. The War Cabinet decided we cannot risk a stampede back into the Commonwealth. Those populations must go into the future.”

“You have the authority, sir. You can get CST to open the Boongate wormhole for us. My team and I will stay on Boongate afterward and go into the future with the rest of the population. But we must get there before the evacuation. We must establish the Starflyer’s intent. The navy needs to know. Surely you must see that?”

“You really believe it, don’t you?”

“We all do, sir.”

“Very well, Hogan, if this is to happen it doesn’t get put in the files until there’s a successful conclusion. Nonnegotiable.”

“I understand, sir.”

“Good. Put your arrest team together and get over to Wessex. I’ll see what I can do at this end.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And, Hogan, if you’re wrong, stay on Boongate. There will be no future for you, not anywhere at any time. Understand?”

“Understood, sir.”

Mellanie walked down the mansion’s broad corridor with her black lacy robe flowing out behind her. The sculpted swan wall lights were turned down to a rouge glimmer, deepening the shadows between the arches. It was two o’clock in the morning, and no one else was about.

Guilt at what she was doing only made it more exciting. Morton hadn’t stirred when she left their room. Randtown had left him more tired than he was willing to admit.

The door opened before she even tapped on it. Nigel was standing there, dressed in a loosely tied emerald bathrobe. The greedy smile on his face was one she’d seen on men countless times before—she’d thought it might be different with him. He took her hand, and hurriedly pulled her into the bedroom.

“What—” she began.

“I wouldn’t want my wives to get jealous,” he murmured as he gave the corridor a theatrical check before closing the door.

“They’re not, so don’t pretend they are.”

“Okay.” He was pressed up against her, hands removing her gown. His mouth moved to hers.

Mellanie planted a hand on his chest and pushed them apart. “Are you going to say hello, first?”

“Don’t play the Victorian bride. You came to me.” He grinned, and walked over to the huge bed. “Now come here.” He patted the furry mattress, which rippled sluggishly.

“What is this, your main orgy room?” she asked archly.

“It would be your room.”

She gave the classic white and purple decor an appreciative glance as she went over to sit beside him. “Nice, I guess.”

“Course, we’d have orgies in it. Seriously.”

She had to laugh, he was so outrageous, and honest. “Yes, I know. I met Aurelie earlier. Talk about making a girl feel inferior. And she didn’t even need reprofiling to look like that.”

“You see, you even like my other wives. What more of an incentive do you need?” His hand slipped off one of her negligee’s shoulder straps and moved down to the exposed breast.

“This is very flattering, Nigel.”

“I want it to be pleasurable, not flattering.”

Mellanie moaned hungrily. He’d got her other shoulder strap off; the negligee crumpled around her waist. His hands knew exactly how to move over her skin, the way she had to spend forever teaching other men. “It already is,” she confessed.

“So say yes.”

“No. Ahha.” She actually felt her body shake from the gentle pressure his fingers applied. It wasn’t a response she could control.

Nigel lowered her down on the mattress, then unfastened his toweling gown.

Mellanie giggled. “Nigel!”

“What did you expect?” he asked modestly. “I am the ruler of the galaxy, after all.”

“God, a man who altered his cock to match his ego.”

He grinned. “What makes you think I had it altered?”

Mellanie’s giggles returned big time. “I take it back, your ego is bigger.”

“Turn over.”

“Why?”

“Massage. To start with.”

“Oh.” She rolled onto her front. Oil that was body-warm was dripped onto her spine. He began to rub it in. “How did you know about the Cypress Island?” she asked.

“If I told you that you’ll just be cross with me. I want to have sex with you too much for that.”

“I won’t be cross.”

“You will. Why won’t you marry me?”

“Honestly?”

“Yes.”

“I wouldn’t want to share you with anyone. I like this, this is fun. And I’d even enjoy joining in with your other wives. But as a permanent thing … That’s not me. Sorry.”

“Hey, I love it. Jealousy.”

“I’m not jealous.” Mellanie tried to twist around to protest, but his hands reached her buttocks. She had to clamp her teeth to stop squealing.

“What does the SI get out of your arrangement?” Nigel asked.

“God, is there anything you don’t know?”

“I don’t know that for a start.”

“It says it just wants to know what’s going on, that’s all. I can get into places where there’s no unisphere coverage.”

“Figures. So it knew about the nature of the Primes?”

“It found out at Randtown. It hacked into their communications through my inserts.”

“Goddamn thing never told us. Bastard.” Nigel moved down to her thighs.

“Do you think it’s hostile as well?”

“I think it’s a snob. I think it looks down on us as the lower-class neighbors bringing down the tone of the galaxy. It’s not actively belligerent, but like all snobs it has a fascination for what it’s not. Hence you, and others like you. It also has sentiment, which is why it helps us out on rare occasions. Yet it will always rationalize that as something else entirely: charity or consideration born of superiority. The trouble is, I don’t know if it would help us in the face of genocide. It probably doesn’t know either. I suspect it will play its waiting game until the end. And that’s going to be too late for us.”

“Is that why you decided to nova MorningLightMountain?”

“It’s among the reasons. Nobody else is going to help us out. Does it bother you, that decision?”

“I felt MorningLightMountain,” she said slowly. “I could hear its thoughts. My inserts were blocking its soldier motiles so I was physically safe, but I was still frightened. I don’t think we can share a universe with it. You know, it completely lacked emotion; I mean there was just no analogue in its mind to what we have. I was going to say that you can’t rationalize with it, but that’s the whole problem: it’s ultra-rational. There’s no way to connect. Even the SI couldn’t make it see logic and reason. It has to go, Nigel, that’s the only way we’ll be safe.”

“Turn over.”

She did as she was told. The heat had gone out of her now; remembering Randtown and the monstrous mentality of MorningLightMountain was a guaranteed passion killer. Then Nigel began working on her belly, and breasts, and thighs, and she forgot all that again amazingly quickly.

“So how did you know?” Mellanie asked.

“Huh?”

“About Cypress Island.”

“Ah.” Nigel rolled onto his belly to face her. “Michelangelo is my son, my fifteenth.”

“What? You’re kidding. He never told me.”

“It’s not something he’s proud of. Quite the opposite, actually. He stormed out when he was seventeen.”

“Wow. I bet that doesn’t happen often.”

“No,” he said dryly. “It was a classic teenage rebellion, he even said I’ll show you, when he left. Then he went and carved that career out for himself. I’m actually quite proud of him for that. Normally the black sheep come slinking back a century later with their tails between their legs, and get a nice safe middle management position in the Dynasty.”

“So he told you I was going to Illuminatus?”

“No. We didn’t understand what was going on, Mellanie. Which comes very hard for people like me and Nelson, especially at a time like this. I cut a deal with Michelangelo. He told me you were hunting the New York lawyers, so Nelson found them in the Saffron Clinic, and gave him the information. We wanted to know why they were important to you. After all, it had the appearance of just another Wall Street finance scam.”

“I’ll kill him.”

Nigel ran his hand through her wild hair. “I said you’d be cross.”

“With him! How can I trust him again after this?”

“You trusted a reporter?”

“Touché.”

“So I’m still favorite, am I?”

“You’re in my top hundred,” she replied airily.

“This is why I want you. You are so unlike any of the other girls I have.”

She traced his lips with her finger. “You need to get out more.”

“Say yes. Just try it for a couple of years. You can still have a career, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

“It wouldn’t be my own career though would it, not really, not if I was your wife. I’d get all the openings and all the breaks, but not because of being me.”

“And the difference between that and having the SI as your agent is …?”

“Perhaps there is none,” she said quietly. “Perhaps I’m just tired of being a whore.”

“Nobody said you were a whore.”

“I said it.” Mellanie sighed, and crawled over the undulating mattress to reach her negligee. She grimaced at the snail-trail of oil she left behind on the fur.

“To reach here from where you were after Morton’s court case takes amazing determination,” he told her.

“I thought it was quite easy to get into your bed, actually.”

“I didn’t mean my bed, I meant here, this little cabal, or rebellion, whatever you want to call our motley crew. Don’t you see, what we’re going to decide in a few hours is going to determine the future of the human race. Not Doi. Not the navy. Not the Senate. Not the Dynasties. Us. You made it to the showdown. You’re going to be history, Mellanie; you’re going to be your generation’s Queen Elizabeth, or Marilyn Monroe, or Sue Baker. Don’t blink now.”

Mellanie looked down sheepishly at the negligee she was holding in her hands. She didn’t feel very historical. “I don’t know who any of them are.”

“Really? Oh. Well, the point is you went and earned yourself a place at the table. That’s why you’re so irresistible; you’re gorgeous and tough, every man’s fantasy. And mine in particular.”

“You’re very sweet.”

“Haven’t been called that in a long time.”

She yawned. “I’d better get back. I don’t want Morty to wake up without me.”

“All right,” Nigel said miserably. “Just remember, it’s an open offer.”

“Thanks. It is tempting. Does it come with a place on your lifeboat if we all make the wrong decision?”

“Yeah.” He laughed. “You get a reserved cabin with a first-class view.”

“Let me guess. Your cabin is next door.”

He spread his arms wide. “Where else?”

“Is there a shower in here? I need to get this oil off.”

Nigel leered, and climbed off the bed. “I’ll show you.”

“That’s not—oh, all right.”

He guided her toward a misty glass door that was glowing turquoise. “Tell me something. What do you see in Bose?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged, uncomfortable with the question, which was stupid considering what they’d spent the last hour doing. “He was useful.”

“And now?”

“I’m not sure. Do you think the memory transfer will work?”

“My e-butler says it seems to be running smoothly. We’ll know for sure after breakfast.”

The bathroom was only slightly smaller than the bedroom. Mellanie looked around in delight at the Egyptian theme, then giggled at the scandalous murals. Nigel went over to the sunken spa pool in the middle; it was filled with scented water that foamed away furiously. “Showers are so boring,” he said. “Let me sponge you off in this.”

Mellanie and Morton joined Nigel’s family for breakfast out on the morning terrace. Justine and Campbell were already there, fitting in just perfectly as they chattered away.

Mellanie took her seat, not far from Nigel, who gave her a courteous welcome. She told the waiter she’d have scrambled eggs and orange juice, then helped Nuala with little Digby’s bottle. The baby already had some of Nigel’s features.

Wilson and Anna arrived, to be given a warm greeting from Nigel. Mellanie thought the ex-Admiral appeared drawn and exhausted. The genuinely warm reception from people around the table helped perk him up slightly.

Mellanie’s plate arrived, the food cooked to perfection. She tucked in, trying to listen to all the conversations at once. The amount of political and financial power gathered around the table was fascinating. She found the way everyone was so casual about the influence they wielded to be quite enticing.

The mansion’s grounds were beautiful, even though the scale was a bit intimidating when it came to living a family life. It didn’t seem to bother the harem. Her e-butler accessed files on Nigel’s wives going back a hundred years, summarizing for her; they all seemed to be from rich families, not like her. Perhaps that was why they were so comfortable with their surroundings. She could sense Morton’s keen interest in the people around him, even though he was working hard at disguising it. This was the kind of super-power status he’d thought to build for himself, until Tara Jennifer Shaheef became a potential problem.

All in all, Mellanie decided, it was going to be a lot more difficult to say no to this than she’d originally envisaged. Perhaps just a couple of years’ marriage …

Paula Myo arrived, dressed as always in a trim business suit, easily the most formal person on the terrace. She turned down breakfast, but accepted a cup of tea from a waiter. “Qatux is ready,” she told Nigel.

Morton had stopped eating when she arrived, becoming very still. Now he put down his knife and fork, and stood to face her. “Investigator,” he said with forced politeness.

The terrace fell silent as everyone watched them.

“Don’t cause a scene,” a mortified Mellanie whispered through closed teeth. She didn’t think he heard.

“Morton,” Paula said.

“Pleased to see me?”

“I’m interested to see you.”

“Now, children,” Nigel said. “Play nice, please, you’re both guests.”

Mellanie had her hand around Morton’s wrist, pulling, trying to make him sit down.

“Interested, huh? Funny how life works out. You wrecked my life, now I’m essential to your future.”

“You might be involved in how we deal with the Starflyer. But you’re hardly essential.”

“What do you mean: involved?” Morton said. “Do you have any idea what risks we took to get the Bose motile to you? Do you?”

“I am very well aware of your propensity to take inappropriate risks, as well as the delusional self-justification which you indulge in subsequently.”

“Now listen—”

Mellanie was almost pulled out of her seat keeping hold of Morton as he tried to move toward Paula. “Stop it,” she barked. “You killed her, what did you expect?”

Morton gave Mellanie a shocked look. “Is that what you think?” he asked.

She wished her super-duper SI inserts had a function that could reverse time. Just a few seconds would do. “Well, did you?” she asked weakly.

Morton sat down, all his belligerence gone. “I don’t know,” he said hoarsely. “I don’t remember.”

Mellanie’s arm went around his shoulder. “It doesn’t matter, Morty. It’s all over now. It’s the past.”

Nigel gave a loud sigh, and crumpled up his napkin. “Well, as breakfast seems to be over, I suppose we’d better get started.”

Dudley Bose and the Bose motile were waiting for them in Nigel’s office. Mellanie could see Dudley obviously hadn’t slept last night. The skin under his eyes was dark, like it had been just after she met up with him. Stubble shaded his chin and cheeks, and he was still in the same clothes he wore yesterday, a rust-orange shirt and creased blue jeans. But it wasn’t the same haunted fatigue that used to be his permanent companion in those early days; Dudley actually looked contented. He was staring around the study with glazed eyes, almost as if he’d just emerged from a long sleep.

She hadn’t quite forgiven him for what he’d called her yesterday in front of everyone, even though it was heat of the moment, so she gave him a sisterly peck on the cheek. “How are you?”

“Good,” he said, and smiled as if it were a revelation. “Yes, good. Funny, isn’t it, remembering how I died is actually quite liberating. Normally it causes tremendous trouble for people who are re-lifed. I remember you telling me about Morton’s ex-wife.”

“I think she was a bit bonkers before,” Mellanie said.

Morton had been snappy at being excluded from the meeting. “Arrogant prick,” he’d muttered at Nelson, after the Dynasty security chief told him he wasn’t on the list.

“I’ll tell you everything, I promise,” Mellanie had said. In fact, she was quite relieved he wasn’t going to be there. He and Dudley in the same room would be awkward. She still didn’t have a clue what she was going to do about that—let Dudley down gently, she supposed. Of course, Morton didn’t have quite the appeal he used to; he was exciting, but then so was Nigel.

“Was it …” Mellanie didn’t quite know how to ask. “Your death, did you—”

“It was quick. I didn’t even know it was going to happen. MorningLightMountain just shot me. The only vile part is having some of its memories from when it dissected me to extract the memorycell; that’s really stomach churning.” He looked around and raised an eyebrow as Wilson and Anna came into the office. “Admiral, good to see you again.”

Wilson gave him an astounded glance before being drawn to the motile. “Dudley, glad you made it back in the end.”

“It was an interesting route,” the Bose motile said.

“Thanks for the warning,” Wilson said. “I owe you one for that. The Conway wouldn’t have made it back otherwise.”

“The Commonwealth had to be told,” Dudley said modestly. “What else could I do?”

Wilson’s gaze flicked back to the human, slightly unnerved by the double act. “Of course.”

Mellanie didn’t know what to make of Dudley, either. It bothered her; usually Dudley could barely fasten his clothes without her being there to reassure him he was doing it right. Now here he was, self-assured and calm as he talked to the one person he hated most of all. This wasn’t her Dudley, not anymore; he wasn’t even stealing lustful glances at her.

Nigel walked around the Bose motile, giving it a curious gaze before sitting behind his desk. It was quite something to have a creature in his office whose other segments regarded every other species in the galaxy as aberrations to be exterminated. His e-butler reassured him that the office’s security systems were scanning it constantly.

That didn’t seem to satisfy Nelson, who took an unusually close position beside Nigel’s desk. Campbell showed Justine to a long leather chesterfield sofa, and put out a courteous arm to help her sit down. He’d become quite protective, Nigel thought, even taking the room next to hers last night.

The study door shut behind Paula. Its e-seal came on, turning the windows slightly misty.

“Paula,” Nigel said. “Would you like to kick off?”

“Of course.” Paula stood up in front of a large portal. It came to life, showing Qatux. “Thank you for joining us,” she said.

“It is my pleasure. I recognize many of the humans with you. So many powerful figures. How emotions must be charged in that room.”

“We’re all stimulated by what is happening,” Paula said. “I should tell everyone here that Qatux joins us today because after Illuminatus—”

“Actually,” Dudley said, “I think I should be first. I have the most relevant information.”

Nigel didn’t say anything; in fact, he was rather intrigued by this new, composed Dudley, who had all the brash confidence of the old astronomer who’d lobbied so effectively for a place on the Second Chance, but without the immense irritation factor. He caught Mellanie sinking down into the cushions, her hand rubbing at her forehead, avoiding all eye contact with Dudley.

“All right, Dudley,” Nigel said with bogus civility. “Please go ahead.”

“I know what the Starflyer is,” the astronomer said.

“What?” Nigel asked.

“There is something I’d like in return for participating today.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve been through a lot, and I’m contributing more than anyone else. I believe that should receive some recognition, don’t you?”

“Dudley!” Mellanie said. “Don’t you understand what this is?”

“Perfectly, thank you, Mellanie. Are you sure you do?”

“What do you want?” Nigel asked.

“To continue as your chief advisor on MorningLightMountain should it be successful in destroying the Commonwealth.”

“Ah,” Nigel said. “I see. A berth on one of my lifeboats.” He saw Mellanie start to color, the girl’s shoulders lifted in anger.

“Hardly an extravagance for you,” Dudley said.

“No. Does this request extend to your new twin?”

Dudley shrugged. “If you wish.”

Nigel was tempted to wait long enough to hear what Mellanie was going to shout at her erstwhile lover, because she was clearly about to—unfortunately they didn’t need contention right now. “It will be done.”

“Thank you,” Dudley said. “Very well: while it was at the structure we named the Watchtower, the Second Chance transmitted a signal to the Dyson Alpha homeworld.”

“We know that,” Wilson told him. “Oscar found a record of the dish deployment in our log files. But the Starflyer got to them before we could tell anyone.”

“But do you know what it transmitted?” Dudley asked, keen to maintain his advantage.

“No.”

“It was a warning that the Second Chance was alien, and should be destroyed. The message was in the Primes’ communications pattern.”

“I don’t understand,” Wilson said.

“The Primes did leave Dyson Alpha before the barrier was erected,” Dudley said. “Their fusion drives were allowing them to colonize every other planet and large asteroid in their system. They could see that one day all their star system’s resources would be exhausted. Several of the immotile clusters sent ships out to their neighboring star, Dyson Beta, to establish colonies there. They are a very insular and arrogant species, the Primes; they assumed Dyson Beta would have material resources and nothing more. They were wrong. The immotile on board the first starship found another alien species. It followed its nature, and fought the new species into submission. After that, it absorbed their industrial and scientific base.

“That’s where the real problem started. The Primes on Dyson Alpha, the original Primes, have continuity built into their souls; it’s an integral part of their racial identity. They can remember their ancestors beginning to think, their own rise to consciousness. Those ancient thoughts lock them into what they are. A lone immotile three and a half years distant from its original immotile group cluster was a little more flexible in attitude. The native Dyson Beta species were developing genetics, the whole concept of which is verboten to the Primes. But the starship immotile started to use genetic science to modify itself physically, and God knows there are a lot of minor limitations and deficiencies in all creatures. The motiles were improved drastically, which led to a subsequent improvement in immotiles. For a start they regained their ability to move.”

Dudley gave his audience a mirthless smile. “The Dyson Alpha Primes were horrified. They called the Dyson Beta hybrids alienPrime, and regarded them as heretical abominations. A war started, then ended very abruptly when the barriers appeared around both stars. The next time MorningLightMountain saw the universe was when the barrier came down, and it received a signal from an immotile whose communications pattern identified it as MorningLightMountain17,735. That was a subsidiary group cluster MorningLightMountain had put on one of the early starships. That’s what the Starflyer is.”

“The Starflyer is MorningLightMountain?” Mellanie asked.

“An alienPrime version of MorningLightMountain, yes. It was on a starship that must have been in space between Dyson Alpha and Beta when the barriers were established. When it couldn’t attack its target, or go home, it must have flown off into interstellar space, and finally crashed on Far Away.”

“I’m afraid not,” Wilson said. “I checked with the Institute director, James Timothy Halgarth, personally. The Marie Celeste couldn’t have come from Dyson Beta; it hadn’t been in space long enough to travel that far.”

“If you’re basing that assumption on information from the Institute, then it must be regarded as invalid,” Paula said. “The Director would have lied to you to cover up the Starflyer’s true nature.”

“We’ve been sucked into the worst kind of war,” Nelson muttered.

“In what way?” Campbell asked.

“This is a civil war. They’re always the most violent and hard fought. And we’re caught in the middle of it.”

“No, we’re fighting for the Starflyer,” Nigel said. “We’re its storm troopers, whether we like it or not. If what Dudley has told us about the original Primes is true, then the Starflyer knows they will never allow the alienPrimes to survive. It’s using us to fight them, and conveniently ourselves, into destruction. We’re the new class of motile, to be manipulated and sent out to die while it remains intact behind the battle lines.”

“That’s why MorningLightMountain had flare bombs,” Wilson said in a relieved tone. “The technology didn’t leak from us to Dyson Alpha; the Primes had it all along. The Starflyer fed the theory to us. Oh! Wait. When the barrier fell we detected an unusual quantum signature inside the Dark Fortress. It wasn’t there before.” He turned to Nigel. “Have you got secure access to navy records?”

“Yes.”

“Get your physicists to compare that signature to the flare bombs.”

“Good idea.” Nigel’s expanded mentality extracted the records and began running comparisons. He still found it amusing the way people always forgot what he was before everything else; all they ever saw today was the imperial Dynasty leader, never the old physicist pushing back the frontier of human knowledge.

“This still doesn’t make sense,” Anna said. “The Starflyer obviously has the ability to switch off the barrier. Why didn’t it just do that when it arrived at Dyson Alpha in the Marie Celeste and launch the flare bomb? Or go back to Dyson Beta and let its own kind out?”

“The barrier builders were still around, maybe?” Wilson said. “It needed a decent interval to elapse before it could risk any kind of rescue attempt. That’s probably why it fled so far in the first place.”

“Even so, it engineered the Second Chance mission; why not have us sent to Dyson Beta and release the alienPrimes? The original Primes would remain locked up.”

“It didn’t know what would happen any more than we did,” Paula said. “This way it wins whatever the outcome. If the barrier builders were still around and it had tried to switch off the barrier around Dyson Beta, they would have detected the attempt and stopped us. By making the attempt at Dyson Alpha, it gets to see if the barriers are still guarded. If not, it releases an ultra-hostile species directly into conflict with us, a race with a proven record of warfare and a technology base advanced enough to construct the kind of weapons necessary to fight an interstellar war. The two of us fight and weaken ourselves, leaving it free to unlock Dyson Beta so its own kind can emerge into a galaxy where the two nearest threats have blasted each other to the edge of extinction.” She pursed her lips ruefully. “Almost exactly what Bradley Johansson claimed all along.”

Results slipped into Nigel’s virtual vision. “The quantum signatures are similar,” he told the room. “Not identical, but they’re certainly based around the same principle. From what we could determine, the Prime flare bomb works by altering the properties of the surrounding mass, which in itself is a none too distant relation to our own quantumbuster. We can surmise that if you change the properties of enough components in the Dark Fortress, then they’ll simply be incapable of performing their intended function: the barrier will fail.”

“So we finally know what we’re facing,” Justine said. “I take it nobody minds if I tell Johansson.”

“As long as he keeps quiet about it until the Starflyer problem has been dealt with,” Nigel told her. “This still isn’t for public release.”

“Well, how much of a problem have we actually got left?” Justine asked. “We have a weapon which in all probability the Starflyer didn’t expect us to produce. Your nova bomb will give us a total victory over MorningLightMountain. Now we know it exists, we can effectively neutralize it.”

“Paula?” Nigel asked. “Can we neutralize it?”

“I’m not certain. Qatux, do you know how far its influence extends?”

The portal image showed the Raiel watching them patiently. “This is obviously exciting for all of you,” it said in its soft wind-chime voice. “I wish I could share the experience.”

“Qatux, please answer the question,” Paula said sternly.

“Isabella Halgarth came into contact with many people who suffered the same compulsion overlay. They are arranged in a three-person structure based on the old human spy cell system. The controller can put them in touch with each other for specific operations, but apart from that they operate in isolation.”

“So you understand the method which the Starflyer uses to control her and the others?”

“It is a sophisticated technique, indicating the controller has a great deal of experience in manipulating the thought routines of other creatures. A Prime-type entity would have an obvious advantage over singleton mentalities; its understanding of mental constitution operates at an instinctive level.”

“What did it do to Isabella?” Mellanie asked, her voice heavy with trepidation. She obviously feared what she was about to hear, but had to know anyway.

“Her thought routines, what you would term the personality, were infiltrated with alien behavioral modifiers. She performed as a normal human under everyday circumstances, but within that framework she acted solely in the interests of the Starflyer. Think of it as having your mind cored like an apple, and the hole being filled with the Starflyer’s desires.”

“How old was she when this happened?” Paula asked.

“Five or six. The memory is hazy. She was on Far Away with her parents. They took her into a room that resembled a hospital; she was scared. After that, her mind was no longer hers.”

“Urggh.” Mellanie wrinkled her nose up. “It did that to a six-year-old? That’s so shitty.”

“Ahh,” Qatux sighed. “Sentiment. I have experienced it often in human memories. It is one of your more exquisite feelings. Would you consider sharing yours with me, Mellanie?”

“Uh. Like: no!”

“So you don’t actually know what the Starflyer is thinking?” Paula said.

“No,” Qatux said. “However, there are residual traces of its presence within her mind which betray certain aspects of its character.”

“Such as?”

“Alterations made to the original directives. Isabella and other agents very abruptly received new instructions when the Commonwealth first announced it was building a starship. They were originally working on the assumption that a series of wormholes would be opened to Dyson Alpha. Its whole strategy had to be altered to incorporate the development of superluminal travel. Isabella was also unaware of your quantumbuster weapon, she was expecting the navy to use flare bombs against MorningLightMountain’s second invasion. That was the information which her kind were supplying to the Seattle team.”

“And we improved on it,” Wilson said tightly.

“Has Isabella got any memory of Alessandra Baron being a Starflyer agent?” Mellanie asked eagerly.

“Yes. Isabella was brought into the operation to hide the New York lawyers when Alessandra Baron learned you were investigating them.”

“Gotcha, you bitch!” Mellanie punched the air. “Yes!”

“Not relevant at this point,” Paula said dismissively. “Qatux, does Isabella know where the Starflyer is, or will be?”

“No. She only knows what she is supposed to do. She was on Illuminatus to join up with the lawyers after they had been given new identities. They would all receive their assignment then.”

“Johansson says it will now return to Far Away,” Justine said.

“It can’t,” Nigel told her. “Not unless it’s already on Boongate, in which case it might stand a chance. The wormhole from Wessex to Boongate will not be opened to transport again.”

“Then it is confined to the Commonwealth,” Paula said. “Qatux, if we take known Starflyer agents into custody can you read their memories for us? At some point, we should encounter one who knows where it is. It is important that we apprehend it as swiftly as possible. Will you come to the Commonwealth to assist me?”

“I would find such a venture most appealing. I would wish to be engaged through your own perception and interpretation facilities.”

Paula faced the Raiel’s image, her face devoid of any expression. “We have discussed this before. You may not leech my emotional state.”

“Is not your task an urgent one? Is this not how humans behave? Is not the price negotiated in advance?”

“Well, yes,” Paula said, flummoxed by the request. “But you will access the agent’s thoughts, you will experience their emotions. That is our standard payment.”

“Their emotional levels are much reduced, suppressed by the Starflyer’s behavioral modifiers. They mimic true feelings, they do not experience them for themselves, there is nothing there for me. You, though, Investigator, would feel a great deal as this case is wrapped up, the culmination of a hundred thirty years of work. I would know what that is like.”

“I …” Paula looked around the study for help.

“I should let you stew in that one,” Mellanie said. “But I’ll be big. My price is an interview when all this is over.”

“You’ll let it feel through you?” Paula asked.

“No, but I know a girl who will, and she’s already wetwired for it.” Mellanie turned to the portal, already looking victorious. “Qatux, how about I get you someone who’s a lot more emotional than the Investigator is? Let’s face it, she’s a bit of a cold fish.”

“That would be acceptable.”

“Great. Nelson, I’ll need some bodyguards to help me collect her.”

“Bodyguards? You’re not going to kidnap someone, are you?”

“Not for her, for me. I’m not very popular with her friends.”

“You can have bodyguards,” Nigel said. He grinned admiringly. “Anything else?”

“An express ticket to Darklake City.”

“Of course.”

“Who are you going to arrest?” Mellanie asked Paula.

“Every agent Isabella came in contact with.”

“Good, that’ll include Baron, then. I’ll cover that arrest for Michelangelo.”

“It wasn’t her that used and abused you,” Paula said. “She is no longer human.”

“She never was,” Mellanie said gruffly.

“Assuming all this leads us to the Starflyer, what are we going to do with it when we find it?” Justine asked.

“Execute it,” Wilson said.

“Quietly,” Nigel said quickly.

“If Johansson is right about it trying to return to Far Away, and he’s been right about everything else, then it will have to reach Boongate via Wessex,” Justine said. “The Guardians are watching for that. Now might be a good time to help them. We’ve got Morton and his squad; they’d be able to take out anything guarding the Starflyer’s train.”

Nigel gave Nelson a questioning glance.

“They could spearhead,” Nelson said. “But it would have to be our operation; I’m not having rogue groups running around near the wormhole generators, no matter how good the cause. We’ve seconded half of our technical personnel to Narrabri to help modify the wormhole generators for the future settlement project. We can’t risk any kind of firefight there.”

“All right,” Nigel said. “We’ll set up at Narrabri. There’s enough space in our planetary station to hide this, and we can get Qatux there without drawing attention. Let’s get started.”

The stealth coat wrapped Stig in a gray-black haze as if he’d been devoured by his own private event horizon. Above him, the midnight sky was dominated by the twinkling stars of Neptune’s Trident, the constellation that marked his birth. Directly ahead, the chain-link fence stretched out for kilometers, a straight line slicing through the low grass like some kind of border between nations rather than a mere aerodrome perimeter. Even with the starlight it was dark out in the surrounding fields where he’d been waiting. His retinal inserts were switched to enhancement, giving the damp land a blue-gray hue. Sleeping sheep were huddled together for warmth. There were flocks on both sides of the fence. The aerodrome was spread over such a big area it was cheaper to give the local farmers grazing rights than buy and maintain a fleet of mowerbots.

He reached the fence in the middle of a hundred-meter section where there were no lights. The poles and the fittings were there; they just didn’t work. His bolt cutters cut through the slim strands of rusted metal as if they were paper. By now he was feeling ridiculous with the whole superagent covert mission setup. There was no real security at the aerodrome, just a couple of overweight guards who spent their nights sitting around the management building raiding the canteen kitchen and watching local dramas on their portals. He could have walked in through the main gate and they’d never know.

Usually.

And that was the one thing that Adam had lectured him about ceaselessly. There was no usual. So here he was jogging over a kilometer of open field between the gate and the back of the vast hangars for the sake of procedure.

“How’s it going?” Olwen asked.

“Good. Be there in five minutes or so.” Sweat was running down his skin now; the stealth coat on top of his usual jacket, force field skeleton, and weapons meant he was carrying quite a weight.

He reached the first row of hangars, and jogged down the strip of hard ground between them, where mosses and weeds were smothering the crumbling gray concrete. On either side of him the ends of the vast buildings presented perfect black semicircles against the star-filled sky. Almost sixty meters high at the apex, their sliding doors had been shut against the elements decades ago, never to be opened again. They rattled constantly now as the gentle breeze from the North Sea swept over the aerodrome. Built by the revitalization project, they were made out of the ubiquitous carbon panels pinned to a geodesic grid of carbon girders. Age and neglect had seen the pins and epoxy decay and fray, allowing blustery weather to worry away at the edges and joints. Each hangar had lost hundreds of panels to the wind, while others now hung by a single tenuous pin, swaying from side to side in the slightest gust. They clattered away against the framework as Stig moved deeper into the deserted ghost city. He turned off the wide thoroughfare to cut through toward the next row. The irregular gaps in the curving walls of the hangars on each side gave glimpses of the interiors. All of them were empty, stripped of machinery and support equipment. Dead cabling and pipes dangled down from unseen conduits overhead. Water leaked in through the missing panels to pool in long dank puddles on the concrete floor.

The final row of hangars, which the remaining blimpbots operated out of, were kept in a better state of repair, with so many new panels fixed to the framework they produced a check pattern so pronounced it looked like the original design. Maintenancebots stood along the base of the walls, their wide, flexible crawler trolleys looking alarmingly spindly for the weight they had to carry.

Powerful halogen bulbs on the top of the hangars produced elongated smears of light down the thoroughfare, which were easy enough for Stig to avoid. His sensors couldn’t detect any kind of electronic activity, anyway. The management building was at the end of the row, another construct of molded carbon panels that had been modified and added to over the years to become a strange amalgamation of cubes, cylinders, and domes.

Stig avoided the main entrance, and walked around to one of the smaller doors at the side. It wasn’t even locked. Every light was on inside. He moved through the corridors, going up and down stairs, checking rooms. The whole place was completely deserted, not even the guards had turned up for their shift.

Stig finished up in the security office, and opened a link to Olwen. “Everything clear in here. I’ve loaded our software into the arrays. I’m opening the gate for you now.” A bank of screens showed various camera images of the aerodrome, with the biggest concentration around the main entrance, the management building, and the inside of the operational hangars. He watched the barrier at the main entrance lift up. A couple of minutes later, the Guardians drove their three trucks through.

He met them outside the service door on the first hangar; it occupied a small corner segment of the flight doors, but it was still big enough to take two trucks side by side. Olwen climbed down out of the cab once they were inside.

“I’ve never been this close to one before,” she said in admiration.

There were two blimpbots tethered end to end inside the hangar. The dark ellipsoid shapes were a hundred fifty meters long, and fifty meters high. With their ducted fans folded back along the fuselage their resemblance to airborne whales was even more acute.

“Me neither,” he admitted. Up close, the blimpbots weren’t quite so impressive. Their fuselage envelopes had as many patches as the hangar that sheltered them, although they were a lot neater. The series of payload bay doors that lined the belly were open, showing various mechanical latches and grabs in the cavities. “I didn’t expect them to be this crude.”

“But they’ll do the job,” she said. “How many are there?”

“Twenty-two in the hangars. Three have had their flightworthiness certificate withdrawn, pending maintenance, but they’ll do for what we want.”

The other Guardians were climbing down out of the trucks.

“Let’s get at it,” Olwen told them. “We can install most of our systems by morning.”

“The next wormhole cycle starts midafternoon,” Stig said. “That’ll give us enough time to get them all airborne and positioned. They can circle the city until we call them in.”

“What about the revitalization team and the engineers?”

“I don’t think they’re coming back. This place is abandoned. And if they do show up, we’ll just hang on to them so they don’t raise the alarm.”

“All right then.”

One of the trucks had been backed up as close as it could get to the underside of the first blimpbot. The Guardians let the rear gate down, and pulled out a set of wheel ramps. Stig and Olwen went over to help them. A trollybot inched its way down the wheel ramps, carrying a fat cylinder nearly four meters long. The metal ramps creaked under it, betraying the weight of the cylinder.

“Are these going to work?” Olwen asked.

“I hope so.” Stig peered up into the truck. “We’ve only got six. I’d be pleased if just one of them reaches 3F Plaza.” He could see another of the cylinders resting on its cradle inside. Crates full of decoy drone and chaff dispensers were strapped to the floor around it. “We need to fit dispensers to all the blimpbots, including the ones we’ve armed. That way the Institute won’t be able to spot the difference until it’s too late.”

“No kidding?” Olwen said.

“Sorry. I get kind of nervous around bombs like this.”

They followed the trollybot as it rolled down to the central payload bay. The Guardians started to attach the blimpbot’s internal hoist cables to the cylinder.

“We’re picking up a lot more rumors from the Institute troops,” Olwen said. “They’re all talking about some kind of attack on the Commonwealth.”

“The Primes again,” Stig said.

“Yeah, but, Stig, it was a big attack; they’re consistent about that. It’s making them very jittery. There’s even been talk about some of them breaking through to Half Way.”

“Stupid of them. They don’t know if there are any Carbon Goose planes left at Port Evergreen.”

“It was only a whisper.”

Probably true, though, Stig thought. Guardians and their supporters had taken jobs at the pubs and clubs that the Institute troops had established as their own in Armstrong City. They provided a slow but steady trickle of information on the troops and their assignments. Morale, already low, was heading downhill fast. The soldiers had all signed up for medium-term contracts to help the Institute combat raids from guerrilla bands out on the Great Iril Steppes; none of them expected to be doing urban paramilitary duties. Being the most hated group on the planet, subject to constant abuse and harassment, was taking its toll. Their officers had to let them out at night; safe together, they drank and bitched like any soldier since Troy.

“Anybody let on if they’re expecting an arrival?”

“I’d have told you. They don’t know, too low down the food chain.”

“It can’t be long now.”

She watched the heavy cylinder rise up into the cargo bay, flinching each time the ancient winch chains let out a creak of protest at the weight. “You’ve done everything you can do. It can only come through at preset times, and we know what those are to the second. We’ve got 3F Plaza covered by every kind of sensor the human race has ever invented. If those troops even so much as glance at the gateway we’ll know about it. So stop worrying, we’ve got it covered.”

Stig looked up at the blimpbots, and laughed at the audacity of the plan they’d come up with. “Right, who’s going to notice a goddamn airship on a bombing run? Dreaming heavens!”

“Nobody,” she said, smiling back with the same wild enthusiasm. “That’s the beauty. Fly them in low enough, and they’ll be over the walls of 3F Plaza before the Institute can aim a single weapon at them.”

“I hope you’re right.” He gave a start as the winch mechanism stopped with a nasty metallic grinding sound. The bomb was completely inside the bay. “Let’s work out how to get this brute secure. I really do want to have them all in the air by morning.”

Oscar didn’t expect a downtime of more than six hours. Enough to recharge the Dublin’s niling d-sinks, and reload the forward section with Douvoir missiles and quantumbusters. Fleet Command had indicated they’d be sent right back to Hanko. After the wormholes had vanished, they’d destroyed over eighty Prime ships before their armaments were depleted.

As soon as the starship eased its bulk into a docking station at Base One, the secure encrypted message popped into Oscar’s hold file. Admiral Columbia wanted to see him right away. Along with the rest of the crew, Oscar was still in shock by the way the War Cabinet had dumped shit from a great height on Wilson. Resentment was a strong twin of that feeling; he was tempted to tell his new commander where to shove his meeting, an impulse made worse by worry that Columbia was implementing a political clearout of his new office. Oscar had been one of the first people Wilson had recruited, making him a prominent loyal member of the old regime.

However, you can’t go around judging people on the basis of your own emotional prejudices. So Oscar did the mature thing, and sent a message back saying he was on his way. Sir.

“If the shit fires you, we walk, too,” Teague said.

“Don’t,” Oscar said as he left for the small shuttle craft. “The navy needs you.” Where have I heard that phrase before?

Nothing physical had changed at Pentagon II. Senior staff seemed twitchy as Oscar went through the offices and corridors, but then they were in the middle of organizing a battle to defend human worlds against forty-eight alien armadas. They were allowed to be twitchy.

Rafael Columbia had taken over Wilson’s sterile white office. He was alone when Oscar was shown in.

No witnesses, Oscar thought immediately. Oh, for God’s sake, get a grip.

Columbia didn’t get up; he simply waved Oscar into a chair with easy familiarity. “I have a problem, Oscar.”

“I’ll resign if it makes it easier. We can’t afford any more internal disruption.”

Columbia frowned in genuine surprise, then smiled briefly. “No, not that. You’re an excellent starship captain. Just look at the Dublin’s performance.”

“Thank you.”

“I have a problem somewhat closer to home. I might have made a mistake.”

“Happens to us all, sir. You should see my list.” Actually, you shouldn’t.

“I’m receiving a lot of information which indicates the Starflyer is a real and current threat. The evidence is building, Oscar. In the past I’ve always dismissed it, but I can’t do that anymore, no matter how personally uncomfortable that may prove to be.”

“It scared the living shit out of me when I found out.”

Columbia stared at him, before finally grinning a reluctant submission. “I might have known. Very well, this makes it easier. For both of us.”

“What do you need?”

“A confirmed traitor has turned up on Boongate, a navy officer called Tarlo. My Paris office is putting together an arrest team; but of course all the wormholes to the Second47 are shut by War Cabinet edict. I need that traitor, Oscar, he can prove or disprove the whole Starflyer legend once and for all.”

“You want me to fly there?”

“No. For the moment we’re keeping this dark; God knows what kind of shitstorm it would stir up if word leaks out before we’ve got it contained. I want you to be my personal emissary to Nigel Sheldon; you must emphasize just how important this is. Ask him to quietly open the wormhole and let the Paris team through. Nobody else, just them.”

“You want me to ask that?” Oscar couldn’t believe what he was hearing, even though it was very flattering.

“Your record ever since Bose witnessed the Dyson Alpha enclosure is impeccable. You were also highly placed in CST before the war. Nigel Sheldon will see you and listen to what you say; I don’t have that level of political capital with him today, and I’m reluctant to bump this up a level by asking Heather to intercede on my behalf. If he agrees to open the wormhole I want you on-site at Narrabri to oversee the mission. I need your dependability, Oscar.”

Oscar stood up. He damn near saluted. “I’ll do my best, sir.”

It was another beautifully clear dawn in the Dessault Mountains as the sparkling constellations slowly washed away into the brightening sapphire sky. Samantha had no time for admiration as the gentle early morning radiance filtered through the open doorway of the ancient shelter. Her skin was hot and sticky inside the thick protective one-piece garment that she and the rest of the team wore while they were working close to the niling d-sink. Modern d-sinks had integral reactive em shielding, but the ones she was dealing with were decades old, and their passive shielding had broken down long ago. This one had been in place for sixty years, receiving and storing power from the solid state heat exchange cable that had been drilled two kilometers into the base of the mountain. She’d spent all night modifying the power emission module. Its original control array had needed replacing, never an easy thing to do with a live system. And there was a lot of basic circuit maintenance that had to be carried out; the niling d-sinks were good high-quality systems, but they’d never been designed with sixty years of continuous use in mind.

It had taken the best part of seven hours, looking through a scuffed, misted visor in the light of four paraffin lamps. Her back ached, her fingers were numb, her head was full of the coding from obsolete programs. She clambered slowly to her feet, hating the sound her joints made as she moved. It was like being an old woman.

“Run the connection verifier,” she told Valentine, the convoy’s technical chief.

“Got it,” he shouted from outside.

Samantha picked up the handheld arrays lying on the crumbling enzyme-bonded concrete floor, and closed the wicks on the paraffin lamps one by one. She was confident enough that the power connections would work. This was the ninth manipulator station they’d set up in five weeks, making her quite an expert on the old niling d-sinks.

“We got power flow,” Valentine called.

Samantha went to the open door, stretching elaborately to work the knots out of her too-stiff muscles. The sun was just rising over the foothills, revealing Trevathan Gulf, the huge valley that stretched out below her. They were on the northwestern corner of the Dessault range, only four hundred kilometers from Mount Herculaneum. Every day, she thought she could see the crest of the gigantic volcano rising through the shimmering air when she looked to the south, a gray splinter hovering tantalizingly along the horizon. Other people in the convoy said she was imagining things. Aphrodite’s Seat ought to be visible from their altitude, possibly the glacier ring as well. Today her eyes were just too tired to peer through the thin air.

Bright sunlight washed along Trevathan Gulf, sparking off the multitude of tributary streams that wound their way through forests of deciduous trees that had colonized the valley floor. The Gulf was a geological fault pushing out from the Grand Triad to split the Dessault range like a highway bulldozed by fallen angels. Its softly meandering course ran over seven hundred kilometers from the base of Mount Zeus in the west to the scrubland border of the High Desert in the east. Eighteen big rivers, and hundreds of smaller streams, drained out of it through the valleys of the sundered northernmost mountains to spill across the Aldrin Plains. Winding rivers carried the water across the grasslands to the North Sea. It was an irrigation system that supported nearly a quarter of the farms on the planet.

Translucent cottontuft clouds scudded low over the treetops, precursors to the heavy storm residue that would arrive later that morning after it had raged around the Grand Triad. Once the dark cumulus was overhead, it would rain for at least three hours. Given the Gulf’s altitude, the water was always cold, sometimes threaded with sleet. The caravan had endured the chilly, rainy climate for weeks now as they helped set up for the planet’s revenge.

“Good job,” Harvey said in his rasping voice. He was standing just outside the shelter, dressed in the same mustard-yellow protective suit that everyone in the caravan wore.

“Same old job,” she replied.

“Yes, but done well. And that is vital.”

“Are we going to start the test?”

“Aye.”

They walked away from the shelter with its thick cladding of ivy. When the hole had been drilled for the solid state heat exchange cable and the shelter erected around the niling d-sink, this had been a broad swathe of open land on the northern side of the Gulf, with just a few saplings struggling for life on the stony foothills. Now with the rain nurturing the grass, lichens, and mosses spread by the revitalization team, the trees had thrived. There was no clear ground anymore, the forest had spread out from the floor of Trevathan Gulf to rise up toward the peaks in a wavy line broken by gullies and ridges. Genemodified pines were in a majority up here on the slopes, though vigorous sycamores were always challenging them for space, and equally prolific species like white poplars and maples fell away in proportion to the altitude above the valley floor. The shelter was now surrounded by bushy weeping pines twenty meters high that crowded aggressively around spindly horn-beams and birch trees. A variety of ivy that had leaves so dark they were nearly black plagued everything; carpeting the sandy ground and swaddling the trunks of every tree. The shelter had been completely swamped by the thick creeper. It had taken them an hour to find and clear the doorway again.

Even without the ivy, the forest provided excellent cover for the shelter, and all its cousins, along the Trevathan Gulf, but reaching it was difficult. The caravan could drive across the foothills above the forest line, plowing through the streams and following the contours around sharp folds; but pushing through the trees was a specialist business. The Guardians Samantha was working with had stolen a JCB trailblazer from one of the tour companies that provided hyperglider flights over the Grand Triad. Its big forward roller-scythe of harmonic blades was the only way of chewing through the forest to reach the shelter. Once they’d reached it, the big machine had circled around in a spiral, clearing ground to set up the station equipment. Samantha knew it was the only way, but she couldn’t help thinking that from the air the trailblazer’s path must look like a giant arrow cutting through the trees, pinpointing their stations. It was a good job there weren’t many aircraft on Far Away.

The equipment they’d set up sat on the springy mat of wood chips spewed out by the trailblazer. It had taken three trucks to carry the crates that they’d unpacked. In two days, the components had been assembled into a ungainly five-sided pyramid of black metal, standing seven meters high. Dew was already collecting in the crevices and ridges as the sun rose high enough to shine on the bulky machine.

Samantha and Harvey walked around its base, toward the road that the trailblazer had carved. Two McSobel technicians were fussing over an open panel, which revealed a matrix of red and amber lights. Valentine was standing behind them. “Any minute now,” he said.

The convoy’s vehicles were parked in a line back down the broken path, out of range from the hazardous em pulses given off by the niling d-sink. When she was three hundred meters from the shelter, Samantha took her helmet off and took a deep breath of cool, moist, unfiltered air. The scent of pine was thick in the air as she trod on the shattered splinters of bark and mashed needles.

“I’d like you to handle the last two stations,” Harvey wheezed.

“Why? Where are you going?”

He pulled off his helmet. Sunlight shone on the thick translucent bands of skin that crisscrossed his cheeks and neck, giving his ruined face a milky texture. “A message came in last night while you were busy. The clans are putting together raiding parties in case the Starflyer gets through the gateway at 3F Plaza. They’ll be spread along Highway One.”

“You can’t,” she said automatically, then sucked in her lower lip. “Sorry.”

“It’s only surface damage,” he said cheerfully. “I can still ride, and I can certainly still shoot—better than any of these lads who call themselves warriors these days. Besides, there’s a rumor the Barsoomians will join us. Now who could resist that?”

“No one, I suppose,” she said with a sigh. Trying to argue him out of it would be useless, she knew.

“Now don’t you go worrying about me. What you’re doing is the truly important thing.”

“Sure. What about Valentine?”

“He’s a good techhead, but we need someone who can drive this on. That’s you.”

“Thanks, but you know we can’t complete all the stations. We don’t have the equipment.”

“Have a little faith in Bradley Johansson, he’ll get the last components to us in time. Meanwhile, you can assemble the systems we do have, ready for the final installation.”

“I heard that we can only build another four functioning stations.”

“You heard just about right. Bradley will deliver the equipment to complete the last eight. Don’t worry.”

“He’s cutting it very fine.”

“I’m sure they have their problems out there in the Commonwealth.”

“Yeah,” she said, not liking what a gripe she sounded.

“But what?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Did you have to?”

“All right,” she admitted. “I wanted to be on the team that goes up to Aphrodite’s Seat.”

“Well, the dreaming heavens know you’ve earned a place. If you finish the last two stations on schedule, and Bradley delivers the remaining components to bring the network up to operational status, you should get to the Nalosyle Vales in time to make the rendezvous.”

“That’s bribery.”

Harvey chuckled, a nasty liquid rumbling sound.

They reached the first parked truck. Over a dozen Guardians were grouped around it, waiting. Ferelith was holding on to an excited Lennox. When she let go, the little boy toddled unsteadily to his mother, a delighted smile on his face. Samantha picked him up, and turned to face the new station they’d built. Valentine and the last two technicians were running down the track. She could just see the edge of the black pyramid about six hundred meters away in the shelter’s new clearing.

The latecomers all pulled their helmets off.

“Everyone here?” Valentine asked. Without waiting, he raised a handheld array, and entered the activation sequence. Samantha brought up her own handheld array, juggling Lennox onto one arm as she tried to watch the power supply symbols.

The air around the clearing sparkled as the pyramid generated its base force field eight hundred meters wide, stabilizing the whole structure. She could feel the ground trembling slightly as the force field permeated the rock beneath them, anchoring itself solidly into place. It was that single function that had made construction of the generators so difficult, almost half of the components had to be custom built for them inside the Commonwealth. Standard force fields couldn’t permeate solid matter for more than a few meters at best. Nothing moved inside the bubble of energy, the leaves on every tree were stilled as the now-lustrous air solidified.

“Stage two,” Valentine shouted.

Samantha tilted her head back, and pointed for Lennox. The little boy stared up curiously into the sky.

Five long blades of air shimmered above the existing force field. Their shape was tenuous at first, but as the initial energy surge was absorbed, the air calmed as its molecules were rearranged and locked into new shapes. There was only the faintest of diffraction layers left to reveal the contours, slight pressure fissures cutting through the clear sapphire sky, but it was sufficient for the naked eye to make out. From Samantha’s angle, it was as though the blade shapes were made from high-quality glass. They curved away gently from each other, expanding until they were half a kilometer wide and separated by three kilometers; then they began the long curve back to a single point eight kilometers above the fresh clearing in the forest.

“The universe’s biggest egg-whisk,” Harvey growled.

As Samantha watched, grinning at his description, thin streamers of cloud hit a couple of the unyielding blades and twisted sharply away. Gentle gusts were washing against her as the breeze that blew constantly along Trevathan’s Gulf was deflected by the blades.

“Stage three,” Valentine warned.

The blades began to move, rotating clockwise, very slowly. After five minutes they’d finished a complete circle, and stopped. Samantha felt the wind they’d stirred race across the road in a giant slothful pressure wave, causing the trees to sway. Her protective suit flapped about, while her sweaty hair swirled around her head. Lennox laughed delightedly.

“We did it,” Harvey said. “Again. What was the power use?”

Samantha consulted her handheld array. “Four percent.”

“That’s a lot.”

Above them, the blades vanished. Then the base force field released its grip on the surrounding rock and air. A zephyr swept along the road as the air currents churned back into their original patterns.

“Initialization uses a disproportionate amount of power,” she said. “Don’t worry, there’ll be enough for the planet’s revenge.”

Four identical black Cadillac limousines drew up outside the big old converted warehouse in Darklake City’s Thurnby district. Mellanie stepped out of the first one, her expensive Fomar pumps just missing the soggy mass of leaves and paper that clogged the gutter. She’d chosen the most sober clothes from her own range to wear, a neat black jacket with slim white lines marking out a square pattern. Matching pants and a cream blouse finished off the image. This way she had a whole Paula Myo authority figure thing going for her. It felt funny coming back here as a take-no-shit professional troubleshooter, backed up by six very tough wetwired CST security operatives.

There was nobody about on the street, so they all trooped over to the door. Nothing had changed; the purple Wayside Production plaque was still on the wall outside, the couches in the tiny reception area were still snowing flakes of chrome on the floor, the scent of ozone and disinfectant hanging in the air. Mellanie went straight through reception into the narrow corridors that separated the stages. Up above her, the ancient solar collector roof creaked incessantly. Voices from one of the stages echoed around the cavernous overhead space. A stagehand came around a corner, pulling a trolley with a circular bed balanced precariously on top. He stared in astonishment at Mellanie and her escort.

“Where’s Tiger Pansy?” Mellanie asked.

“Huh?”

“Tiger Pansy, where is she?”

His hand waved limply back down the corridor. “Dressing room, I think.”

“Thank you.” Mellanie marched past him. She hadn’t actually made it as far as the dressing room before. It wasn’t hard to find, a big open area lined with lockers on one side, makeup tables along the other. The far end was a jumble of clothes racks. Several girls dressed in feathers and gold-crusted Hindu sarongs were sitting around waiting for their turn with the makeup lady, a large elderly woman in a black mourning dress. One of the girls was having her OCtattoos tuned by a sensorium technician; she was very young, an easy forty centimeters taller than Mellanie, thin bordering on malnourished, with lustrous black skin. She had a nervous yet resigned expression on her face as she watched the technician sticking modifier patches over the OCtattoos that webbed her thighs and genitalia. Something must have registered as she caught sight of Mellanie. The technician looked up from his sophisticated handheld array. Across the dressing room, the babble of conversation cut off.

“Tiger Pansy?” Mellanie called.

Someone stood up in the middle of the girls waiting to be made up. Mellanie barely recognized her; the peroxide blond hair was now orange verging on tangerine, and seemed to be all straw, standing up as if it’d been electrocuted. Reprofiling had taken the chubbiness out of her cheeks, but the thick crust of skin it’d left produced deep creases as her jaw worked away at her gum. Even before the makeup session, she still had way too much mascara around her eyes. The turquoise and topaz feathers around her chest were under a lot of strain holding her vast breasts up.

“Oh, hi, Mellanie,” she squeaked. “Watcha doin’ back here?”

“Came to see you.”

“Yeah?” Tiger Pansy giggled, a high-pitched sound drilling through Mellanie’s eardrums. “You wanna interview me? Jaycee won’t like that.”

“I’m here to offer you a job. And nobody cares what Jaycee likes, least of all me.”

“Oh, really?” a man’s voice asked.

Mellanie turned to face him. Like his studio, Jaycee hadn’t changed either, head still shaved, black clothes with the crow’s-foot wrinkles that only cheap cloth produced. “Get lost,” Mellanie said curtly.

Jaycee’s pale skin started to flush. He gave her bodyguards a quick appraisal. “Fucking say that without your friends here.”

She smiled with predatory malice. “They’re not here for my benefit; they’re here to keep you safe from me.”

“Fuck off, bitch. I mean it. You don’t come in here like you rule the universe and try to steal my fucking girls away. Tiger Pansy’s mine. You fucking got that?”

Mellanie cocked her head to one side, pursing her lips as if she were mulling over what he’d said. “No.”

“I don’t care who the fuck you think you are, fuck off now!” Jaycee yelled. “And you”—he jabbed a finger at Tiger Pansy—“you don’t go fucking anywhere. Understand?”

“Yes, Jaycee,” Tiger Pansy said meekly. Her chin quivered as she fought back tears.

“Don’t talk to her like that,” Mellanie said. She took a step toward Jaycee.

“Or what? You’ll give me a blow job?” He smiled around at the bodyguards. “Did Alessandra pass her around you guys? I hear that’s what she does: the Baron show’s whore.” His sneer turned triumphant. “Isn’t that right?” he asked Mellanie. “You’re just a fucking cheap media whore. What? You think I don’t fucking know that? Every fucker in the business knows what you are.”

Mellanie knew she should just grab Tiger Pansy and get out. Had it been anyone else but Jaycee she would have done just that. “I am not for sale,” she growled out as she took another step, putting her nose to nose. “I told you that before.” She brought her knee up.

Jaycee twisted with fast competence, bringing his own leg around protectively. Her knee skidded off the back of his thigh. His grin was mocking. “And we’ve done this befor—”

Mellanie slammed her forehead into his nose. Jaycee screamed as his cartilage made a horrible crunch. His hand came up automatically to cup his nose and stanch the blood. That was when Mellanie brought her knee up again, properly this time.

“Yeah, you’re right, this is a real déjà vu session,” she said amiably as tears flooded Jaycee’s eyes. His mouth opened in a silent screech as he fell to his knees, one hand clamped over his nose, the other over his crotch. Blood made the front of his black shirt glisten disgustingly.

The girls got out of the way fast as Mellanie walked over to Tiger Pansy. “This job, it pays so much you’ll never have to come back here. There’s a rejuvenation treatment thrown in as well. You can start over again.”

“Yeah?” Tiger Pansy asked. Her jaw worked hard on the gum as she looked at Jaycee. “Is he gonna be all right, d’ya think?”

“Unfortunately, yes. I don’t want to rush you, but I do need an answer.”

“He wasn’t last time you did that, y’know. He couldn’t get it hard for a week.”

“For which the human gene pool was very grateful. Tiger”—she put her hand on the porn starlet’s arm—“I need your help. I really do. A lot of people are depending on you.”

Tiger Pansy gave the bodyguards a resigned look. “Who do I got to fuck?”

“Nobody. It’s not like that. We’re going to link you up one-to-one for a special client. That way this client gets to find out what you feel. I came to you because you’re the best sensorium artiste there is.”

“Yeah?” Tiger Pansy grinned sheepishly. “You’re an all right girl, Mellanie, I knew it when you came in here that first day. Straightaway, I said to myself, I said, she’s class, Tiger, you should try and be more like her. I’m not, though.”

“You’ll do it?”

“Mellanie.” Tiger Pansy put her head down and whispered, “there’s this, like, medicine I need to get through the day. Special medicine. Jaycee used to get it for me. I can’t go nowhere without it.”

For some reason, Mellanie’s throat tightened to an almost-painful degree. She couldn’t remember feeling so much sympathy for anyone before. “We can get it for you, I promise. Better quality than Jaycee ever supplied. You can go anywhere, Tiger. And when you’re rejuvenated you won’t need it anymore.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

Tiger Pansy produced a lottery-winner smile. “Okay then.”

The look on Nigel Sheldon’s face wasn’t exactly engineered to make Oscar feel welcome. Daniel Alster, who’d met him from the train, had been polite and upbeat. Oscar had thought that attitude would reflect from his boss. Now, in the senior management suite at Narrabri station, he realized what a mistake that had been.

“So what does Columbia want?” Nigel asked. “It has to be important and delicate to send you.”

“The navy intelligence Paris office has found a rogue officer called Tarlo, and needs to arrest him. However, there’s a problem. Tarlo is on Boongate.” Oscar braced himself for the outburst.

Amazingly, Nigel leaned back in his chair and gave a bemused little smile. “Tarlo was one of the people on Illuminatus, wasn’t he?”

Oscar had to think back quickly over the briefing he’d absorbed on the train journey over from the High Angel. “Yes, sir.” All he could think was how amazingly well briefed Nigel Sheldon was. Then again, he is the head of the largest Dynasty.

“What sort of rogue?” Nigel asked maliciously.

“Sir, we need to arrest him and read his memories to confirm who he’s working for.”

“So Columbia is finally starting to believe in the Starflyer, is he?”

“Uh,” Oscar managed to rumble.

“Don’t worry, Oscar, I know it’s real.”

“You do?”

“Me and several others, so you can relax now.”

Somehow, that just wasn’t possible. “Thank you, sir. The Paris office has put together an arrest team. We’d like to send them through to Boongate.”

“The War Cabinet decided to keep all the Second47 wormholes closed.”

“I know, but it’s only a team of five. The time the wormhole would be open for isn’t long enough to permit any kind of mass exodus from the Boongate side, especially if the planet is unaware the wormhole is open.”

Nigel drummed his fingers on the desk. “What is the plan should they capture Tarlo intact?”

“Direct memory read.”

“That’s what we’re doing here with Starflyer agents; if Columbia is coming around to our views we can share our information with him.” He screwed up his face, undecided. “If they get Tarlo, the arrest team will want to come back. That’ll mean opening the wormhole again. People on Boongate will know; damnit, my people there will know, and I’ve already forced them to stay. I don’t think so, Oscar, I’m sorry.”

“The arrest team have volunteered to go into the future along with the rest of the planet. They’re not asking for a return trip, sir, they just want the chance to get their man.”

“Oh.”

“Tarlo is a critical Starflyer agent; his position in the Paris office allowed him to cover up any number of its operations. His memories would be invaluable in exposing the whole Starflyer network. I cannot overemphasize how important he is.”

“Damnit.” Nigel let out a long breath. “All right, but we keep this very quiet. If and when Tarlo is hooked up to a neural download the data extracted from his brain is to be routed through to the operation we’re putting together here. Columbia can have full access, but we direct the procedure.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Nigel nodded acknowledgment. “You’d better hook up with Wilson. He can brief you on our operation.”

“Wilson’s here?”

“Yes,” Nigel said wryly. “Along with some others you may recognize. But that’s not to be shared with Columbia until we’re convinced he’s acknowledged the Starflyer. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well. Daniel, organize some transport for the arrest team.”

“I’ll get right onto it. What do you want to do about opening the gateway?”

“The Paris team goes through, and that’s it. If it’s open for more than a minute I’ll want to know why. Who’s on duty over there?”

“Ward Smith. I’ll get over to the gateway control center and liaise with him myself.”

There were eight Guardians working on the big engine. The old Ables ND47 sat on the single track that ran through the huge Foster Transport shed, its new ultramarine paintwork gleaming under the bright overhead lights. A cluster of mobile gantries surrounded it, giving the engineeringbots access to the entire superstructure. Under the supervision of the Guardian team they were installing force field generators and medium-caliber weapons in casings that looked like they were integral segments of the bodywork. Forty meters behind the engine, two long enclosed wagons sat on the shiny rails.

Bradley Johansson stood beside the big coupling on the first wagon, looking up at its dusty yellow and maroon shell. A single connector cable dangled from beneath the coupling, its end almost reaching the ground; it was as thick as his torso.

“We’re basically ready to go,” Adam said. “All the equipment and vehicles are loaded. The old brute is so heavily armored even it will have trouble carrying the weight.”

“And if it does get hit?”

Adam grinned, and patted the cool metal chassis of the front wagon. “The armored cars make the final dash through to Half Way. I’ve got it all covered, Bradley, stop worrying. We will make it.”

“All of us?” Bradley asked quietly. He glanced at the Guardians swarming like acrobats over the gantries around the nuclear-powered engine. There wasn’t one of them over thirty-five.

“Most of us,” Adam said.

“I fear the dreaming heavens will be welcoming a lot of friends this coming week.”

“You know, I never did get that part of your philosophy. Why give the Guardians their own religion? That makes it look even more like a cult.”

“I didn’t. I’ve been to the dreaming heavens, Adam. It’s at the far end of the Silfen paths, a place where noble demons fly through an endless sky. I was cured there.”

Adam gave him a judgmental look.

Bradley’s e-butler told him Senator Burnelli was calling.

“I’ve been in a meeting,” she told him.

“Forgive my lack of surprise, Senator, but that’s what politicians do.”

“Not meetings like this one, we don’t. You’ll be happy to hear you’re almost legitimate now. We want to bring you in, Bradley, you and the Guardians.”

Bradley opened the call to Adam as Justine explained what had been decided at Nigel Sheldon’s mansion.

“The Starflyer is the same family as the Primes,” Bradley said. “Well, in all the dreaming heavens, I never knew that. It does make sense, though. I remember its interest in the Dyson Pair right from the start.”

“Do you know where the Starflyer is?” she asked.

“No, but like you, we believe it will try and get through to Boongate.”

“It can’t. However, we are going to let it think it can. If its train approaches the gateway, our squad will bag it.”

“A honey trap. Good idea.”

“You’re at the Narrabri station already, aren’t you?”

“Now, Senator, you know that’s not a question I’ll answer for you.”

“But we want to join forces. You must have established procedures for this very moment.”

“We are certainly prepared for most eventualities.”

“Well then, we stand a much better chance if we combine our operations.”

“Forgive me, but after being hunted like a diseased animal for a hundred and thirty years, it is understandably hard for me to welcome the hounds into my house.”

“You have my word this is an honest offer; Nigel Sheldon’s word, too. I can put you in contact. You can hear it from him personally.”

“I appreciate that. However, there is one way you can settle the problem of trust.”

“Yes?”

“Kazimir McFoster was carrying some data for us when he was murdered at LA Galactic. We believe you may have it.”

“I do, yes.”

“Excellent. If Paula Myo delivers it to me in person, then I will truly know the Guardians have come in from the cold.”

“How about if I deliver it? Surely that would prove our goodwill?”

“Please understand, if it is the Investigator, I can be absolutely certain. I believe in her honesty. It is the one true constant in a very uncertain universe.”

“But you don’t trust me?”

“Please don’t be offended, Senator. It’s just that habits, both good and bad, become ingrained over a hundred thirty years. And I am a creature of habit.”

“Very well, I’ll see what I can do. But listen, CST is searching Narrabri station in case the Starflyer is already in place. If the security teams close in on you, for heaven’s sake call me. The last thing we need is for us to be shooting at each other.”

“Thank you, Senator. I am not so prideful as to risk everything we have achieved on a point of stubborn principle. If we are in trouble, I will shout for help very loudly indeed.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

Bradley smiled, his eyes focused on the far end of the shed. Adam groaned in dismay, resting his forehead on the huge steel wheel. “I can’t believe you just did that. Paula Myo? You’ve got to be fucking joking. As soon as she sees you or me, she’ll blow our brains out. She has no choice; her DNA won’t let her do anything else.”

“Nonsense, Adam, you must have more faith in human nature.”

“She squealed on her own parents, for God’s sake.”

“They weren’t her parents, though, were they? They were her kidnappers.”

“Oh for—We had it. We were there. Burnelli was offering us legitimacy, and you blew it. So much for not being prideful. Damnit!” He slapped the wheel in frustration.

“Adam, Adam, have you no negotiating skills? Investigator Myo is the opening gambit. It would be lovely if she did agree, but I expect we’ll wind up with a two-minute call from Nigel Sheldon or some other high-placed player.”

Adam groaned again, sounding like an injured animal. “I don’t need this extra stress. I really don’t.”

“It won’t be much longer, I think we can both be sure of that.”

The CST exploratory division wormhole at Narrabri station followed the usual layout: An isolated building away from the commercial sector, where the big environment confinement chamber was grafted onto the gateway. The Operations Center and all the associated support team offices formed a protective honeycomb around the outside.

Paula stood on the floor of the environment chamber waiting for the wormhole to be aligned. Nigel stood at her side, his mouth raised in a soft smile as he looked at the fuzzy bubble of air that was the force field capping the wormhole.

“Always gives me a buzz,” he confessed to the Investigator. “People just take this for granted so much these days, nobody appreciates the technology and energy sitting behind a gateway.”

“Making the extraordinary appear commonplace is the ability of true genius.”

“Thank you, Paula. Tell me, would you consider marrying me?”

“You ask me that every time we meet.”

“What do you answer every time?”

“No thank you.”

“Ah well, I’m sorry. And I won’t wipe this time from my memory. You must think me appallingly boorish to have done so before.”

Paula gave him a sly look. “If you ever did.” The slight flush above his collar was confirmation enough for her. “What did Heather say about the Starflyer infiltration?” she asked.

“Let’s just say she’s not a very happy person today. Christabel helped her save some face with the precautions she’s already instigated. Good move on your part alerting her.”

“It was Renne Kampasa who knocked on the door.”

“The one who died on Illuminatus?”

“She suffered bodyloss, yes.”

Nelson and Mellanie walked into the chamber. Paula was about to greet them when another woman came through the open airlock. She walked carefully, balancing on platform shoes that added over ten centimeters to her height. Paula froze in surprise.

“This is Tiger Pansy,” Mellanie said. She sounded proud, as if she was introducing a sister who’d made good.

“Real pleased I’m sure,” Tiger Pansy said around her gum. She smiled at Paula. “Hey, I know you, you’re that famous Investigator, right. I was wanting to play your character in Murderous Seduction, but Jaycee gave it to Slippy Gwen-Hott instead. Shame, that.”

Paula had absolutely no idea how to reply. She looked at Nigel for guidance. He seemed indecently pleased at her discomfort.

“Delighted to have you here, Tiger Pansy,” Nigel said with perfect civility.

“Oh, wow, it really is you.”

“This,” Paula sputtered at Mellanie, “this is the person you found for Qatux?”

“Of course,” Mellanie said. “Tiger Pansy is perfect.”

Paula took a breath, and gave the porn starlet a close look. Tiger Pansy was combing at her wild red hair with three-centimeter gold and purple fingernails. Her facial skin was leathery, with a sheen that betrayed inexpert reprofiling treatments that not even her excessive makeup was able to conceal. She’d squeezed into a henna-colored skirt that only came halfway to her knees; a black blouse had the top three buttons undone. Paula was sure Tiger Pansy was wearing an uplift bra. She really didn’t need to. “Do you know what you’re supposed to be doing?” Paula asked.

“Yeah, Mellanie explained it all to me. It’s kinda weird, but what the hell. It ain’t fucking a D.O.L. for a living. Right?” She giggled loudly, a sound reminiscent of a sea lion mating call.

And Paula realized that, actually, Mellanie was one hundred percent right. Tiger Pansy was perfect for this. “Right,” Paula agreed.

“They’re coming through,” Nelson announced.

The dark force field turned fluorescent as the Operations Center locked the wormhole exit inside the High Angel, the first time the sentient starship had ever allowed that to happen. Hoshe and Qatux walked through it.

Tiger Pansy’s jaw stopped chewing as she looked up at the big alien. “Oh, wow.” Her giggle turned nervy. Even Mellanie’s chirpiness faded away.

Nigel stepped forward. He bowed. “Qatux, welcome to the Commonwealth. We are honored that you’re here. I only wish it was under different circumstances.”

“Nigel Sheldon,” the alien rasped. Several of its eyes swayed around to look at the Dynasty leader. “I am grateful for this opportunity. My race has remained sheltered in the High Angel for too long. And is this the delightful lady who has agreed to be my companion during this visit?”

“Ohh.” Tiger Pansy’s mouth opened to a wide incredulous O. She walked forward, almost falling as her shoes wobbled on their slender heels. Nigel, Nelson, and Paula all gave a little lurch forward, their arms lifting in unison ready to catch her. “You’re a real gentleman, you know that.” Tiger Pansy hesitantly put out a hand.

Qatux unrolled an unsteady tentacle. Its tip coiled gently around Tiger Pansy’s wrist. She shivered as if caught in a blast of icy air. Slender OCtattoos glowed a phosphor green beneath her skin; for a moment her whole body was luminous, with emerald pinpricks shining through her fuzz of hair. Qatux sighed like a human who’d just downed a whiskey chaser in one.

Tiger Pansy looked down at her hands as the light faded. “I didn’t know they could do that. You got you some fancy software there, Mr. Qatux.”

“Yes,” Qatux murmured. “I thank you for allowing my routines access to your circuitry. They can provide the direct links I require. I can feel your emotional content perfectly. You are a poignant lady, Tiger Pansy.”

Tiger Pansy’s nervous giggle sliced into the silence. “Hey, that’s really sweet.”

Qatux released her hand; its head swung around to face Nigel and Nelson. “And now it will be my delight to help you uncover the Starflyer agents in your midst.”

“We’re setting up a dedicated analysis center,” Nelson said. “The suspects will be brought in for you once we’ve neutralized any wetwired weapons.”

The biggest airlock door in the chamber expanded. Qatux moved through it with a ponderous gait. Tiger Pansy tottered alongside. “So is there, like, a Mrs. Qatux?” she asked.

Paula couldn’t help the gentle smile on her face as she watched the very odd couple leave.

“Now there’s something you don’t see every day,” Hoshe said quietly.

“Only once in a very long lifetime, I’d say,” Paula replied. Her e-butler told her there was a call from Justine for herself and Nigel.

“I’ve made contact with Johansson,” Justine said. “He’s willing to help us track down the Starflyer, but there’s a problem.”

“Which is?” Nigel asked.

“He wants some proof that our offer isn’t an entrapment. After all, he has spent a hundred thirty years being pursued by the Serious Crimes Directorate, and now he’s about to face his target.”

“Will a personal guarantee from me swing it?” Nigel asked.

“He wants Paula to deliver the data Kazimir McFoster was carrying.”

“No.” The word came out before Paula even knew she’d said it. There was no analysis, no careful reasoning. She simply knew the answer.

“Why not?” Justine asked. “I know this is difficult for you, but the Guardians were right.”

“I accept that,” Paula backtracked. “Johansson had a perfect right to oppose the Starflyer, even though he should have used different methods. But Elvin is a mass murderer, a political terrorist of the worst kind. I cannot overlook that, no matter what.”

“You have to,” Nigel told her.

“You both know what I am. Therefore you know I cannot.”

Just for an instant, Nigel’s affable facade slipped. “I don’t get this; you of all people know what’s at stake here. Just take the data to them, forget your damn scruples for a minute. We can nab that little shit Elvin when this is over, because I assure you I certainly haven’t forgotten Abadan.”

“No,” Paula said.

“Shit!” Nigel glared at her. It would have made anybody else in the Commonwealth back down immediately; Paula seemed oblivious of his anger. “All right,” he snapped. “Justine, call them back. Negotiate. Find someone else they consider acceptable.”

Mellanie trailed after Qatux and Tiger Pansy as Nelson led them over to the security center. It wasn’t far from the exploratory division, a blank dome with a heavily guarded entrance. Cat’s Claws had been assigned the escort duty; wearing their bulky armor suits they looked formidable. Her inserts scanned them passively, showing her which one was Morton; otherwise she would never have known. He didn’t say anything to her. All of the squad were taking their duty very seriously.

“This way I get to stay in the game,” Morton had said contentedly when he and the others suited up. Nelson had given them the option of leaving, but they’d decided to stay on. Mellanie knew why Morton was doing it; this kept him close to the real players and, she hoped, her as well. The Cat and Rob just seemed to enjoy the whole idea of a fight.

Nelson had turned over a lecture theater for Qatux to use. Most of the seating had been removed, and the lighting dimmed. Various technicians were setting up equipment cabinets. They all stopped when the alien came in. Several applauded. Tiger Pansy giggled, and started doing introductions like some old-fashioned diplomatic interpreter.

Mellanie saw Dudley and the Bose motile lurking about near the big wall-mounted portal that presenters used to display their lecture data on. The Bose motile had three security guards standing close by. They all wore sharp business suits, and appeared perfectly friendly, but Mellanie’s scan located some inserts with a very high power density wetwired into their bodies. Their visible OCtattoos were green and red lines running in parallel along the rear of their cheeks.

Two of the Bose motile’s sensor stalks bent around to follow her as she walked over to them. “Hello, Mellanie,” it said. She saw it now had a slim modern handheld array hanging from a leather strap around one of its arm limbs.

“Hello,” she said pleasantly. “So are you Dudley one, or two? What have the pair of you decided?”

“We haven’t discussed that yet.”

Mellanie was amused to hear the array synthesizing Dudley’s voice perfectly. It obviously irked the human version, judging by his expression of distaste. She smiled brightly, and leaned forward to kiss him. Morton was over by the main door with The Cat, so she figured it would be easy enough. Amazingly, Dudley moved back before her lips touched him.

“Dudley?” She frowned at him.

“Ah, yes, I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”

“Talk to me?”

“Yes. I’d just like to say that I am happy to stand aside now Morton has returned.”

“Stand aside?”

“That’s right. I know how much you feel for him. In view of that I think it’s for the best. Circumstances have changed for both of us, have they not?”

“Circumstances?” Mellanie desperately wanted to stop repeating things, but she was so surprised by Dudley her brain was refusing to come up with anything original. When she studied him she saw he’d actually shaved. The tiredness and perpetual worry were fading from his eyes. He’d even dressed in a stylish mauve shirt and black semiorganic trousers. For the first time, she could actually see his true age in that calm face that looked back unflinchingly at her.

“I believe even you would have to concede that our relative situations have altered substantially since we met,” Dudley said. “That calls for a serious reevaluation of our relationship.”

She just stared at him. This wasn’t even Dudley talking anymore; there wasn’t an illusion of reticence or caution. His voice was calm and measured, verging on patronizing.

“Of course, I’m enormously grateful for what we experienced and shared,” he said hurriedly. “Without you I would never be whole again. And I will never be able to thank you enough for that. I hope we can continue to be friends as well as colleagues in this endeavor.”

“You’re dumping me.”

“Mellanie, human beings are effectively immortal. I know this is your first life and everything is more intense for you, but believe me when I say nothing lasts forever. It is better this way. Honesty is the way forward for both of us.”

“You are dumping me?” Even from her own mouth it sounded terribly wrong.

“I am,” the Bose motile said. “It’s because I’m a complete asshole.”

Dudley glared at his alien twin. “I see you haven’t mastered tact yet.”

“Well, face it, where would I inherit that from?”

“After everything I’ve done for you?” Mellanie asked; it was as though she was questioning herself.

“Our hierarchal structure wasn’t entirely one-sided,” Dudley said in the kind of tone used to correct one of his students. “I believe you gained as much, if not more, from this relationship as I did. Look at where we are, deciding the future of humankind.”

“Oh, just fuck off.” She turned around and walked away, fast. At least there was no danger of tears—for a second, the image of Jaycee sinking to the ground clutching at his balls filled her mind—well, no tears in her eyes anyway. He’s not even worth that.

“Sorry,” Dudley Bose’s voice called out across the lecture theater.

Mellanie didn’t turn to check which one of them had said it. She already knew.

“You okay?” Tiger Pansy asked.

“Sure. I’m fine.” The original bounce-back girl, me.

“Hey, Mellanie, I gotta thank you,” Tiger Pansy said. She waved enthusiastically at Qatux, who was discussing sensorium interface technology with one of the CST technicians. The Raiel raised a tentacle in acknowledgment. “This is like the bestest gig ever.”

“I thought you’d like it. But, Tiger, remember, you really can’t tell anyone afterward. These people can’t be messed around.”

“I know that. I ain’t that stupid.”

“I know you’re not. Take care.”

“You going?”

“Yeah. There’s only one thing I want now, and it’s not here.”

“Well, I hope you find it.”

“Me, too.”

Nobody around the Raiel really noticed as she walked away. The last thing she wanted was to run over to Morton after what had happened, so she went toward a door on the opposite side of the lecture theater. Hoshe was sitting on one of the remaining audience chairs, suspiciously close to the door.

Mellanie gave him a fond smile, and sat beside him. Without warning, she darted forward and gave him a kiss.

“What was that for?” he asked.

“Hoshe Finn, my very own guardian angel.”

“I didn’t think you were speaking to me after Isabella.”

“Humm, your halo did dim there for a minute. But once again you made sure no harm came to me.”

Hoshe glanced down at the two aliens who were now talking together. Dudley Bose was standing beside the Bose motile, trying to steer the conversation his way.

“One of your smarter moves,” Hoshe said. “You can do a lot better than him.”

She glanced at the trio of armor suits. “I thought you said you were married.”

Hoshe grinned. “I guess I deserved that. Shouldn’t pry into your private life.”

“There’s nothing much private about it. That’s my biggest problem. What about you? What are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to Nelson. I have a favor to ask.”

“What’s that?”

“I need to get some people off Boongate. A Senate Security team was following a suspected Starflyer agent and got stuck there. My fault.”

“I doubt it. Do you want me to talk to Nigel about it? He has the final say on that.”

Hoshe gave her a surprised look. “You can do that?”

“For you, of course.”

“Might be worth it.” He didn’t sound very certain.

“Just say the word. I owe you.”

“No you don’t.”

“A month’s unisphere access, and a week at a B and B if I remember rightly. There’s a lot of interest piling up in that account, Hoshe Finn.”

“Another time, another universe.”

“I’d still like to repay you.”

“I’m not sure it’s worth it. Look, this is just about over now. Sheldon will destroy the Prime homeworld; Paula and the Guardians will track down and eliminate the Starflyer. Everybody needs to start thinking what they’re going to do after the war, because life is going to be a whole lot sweeter then. After what we’ve all been through, it can’t be anything else.”

“God, I hadn’t even thought about afterward. I’ve been so scared since Randtown. Trying to keep one step ahead takes up every moment.”

“You’re a damn good reporter. I bet you wind up with your own show.”

“That’d be nice,” she said, and it was a comfy thought, the kind she had before the ships flew down out of a clean Randtown sky, and her world turned upside down. Again. “I could do with something that’s going to last.”

“Well, there you go then.”

“There’s just one thing I’ve got to do first.”

Hoshe gave a mock-groan. “What?”

“I’m going to cover Alessandra Baron’s arrest. I want to see her led away in chains. I want to show the entire Commonwealth that most beautiful sight.”

“They don’t manacle people anymore. Besides, if she’s a Starflyer agent it’s likely to get violent.”

“Here’s hoping,” Mellanie muttered with a wicked smirk. “Who’s going to be the arresting officer?”

“Hasn’t been assigned yet,” Hoshe said, with an eye on Nelson and the Raiel.

“But you could put in for it, couldn’t you? You could do that while I speak to Nigel. How about that? A trade, not a repayment.”

“Done.”

The maglev express was almost empty. After all, who in their right mind would travel to Wessex right now?

Alic walked out of the first-class carriage onto the nearly deserted platform in the Narrabri station’s Oxsorrol terminal. The three cases carrying his armor suit and weapons followed loyally a few meters behind. Vic Russell was close on his heels, eager to get going. Matthew Oldfield, John King, and Jim Nwan formed a rearguard group, trying to keep their conversation lighthearted. It wasn’t going well, every movement agitated some injury sustained on Illuminatus. Alic knew they shouldn’t be going into combat again so soon, but this mission overrode any kind of by-the-book protocol. Besides, he kept telling himself, there were five of them, and they’d raided the Paris office armory for some serious heavy-caliber hardware. There would be no repeat of Treetops no matter what Tarlo was equipped with this time.

Two men were waiting for them on the platform outside their carriage. One of them was in a navy captain’s uniform. Alic recognized him immediately. “Captain Monroe?”

“Pleased to meet you. Daniel Alster here is our liaison with CST for this operation, and we have some very good news for you.”

“We can go?” Vic demanded.

“Yes,” Oscar said.

“All right!” Vic high-fived with John King.

“We have some transport for you gentlemen.” Daniel gestured at a big Ford ten-seater Holan parked on the side of the platform. “It’ll take us over to the station’s track engineering facility.”

“What’s there?” Vic asked.

“A train that will take you through the wormhole.”

“How long before we go through?”

“Once you’re suited up, we can take you straight to the gateway,” Daniel said, unperturbed by the big man’s attitude.

“Thank you,” Alic said before Vic could make a scene. He was already regretting agreeing to the big man coming on the mission. Even if they were successful in engaging Tarlo he wasn’t sure they could get him into the cage they’d brought.

“You should know the gateway will only be opening once,” Oscar said. “After you’re through, you will be evacuating into the future with the rest of the population.”

“We accept that,” Alic said. He wondered if he should give Vic another chance to withdraw. Once the mission was over, the big man would be separated from Gwyneth for a long time.

The Ford drove them to one of the eight long sheds that housed CST’s Wessex track engineering division. A single gentian-blue carriage was waiting for them, which looked like it had been in service for a century at least. There was a tiny cabin at the front, with five rows of bench seats giving the track crew a view through grimy windows. Three-quarters of the spartan metal-panel interior was simply storage space for bots and equipment. Long doors at the rear had their own lift platforms, which were folded up against the sides.

“It’s not fast,” Alster said as they climbed up the ladders to the cabin. “But it is reliable, and it can get you there easily enough. The drive array has modern software; traffic control can take you straight across the station yard to the gateway. I’ll be in the control center myself to supervise the opening.”

“Thanks,” Alic told him. The rest of the team was climbing up to see what they’d got.

“Your cases can come up on the door elevators,” Alster told them. “If you’d like to get suited up now, we can begin.”

“Keep a communications link open to me from now on,” Oscar said.

“Will do,” Alic said. “And thank Nigel Sheldon for the opportunity. It means a lot to us.”

“I know.” Oscar backed out of the door, and went down the short ladder to the ground.

“All right,” Alic said. “Jim, get the doors open and our cases inside. We need to be ready. Matthew, establish a link to Edmund Li. Let’s find out what the bastard’s up to. Then we can finalize our game plan.”

The Ables ND47 was fully automatic, of course. New arrays had been installed during its refurbishment; the drive software was capable of controlling it through the maze of tracks that made up all of CST’s planetary stations and then taking the engine out on the main lines of whatever planet it was visiting.

There were manual systems fitted, but they were there to comply with safety regulations rather than necessity. Adam gazed over the broad console that took up the entire front portion of the tiny cab sitting atop the huge engine. The two narrow windows in front gave him a view along the top of the engine, where the darkish purple metal segments were riddled with long black grilles and stumpy tarnished-chrome vent pipes. When he turned around, the single rear window showed him the two long wagons pressing up against the engine. Display screens along the back of the console filled with graphics that illustrated the coupling integration diagnostics at work, checking the integrity of the connections. The left-hand side of the console was a burgundy color, containing all the nuclear micropile controls and readouts. A completely new console section, which was fixed to newly welded brackets on the wall, presented the control systems for the force field and armaments the Guardians had grafted on in the last few days. That was why they’d agreed someone should be in the cab, though again with modern control arrays it wasn’t strictly necessary. They all just felt more confident with someone up there.

Adam saw the last of the mobile gantries lower its platform, and roll away from the engine. When he stuck his head out of the cab door, he could see Kieran walking among the engineeringbots as they fussed around the wheels.

His e-butler told him a call was coming in from Marisa McFoster.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“Victor’s on the move,” she said. “There’s a whole load of vehicles driving out of the Sunforge warehouse. Vans and small trucks, all shielded—we can’t see what’s inside.”

“Where are they going?”

“It looks like they’re heading for the gateway. They’re not using any of the yard’s service roads, they’re just driving right across the rails.”

“Don’t expose yourself,” he told her. “Just maintain the observation.”

“Is this it, is the Starflyer coming?”

“I don’t know. But we’re ready for it.” Adam sounded a single blast on the engine’s horn that reverberated around the big shed. He couldn’t resist; he leaned out of the cab door and bellowed: “All aboard.”

Wilson knew he should dump his irritation toward Dudley Bose; it really wasn’t helpful. But there was just something about the astronomer that rubbed him the wrong way. He’d been furious when the old man lobbied himself onto the Second Chance; he’d been exasperated with the young re-lifer who hadn’t adjusted to his new circumstances, and now the man had all his memories back and seemed a whole lot more rational, he was still irritating, still pressing for attention, getting in the way.

It had seemed like a good idea while they waited for the various arrest squads to bring in known Starflyer agents, and Paula and Nigel began their search for the actual alien itself. Wilson and Anna had gone over to the Bose motile when it finished talking to Qatux, and asked if it had accessed the signal that the Far Away flare had broadcast.

“No,” it said, “I haven’t.”

“The Commonwealth has never been able to translate it,” Wilson said. “But if you’re right about the Starflyer being an alienPrime—”

“I understand,” the Bose motile said. “I should be able to translate it for you.”

“I’d like you to try,” Wilson said. “It’s been bothering me ever since we found out what the Starflyer is. Suppose it was talking to another ship?”

“That’s unlikely,” Dudley Bose said. He’d inched his way closer to them as soon as Wilson started talking to the Bose motile.

Wilson pressed his teeth together, then smiled tightly. “Why’s that?”

“The flare emission was omnidirectional.”

“I imagine their ships would have remained silent during flight so as not to attract attention from whoever built the barriers,” Anna said. “Once the Starflyer had landed, it wouldn’t know where any of the others are. It would have to broadcast in all directions.”

“Which it actually didn’t,” the Bose motile said. “The Far Away star has a rotation of twenty-five days. As the flare only lasted for seven days, the signal was only broadcast across a relatively narrow sector of the galaxy, one that didn’t include the Dyson Pair; in fact, the star’s bulk would have shielded them from the signal.”

“Can we just examine the signal?” Wilson said. He was beginning to regret mentioning it. His e-butler accessed the national library on Damaran, and pulled out a recording of the signal.

They all waited while the Bose motile reviewed it. The initial flurry of activity in the lecture theater that had accompanied Qatux’s arrival was now dying down. Most of the technical systems were set up, Qatux and Tiger Pansy were talking together, Cat’s Claws remained on duty by the main entrance, Nelson maintained a number of his own security staff around himself and Paula. The only person Wilson couldn’t see was Mellanie.

“Simple enough,” the Bose motile said. “It’s basically an identity, which is MorningLightMountain17,735, followed by a short message: I am here. If any of I/us survive, contact me or fly here. The patterns are a very old form, but the content is easy enough to decipher, there is little ambiguity.”

“Did we ever detect another flare?” Anna asked. “An answer to the Starflyer?”

“No,” Dudley said.

“That doesn’t mean there wasn’t one,” the Bose motile said. “If another survivor picked up the signal, it could have used an interstellar communications maser to reply. Their ships were all equipped with them. The Commonwealth would never see that.”

Wilson was thinking along similar lines. “So we don’t actually know if there are any more of these alienPrimes at loose.”

“If one survived, it is logical to assume there could be others,” the Bose motile said. “Though I doubt there can be many; the Dyson Beta Primes had only just started building starships; they didn’t have the production capacity of Dyson Alpha when the barriers were established. The numbers would be small.”

“But if any of them landed on a world more useful than Far Away, there’s no telling how big their civilization is by now. Primes almost match the old nightmare of exponential expansion.”

“You should assume that the Dyson Alpha Primes had starships in flight as well,” Anna said.

“We are going to have to conduct an extensive search of stars in that sector of the galaxy,” the Bose motile said. “The problem could be more widespread than originally thought.”

“If Nigel Sheldon does initiate novas, the problem will be considerably reduced,” Dudley said.

The lecture theater’s main doors opened, and Oscar walked through. He caught sight of Wilson and waved happily.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Wilson said, smiling happily.

“I might ask you the same thing,” Oscar said after he’d collected his kiss from Anna. “You should have carried him off back to York5 and started a decent honeymoon,” he scolded her.

“Don’t think I didn’t want to,” she said wistfully. “So when did you get back?”

“About five hours ago.”

“Damn, I’m glad you’re okay,” Wilson said. “Are you reloading?”

“The Dublin is, yes. I’ve got another job.”

“What? Columbia isn’t being difficult about you being one of my placements, is he?”

“No, quite the opposite. Columbia is coming around to the idea the Starflyer might be genuine. I’ve been appointed as a glorified messenger boy.” He explained the Paris team’s mission. “Sheldon said you’d brief me on this little black ops setup you’ve got running here. Is that really a Raiel?” He was staring at Qatux.

“Yes, it really is,” Wilson said. “It’s called Qatux, and it’s agreed to help us root out Starflyer agents.”

“Uh huh.” Oscar faced the Bose motile. “And that alien?”

“It’s a Prime,” Anna said with a laugh. “Our deadliest enemy.”

“The good news is that this one is harmless and on our side,” Wilson said.

“And the bad?”

“It’s yet another version of Dudley Bose.”

Alic ran the integration program one last time. The additional weapons mounted on his armor suit responded properly. Two particle lances on malmetal arms that were secured to the base of his spine rose up over his shoulders, and swung from side to side as his sensors ran a targeting program. They locked on to Vic, whose armor suit had almost doubled in size thanks to the backpack missile dispenser.

“Hey, careful who you’re pointing those things at,” Vic complained.

The particle lances retracted, folding back parallel to Alic’s spine. He was as anxious as any first-day recruit to fire them. He hadn’t known particle lances could be built so small, and even with modern power cells he didn’t have many shots. Of course, without the armor and malmetal he could barely pick one up, they weighed so much; he couldn’t imagine what they were made out of, solid uranium by the feel of it.

John King and Jim Nwan both had rotary launches on their forearms, with a flexible feed tube snaking around to their backpacks. Matthew Oldfield was carrying all the electronic warfare systems; there were so many sneekbots clinging to his suit, he looked like the king of the insects. Matthew also managed the cage, three large matte-black mobile cubes that should be powerful enough to hold Tarlo.

Alic was mildly impressed that the carriage floor could take their combined weight. He brought the management array systems up into his virtual vision. Midnight-black hands flicked over the control icons. Narrabri station traffic control responded with a transit authorization, and they started moving with a small judder.

“We’re on the move,” he told Oscar.

“Okay, I’ll inform Alster. He’s in the gateway control center. What’s Tarlo doing?”

“Li says he’s still up in the security room.”

“You sure you want to do this?”

“It’s not quite what I thought I’d be doing when I woke up this morning, but yeah.”

“Good luck.”

“Yeah, see you in fifteen years.”

Their speed built up as soon as they left the track maintenance division shed. The station force field curved overhead, a gray film smearing the sky. Above that, the Narrabri city force field extended from horizon to horizon, its apex reaching out of the troposphere. The borealis storms had died down now, though the highly charged atmosphere was still plagued by severe lightning storms. Brutal blue-white flashes rippled around the boundary of the city force field. Alic felt ridiculously safe underneath all that technological protection. The Primes had flung their worst at Wessex, and the Big15 planet remained secure. It made him confident for the future.

The carriage snaked over points every few seconds, clicking and rattling as it moved to a different set of rails, then switching again. Long trains slid past on either side, blurs of lighted windows. Up ahead, a long stretch of pale rosy light spilled out from the gateways to douse the myriad tracks. It had gaps in it, dark shadowy sections. Gateways to the Second47, Alic thought. They’d never shine their unique starlight here again. The knowledge made him sad.

“Anything new on Tarlo?” he asked Matthew.

“No, Boss.”

“Okay.” He knew there wasn’t. Just had to do something to distract his nerves, which were far too jumpy.

The carriage lined up on the cliff face of gateways and carried on forward at a much slower speed. There were fewer trains running on this section of the station yard. They passed a GH7 class engine waiting on a siding; the massive machine only had five wagons attached, their pea-green metal bodywork caked in topaz sand thick enough to obscure their company logo.

His e-butler told him Daniel Alster was calling.

“You should be on the direct Boongate line in another couple of minutes,” Alster said. “Once you’re there, we will open the gateway and give you transit clearance. It will close thirty seconds after you’re through.”

“Right, thanks.”

“Good luck.”

“Looking good,” Alic told his arrest team. His heart started to beat a lot faster as the carriage squeaked and rolled onward.

Oscar simply couldn’t take his eyes off Tiger Pansy. She’d caught him staring quite a few times, and he’d managed to deflect her questioning gaze with a polite half smile. He knew it was getting close to rudeness now, but she was so out of place here her attraction was akin to a star’s gravity well. But then, would someone like her care about middle-class standards of rudeness? And what does that judgment say about me? Damn, was Adam right about what I’ve become?

“You’re going to have to stop that,” Anna said, and moved to stand in front of him.

“I know,” he mumbled awkwardly.

Her smile became evil. “If you’re a big fan, you should get over that shy streak and go ask her for an autograph.”

“Well, shucks, I guess I’m just too bashful.”

Wilson chuckled. “Stop letting her bully you, man.”

“Advice from the henpecked husband. Great, just what I need.”

Wilson’s tranquillity chilled rapidly. “Oh, hell,” he whispered. “Dudley Bose is on the way over. Both versions. The human one looks pissed.”

Oscar resisted the impulse to turn around. “Time to make a break for it?”

“Too late,” Anna said through gritted teeth and a broad false smile.

“Captain Monroe.” Dudley’s imperious voice cut right through Oscar’s residual good humor. He turned and summoned up a smile. “Dudley. I understand you’ve reacquired your memories.” His gaze flicked to the tall alien with its odd stalklike tentacles. It unnerved him to see something resembling an eye on the end of one bending around to return the gaze. This was worse than locking stares with Tiger Pansy.

“Yes, you bastard,” the human Dudley spat. “I got my memory back. So I know what you did to me.”

People nearest to them hushed up and stole some circumspect looks.

“Problem?” Wilson asked politely.

“Like you care,” Dudley sneered. “You who left me there to die.”

“You make it sound deliberate,” Anna said.

“Well, wasn’t it?” Dudley demanded. “You just kept telling us to go farther in. All the time: Just a little bit farther, Dudley. Go on, find out what’s around the next spiral. This is really interesting. And we trusted you.”

“I never said that,” Oscar insisted. He was racking his memories of those frantic last minutes by the Watchtower. “Your comrelay failed as soon as you entered the tunnel.”

“Liar! You knew MorningLightMountain’s ships were on their way. I’ve seen the official recordings; the whole ship was panicking. Yet you let us carry on. You dumped us like we were garbage.”

“If you’d really accessed the original recordings you’d know we busted our balls trying to reestablish contact,” Oscar said with tight anger. “Mac and Frances put their asses on the line to try to get you back. It was you that ignored protocol; you should have come back as soon as you lost contact. If you’d paid the slightest bit of attention to your training you’d have known that. But, oh no, you were too busy playing up for the unisphere media to bother with training like the rest of us. The Great Discoverer off to further the frontier of human knowledge. You’re as ignorant as you are arrogant, and that hideous little combination is what plunged us into this war.”

Wilson hurriedly stepped between them. Oscar was annoyed. He would have liked to have smacked Dudley right on the nose, and to hell with how bad it would make him look.

“Enough, the pair of you,” Wilson said. The tone of command was perfect. Oscar felt himself scowling at what he could see of Dudley, but still backed off. I’ll be damned, how did he do that?

“We clearly need to go over what happened to establish exactly where the communications failure occurred,” Wilson continued. “But this is not the time or the place.”

“Pha.” Dudley waved a hand in disgust. “Official inquiry by a navy already discredited. Did you prepare the whitewash answers before the President fired you?”

A now furious Oscar sidestepped around Wilson. “Part of the training you missed while you were mouthing off on talk shows was how to recognize impossible situations. You should have wiped your memorycell and suicided as soon as you were captured. Where did MorningLightMountain get the stellar coordinates for our planets, eh? Your mind! You’re not just a traitor, you’re a coward with it!”

Dudley went for him, fists raised. The Bose motile hooked a thick curving arm around his torso, preventing him from reaching Oscar.

Wilson pushed Oscar hard in the chest, shoving him back. A quick pushing match followed before Oscar’s heat withered in shame. “Sorry,” he mumbled, mortified to find that Anna was helping to restrain him as well. “He just gets to me.”

“I know,” Wilson said; his arm was still draped loosely over Oscar’s shoulder, muscles tensed in case he needed to push again.

It was an image mirrored by Dudley and the Bose motile, who were walking in the other direction. Dudley managed to look back, and screwed his face up in rage.

Oscar sucked in his lower lip, trying desperately to resist the temptation to start it all up again. Anna and Wilson were both pressing in close.

“Come on,” she murmured. “Let it go. Down, boy. Calmly.”

“All right.” Now thoroughly embarrassed, Oscar held his hands up in surrender. “Backing off. Doing yoga; some balls like that.”

Anna grinned. “Never knew you had it in you.” Her lips puckered up in a mocking pout. “Soooo macho.”

Oscar just winced. “Don’t. Please.”

Wilson gave him a rueful grin, then sobered. “You know, much as I dislike Bose, that is a worryingly big discrepancy.”

“The Starflyer agent?” Oscar guessed.

“My first choice. Damn, we really are going to have to sit at a table with the little shit and listen to what he has to say.”

“Better off with the motile. It doesn’t look like a permanent walking hissy fit.”

“Hey, behave.” Anna punched him on the arm.

“Ow.” Oscar rubbed at the pain, then noticed Tiger Pansy standing a couple of meters away. She had an avid grin as she chomped away on her gum. “You guys,” she said with shrill admiration. “You’re so intense. Really.”

“What the hell is that?” Adam asked.

The sensors that the Guardians had planted around the approach to the Boongate gateway were showing a single dilapidated old carriage creeping forward onto the main Boongate line.

“It’s the type of carriage the station maintenance crews use,” Kieran said.

The sensor image wobbled, then expanded. Kieran was focusing the camera on the carriage windows. There wasn’t much to see. A yellow light illuminated the interior of the carriage, diffused by the grimy glass. There were dark humanoid shadows moving around inside. Bigger than the average human. Much bigger.

“Bradley?” Adam asked. “What do you think?”

“It seems an unlikely vehicle for the Starflyer to use. On the other hand, because that’s not what we’re expecting …”

“It does have a small cargo handling ability,” Kieran said. “How big does it have to be?”

“I don’t know,” Bradley said.

Adam shook his head. He really didn’t like that carriage. It was wrong, and he knew it. But he couldn’t work out what it might be doing.

Sensor data such as it was filled his virtual vision. The carriage certainly didn’t have a force field. But there were some large power sources inside, five of them. And its communications link to traffic control was all standard.

He touched the icons of the small combat team they’d hidden out near the gateway. “Get ready,” he told them.

“If it’s the Starflyer, it will be heavily protected,” Bradley warned.

“I know. Call Burnelli, get her to find out what that is.” He took his armor suit helmet from the cab’s console where it had been lying, and locked it over his head. A hundred meters in front of him, the shed doors began to slide open.

“Sir, the navy team is in position,” Daniel Alster reported.

“Okay,” Nigel said. His virtual hands pulled the wormhole activation code from an encrypted store, and sent it to the Boongate gateway control center.

“Confirm activation code,” Alster said. “We’re opening it now.”

“Get them through as fast as you can, Daniel, please.”

“Yes, sir.”

Nigel shifted the gateway control center data to a part of his virtual vision grid where he could monitor it. In front of him, the doors to the lecture theater opened automatically for himself and Nelson. “They’re going through,” he told the security chief.

“I hope it’s worth it.”

“With confirmed Starflyer agents in custody, Columbia will fall into place without a fight. That makes it worthwhile.” Nigel scanned across the auditorium floor to see the various groups. He was halfway to Qatux when Mellanie intercepted him, with an uncomfortable-looking Hoshe in tow. “We’ve got to get some people back from Boongate,” she said.

“Excuse me?” He couldn’t help glancing over at Oscar, who was in a huddle with Wilson and Anna. Oscar looked up expectantly.

“There’s a Senate Security team stranded there.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that, but it’s not our problem.”

“They’re following a Starflyer agent. I thought we wanted Starflyer agents.” Her arm swept around the auditorium. “That’s the whole idea, isn’t it? Grab them and haul them in here for Qatux.”

“Wait, which Starflyer agent are they watching?”

“Victor Halgarth, Isabella’s father,” Hoshe said.

“He’s there as well?” The Boongate gateway data in Nigel’s virtual vision grid showed him the wormhole opening.

“As well as who?” Mellanie asked. “Look, Nigel, the Senate Security team have just reported Victor’s on the move with a whole bunch of armed troops. We need to get them out, or send in reinforcements. Either way, the gateway has to be opened.”

Wilson and Oscar exchanged a startled look.

“The Paris team can’t divert to help Senate Security,” Oscar said. “Arresting Tarlo is an absolute priority.”

“Tarlo’s on Boongate?” Paula asked in surprise; she turned to Hoshe. “Why didn’t we know?”

“None of this has been filed,” Hoshe said.

“Two Starflyer agents on Boongate?” Nelson asked. He sounded alarmed.

“What operation are you running?” Paula asked Oscar.

“Tarlo’s appearance was reported by Edmund Li,” Oscar said. “He works at the Far Away freight inspectorate division on Boongate. Tarlo has taken over the whole Far Away section at Boongate station. The Paris office team are going in to arrest him.”

“Going in?” Paula asked in surprise; she rounded on Nigel. “Are you opening the gateway?”

“It’s already open,” Nigel said. He tried not to sound sheepish.

“You have to shut it,” Paula said. “This can’t be a coincidence.”

Nigel reviewed the data in his grid. “It’ll be closed any minute now.”

“Nigel!” Justine called out.

“Now what?”

“I’ve got Bradley Johansson, we really need to talk to him. Now.” She switched Johansson’s link to a general call.

“Mr. Johansson,” Nigel said. “It looks like the Commonwealth owes you a big apology.”

“Thank you, Mr. Sheldon, but right now I’d like to swap that for one piece of information.”

“What’s that?”

“There’s a train approaching the Boongate gateway. Is it one you authorized?”

“Yes. Don’t worry. It’s carrying a team who are going to deal with a Starflyer agent.”

“Really? And what about the second train?”

Nigel stared at Nelson. “What second train?”

The link broadened into a grainy visual image. A single aging carriage was crawling forward toward the giant row of gateways. Three hundred meters behind it, another train was sliding onto the track that led to Boongate.

“Who the fuck is that?” Nigel gasped. His expanded mentality accessed Narrabri station traffic control. The train wasn’t even registering on the system.

“Shut the gateway,” Paula demanded. “Now!”

Nigel didn’t need to be told. His virtual hand touched Daniel Alster’s icon. There was no reply; it didn’t even acknowledge his connection request. The only result was the Boongate gateway data dropping out of his grid. “Shit.” He hurriedly called up Ward Smith’s unisphere address code. It didn’t answer, either. Nigel diverted his full expanded mentality to the Boongate gateway control system, ready to take personal control and shut the wormhole. His electronic presence couldn’t gain access. “I can’t get in,” Nigel said. It shocked him more than anything else. “I can’t get into the fucking system.”

“What about Alster?” Oscar asked. “Can he shut it down?”

“He’s not responding.”

“Daniel Alster, your chief executive aide,” Paula said; she nodded with what could have been satisfaction. “Perfectly placed.”

“This is most exhilarating,” Qatux said. “I am so glad I came.”

The Boongate gateway was four hundred meters dead ahead, and the carriage had slowed to walking pace. Alic could see the track leading straight into the bottom of the funereal semicircle in front of them, glimmering silver in the dusky light. So close! The tension from waiting was acting like ice water on his guts. None of the others were saying anything; they all stood together watching the gateway as it opened for them.

It had never actually closed, Alic knew, that was misleading; the wormhole still reached Boongate—CST had simply reduced its internal width to zero. Expanding it again was a simple application of power. In his mind he saw it as a single big lever you just had to pull down.

The dark semicircle began to brighten, shading up to a husky gold.

“Here we go,” Matthew said.

“Hell, I never thought we’d actually do it,” Jim said. “What do you think the future’s going to be like?”

“Let’s just concentrate on the mission,” Alic said.

“Oh, come on, Boss, you’ve got to be interested.”

“Maybe, but the mission comes first.” But it did give him pause for thought as the carriage began to speed up.

“Do we get twenty years’ salary paid us?” Jim asked.

“From the navy?” John said. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“But we’ll be gone for twenty years.”

“Only if we actually make it through this time travel wormhole. I mean what happens if the Primes attack Wessex while we’re halfway through?”

“Then we get dead very quickly,” Vic said cheerfully. “Without the generator, the wormhole collapses with us inside.”

“Sheldon will use his superbomb against Dyson Alpha,” Matthew said. “Nobody’s going to attack Wessex. We’ll win the war.”

“Okay, but what if some other war breaks out in ten years’ time while we’re still traveling?”

“Great, you just keep looking on the good side—”

“Alic,” Oscar said. “It’s behind you.”

“What?” some primitive instinct sent a shiver along Alic’s limbs.

“The Starflyer is behind you. There’s a train accelerating along the track. We’ve lost control of the gateway. Move!”

Alic swung around to examine the rear of the carriage. The ceiling lights were dim back there, turning the cargo handling area into a gloomy metal cave. He raised an arm, a plasma rifle siding up out of its forearm recess. He set it to rapid expansion, and fired. The bolt blasted a two-meter hole through the rear of the carriage. A judder ran along the carriage floor as it rocked on its stiff old suspension.

“Christ, Boss,” Jim exclaimed. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Alic didn’t answer. He was staring through the gap. Bright light was shining straight in at him. His retinal inserts brought filter programs on-line. A GH7-class engine was moving onto their track three hundred meters behind them, its headlights blazing as it started to pick up speed. He could see the last of its wagons curving around off the points, clad in yellow sand. It was the train they’d just passed on a siding.

The front of the GH7 was almost three times the height of the carriage they were riding in, and easily twice as wide. Its chrome air intake grille alone was bigger than them. And its speed was reducing the distance fast; with only a few wagons it could accelerate hard.

“Shit!” Vic cried out.

“It’s the Starflyer,” Alic told them. One of his particle lances swung up and over his shoulder, pointing directly at the center of the GH7. He fired. Incandescence flooded the carriage like a solid force. Windows blew out from the sound blast of the discharge. Alic swayed backward, almost falling, feeling the suit’s electromuscle bands fighting the recoil. The lance struck the GH7 head-on, and broke apart.

“Force field,” Matthew said. “They’ve got heavy-duty protection.”

“Vic, John, take out the track,” Alic ordered. The GH7 was closer now, barely two hundred meters away. It was terrifyingly massive.

“Speed up,” Oscar said. “Take control of the carriage, and accelerate.”

Alic’s virtual hands danced over the carriage management icons. Vic and John raced for the back of the carriage, and knelt down in front of the blast hole. They began shooting at the track between them and the GH7. Green and purple flashes streaked across the ground outside.

“They’ve extended their force field,” Vic yelled. “We can’t hit the track.”

Alic’s black virtual hand thumped the carriage accelerator symbol, and held it down. There was a shrill whining sound from the axle motors, and the carriage lurched forward.

“They’re gaining on us,” Matthew yelled. “We’re going to get bulldozed.”

Alic whirled around. The gateway was only two hundred meters away now.

A searing scarlet explosion erupted from the side of the GH7. Flames splashed across the giant engine’s force field, twisting away into the sky to fuel a writhing cloud of black smoke.

“Oh, great,” Jim moaned. “Now someone else out there is shooting.”

Nigel’s expanded mentality examined the physical connections into the Boongate gateway control center. Fireshields had been erected at every interface node in CST’s Narrabri network, isolating the entire system.

There has to be a way in!

He could crack the fireshields, but it would take time. They were based on one hundred ninety geometry encryption.

“Get a security team into the gateway control center,” Nigel snapped at Nelson. His digital presence circled around and around the network, interrogating every routing node, hunting a weakness. Eight of Narrabri station’s RIs were diverted from their primary function of managing wormhole generators, and assigned decryption on the fireshields. He knew they wouldn’t do it in time.

The traffic control network, with its complex sensor system spread across the station, was still available to him. He accessed the cameras on top of the Boongate gateway, receiving a clear view looking down on the little carriage as it shuddered its way along the last hundred fifty meters of track. The GH7 was right behind it, headlights illuminating the shoddy paintwork and grime-smeared wheels. The distance was shrinking rapidly as the carriage accelerated as best its ancient hub motors could manage. Missiles slammed into the GH7. Completely ineffectual.

Where did they come from?

“Gateway control center is closed and barricaded,” Nelson reported. “We can’t get in.”

“Blow it open,” Nigel ordered. One aspect of his expanded mentality was examining the orbital platforms to see if their beam weapons could get a clear shot at the GH7. But he didn’t have access to the Narrabri force field, and by the time he got through to Alan it would be too late.

Another slender particle lance shot came from the carriage to strike ineffectually at the force field around the GH7. Then the carriage swept through the open gateway.

Alic was instinctively bracing himself for the impact. The GH7 was closing fast now, bearing down on them with more inertia than a falling moon.

“Get ready to jump,” Alic said. He bent his legs, ready to use the strength of the suit’s electromuscle. It should be enough to power him clear, then if he sprinted …

“We stay,” Vic growled. “We’ll be through any second. I’m not going to let him get away from us now.”

“But—”

The weak rose-gold light emanating from the gateway was almost lost in the harsh blaze of the headlights behind them. Alic was mesmerized by the GH7 as it raced ever closer. Decision time was measurable in seconds. Less.

“Stay with it,” Vic pleaded.

Which was a personal choice, Alic knew, whereas he should be making cool operational assessments. Too late.

Another barrage of missiles hammered at the GH7 engine. Then they were through the force field, and Boongate’s planetary station was laid out in front of them under the gloaming of a twilight sun. Alic stared in consternation at what was waiting for them. “Jump,” he yelled frantically.

The GH7 vanished through the Boongate gateway.

“It got home,” Nigel exclaimed. He couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. “Right under our fucking noses. Son of a bitch!”

“Commander Hogan’s link has dropped out,” Oscar said. “They must be under attack on the other side.”

“No goddamn kidding.”

“Unisphere connection to Boongate has failed,” Nelson said. “It looks like the physical link was taken out just the other side of the zero-width wormhole.”

“Mr. Sheldon,” Bradley Johansson said, “we need to go after it.”

Nigel shot Justine a look, anxious for advice from someone who must surely understand all the factors. She just shrugged, her left hand held against her belly. He thought she was going to be sick; her cheeks were puffing out.

“We’ll put a team together,” Nigel said. It came out like an admission of defeat.

“Your pardon,” Bradley said. “We already have a team. And I have spent a hundred thirty years preparing for this eventuality. Let us go through.”

“I don’t even have control of the gateway right now.”

“My squad is getting entry into the gateway control center,” Nelson said. “Some resistance. Oh … they’re all dead, all the staff, he murdered them.”

Nigel closed his eyes, experiencing an anguish that was close to physical pain. One of his grid squares expanded into his virtual vision. He couldn’t recall summoning it. Links from the security squad showed him the carnage. “Oh, Christ.” It was Anshun all over again. “How many of these Judas bastards are there?” Four of the security squad were chasing someone in a force field suit, blowing flaming holes in the structure of the gateway administration building as they went. A grade one security alert was slowly closing off the building, force fields compartmentalizing it. Too little, too late, Nigel knew.

“We have to get back to Far Away,” Bradley Johansson said. “The Guardians can stop the Starflyer. This is our time, Mr. Sheldon; let us do what we have devoted our lives to achieving.”

Ion rifle fire and enhanced energy grenades were shredding the fourth floor of the administration building as the security squad closed in on Daniel Alster. Nigel took a breath, steeling himself. “What do you need?”

“We have a train here at Narrabri station loaded with our equipment. All we need to make it work is the data Kazimir was carrying. Senator Burnelli has it.”

“I do,” Justine confirmed. She held up a memory crystal, then grimaced against another burst of nausea.

“Once we have that,” Johansson continued, “we need passage through the wormhole to Boongate. Investigator Myo can guarantee that.”

“No,” Paula said. “I will not do that. I will not legitimatize Elvin’s criminal activities.”

“We need a guarantee if we are to expose ourselves,” Johansson said. “Surely you must see that?”

“I have no reason to lie,” Nigel said. “You can go through. No catch.” The RIs were breaking the fireshields, hacking a route back into the Boongate wormhole systems for him. It didn’t look as if Alster had inflicted any physical damage to the giant machine.

“Investigator, I am not asking you to legitimatize anything,” Bradley said. “I am asking you to help us overcome the mistrust that has assisted the Starflyer for a hundred thirty years. In addition, you will be able to witness its final demise.”

Nigel had never seen Paula look so uncertain before. There was even a sheen of perspiration on her forehead. He put the link to Johansson on hold. “You’ll have to go,” he told her gently. “Take Cat’s Claws with you; they’ll maintain your safety.”

“I arrested Morton,” she said indignantly.

“All right, some CST security operatives, then. But we need to get this moving.”

Wilson and Anna had been whispering together. “We’ll go,” Wilson said. “Someone from our group needs to confirm what happens on Far Away, if we ever reach it.”

“You two have no experience on dealing with unknown terrain,” Oscar said. “Besides, I’m a serving navy officer.”

“Enough.” Nigel held his hand up. “The three of you and Paula can go with Cat’s Claws. That’s it. Nelson, get them suited up, the best armor we have.” He brought Johansson back on-line. “Bradley, we’re sending a team out to you, including Investigator Myo; they’ll accompany you to Far Away.”

“Thank you, Mr. Sheldon.”

“I also will accompany Mr. Johansson,” Qatux announced.

Tiger Pansy’s giggle was loud in the auditorium. “I guess that means I get to go, too, huh?”

“If you would be so kind,” Qatux said. “I do not believe anything you can experience in the Commonwealth will be as rich with emotional content as this chase.”

“Sure. Okay,” Tiger Pansy said. “It’ll be a laugh.”

“Qatux, you can’t go,” Nigel said.

“Why not?”

“It’s dangerous.”

“That is for me to judge. I am an individual.”

“But we need you here,” Hoshe said.

“I will return to assist you in investigating Starflyer agents. I expect I will be of more use on Far Away in the immediate future; there are likely to be more Starflyer agents there.”

“Oh, why the hell not.” Nigel grunted with ill grace. “Anyone else?” He stared at Mellanie, who responded by looking up to study the ceiling.

“Could I ask you to hurry, please,” Bradley Johansson said. “We’re running out of time.”

There wasn’t much government left on Boongate by the time MorningLightMountain sent its ships and flare bombs into the star system. The population, too, was much reduced; people had been leaving ever since the Lost23 were invaded. For the rich it was easy: they could afford to switch home without too much trouble; the middle classes, well informed or with a young family, took the loss as the price for safety; for single people it was even easier to pack up and leave. Local government, assisted by the Commonwealth Senate, did their best to discourage the exodus. The navy strengthened the planet’s defenses, including the force fields that shielded cities and the larger towns. Recently a starship had been assigned to the system for patrol duties, complementing the orbital platforms. The displacement continued more or less as before.

So many police had left that Boongate’s First Minister was forced to ask CST for additional security staff to help with crowd control around the planetary station. Sure enough, Nigel sent them in from Wessex, though it was in their contract that they returned to that base between shifts. Without that concession they wouldn’t have taken the duty.

As more and more people drifted away from the countryside and villages, leaving for the far side of the Commonwealth, so the rural police were withdrawn to the towns. Eventually, they were brought back to the cities, and just patrolled the towns. Intermittently.

Best estimates were that thirty-seven million people had so far abandoned their world. That still left over ninety million living there in various levels of trepidation. When the flare bombs and quantumbusters detonated in the star there was no real mechanism left for counting how many people made it to safety under the force fields. The frenzied particle storms that swept around the planet disrupted power supplies and communications. Everyone who heard the warning did their best to make it to safety, cowering in cellars or behind thick walls, heading underground, driving into tunnels; a lucky few had caves nearby. Once the borealis blizzards had diminished, the agitated atmosphere hit the survivors with gales and hurricanes. People struggled on to the nearest population center with a force field.

The War Cabinet had given planetary governments of the Second47 half an hour’s advance warning before they made their public announcement. Boongate’s First Minister and the remaining members of the cabinet were left with the near impossible task of getting the survivors to the capital inside the one-week deadline for evacuation. Anyone with a car started to drive. Buses were commandeered. Train schedules were drawn up, utilizing both passenger carriages and cargo wagons.

The CST planetary station force field, which had powered up when the invasion began, remained on. With everyone left on the planet slowly congregating underneath the capital’s force field the government needed to keep the station clear to prevent a stampede. Within hours, the new deluge of refugees had ringed the entire station. Their numbers expanded constantly, without order. It was soon impossible for food, or police, or medical personnel to reach the innermost migrants pressed up against the force field. All anyone could do was wait for Nigel Sheldon to make good on his promise. The cabinet knew that as soon as the gateway was opened to the future, and the station force field turned off, there would be a panicked race for the gateway, with injuries reaching horrific numbers. Medical contingency plans were drawn up with little prospect of ever being implemented.

In the meantime, those who were inside the station boundary when the force field came on rejoiced in their amazing good fortune, and settled down for the kind of relaxed wait impossible outside. It lasted right up to the moment when the gateway to Wessex opened without any warning.

The battered old track maintenance division carriage burst through the opening. Its frame was shaking violently as its motors strained away at torque levels they were never designed for.

A host of vehicles was waiting on either side of the track. Big four-by-fours and covered vans, all of them equipped with bulky mounted weapons now openly deployed. There was a long moment broken only by the metallic screeching of steel wheels and bearings that were being pushed far beyond their safety margins. Armor-suited figures leaped through the carriage’s shattered windows as the vehicles fired lasers, kinetics, and ion bolts into the bodywork. The flimsy metal panels crumpled and vaporized, yet still the tormented chassis held together. It was nothing more than a fireball on wheels now, plummeting forward.

The giant GH7 engine raced through the gateway, its five big cargo wagons intact. All the vehicles stopped firing. Two seconds later, the GH7 slammed into the burning wreckage. What was left of the carriage simply disintegrated, its remnants forming a short-lived halo of flame around the front of the GH7.

Scraps of scorched twisted metal pattered down around Alic. His passive sensors showed him their blackened shapes bouncing across the stony ground. When he shifted the focus, he saw the GH7 slowing to a more reasonable speed now its mad dash for the gateway was successfully concluded. It was already half a kilometer away. The parked vehicles started up, and drove off after it, providing a tight escort on either side. They rocked violently as they cut across tracks and drainage ditches, always maintaining their position in the line.

The two vehicles bringing up the rear of the little convoy opened fire with magnetic Gatling cannons, strafing the area where the armor suits had landed. Instinct made Alic clasp his arms over his head as the ground erupted into clouds of stone chips around him. A couple of the projectiles struck his armor, punching him sideways, but the force field held. Their impact was like taking a kick in the ribs.

“Son of a bitch,” Jim groaned. “I got hit on the helmet.”

“You okay?” Matthew asked.

“Hangover like an eight-day stag weekend.”

“Boss, you want us to hit the vehicles?” Vic asked. “I can target at least eight with missiles.”

“No. They’re not important. The Starflyer’s all that matters now.” He saw a red square flashing in his communications grid. “Damnit. We’ve lost the unisphere, all I can hook into is the planetary cybersphere. I can’t tell Oscar what’s happened.”

“They’ll be here soon enough,” Jim said.

Alic climbed to his feet. That was when he noticed that John King’s telemetry grid was black. “Oh, shit. Anyone see John? Did he make it out?”

“I got him,” Vic said. “Some of him. The kinetics got through; he must have taken a real pounding. Damn, they made a mess. Chewed him up bad.”

“Crap.” Alic wanted to hit something. Hard. “Can you see his helmet? Did his skull get damaged?”

“No, I think that’s okay; he’s in one piece from the shoulders up. More or less.”

“Okay, his memorycell’s intact. He can be re-lifed.”

“By who?” Jim cried. “This planet isn’t even going to be here by the end of the week.”

“Before we leave, we come back and recover the memorycell,” Alic said. “That goes for all of us. Last man standing has that duty. Agreed?”

“Yes, Boss.”

The other two grunted acknowledgment.

“All right.” Alic stared along the track where the GH7 had gone. The Far Away section force field was a gray-shaded bubble squatting over a cluster of diminutive buildings and warehouses six kilometers away. “We know where it’s going. Let’s get after it. Matthew, get Edmund on-line. It’s about time he earned his money and switched off that force field.”

“Just us four?” Jim asked.

Alic looked around at the gateway. It was still open. I could run through. We all could. It would be so easy. Technically the mission’s over. We’ve proved the Starflyer exists. “I don’t think we’ll be alone for long.”

His visual sensors picked up something moving a kilometer away across the station yard, heading toward them. A laser radar sweep showed him a bike, moving fast as it jumped rail tracks, heading for the wormhole. It picked up a couple of other moving objects behind the bike, possibly small cars. “Let’s move,” he said. “We’ll get run over if we stay here much longer.”

Adam eased the Ables ND47 out of the shed and applied the brakes. Narrabri traffic control logged them onto the system, and assigned them a transit code. He had to smile at the file name: Guardian 0001A.

Now we’re The Man.

“Here they come,” Bradley said.

Adam opened the cab door, looked out. A medium-sized truck and a fifteen-seater bus were racing along the service road to the shed.

“Everyone okay down there?” he asked the team crammed into the armored vehicles. The three squad leaders, Kieran, Rosamund, and Jamas, all replied yes. He thought they were all wound too tight. Even for a Guardian, committed since birth, it was quite something to finally know the Starflyer had passed just a few kilometers away. As for him …

I don’t have to take it on faith anymore. It was an astonishing release, almost spiritual. The Starflyer was real, the Guardians were mainstream, and there was a noble cause to be fought. In the middle of a war for species survival with millions already dead he actually felt good.

The bus and truck pulled up beside the two closed wagons behind the Ables ND47. Bradley had already opened the broad side doors, and was extending the ramps. He’d said Sheldon was sending something large. Adam assumed that would be some kind of combat aerobots.

Armor-suited figures were hurrying out of the bus. The back of the truck rolled up, and a thick ramp slid out.

“Fuck me,” Adam muttered.

A Raiel lumbered down out of the truck, its bulky body undulating in long wave motions. It was followed by a woman with wild red hair, who was dressed in a black blouse and short skirt colored almost the same shade as her hair. She’d squeezed a force field skeleton suit on top of her clothes. Even that couldn’t quite account for her inelegant movements. Then Adam realized she was in heels.

Five Guardians spilled out of the armored vehicles to greet the newcomers. Mostly they clustered around the Raiel.

A man in a sharp expensive business suit stepped out of the bus. Adam recognized Nelson Sheldon immediately. His presence sent a little shiver along Adam’s spine as he watched Bradley take his suit helmet off and walk over to shake hands with the security chief. Historic moment. A figure in an armor suit standing beside Nelson handed Bradley a small plastic case, the type used to carry memory crystals.

Her! Adam shivered again inside his armor suit.

As if she could sense his thoughts, Paula Myo turned and tipped her blank helmet up so that she was staring right at him. Even with all his suit’s passive and active layers of protection, Adam felt terribly vulnerable.

“All right,” Bradley announced, “let’s get this show on the road.”

The Raiel started up a ramp into the rear cargo wagon. Bradley had obviously decided it could ride in one of their armored Volvo trucks.

Paula Myo stayed outside, looking up at the cab on top of the Ables ND47. Adam’s e-butler told him she was calling him on a secure local channel. He opened the communications link.

“Mr. Elvin,” Paula Myo said.

“Investigator. Thank you for agreeing to help us.” Total bullshit, of course; he wasn’t pleased. He didn’t want her within a hundred light-years of this train, nor him.

“Just so we understand each other,” Paula said. “When the Starflyer threat is over, I will be arresting you for the Abadan atrocity. Johansson has committed many criminal acts, but they were politically motivated, for which I expect he will be given a pardon. High-level discussions are under way on that subject. You, on the other hand, will not receive a pardon. That has already been decided. Your continued assistance in exterminating the Starflyer might help mitigate your sentencing with the judge, nothing more.”

Adam canceled the link, and gave her the finger. It wasn’t a gesture that came over well in an armor suit.

Paula walked up the ramp into the first covered wagon.

Adam slammed the cabin door shut. He was shaking inside the suit. Even his virtual hands seemed to be trembling when he began manipulating the engine’s systems, preparing the defense hardware for whatever was waiting on the other side of the wormhole.

Pre-combat nerves, that’s all. Not her. She doesn’t scare me. Not anymore. No way.

“Well, they didn’t start shooting at each other,” Nelson said. “That’s something.”

“Not yet,” Nigel told him. He was relaxing in a seat at the back of the converted lecture theater, as good a place as anywhere to see the remainder of this mission through. His expanded mentality now had complete control over the Boongate gateway. CST communications technicians were looking into reestablishing Boongate’s connection to the unisphere. Someone had bombed the primary connection node, and the backup, and the fallback interlink. Emergency laser relays working through the main gateway were now in operation, allowing a remote survey of the damage. Permanent reconnection would mean keeping the main gateway open while technicians went through to do the work. With less than a week left before the evacuation was due to begin, Nigel didn’t favor that option. Besides, the main gateway would soon have to be reduced to zero width to permit final realignment on the generator itself so it could be formatted for temporal transit.

One piece of data that was coming through clear and strong was the images of the rush toward the gateway on the Boongate side. It had only been opened twenty minutes, and already over a hundred vehicles had powered through, from bikes, to cars, buses with tires that had burst on the rough journey over tracks, even a tow truck; so far five guys had cycled through. Sensors on the other side showed a lot of people jogging toward the open wormhole, making good time, too, considering the terminal was five kilometers distant.

A section of his grid expanded into his virtual vision, showing him the Guardians’ train starting its journey across Narrabri station.

“They’ll be through in two minutes,” he told Justine, who was sitting next to him, chewing on a peppermint settler tab.

“Will you shut the gateway after that?”

“Completely. I’m recoding the management routines so that I’m the only person who can activate it. When that’s done I’m going to start firing half of my security operation. This was a total fucking catastrophe.”

“No more than the rest of this war,” she said equitably. “Who knows when the subversion software was loaded in? It could have been sitting in the arrays for decades waiting for today. The Starflyer really thinks and plans ahead. I just hope Bradley Johansson’s counterstrike is up to the task.”

“At least he has a plan,” Nigel said wearily. “I suppose I’d better send a starship to Far Away to provide backup. Oh, hell …”

“What now?” Justine asked.

“According to Johansson, the Starflyer’s going to take off and fly back to Dyson Beta, or somewhere it can link up with its own type.”

“Yes.”

“But it didn’t know we could build FTL starships when it started this conspiracy. We can catch the Marie Celeste at any time in the next six hundred years if it goes back to Dyson Beta at sublight speed.”

“Ah, you’re thinking it modified the Marie Celeste for FTL.”

“At least. I’m just hoping Alster didn’t give it the details of our new hyperdrive. We really would be up shit creek. No.” He shook his head. “We only just built the prototype drive ourselves two weeks ago, and there’s been no transport to Far Away for longer than that. If the Marie Celeste is FTL now, it’ll be using our original continuous wormhole generator.”

Mellanie and Hoshe entered the auditorium; they’d both been to see off Wilson’s team, staying with them while they suited up and caught their transport out to the Guardians’ train.

“Are you angry with me?” Mellanie asked Nigel.

“For what?”

“I was being a bit of a brat when I asked you to open the wormhole.”

“I just wish you’d asked earlier; we might have caught the Starflyer with its pants down.”

“Thanks.” She gave him a demure kiss. Both of them automatically looked over at where Dudley and the Bose motile were standing. Dudley was emphatically not looking in their direction. “Will you open it to get them back?” Mellanie asked.

“Not the main wormhole, no, it’s being converted to time travel, remember. If Wilson and Cat’s Claws do come back from Far Away, we can probably use the exploration division wormhole to retrieve them. I haven’t really thought any of this through. There’s also the question of the Commonwealth’s connection to Far Away as well. Which is going to be difficult and very expensive to renew, especially if the Commonwealth is paying for forty-seven new worlds at the same time. We might just reduce the connection to starship flights, or leave them as an Isolated world.”

“They wouldn’t care,” Mellanie said. “Morton could build himself his empire there. It’s that kind of planet.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t go with them.”

“Really? It’s simple enough. I don’t have a death wish.”

Nigel grinned. “How’s Paula?” he asked Hoshe.

“Not happy. I really don’t think it was a good idea forcing her to go.”

“She’ll survive.” His virtual vision showed him the Guardians’ Ables ND47 turning onto the Boongate line. Cars and small vans were popping through the gateway, where CST security was busy rounding them up. Sensors showed him a force field strengthening around the train. He opened a link to Wilson. “Good luck. I’m going to send a starship to Far Away to support you. It should be there in a week or so.”

“Thanks,” Wilson said. “See you when we get back.”

“Boldly they rode and well,” Adam muttered as the engine lined up on the Boongate gateway. A four-by-four Toyota pickup sped out of the glowing haze that capped the entrance. A CST security division helicopter buzzed over it. “Into the jaws of death.” His virtual hand twisted the power feed, and they began to pick up speed. The force field extended, sweeping out across the rails ahead. “Into the mouth of hell.” Now they didn’t need to be stealthy, he deployed the weapons from their disguised casings. The gold glow from the gateway shone in through the cab windows. Adam smiled in welcome at the placid light; this far above the ground, isolated, running smooth, it was as though he were gliding into the sunset. “Rode the six hundred.”

The Ables ND47 went through the gateway at close to a hundred kilometers an hour. The gold haze tore away from the front of the engine revealing the twilit landscape of the station yard. A big Audi Luxnat ten-seater was trying to turn onto the track. The train smacked into it, shredding the bodywork to splinters of carbon. Adam winced in guilt. Hope the Investigator didn’t see that.

Dozens of other vehicles were jouncing their way across the multiple tracks, converging on the gateway. Cameras showed him exhausted runners flinging themselves down as the train hurtled past. He took in all the peripheral scenes with a swift sweep through his virtual vision display grid, concentrating on the tracks ahead. Radar showed them intact. The force field over the Far Away section was an impenetrable bubble.

“We’re closing the wormhole now,” Nigel Sheldon said.

“Thanks for nothing,” Adam retorted gleefully as the signal faded. Sensors were showing him some kind of firefight up ahead. His virtual hand throttled back on the power, and began applying the brakes. The cab’s array connected with the local traffic control. Adam used the authority codes he’d been given to open a route directly to the Far Away section. It was a superfluous order; the points were still open. The Ables ND47 rolled onward, using the same route the Starflyer had taken not thirty minutes before.

Adam concentrated on the firefight. Over twenty vehicles were clustered together outside the force field, guarding the point where the tracks led into the Far Away section. His sensors showed him weapons fire emerging from fast-moving locations. Whoever was launching them must be stealthed, the sensors couldn’t lock on to them.

“This has to be the navy team,” he said.

“We agree,” Wilson said. “One moment, I’ll try to contact them.”

“Got another one,” Vic claimed as the ground close by sizzled from a burst of maser energy.

Alic was jammed into a shallow drainage ditch beside Vic. Jim and Matthew were fifty meters away, using a raised roadway for cover.

The vehicles that had escorted the Starflyer’s train were spread out ahead of them, making sure no one got close to the big dome of energy that protected the station’s Far Away section. They’d encountered vigorous resistance from a kilometer out. It’d taken time to creep forward. Vic’s missiles had disposed of eight, but Alic didn’t want him to waste any more. They’d need serious firepower if they ever caught up with the Starflyer.

A particle lance swung up and over his shoulder, and he raised himself up so its sensors could lock on to the closest four-by-four. He fired, and the vehicle exploded in a spectacularly violent fireball. The blast wave slammed overhead, sending a rain of small stones rattling down on Alic and Vic.

“Good shooting, Boss,” Vic said.

Masers and a burst from a magnetic gattling cannon pounded the ditch. Alic and Vic started to crawl along through the trickle of dirty water in the bottom.

“Edmund, any progress?” Alic asked.

“No, man, sorry. All I can see is about ten cars and such ringing the gateway to Half Way. There’s been no change since the train went through. They’re just waiting for anyone to try and take them on.”

Alic wanted to give the man a swift kick up the ass. Even before they’d left for Wessex, the Paris tactical crew had come up with half a dozen safe routes he could take to the force field generator. Edmund Li had also been given powerful software to subvert Tarlo’s routines. Technical had shown him which generator components to shoot with his ion pistol. There was nothing stopping him from making the run. Nothing.

“Edmund, you’ve got to kill that generator.” Another fusillade from an enhanced energy area denial cluster made him fling himself down. Blue flame sealed off the top of the ditch. Steaming water gurgled around his armor. “We can’t get you out.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t do it, I’m safe here.”

A repetitive drumming sounded through the roar of retreating flame. Jim was firing his rotary launcher. The air was split by a whistling shriek as hypervelocity kinetics zipped overhead. A moment’s pause, and another of the bad guy vehicles was reduced to flaming scrap metal.

“You can’t stay there,” Alic said; he was near to pleading now. “Tarlo will keep the force field on permanently. He doesn’t want any attempt to follow the Starflyer. That means you won’t be able to join the exodus. This planet will be abandoned. You’ll die in there, Edmund. Nobody will ever find your memorycell for re-life.”

“Oh, Christ, I don’t want this.”

Alic resumed crawling forward. “None of us asked for this war. Your part won’t take more than five minutes. Get to that generator, let us in. We’ll take care of Tarlo and the escort vehicles.”

“I’ll see if I can get there.”

“That’s fine, Edmund. Go for it, now, eh?” Alic accessed two of Matthew’s sneekbots as they scuttled over the hostile landscape, trying to triangulate on another vehicle.

“Which one is launching those bloody area denial clusters?” Vic asked.

“Not sure,” Matthew said. “They took out five sneekbots last time.”

Alic’s e-butler told him it was picking up a localized secure call from Paula Myo. “Localized?” he queried.

“Yes.”

“Thank Christ, put her through.”

“Commander, is that you engaging the vehicles outside the force field?”

“Yes!”

“Okay, stand by, we’ll take them out for you. We need you a minimum one hundred meters away from them.”

“We are. What have you got?”

“The Guardians tell me they have zone killers.”

“Guardians? You’re with the Guardians?” He didn’t know why he was surprised; the universe wasn’t operating logically today.

“I am. We’re in pursuit of the Starflyer. Stay down.”

“Trust me, I’m down a long way.” He and Vic were clinging to the bottom of the ditch. He strengthened his force field to maximum.

“Do you still have a contact inside the Far Away section?” Paula asked.

“Yeah. He’s proving reluctant to shut off the force field generator.”

“Why? We need the force field down.”

“He knows. I think he’s finally doing something about it.”

“Good. Heads down, here it comes.”

The sneekbots showed Alic something like a man-sized jet-propelled moth descending on the cluster of vehicles. There was a dazzling green flash, and every sneekbot signal vanished. Vivid green light flowed into the bottom of the ditch like a pervasive liquid. Then the ground thumped Alic upward as if he’d been caught in an earthquake. A prolonged thunderclap howl reverberated across the land. Alic could feel it through the suit’s insulation.

“Clear,” Paula said.

Alic slowly clambered up out of the ditch. Each of the remaining escort vehicles was lost inside a thick swirl of flame. He watched a big Ables ND47 approaching down the same track the Starflyer’s train had used. It was braking hard, with sparks zipping out from the huge wheels.

“Now that’s what I call making an entrance,” Vic said.

The Ables ND47 came to a halt. A small door opened in the side of the first wagon.

“Get in, please,” Paula said.

Alic and his arrest team sprinted across the blackened land. He noticed the zone killer had left the rails intact. Up on the front of the engine, a couple of dark cylinders twice the size of his armor suit were extending ponderously from the bodywork on malmetal stalks. He didn’t recognize the type of weapon, but he knew he didn’t want to be close by when they went off.

There were several bright flashes from above the engine’s chrome intake grille, accompanied by a crack. Something like a black nebula swirled across the gap between train and force field. A broad arc on the force field’s surface started to glow a gentle copper; static flames thrashed about close to the ground, raising a pack of small dense dust devils.

Alic jumped up into the dark wagon. Outside, there was a terrific boom as the weapons fired.

Edmund hit the outside door running. Behind him, the administration block’s network was crashing from the disruptor software he’d loaded in. The sensors couldn’t see him; but Tarlo would know for sure someone was inside the force field. Someone who was trying to sabotage the Starflyer’s return. It didn’t take a tactical genius to work out what the next stage had to be.

The building housing the force field generator was an elongated geodesic hall of pearl-gray composite. He could see it protruding over a warehouse on the other side of the parking lot. Once he was there, this nightmare would be over.

His parked Honda came to life as soon as he loaded in the drive orders. It accelerated hard, wheels spinning on the damp concrete, and headed out toward the main road. As a distraction it should gain him a few seconds—so the Paris tactical experts claimed. Edmund sprinted in the opposite direction; if he could just make it to the cover of the warehouse he should be okay.

The turbid gray sky above the parking lot flared brilliant white. A terrifyingly loud screech echoed around the inside of the force field. Edmund lost his footing and went sprawling painfully on the concrete. He gawped up at the force field, where scarlet lightning was now scrabbling furiously against it. The vivid streamers slithered up into the air to strike the bottom of the station force field.

White light blazed again, and the horrendous noise ripped across the Far Away section. This time he understood: someone was shooting at the force field with incredibly powerful weapons, trying to break through. He made himself get up. Blood was soaking into his shirt sleeve where he’d landed on his elbow. Wincing at the pain, and cowering as another energy blast struck the force field, he ran for the warehouse.

By the time he made it around the corner he was breathing heavily. The geodesic hall was only a hundred eighty meters away now. He dashed for it as fast as he could, ignoring the awesome burns of light overhead as they alternated between dazzling white and lurid crimson. The punishing noise trapped under the force field was just about constant. His ears were ringing badly.

He was short of breath and unsteady on his feet when he finally arrived at the door to the geodesic hall. It was open, which he didn’t expect. He took a quick glance inside. Nothing was moving. Edmund pulled down a ragged breath and went in.

The generator was a large cluster of metal and plastic shapes laid out along the floor, as big as a house. White and red light took turns to fluoresce the composite arching overhead. The stentorian roaring was muted inside. He identified the power injection points, and put his hand down to his holster.

“Shit!” The shock stabbed through him as his fingers closed on empty leather. There was no pistol; it must have dropped out when he fell. “Oh, fuck. Fuck!” He stared helplessly at the bulky generator. He had no idea where the control console was—that’s if there even was a control console. His head twisted from side to side, searching for something he could use to smash a section of casing. That would be as much use as screaming at it to switch off, he decided. There was nothing else for it; he’d have to go back for the ion pistol.

The interior of the hall flared with blue-white light. An ion pulse ripped through the air, and struck the generator casing. A dazzling purple discharge seethed down the dark metallic composite, partially obscured by a fountain of smoldering plastic droplets.

A second ion pulse hit a power injector, exactly where the Paris experts had told Edmund to aim. It was suddenly very quiet. The alternating red and white light outside had stopped.

Very slowly, Edmund Li turned around to face the person who was shooting, knowing what he’d see. Tarlo was standing to one side of the open door, his arm outstretched, holding an ion pistol.

“Why?” Edmund asked.

Tarlo simply smiled as he swung the pistol around to point at Edmund Li’s head. He fired again.

Adam was sweating inside his armor. He’d calculated the firepower of the atom lasers himself. It should have been enough to break the force field, especially with the dump-web stressing it. Instead he was watching the awesome energy blasts ricochet dangerously.

The force field vanished. “Dreaming heavens,” Adam grunted. “Your inside man did it.”

“What do you know,” Alic said. “Edmund came through.”

Adam moved the Ables ND47 forward cautiously. Radar scanned ahead, showing him the tracks were broken less than a kilometer in front of them. “We’re not going to get much farther in this,” he told the teams back in the wagons. The sensors showed him the phalanx of vehicles around the gateway that led to Half Way. He launched another zone killer. The triangular shape streaked away from its launcher on top of the engine, curving in a short ballistic arc. It detonated in a cascade of green scintillations that sank toward the ground in a display of perverse splendor. Harsh orange fireballs spoiled the beauty as the vehicles and their munitions exploded.

The train braked again, grinding over the last few meters of track before coming to a halt in front of the shallow blast crater that had destroyed the rails. “End of the line,” Adam said. He unlocked the wagons.

“I’m staying here,” Vic announced as Kieran gunned the armored car down the ramp.

There were eight of them crammed inside, Vic, Alic, Wilson, Anna, Bradley Johansson, Jamas, Ayub, and Kieran up in the driver’s seat. All of them wore armor suits of various marques, though externally there was little difference: stone black figures that outlined a rough human shape. Additional weapons packs distorted their basic humanity.

“I understand,” Bradley said

“No you don’t. He’s still here.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I can feel it. Getting in was too easy. Tarlo’s a smart bastard. He doesn’t play a straight game.”

“Then you should stay inside this armored car,” Bradley said. “It is extremely well protected.”

“No. I’ll find him out there. Hey, I’ll be covering your ass. He’ll have something planned for you.”

“My team has planned for most eventualities.”

Vic stood up. “But not all of them.”

“As you wish,” Bradley said.

The side door slid open. It was dim outside, the air layered with smoke from the ruined vehicles.

“You coming, Boss?” Vic asked.

“We know the Starflyer’s real,” Alic said. “It’s just on the other side of that gateway. That’s my priority. Jim, Matthew, if you want to go with Vic, that’s fine by me.”

“I’ll stick with you, Boss,” Jim said.

“Sorry, Vic,” Matthew said, “but this is bigger.”

“That’s okay.” The big man stooped to get through the door. “I want this for myself. And Gwyneth.”

“Good luck,” Alic said.

Adam climbed down the ladder on the side of the engine, thankful for the suit’s electromuscle. It was a long way to the ground, and he was getting tired after days of high-pressure preparation. Three armored cars were waiting beside the broken track for him, blunt olive-green ovals with a smooth skin of passive deflector panels riding on ten independent mesh-flex wheels. They were in a triangular formation around three Volvo trucks. The Volvos were based on the twenty-wheel GH chassis, developed for rough terrain on developing worlds. They’d been customized with a cruder version of deflector paneling than the armored cars, then beefed up with extensive electronic countermeasures, turning them into squat brutes a dull gray-blue in color. With their diesel tanks full they should have the range to dive from Armstrong City to the Dessault Mountains, where the components they were carrying were desperately needed for the planet’s revenge.

As Adam made his way over to the armored car taking point duty he saw Vic walking away, and shook his head in regret. They could have done with a genuine professional. Personal feelings were always bad news in combat situations.

The armored car’s side door slid open, and he climbed in. There was one seat left, opposite Paula Myo. Oh, crap.

“Do you want to drive, sir?” Rosamund asked.

“No, that’s okay. Just remember what I taught you.”

“If she does that, she’ll probably wind up in suspension, just like you’re going to,” Paula said.

“We’re not in that courtroom yet, Investigator. We both have to live through the next couple of days first, and personally I don’t give us particularly high odds.”

“You want us to kill her for you, sir?” Rosamund asked. She sounded very hostile.

“Oh, dreaming heavens, no. Let’s just all stay civilized, shall we? All of you, leave the Investigator and me to work out our own little problem by ourselves.”

“Okay. But you just have to say the word.” Rosamund fed power to the engines, and the armored car rolled forward.

“You should watch your mouth,” Adam told Paula. “Remember this is my home ground.”

“To the best of my knowledge you’ve never been to Far Away.”

“No, but these are my people.”

“I don’t think so. You’re a black market arms dealer who gave them some training. Do they know how many innocent people you slaughtered before Johansson sheltered you?”

“You two,” Bradley said, “knock it off. We have a different war to fight today.”

Adam bit back on his next comment. He was sure the Investigator was smiling inside her helmet. His virtual hands pulled sensor images from all the armored cars out of his mission display grid. They were heading across the last few hundred meters of ground in front of the small gateway. It shone a pallid coral-pink in front of them.

“It’s open,” Rosamund said.

“Pay attention to the weapons,” Adam told her. There were over twenty maser cannons covering the gateway, the first line of defense in any alien invasion. Ironic, Adam thought, ultimately they wound up facing the wrong way. The X-ray lasers on the armored cars began firing, targeting the cannon.

Adam switched his attention to the person next to Myo. He was wearing absolute state-of-the-art armor, which Adam envied; despite his every effort and contact in the black market he hadn’t been able to get his hands on the suit that the navy had used to equip all its Lost23 insurgents. “Hello, Rob,” Adam said. “Good to be working with you again.”

“For you, maybe,” Rob retorted. “I didn’t even know it was you last time, and I wound up with a two-hundred-year life suspension.”

“We almost made it though, didn’t we? Almost stopped the Second Chance. If we had, we wouldn’t be here today.”

“Is this supposed to make me feel better?”

“Just pointing out how things go full circle.”

“Elvin, you took no part in the Second Chance assault,” Paula said.

“I planned it, I organized it. The damn thing would have worked if the SI hadn’t thrown in on your side.”

“Look,” Rob said. “I didn’t know I was working for you. And the only reason I took the job was because I owed some very bad people a lot of money. Okay? We’re not comrades, we’re not buddies; that’s it, period.”

“Were you recruited through an agent?” Paula asked.

“It’s in my file,” Rob said. “I cooperated fully with the police. Much good it did me.”

“Give it a rest,” Adam snapped at her. “We’re about to face the Starflyer itself.”

“I ask, because Vic may be right. This is very easy. Why has the Starflyer left the gateway open to Half Way?”

“You think it’s going to ambush us? We’re ready for that. This is what I do, plan combat scenarios. I know you don’t like the idea, but have some faith in me, Investigator; you wouldn’t be chasing me unless I was good.” Even as he said it, he checked his virtual vision grid. The maser cannons were being taken out one at a time, slumping over to the ground as their mountings turned sluggish. They were only a hundred meters from the gateway now, bumping along the single track that led to Half Way. It was discomfortingly easy, he had to admit.

“Remember Valtare Rigin?” Paula asked.

Better than you realize. Adam still got chilly when he thought how close they’d been that day on Venice Coast, and she’d never seen him. “Owner of the Nystol gallery on Venice Coast, the one Bruce targeted.”

“Yes. We didn’t release the information at the time, obviously, but our forensic team found that Rigin’s memorycell had been removed postmortem.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Tarlo took the head of the Agent on Illuminatus, complete with memorycell. Do you understand, Elvin? The Starflyer is building up a very intimate database on your activities. Now I don’t know how many more of your contacts it has captured and subjected to download. But it knows who you use, who you want, what equipment you’re buying. Tell me this: if it has all that, is there any way it can deduce what you’re doing today, now?”

Adam hated the question. He knew what he would like to answer, no, no way, but the stakes were too high for that kind of pride now. “I don’t know. I never tell the Agent what the operations are, especially last time. I just needed people with combat experience.”

“Let’s hope that’s not enough.”

“Wait a minute,” Rob said. “You mean that thing knows my name?”

“Yes,” Paula said.

“Oh, shit.”

“We’re ready,” Rosamund said.

The last maser cannon had been eliminated. They were right in front of the gateway to Half Way. Mild ruby light shone through the milky opaque pressure curtain force field. Nothing was visible through it.

“Send the drone through,” Adam said.

The little winged bot zipped through the force field. Its camera showed a landscape of naked rock beneath a dark fuchsia sky. A single set of rails ran from the gateway into the head of a deep valley, dipping down toward the calm sea.

“Nothing,” Rosamund reported. No electromagnetic activity, no thermal spots. They’re not there.

“Take us through,” Adam ordered. “And send the drone out over Shackleton; let’s see if there are any planes left.”

Vic watched the last Volvo truck disappear through the red pressure curtain. He’d jogged away from the Guardians as they knocked out the maser cannon; the big T-shaped weapons had keeled over to lie smoldering on the scorched ground amid the still-burning wrecks that the zone killer had taken out. It was like being back on Illuminatus, walking through the aftermath of Treetops.

He knew their easy passage was all wrong. The local network had crashed thanks to Edmund, but the hardened security links should have been resistant to the disruptor software. Tarlo would have retained fire control. If he’d wanted, he could have engaged the Guardians. The maser cannon were old, but they could have probably taken out a couple of the Volvos. It didn’t make a lot of sense, unless Tarlo wanted the Guardians to get through to Half Way. Why?

Vic reached the geodesic hall containing the force field generator. His sensors couldn’t detect any personal force fields or weapons power packs. There was an infrared source lying just inside the door, human-sized. He went in.

The corpse sprawled on the enzyme-bonded concrete only had half of its head left. An ion pulse had blown the face off and incinerated most of the rest. Vic was pretty sure it was Edmund Li. It certainly wasn’t Tarlo. Of course, there was no way of knowing just how many Starflyer agents there were left on this side of the gateway. He switched his suit sensors to active scan, and swept around the dark hall. The two shots that had disabled the generator were easy to detect, the casing was still hot where they’d hit. There was no sign of anyone else in there.

A huge explosion outside made Vic crouch down instinctively as his force field strengthened. As soon as he went back out through the door he saw a giant gout of flame and black oily smoke rising up from the long building that housed the Half Way wormhole generator. The gateway at the front of it was now nothing more than a concave semicircle packed with complex machinery. There was no red luminescence, no alien starlight diffused by the pressure curtain. Another explosion ripped out from the generator building, sending debris flying for hundreds of meters. Flames took hold inside, licking around the huge holes blown in the roof and walls.

Vic started jogging toward the dead gateway, heedless of the exposure. His sensors scanned around constantly, searching for any motion, any hint of human activity.

Someone was walking toward him, stepping unhurriedly over the burned earth in front of the gateway, making no attempt to conceal themself. Vic didn’t need confirmation, he knew who it would be, but his visual sensors zoomed in anyway.

He stopped ten meters short of Tarlo. The Starflyer agent wasn’t using any of his wetwiring, his inserts were inert, power cells switched to inactive mode. He simply stood there in a glossy suit of semiorganic fabric refracting a moiré shimmer; his blond hair swept back and held in place with a small black leather band.

“Vic, right?” he asked the hulking armor suit. “Gotta be Vic.”

Vic switched on the suit’s external audio circuit. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“Cool. How’s Gwyneth?”

“Does it matter to you?”

“Part of me, man, yeah.”

“She’ll be okay. Why did you do it?”

Tarlo’s handsome face gave a sympathetic grin. “It’s what I had to do. Man, that Paula Myo, what a ball-buster. I always knew she’d be the one who blew me.”

“Who am I talking to?”

“Both of us, I guess. My part is over, so it doesn’t care anymore. It’s just waiting for you to kill me.”

“You failed, though. The Guardians got through.”

“The Guardians got through. I succeeded.”

“It was a trap.”

“What do you think?”

“I think I’ll take you back for a memory read.”

“Man, it’s too late for that; Qatux has gone through with the rest of them.”

“How did you know—” Vic’s suit sensors showed one of Tarlo’s inserts powering up. He fired his ion rifle, which blew Tarlo’s body in half.

All the trees in the forest were identical, elegantly rotund, and rich with red-gold leaves that reminded Ozzie of New England in the fall. This, though, was high summer, with a bright sun high overhead, and warm dry air gusting through the branches. Ozzie had stripped down to his T-shirt and a pair of badly worn shorts; not that it stopped him sweating hard from the effort of carrying his pack. Orion was wearing cutoff pants and no shirt; his expression martyred as he lumbered on in the grinding heat of the afternoon. Tochee seemed unaffected, its colorful fronds flapping loosely as it slid along.

Ozzie was pretty sure he knew where they were, though his newfound pathsense wasn’t quite as precise as a satnav function. He’d started to pick up on a few signs in the last half hour. This path was now quite neat, the kind of track that you’d get when someone took care of it, rather than just a route that people and animals walked at random. There were no dead branches lying across the way, and remarkably few twigs. Several boggy puddles had been filled with gravel so travelers didn’t have to detour. Then he even saw where branches had been cut on trees close to the path; they were long healed over now, just knobbly warts in the sepia bark. All the things a government land management agency would do to keep the path open for walkers.

His insert functions were slowly coming back on-line, which gave him a very positive feeling as he strode onward. Ever since they’d left the gas halo, his bioneural arrays and inserts had reverted to the usual erratic basic operational ability that characterized the Silfen paths. The day after they’d talked with Clouddancer he’d picked up a path right in the middle of the forest that cloaked the reef. That was four worlds ago. It wasn’t that Ozzie knew where to go; rather he could now sense where the paths would take him. Several times he’d started off down one only to turn around and discard it, searching for another, one that would take him closer to the Commonwealth. There was no mental map, more a simple awareness of direction.

The graphics in his virtual vision were strengthening with every step forward. Processing power increased in tandem. Signal strength between his inserts and his handheld array rose dramatically. Then the array detected another signal.

“This is it,” Ozzie yelled out. He started to run forward.

“What is?” Orion asked. “We left the end of the path a while back.”

The forest began to thin out, revealing a rolling landscape of gray-green meadows. Alien bovine animals with six fat legs and an amber hide were grazing indolently. Sheep mingled among them, unperturbed by their strange stablemates. He saw hexagonal metal troughs filled with hay. Long lines of wire fencing divided the land up into huge pasture fields. Beyond them were some crop fields, their green wheat shoots just on the cusp of ripening. Hills rose up in the distance, mottled with the gold-brown shading of extensive forests.

Ozzie’s inserts interfaced with the planetary cybersphere. Achingly familiar unisphere icons popped up into his virtual vision. The shock of seeing them again after so long was like an ice shower. I’m home. He turned to his companions who were just emerging from the small wood without any sense of urgency. “We did it,” he yelled. His legs gave way and he sank to his knees. A wicked vision of early papal visits to the worlds he and Nigel first opened filled his mind. He bent down and kissed the ground. “We fucking did it,” he yelled up at the blazing sun.

“Did what?” Orion asked curiously.

“We made it, man.” Ozzie struggled to his feet and hugged the startled boy. “Look around you, man. Don’t you see it? Sheep, fences, farmland, I think that’s a load of barns over there. We’re home, we’re back in the good old Intersolar Commonwealth.”

Orion gazed around curiously, a tentative smile on his freckled face. “Where?”

“Er, ah, good question. Hang on.” His virtual hands danced over icons, pulling information out of local systems. “Bilma. That’s in phase two space. Haven’t visited before, and it’s out of range of my wormhole. Never mind. We’re on the Dolon continent, other side of the planet from the capital. Nearest town Eansor, population twenty-two thousand. Seventy-two kilometers”—he spun on his heel, a huge smile on his face, and shot an arm out, pointing over the hilly land—“that way. And there’s a road three point four kilometers”—he turned again—“there.”

“Friend Ozzie, friend Orion, I am delighted you have completed your journey.”

“Hey, man”—Ozzie laid an arm over Tochee’s back—“my house is yours. And I’ll apologize in advance for people making a fuss over you and generally behaving badly. You’re going to be quite a celebrity. The ambassador for your whole race.”

“I believe the translation routine has made an error there, but I thank you for the caution. What do you propose doing now you are home?”

“Good question. One: a bath! Two: decent food. Maybe switch that around.” He took another long look around the bland farming landscape they’d emerged into. One thing really bothered him with the unisphere icons: the date. According to the display, he’d been away from the Commonwealth for over three years, whereas in his personal timescale he’d been walking the Silfen paths for eighteen months. “Okay. I need some time to check up on what’s happening. According to Clouddancer we’re in the middle of a war. We also need to organize some transport, especially for Tochee. So let’s see.” He began to pull information out of the unisphere, as slowly as any beginner who was just getting to grips with inserts and virtual vision for the first time. A list of local vehicle hire companies materialized. He ran down their inventories, and settled on a Land Rover Aventine, which had enough room to take Tochee if ten of the fourteen seats were folded down. He paid for it, and loaded instructions into the big four-by-four’s drive array. “Let’s head for the road, guys. Our car’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”

“Ozzie,” Orion asked cautiously.

“Yep?”

“This town, Eansor, has it got, like bars and such in it?”

“Of course, man.” He’d just pulled the town’s commercial register out of the unisphere to find the best hotel.

“So, tonight”—Orion squinted up at the sun, which was in the last quarter of the sky—“are we going to visit a few places, you know, social places, ones that have girls in them?”

“Oh, right, not a bad idea. We’ll definitely hit the town over the next few days, I promise.”

“That’s good. I’ve remembered all the pick-up lines you gave me.”

“You have?”

“Yeah, I still think I can pull off the heaven one.”

“The what one?”

“When you look at a girl’s collar and read the label back to her, and tell her—”

“She’s made in heaven. Ah. Right, I remember now. Sure. Look, man, those kinds of lines are strictly last resort, okay. Your big advantage is going to be telling them what we’ve been doing and what you’ve seen; no other kid can compete with that, you dig? You’re going to be the hottest brightest dude on the block. The chicks’ll need sunscreen just to stand near you.”

“Okay.”

“But first, you need a decent scrub and some flash clothes. We can sort that once we’re relaxing at the hotel.”

“I don’t understand why you need verbal trickery to ensnare a temporary mate,” Tochee said. “Are you not attracted to each other by what you are?”

Ozzie and Orion shared a glance.

“Our species tend to amplify things a little,” Ozzie said. “No harm in that.”

“You speak an untruth to potential mates?”

“No, no. It’s not that simple. This is like a ritual.”

“I believe the translation routine is insufficient once again.”

“Is Tochee going to come with us to the bars?” Orion asked.

Ozzie glared at him. “Probably best not.”

“I would like to see all aspects of human civilization. From what you have told me, it is richly textured and steeped in artistic culture.”

“Oh, brother,” Ozzie muttered.

They sat on the side of the road for ten minutes before the Land Rover Aventine pulled up in front of them. It was a dark metallic red four-by-four, with curving windows of mirrorglass along both sides. The broad malmetal door at the rear flowed apart, and Tochee wriggled itself into the back.

Ozzie sat up at the front, and loaded some new orders into the drive array. It was strange being in a technological artifact again. Even the smell surprised him, the pine-bleach cleaning fluid and polished leather scent of a vigorous valet service.

“This is fast,” Orion said as they set off.

“Uh huh.” They were doing under a hundred kilometers an hour. The road was just a simple strip of enzyme-bonded concrete, a minor route linking isolated rural communities. Same the Commonwealth over. “How old were you when your parents moved to Silvergalde?”

“Dunno. Two or three, I think.”

“So you don’t like remember much about the Commonwealth, then.”

“No. Just the stuff people brought to Lyddington. Not that much of it worked there.”

Since they left the Ice Citadel, Ozzie had conveniently forgotten the kind of parental responsibility he’d assumed when he allowed Orion to tag along. He was going to have to look out for the boy as much as he was Tochee. Both of them were excited by the car journey, asking questions about the farms and other vehicles they passed. It was like having a couple of five-year-olds to contend with.

When the road finally turned onto a two-lane highway that took them into the town and the Land Rover Aventine really built up some speed, Orion whooped like a roller coaster passenger. Tochee inquired if all human vehicles were so fast. Ozzie knew enough now about their big alien friend for its body language to tell him it was nervous. He limited the car to a hundred eighty kilometers an hour.

Eansor was a pleasant enough town, though hardly spectacular by anyone’s standards except those of Orion and Tochee, who were mesmerized by the buildings and roads and people. The highway wound through the industrial parks on the outskirts, over bridges in the suburbs where the best houses lined the river, and finally dipped into the gentle rumpled valley where the city center colonized the slopes with big stone and glass buildings.

Ozzie directed the Land Rover around the back of the Ledbetter Hotel and parked it in a delivery bay. “Wait here,” he told the others. “Seriously, guys. I need a quiet day to catch up. I don’t want to cause any scenes here, okay?”

“Okay,” Orion said amiably.

Just to be safe, Ozzie locked the Land Rover doors as he left.

The Ledbetter’s high-ceilinged lobby had an extensive central display of exotic alien vegetation, with the plants carefully graded so that as you walked through them their leaf colors progressed through the rainbow. Ozzie, who had endured enough wondrous alien vegetation along the paths to last his next five lives, walked straight from the revolving doors to the reception desk completely ignoring the lush surroundings. There were a lot of glances from the other patrons shooting his way, usually followed by a nose wrinkling in disapproval. That was why he just kept staring right ahead; he knew exactly what he looked like as his boots trod field dirt into the plush royal-blue carpet.

He reached the slate-topped reception counter, and slapped his hand down on the polished brass bell. Two largish assistants from the concierge desk were moving into place behind him. The duty receptionist, a man in his late thirties wearing the hotel’s gray blazer uniform, gave Ozzie a reproachful look. “Yes.” Pause. “Sir.”

Ozzie smiled from inside his extravagant beard. “Like, gimmie the best suite you’ve got, man.”

“It’s booked. In fact, all our rooms are booked. Perhaps you should try another establishment.” He looked over at the two assistants, hand rising to beckon.

“No thanks, dude. This is the only five-star in town.” Before the receptionist could stop him, he reached over the counter and pressed his thumb against the i-pad on the hotel’s credit array.

“Listen, pal—” the receptionist began. Then blinked as the hotel system registered Ozzie’s bank tattoo and identity certificate. “Oh.” He swayed forward slightly, peering closely. “Ozzie? I mean, Mr. Isaac, sir. Welcome to the Ledbetter.”

The assistants froze. One of them actually smiled.

“About that suite?” Ozzie said.

“My mistake, sir, our penthouse suite is available. We’d be honored to have you stay here with us, sir.”

“Glad to hear it, man. Now, about this penthouse; I expect you get a lot of important people here, people who don’t want everything they do splashed on the gossip shows.”

“I believe you’ll find us most discreet, sir.”

“So far, so good. Is there a service elevator to the penthouse?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Even better. Now listen carefully. There’s a very large alien sitting in a car in one of your delivery bays out back. I want it into the service elevator and up into the suite without any fuss and without anyone seeing. I do not want to look out of my window tomorrow morning and see Alessandra Baron or any other media dudes camping outside.” He shunted a very large gratuity to the Ledbetter staff general account. “We cool on that?”

The receptionist’s eyebrow rose a fraction. “I will make your request quite plain to the other members of staff.”

“Good man. Now, do you guys have a decent room service menu?”

“We do indeed, sir. Our restaurant has the finest menu in town. Would you like to see it now?”

“No, just send the food up to the suite.”

“Yes, sir. Er, which items?”

“All of it.”

“All of it?”

“Yeah, and just to play safe: twenty-five lettuce as well.”

“At once, sir.”

The en-suite bathroom to the master bedroom featured a circular sunken marble pool, large enough for several people. But not quite big enough for Tochee. The alien lay on a bed of towels beside it, and scooped the warm soapy water over itself. Its manipulator flesh gripped two of the largest combs to be found in Eansor and raked them through its colorful fronds, pulling out the flecks of dried leaves, and grit, and mud spots, and grass stalks, and all the other detritus it had picked up in the feathery appendages as they moved between worlds.

Orion, wearing just a huge canary-yellow towel around his waist, was working around Tochee with the shower hose, washing off the foam that Ozzie had rubbed into its fronds after they’d been combed.

“We do not have ‘shampoo conditioner’ on my world,” Tochee told them. Several of his cleaned fronds quivered at the slightest movement; they were becoming dramatically soft and vibrant as the water dried away. “I would become very important if I were to introduce such a thing.”

“It’s the little things in life that count, man,” Ozzie said. Like Orion, he was wearing a big towel and nothing else. He’d probably have another shower once they were done with Tochee’s beauty therapy. Three in one day! The water washing down the drain in the first one had been vile.

They’d eaten after their all-important first wash with real soap, the three of them moving along the line of trolleys laden with the restaurant’s finest cooking. Ozzie had wolfed down the perfectly cooked French-blue steak. Sampled the fish, the game, the risotto, the sweet and sour chicken, the Thai spice dishes, the pasta. Fries! A whole mountain of them. Beer, drunk as if it had been passed down from Mount Olympus.

Tochee had stuck to the vegetable dishes. How anybody, alien or not, could eat two bowls of raw carrot sticks intended for the dips was beyond Ozzie. The lettuce had been a good idea, too; Tochee ate half of them.

Orion and Tochee both tried ice cream for the first time ever. Finished every spoonful on the trolleys, and sent out for more. Ozzie munched his way through the other puddings, taking a couple of spoons from each.

After the bacchanal meal, they’d brought in clothing store staff from the city, with big cases of the latest fashions. It had taken an hour to choose a wardrobe for both of them. The hotel’s in-house salon sorted out Ozzie’s beard, and gave him a proper manicure. He wouldn’t let them cut much off his Afro; he kind of liked it so explosive. Orion got a similar treatment. It only ended when Ozzie politely rescued the poor girl who was styling the boy’s hair.

“You were drooling,” he told Orion when the flustered girl had left.

“She was beautiful,” Orion protested. “And really friendly.”

“Oh, man, she was sixty years older than you. Trust me on that, rejuvenation is easy to see if you know what you’re looking for; she wore that much makeup because she’s not actually very pretty; and she was being professionally courteous, not friendly.”

“You’re just jealous.”

Ozzie promptly canceled the massage he’d booked for both of them.

Sprucing up Tochee took a good ninety minutes. But Ozzie had to admit, it was time well spent. Once they’d finished blowing the hair dryers over its fronds, their friend looked magnificent. Fluffier than they’d ever seen it, but wonderfully colorful. “A whole Vegas chorus line worth of costumes in one package,” Ozzie declared.

“Are we going out now?” Orion asked. He’d put on a semiorganic black shirt, wearing a white and scarlet jacket over the top; the pants were green enough to hurt the naked eye. It was an ensemble fashionable with the under twenties, the store assistant had promised. Ozzie felt really old just looking at the boy; no way was he going to walk into a bar with anyone dressed like that.

“Sorry, not tonight. I told you I had some serious datawork to catch up with.” The hotel, indeed Bilma itself, was just an interlude before he got back to his asteroid and thought out what to do next.

“Tomorrow then,” Orion said in a whiny voice. “Promise me tomorrow. It’s not fair we get back and I have to stay in the whole time. I want to meet some girls.”

“All right, tomorrow,” Ozzie said, anything to divert the boy.

“So what do I do tonight?” Orion asked. It was already dark outside, with ground lights ringing the hotel shining green and red through the windows.

“Access something. I’ll show you how. Tochee might like to see something of the Commonwealth as well.” He ushered them into the suite’s main lounge, and accessed the room management array. The big hologram portal lit up with a huge unisphere category menu. Ozzie hurriedly loaded in restrictions that would stop the boy wading through porn all night long—for Tochee’s sake, obviously—and switched the array to voice activation function. He slotted a direct translation routine in for Tochee, and left them to it.

The Guardians’ vehicles were almost down to the bottom of the deep inlet where Shackleton was situated when Adam’s narrowband link back to the train dropped out. He told Rosamund to send the drone back to inspect the gateway. Even as the little bot turned a sharp curve through Half Way’s clear red sky he was certain what it would find. Vic had been right. Judging by the silence in the armored car and the way everyone was keeping quiet on the general band, he wasn’t the only one with that thought.

The image in his virtual vision showed him the simple hoop of equipment that anchored the Half Way end of the wormhole. For a moment, it was illuminated by one of the powerful blue-white flashes in the sky. The stab of light revealed the interlocking machinery inside the arch. There was no wormhole.

“Well,” Morton said. “I’d say getting back is going to be a tad difficult now.”

“There are still planes at Shackleton,” Adam said, keeping positive. He didn’t want anyone to start panicking. Not yet, anyway. If they started thinking about how isolated they were, they’d lose it very quickly indeed. All he could think of was the one remaining wormhole on this godforsaken planet, and the fact that the Starflyer was going to reach it first. He had to admit, as traps went, this one was a beauty. All the Starflyer had to do was get through to Half Way and blow the generator behind it, leaving them stranded on a world with no link to anywhere, in an environment that would slowly kill them. And who would come looking? Sheldon might. Possibly.

Adam’s e-butler told him Bradley was calling on a private link. “This isn’t good. Did you ever examine this scenario?”

“Stig and I reviewed what would happen if the Starflyer blew the Port Evergreen wormhole generator as it returned. That was a year ago. We believed there would be sufficient resources on Far Away for the clans to complete the planet’s revenge. But that assumed they already had the Martian data, and we’d got more equipment through. The Far Away freight inspectorate division screwed that up for us, which is one of the reasons why we switched to the blockade run scenario.”

“But we expected to do that before the Starflyer’s return,” Bradley said.

“Exactly. Then the Prime attack threw another spanner in the works. And I certainly didn’t predict anything quite this personal.”

“So what are our options?”

“There’s only one: get to Port Evergreen before it.”

“And can we do that?”

“Even if it hasn’t sabotaged the planes, it has a thirty-minute head start. We don’t have aerobots. Or even air-to-air missiles.”

“I see,” Bradley said. “Is there any way we can call ahead, and reverse this trap on the Starflyer? Get our clan warriors through the wormhole at the other end, and secure Port Evergreen before the Starflyer arrives? That way it will be trapped between us.”

“The planes only have short-wave radio in case of emergency. There are no satellites here, only a seabed fiber-optic cable between Shackleton and Port Evergreen to link Far Away to the unisphere.”

“So someone stays behind and when the next cycle begins they send a message through to Stig.”

“The Institute is blocking all communications, has been for days.”

“Then we have no choice but to make the flight and hope Stig can help us out somehow.”

“Without knowing what’s going on?”

“He’s not stupid. He’ll know the Starflyer is returning, and that we’re on our way as well.”

“I hope you’re right.”

The vehicles arrived on the shelf of rock where the pressurized huts and vast hangars were laid out a hundred meters above the sea. Two of the hangar doors were open, the regular flashes from the planet’s odd double star revealing their empty cavernous interiors. When the drone made its early flyby, its active sensors revealed the remaining seven hangars each contained a Carbon Goose.

“Our vehicles will fit into one,” Adam announced.

“I don’t mean to intrude, but isn’t that a little too risky?” Bradley queried him. “All our eggs in one flying basket.”

“I’m prepared to run an inspection on the planes,” Adam replied. “We’ve been running with the possibility of sabotage by Starflyer agents, that’s why I brought the forensic sensorbots. There are enough to check over three planes. But we have to get airborne and fast. Putting all the sensorbots onto one plane will speed the whole process up. We can’t afford luxuries like three aircraft, Bradley, not any longer.”

“I apologize, Adam. This is your operation; I’ll try to keep my mouth shut for the rest of the journey.”

“Don’t. I can still make mistakes. If you see one coming, shout it long and loud.” Adam switched back to the general channel. “Kieran, Ayub, you have decontamination duty. I want it checked thoroughly; we don’t need any surprises over the middle of the ocean.” He made everyone else wait in the relative security of the vehicles while Kieran and Ayub went over to the Carbon Goose in the fifth hangar, which had been left in a minimal power hibernation mode. A swarm of standard forensic sensorbots wriggled over the rock with them, looking like arm-length caterpillars. The machines bristled with gossamer-thin smart-molecule filaments like a downy fur. They circled the gigantic aircraft, testing the rock for any sign that someone had been in the hangar recently.

“Nobody for well over a week,” Ayub reported. “Zero thermal disturbance. No residual chemical dissemination.”

Adam gave them the go-ahead to test the plane itself. Kieran went up to the cockpit and loaded a batch of diagnostic software into the avionics. Ayub supervised the sensorbots as they crawled over the fuselage and slithered in through the airlocks. They wriggled into the structure through inspection ports and grilles, probing every component casing with their filaments, sniffing the air for any trace chemicals, performing resonance scans on the structure. He dropped three into each of the nuclear turbines so they could squirm their way past the fan blades and work their way back through the compressor bands.

“When does the wormhole cycle begin?” Anna asked.

“In just over six hours,” Adam said. “Assuming the Starflyer has a standard flight, it’ll remain open for about an hour and a half after it arrives at Port Evergreen.”

“That just gives us enough time,” Wilson said. “But it’ll be tight.”

After twenty minutes, Ayub cleared the lower cargo hold, declaring it free of booby traps.

“How long does this take?” Oscar asked.

“As long as it needs to,” Adam said resolutely.

“We’re giving them too big a lead time,” Wilson said. “At this rate there’s no way the Starflyer will leave a working gateway at the other end by the time we get there. We have to keep hard on its tail if we’re to stand any kind of chance. You’ve got to run a minimum scan and take the risk.”

Adam knew he was right. If the Starflyer truly hadn’t wanted them to follow, it could easily have wrecked the remaining planes before it left. So either they’d been sabotaged, or it simply intended to destroy the Port Evergreen generator, leaving them trapped here. Simple is always most effective. And the Starflyer must be improvising to a degree as well. “Okay,” he told the drivers. “Load them up.”

Kieran and Ayub opened the main cargo deck ramps at the back of the Carbon Goose. The Volvos went up first. As the armored car drove under the wing, Adam saw sensorbots starting to fall out of the turbine exhausts to lie flexing uselessly on the sheer rock floor, their sophisticated electronics victim to the micropile’s radiation. He stayed focused on them for a long time as they slowed and finally became inert. It was a bad omen on a world inimical to humans when even the machinery designed to function here proved deadly to standard Commonwealth technology.

Wilson was still in his armor suit when he entered the cockpit. In keeping with the rest of the Carbon Goose, it was a big compartment with seats more like leather recliners than the cramped USAF fighter seats that he used to contend with in his first life. The windshield was a curving transparency six feet high that gave a panoramic view out over the blunt nose. Kieran was sitting in the pilot’s seat, still in his armor, with three high-performance arrays spread out on the control console. They were plugged into the plane’s avionics with thick fiber-optic cable.

“Did you find anything?” Wilson asked.

“No. The software checks out. I’ve loaded some additional monitors in case anything was submerged, but they didn’t really have the time to plant anything sophisticated. There’s no thermal trace of anyone here before us. My opinion for what it’s worth: this is clean.” He climbed out of the chair and unsealed his helmet.

Wilson studied the young face that was exposed. Short hair framing slim features, alert eyes; eager, dedicated, efficient. Me, three hundred forty years ago. God! “When I was in the air force, I learned to always trust my engineering crew. I don’t suppose anything’s really changed.”

Kieran broke into a genuine grateful smile. “Thank you.”

“Okay, let’s see if I actually remember how to fly.” He started to take his armor suit off.

“Admiral. I’m glad you’re here.”

The term surprised Wilson. Thirty hours ago, the navy that he was in charge of had been hunting down the Guardians as if they were a pandemic virus. It made the young man’s faith all the more touching. “I’ll do whatever I can,” he promised.

Oscar and Anna arrived in the cockpit as Wilson was pulling his feet out of the armor’s boots. He was only wearing a white T-shirt and shorts, and the cockpit’s air was almost freezing.

“Here you go,” Oscar said, and dropped a small bag at Wilson’s feet. “Our CST-issue executive travel pack. Essential for survival in hotels and conferences the Commonwealth over.”

“Don’t mock,” Wilson growled as he unzipped the bag. He found a fleece with a CST logo on the chest, and pulled it on quickly before sitting in the luxurious pilot’s seat. “Yow, this leather’s cold.” He put his hands over the console’s i-pads, and reviewed the menus rolling into his virtual vision as the interface was established. The first thing he did was locate the plane’s environmental circuits and switch the heating on full.

“Everybody in and secure,” Adam reported.

Anna was out of her armor suit, puffing against the cold as she pulled on some clothes from her CST pack.

“You want to take the copilot’s seat?” Wilson asked.

“Sure.” She gave him a quick intimate smile.

“We actually need to be in the air before you two can join the mile-high club,” Oscar told them dryly.

Wilson grinned. “This is the bit I’ve always wanted to say,” he confessed to them as the avionics confirmed the micropiles were ready. “Atomic turbines to power!”

Anna and Oscar exchanged a look. Oscar shrugged.

The turbines spun up, and Wilson released the wheel brakes. The Carbon Goose rolled out of its hangar and down toward the icy sea.

“Oh, brother,” Ozzie grunted. He was accessing files from his asteroid, seeing the refugees from Randtown come stumbling through the wormhole. “There goes the neighborhood.” Two hours into his review of everything that had happened, and he was beginning to wish he’d headed off in the other direction after leaving Island Two.

The last home file showed him Nigel wandering around the bungalow. Ozzie’s own recorded projection played out, and Nigel swore at the end of it. Back in the cozy warmth of the Ledbetter penthouse suite, sprawled on his circular, emperor-sized jellmattress, Ozzie grinned at his old friend’s dismayed expression. Poor old Nige had always disapproved of his lifestyle, the decisions and choices. It was their contrary opinions that made them such a good team.

He drained his tumbler of bourbon and told the maidbot to refill it, then moved on to examine records from the latest invasion. “Oh, brother.” The damage that the flare bombs and quantumbusters inflicted on the stars was terrifying. Then something terminated Hell’s Gateway, something that the Sheldon Dynasty had done independently from the navy, something greater than a quantumbuster. Half of the unisphere now comprised speculation and gossip about Nigel using that ultra-weapon against Dyson Alpha, winning the war in a single strike.

The other half of the unisphere was busy discussing the Second47’s evacuation into the future. Ozzie took another swig as the War Cabinet made their announcement. “Son of a bitch, don’t bring me into this,” he shouted at Nigel’s image. His so-called friend’s face loomed hugely over the bed, as projected by the portal on the opposite wall. It was badly focused now. Ozzie tried to do some math to see if Nigel knew what the fuck he was talking about, but the equations were impossible to form. He looked at his tumbler, which was empty again. “Just bring the bottle,” he told the maidbot.

Virtual hands wobbled through virtual vision, and he knocked politely on the SI’s icon.

The War Cabinet vanished to be replaced by tangerine and turquoise lines weaving through and around each other. “Hello, Ozzie. Welcome back.”

“Good to be back. I mean it. You’ve no idea how wonderful toilet paper is until it’s taken away from you by an unfeeling universe. I think it’s a defining characteristic of human civilization, the ability to manufacture something decent to wipe your ass on. Believe me, forest leaves just don’t cut it. Well, actually,” he sniggered, “they do, and that’s the problem. And you can make that my epitaph if you want.”

“Duly noted.”

“Hey hey, don’t you smartass me. You’ve got some bigtime explaining to do, man.” The maidbot rolled up to the side of the bed, and held out the bourbon bottle. Ozzie took it, and winked at the little machine.

“You are referring to the emergency Randtown evacuation,” the SI said.

“Nail on the fucking head, dude.”

“We took the liberty of saving thousands of human lives. We assumed that given the circumstances, you wouldn’t object.”

“Yeah yeah, trillions of dollars spent building the ultimate in private housing, and it’s all blown. All gone.” The room rotated around him, leaving him spread-eagle on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. He took another drink of bourbon to compensate. “I’ll have to dream up something else now. Maybe go back to the Ice Citadel. No! Fuck, what am I saying? It was cold there. I am, like, not a cold-weather person. I learned that about myself.”

“So your venture was successful, then?”

“Oh, brother, was it ever. I found out everything; who put the barriers up, why they did it, why they won’t help us. And I’ll tell you something else, I was right about the Silfen, too.”

“Do they evolve into an adult state?”

“Ah ha.” Ozzie wagged a finger at the slow wavestorm of glowing lines. “I thought you’d want to know that. Man, you should have seen where they live. The gas halo is like totally groovy. Maybe I should try and build one. I’d just love to see Nigel’s face when I tell him that.”

“Who built the barriers?”

“Clouddancer said it was some race called the Anomines. But that was in a dream. I think. Anyway, they’re not around anymore. Actually, no, cancel that; they are but they’re not the same. I think they out-evolved the Silfen, some of them anyway. The others all went back home and joined Greenpeace.” Ozzie smiled lazily. The bed was wonderfully soft, and he was very tired now. He closed his eyes. “They’re not going to help us, you know. You’d dig that. You haven’t been majorly helpful here, have you? Apart from scooping up that Mellanie chick. Damn, she’s hot. Do you know if she’s dating anyone?” He yawned. Waited for the answer. “Oh, come on, man, you’re not pissed at me, are you? Just a few home truths among friends. You’ve got to grow thicker skin.”

There was still no reply. The light in the room changed.

“Mr. Isaac.”

“Huh?” That wasn’t the SI. Ozzie opened his eyes. The tangerine and turquoise lines had vanished. He swung around toward the sound of the new voice, or tried to; the bed kept getting in the way. A man’s head slid into view. Upside down, and frowning. “Hey!” Ozzie exclaimed happily. “Nelson. Been too long, man. How’s it hanging?”

“I’m glad to see you’re all right.”

“Never better.”

“Quite. Nigel would like a word.”

“Bring him on in.”

“It’s easier if we take you to him.”

“Sure thing. Let me find my shoes.” Ozzie finally managed to move, and slithered off the end of the bed to land in a heap on the floor. Something hurt. It probably belonged to him. “Can you see them?” he asked Nelson earnestly.

Nelson smiled blankly, and beckoned. Ozzie was lifted to his feet by two powerful young men in gray business suits. They had identical red and green OCtattoos on their cheeks, a stack of centimeter-long lines that looked like neon sideburns.

“Hi, guys. Good to meet you.”

They carried him out of the bedroom. Orion was in the lounge outside, still wearing his fancy white and scarlet jacket. The boy looked very scared. There were a lot of people in the lounge with him, just like the ones carrying Ozzie: polite well-built men and women without any sense of humor.

“Ozzie?” Orion said; he bit his lip, looking fearfully at Nelson.

“Hang tight there, little dude, everything’s perfectly under control. Where’s Tochee?”

“I am here, friend Ozzie.”

“Do as they say.” Being vertical wasn’t good. Ozzie’s stomach didn’t like it. He threw up.

They carried him into the service elevator. There was a convoy of big dark cars outside the hotel. He was bundled into the first one. The short drive ended with him being carried onto a hypersonic aircraft, just big enough to accommodate Tochee at the back where a dozen seats had been removed.

Nelson sat down opposite Ozzie and produced a large red tablet. “Take this.”

“What is it?”

“Something to help.”

“I’m not ill.”

Fingers pinched his nose shut, and he opened his mouth in reflex. The tablet was shoved in, followed by water. Ozzie half swallowed, half gagged. “Oh, brother.”

Nelson leaned back. “Strap him in. He’s going to need it.”

The flight was truly horrible. Ozzie shivered violently in his seat, his skin feverish. He desperately wanted to be sick again, but it was as if his stomach had grown an extra membrane to prevent it. The acidic heartburn down his gullet spread right through his gut. His headache seemed to be sweating its way through his skull.

An hour later his teeth had stopped chattering. The aches and discomfort were fading away, leaving his clothes soaked in cold sweat. “I fucking hate sober-ups,” Ozzie growled at Nelson. “They’re not natural. Son of a bitch, look at my clothes.” He plucked at his wet T-shirt in disgust.

“We brought your bags,” Nelson said. “You can freshen up on the train. “We’ll be landing in five minutes.”

“Landing where?”

“The planetary station.”

“Great. I’ve got to pee.”

Nelson gestured down the aisle.

Ozzie slowly slipped his straps off, and rose unsteadily to his feet. Orion was sitting in the chair behind. “You okay there, dude?”

The boy nodded. “I think Tochee was worried, but I told him we’d be all right. He doesn’t understand how important you are.”

“I’ll try and explain to it later.”

“Ozzie,” the boy said quietly. “She’s really nice. We talked a lot. She’s called Lauren. She was really interested in the Silfen paths and where we’ve been.”

Ozzie glanced around at the security team member Orion was surreptitiously indicating. “Uh, okay; again, she’s polite in that serial-killer fashion because that’s her job. Don’t ask her to marry you or anything.”

“All right, Ozzie.” The boy pouted.

The hypersonic came down on a landing pad behind the station’s cluster of administration buildings. There was no one around to see them disembark and hurry over to the sleek private maglev express with its two carriages.

“Just us?” Ozzie asked when he looked down the deserted front carriage. There were big spherical chairs set along the length of the carriage, with a bar at the far end.

“Just you,” Nelson confirmed.

Ozzie took one of his new cases into the washroom to change. His attempt to interface with the unisphere was completely unsuccessful. His inserts reported the train was efficiently screened.

Back out in the carriage, Ozzie raided the bar for some sandwiches, then went to sit near to Tochee and Orion. He acted as tour guide as the express hurtled along, pointing out the worlds they passed through. The Big15 planet Shayoni first, which led to Beijing, followed by a fast trip around the trans-Earth loop to New York, and finally Augusta.

“Your transport is so much more efficient that the Silfen method,” Tochee said. “And your worlds so ordered. Do you disapprove of disarray?”

“Don’t judge us on what you’ve seen so far,” Ozzie told it.

At New Costa station their train peeled away from the main area of the yard to slide through a lone gateway.

“And this has to be Cresset,” Ozzie said. “I haven’t been here for a while.”

“Seventy-three years,” Nelson said as the maglev glided in to Illanum station. More dark cars were waiting for them.

“Where now?” Ozzie asked.

“One of Nigel’s residences just outside the town.”

“All of us?”

“Yes, all of you. We have suitable rooms prepared.”

“Okay then.” Ozzie was giving the station’s cargo handling sector a suspicious look. Its capacity had jumped up by an order of magnitude since he’d last visited.

The “residence” was a big mansion of pale stone modeled on the stately homes of eighteenth-century Europe. It was several kilometers out of town, and surrounded by towering trees that were oppressively dark in the deepening twilight.

“You’ll be all right,” Ozzie told his companions when they walked into the big entrance hall. Orion’s expression was dropping into a sullenness that Ozzie recognized only too well. “Get some sleep, we’ll talk in the morning.”

Nelson led the way through the mansion to a study overlooking the front lawns. There was a greenway outside, barely visible now the sun had set. Ozzie wasn’t sure if he remembered it or not; it did seem vaguely familiar. He resented not having access to the unisphere after only just being reconnected.

Nigel was waiting in a big leather armchair. “Thanks, Nelson.”

Nelson smiled tightly and left, closing the door behind him. Ozzie’s inserts told him a strong e-seal had come on around the room. “Just us, huh?”

“Just us.” Nigel waved a hand at a chair identical to his own.

“Shouldn’t the fire be blazing away?” Ozzie said as he sat down. “With like maybe one of those big hairy dogs stretched out in front of it.”

“Irish wolfhound.”

“And you an’ me jiving away with some brandy.”

“You’ve had enough to drink today.”

“Okay, Nige, so what’s with the big CIA spook operation? My unisphere address is open. You could have called.”

“Better this way. That kid you’ve turned up with tells an interesting story. And the alien; nobody’s seen anything like it before. Communication by photoluminescent visual signals in the ultraviolet spectrum. The xenobiologists are going to love that.”

“Tochee’s an okay dude, sure.”

“So you walked the Silfen paths?”

“Yeah, man. They are the most incredible wormhole network imaginable. I think they’re sentient in their own right. That’s why we can never quite track them down, they move the whole time, opening and closing, timeshifting, too.”

“Figures. Incorporating a wormhole’s control routines into a self-sustaining exotic energy matrix is one of our research projects.”

“Clunky, man, so clunky compared to this.”

“So what did you find? Have they got an SI equivalent?”

“Yeah, something like that. It has a shitload of data, like a galactic library. I know who put the barriers around the Dyson Pair.”

Nigel listened silently while Ozzie told him about finding the Ice Citadel, and Tochee, and seeing the ghost planet’s history, and finally ending up in the gas halo. “So this Anomine species isn’t going to help us?” he asked.

“No,” Ozzie said. “Sorry, man.”

“That was a well-spent time away, then. Are you happy?”

“Hey, fuck you!”

“Why did you order the Dynasty political office to prevent anyone examining cargo sent to Far Away?”

“Uh.” Ozzie gave a sickly grin. That wasn’t exactly what he was expecting to talk about. “Well, man, you know, like, it was oppressive. I don’t dig that at all.”

“Ozzie, give the bullshit routine a rest, will you? There’s too much at stake. If you haven’t worked it out yet, I’m trying to decide whose side you’re on.”

“Side?”

“Are you a Starflyer agent, Ozzie?” Nigel asked quietly. There was a glint of moisture in his eye. “Damnit, do you have any idea how much it hurts just to have to ask you that?”

“You know the Starflyer’s real?” an equally astounded Ozzie blurted.

“Yeah, we know it’s real, we just found out. So, why the political restriction?”

“I didn’t know if it was real.”

“What made you even suspect?”

“I met this dude, Bradley Johansson, man, could he spin a story. He claimed he’d been to the gas halo, that the Silfen had removed his Starflyer conditioning. I’d never heard anything like it. He almost made sense. So I asked myself, what if he was right? You know? I mean, it’s a big universe out there, Nige, anything is possible.”

“So you took a chance, and threw in with him. It was fun, wasn’t it, Ozzie; fun being on the other side, sticking it to the man.”

“I’m not that shallow.”

“Yes you are.” Nigel narrowed his eyes. “When did you meet him?”

“God, man, I dunno, like over a century ago.”

“Before or after he founded the Guardians?”

“Same time. He was just getting his act together.”

Nigel tented his fingers in front of his face, staring hard at Ozzie. Suddenly his eyes widened in shock. “Oh, my God, you stupid, stupid son of a bitch. I don’t believe it.”

“What?” Ozzie asked, disturbed by his friend’s behavior.

“The Great Wormhole Heist.”

“Ah.” Ozzie couldn’t help a slight smirk. “That.”

“You helped him. I always wondered how the hell they got into the supercomputer routines we’d written; the access codes were all our personal encryption. You gave him the codes, didn’t you?”

“Better than that,” Ozzie said evilly.

“How better?”

“I was one of them.”

“One of … oh, fuck, Ozzie. You were part of the Great Wormhole Heist?”

“Sure, man, it was a blast.”

“A blast? Jee-zus, Ozzie, that was Paula Myo’s case. Suppose she’d caught Johansson? His memory read would have shown you taking part.”

“It was worth it. You have no idea how high I got creeping around that museum, giving the guards the finger when the force field came on around us. Then we just waltzed right into the Vegas vault. Shit, Nigel, even we don’t have that much money. It was stacked to the fucking rooftops, like a dragon’s bed of gold.”

“It’s less than an hour’s income for CST, you dickbrain, and we own half of Vegas anyway. Why didn’t you just give Johansson an open credit transfer?”

“I knew you wouldn’t get it. Nigel, man, we built that machine with our own two hands; it’s still our finest hour, not CST. That was the two of us against the world back then. That generator was built with love, it’s part of us, the kid our souls had together. It wasn’t fair leaving it to be gawped at by bunches of schoolkids like some freakshow exhibit. I gave it a swan song that’ll never be forgotten.”

“It wasn’t in danger of being overlooked; it’s the foundation for our whole society.” Nigel groaned out loud, and appealed silently to whatever rationality Ozzie believed in. “Why didn’t you just come and tell me about the Starflyer?”

“And you’d have listened, and taken it all seriously? Come on. Nige, you are The Man. You’d have told me and Johansson to go take a flying leap, then given me another lecture about being stoned.” He gave his friend a kindly smile. “How long have you known the Starflyer is real, Nige, I mean, really accepted it’s a genuine twenty-four-karat pain in humanity’s ass? Be honest.”

“We’ve suspected something weird’s been going on behind the scenes for a while now. I wasn’t sure if it was the SI. One of its agents was involved.”

“How long?” Ozzie chanted; he wasn’t about to let Nigel off this one.

“Couple of days.”

“Pretty good. Longer than I’d have given you credit for.”

“Oh, like you were sure,” Nigel snapped back. “You who were so confident you used Johansson as an excuse to play superthief for kicks. You know, I bet you’re secretly pissed Johansson hasn’t been caught. For a hundred thirty years you’ve been waiting for this little stunt to get added to the catalogue of Ozzie legends, haven’t you?”

Ozzie pulled a sullen expression, modeled on Orion at his worst. “I was playing long odds, is all. I told you: Johansson was convincing. Somebody should have taken a close look. And don’t sit there telling me I shouldn’t have done anything. Look outside and see the kind of super-deep shit we’re in right now.”

“Were.”

“What?”

“Were in deep shit. I’ve managed to pull us out of it. There’s not going to be any more MorningLightMountain anymore, or the Starflyer.”

That little edge of conceit was something about Nigel that always bugged Ozzie. “What have you done, Nigel?”

“I’m sending a ship to Dyson Alpha; a nova bomb is going to take care of MorningLightMountain once and for all. This is all going to be settled within a week.”

“Nova bomb? Is that what your secret weapon is? Nobody on the unisphere knows. What the fuck is it?”

“Same principle as a diverted-energy-function nuke, but bigged up like you wouldn’t believe. Our Dynasty weapons development team took the diverted-energy principle, and bolted it onto a quantumbuster. Simple really, the quantumbuster effect field converts any matter within its radius directly into energy, only now that energy is diverted into expanding the effect field farther. And that’s a lot of energy. The field grows large enough to convert a measurable percentage of a star, which gives us an explosion on the same scale as a nova. It annihilates the star and any planet orbiting within a hundred AUs. The radiation will be lethal to any habitable planet within another thirty or so light-years.”

Ozzie frowned, horribly intrigued despite every liberal moral he possessed. “That’s an impossible feedback.”

“Not quite. It only has to hold together for a fraction of a second. Conversion is almost instantaneous. That gives us a loophole.”

“No.” Ozzie put his hands to his temples, shaking his head hard enough to make his hair wave from side to side. Realization of what was about to happen was affecting his body far worse than any little sober-up tablet forced down his throat. He really did think he was going to be physically sick. “No, no, I don’t give shit about the mechanics. Nigel, you can’t do this, man. You can’t kill MorningLightMountain, it is the Primes now, their whole species.”

“We’ve been through this, Ozzie; the War Cabinet, Dynasty heads, the StPetersburg team; we looked at every tactical scenario, every option. There’s nothing else we can do. MorningLightMountain is trying to exterminate us, just like the Starflyer planned. Maybe you should have tried a little harder to get me to take notice of Johansson instead of playing the romantic underdog. Not that you ever were that, Ozzie, it just suits you to pretend so you can get laid more often. Well, wake up and smell the coffee; we’re not college students anymore, Ozzie, we left California behind three and a half centuries ago. Grow up; I had to—and I get laid more than you because of it. Why do you think I used your name in the War Cabinet announcement? People trust you, Ozzie, they like you. If you’d kicked up a fuss back when you met Johansson, they would have listened; Heather would have busted the Starflyer’s corruption apart like a jackhammer on glass. Don’t go around blaming me and calling me a warmonger. You knew, Ozzie, you goddamn knew about a threat to the entire human race, and you didn’t fucking tell anyone. Who’s to blame, Ozzie? Who backed us into this corner, huh? Who took away our options?”

Ozzie had sunk back into the chair as Nigel’s voice grew louder. It wasn’t often Nigel, the original calculating iceman, lost his temper, but when he did it was best not to interrupt—people had been ruined, or worse, for making that mistake. Besides, there was a nasty taste of guilt spreading around Ozzie’s brain like a fast-acting poison. “It’s genocide, man,” he said simply and quietly. There was no logical argument he could come up with to counter the tirade. “It is so not what we are.”

“You think I don’t fucking know that,” Nigel stormed. “I wore the same T-shirts as you, I went on the same marches. I hated the military industrial imperialism that ran the world back then. Now look where you’ve put me!”

“Okay.” Ozzie raised his hands. “Just calm down, man.”

“I am fucking calm. Anybody else, Ozzie, and I mean anybody, and they would have been wiped from history by now. Nobody would question what happened to you, because you would never have existed.”

“I’ve seen it happen, man,” Ozzie whispered. “I walked one of the ghost planets. I witnessed their history; I felt them die, Nigel, every last one of them. You can’t let it happen. You just can’t, I’m begging you, man. I’m on my goddamn knees, here. Don’t do this.”

“There is no other way.”

“There’s always another way. Look, Clouddancer said the barrier generator was only disabled, not destroyed.”

Nigel gave him a startled look. “It was a variant on the flare bomb, we think; it altered the generator’s quantum structure.”

“There, see! The generator is still there. We’ve just got to repair it, get it working again.”

“Ozzie!” Nigel gave his friend a weary, despairing look. “You’re grasping at straws. It’s not you.”

“We have to try.”

“Ozzie, think it through. The barrier generator is the size of a planet, and we’ve got days, maybe only hours before MorningLightMountain strikes back at the Commonwealth. If it does, it will kill us, it will genocide the human race. Do you understand that?”

“Let me try,” Ozzie implored. “You’re sending a ship, right, the one with the nova bomb?”

“Yeah. We developed something new, Ozzie, this drive is something else again. It doesn’t use any of our old wormhole technology; you really do just jump into hyperspace. MorningLightMountain can’t detect it.”

“Perfect! Let me go on it. I can take a look at the generator. You know if anyone can work it out, I can.”

“Ozzie—”

“MorningLightMountain won’t know I’m there. If it starts an attack on the Commonwealth I’ll fling a nova bomb into its star myself. But we have to try this. Let me go, Nigel. It’s a chance. I know you, man; you won’t be able to live with yourself if you don’t at least consider it.”

“Ozzie, every physicist in the Commonwealth has been studying the data which the Second Chance gathered on the generator. We don’t even know what some of the shells are, let alone what they do. And we certainly don’t know how to build sections of them. Not inside a week. Get real here.”

“I can do it, I know I can. There must be a self-repair function, something that can undo the damage. Yeah! Clouddancer said it should outlive the star itself. If the Starflyer could have destroyed the generator, it would. That gives us a chance.”

“You’re not going, Ozzie.”

“Give me one good reason.”

“I don’t trust you.”

For a moment Ozzie thought Nigel had hit him—his skin certainly went numb the way it did after a sharp blow. He couldn’t hear anything either. The air in the study had turned dead. “What?” His voice was a piteous croak.

“I don’t know if you’re a Starflyer agent or not. If it’s going to take a last shot at defeating us, then this would be absolutely perfect. So read my lips: you are not taking our two most secret weapons into the MorningLightMountain star system by yourself. They are the only guarantees of racial survival we’ve got.”

“I’m not a Starflyer agent,” Ozzie said meekly. “You can’t really think that.”

“You’re either a friend of Johansson’s like you said, or a Starflyer agent. Those are the only two reasons for stopping the Far Away cargo inspections, because both groups need to get their equipment through without drawing any official attention. Right now, Johansson is out of contact on his way to Far Away, so I can’t confirm your story short of a memory read. I don’t want to do that, even if we had the time—which we don’t. So for now, I’m doing what any good friend would do, and quarantining you. When Johansson gets back, he’ll be able to vouch for you. I’m sorry, Ozzie, but we’ve learned the hard way just how deep the Starflyer has penetrated our society. I’m even partly to blame for that. I let that sonofabitch Alster fool me, which is going to take some serious piety on my part to recover from. And we both know how hard that will be.”

“You really mean this, don’t you, Nige; you’re not going to let me go.”

“I can’t. If this was reversed, you wouldn’t either.”

“Oh, man. This is the only chance we’ve got to save our souls. We can’t commit genocide.”

“We have to.”

“Look, will you at least tell the captain to take a flyby of the generator?”

“Sure thing, Ozzie. We’ll do that.”

Ozzie knew that tone, Nigel was just humoring him. “You son of a bitch.”

Nigel stood up. “You and your friends will stay here until this is settled. I can’t give you unisphere access, but if there’s anything you want, just ask.”

Ozzie almost told him where to stick his hospitality. “All the data on the generator. I’m going to look at it anyway.”

“Fair enough, Ozzie.”

“And if I find a way of fixing it …”

“I’ll bend over and you can kick my ass into orbit.”

“Damn right I will. Oh, and Nigel, get the boy a girl, will you? A sweet one, not some fifth-lifer.”

Nigel gave him an irritated glance. “Do I look like a pimp?”

Ozzie smiled.

“This is only going to take a week,” Nigel said. “He can wait.”

“Hey, come on, man, we could all be dead by then. The kid’s never been laid. Now you’ve gone and flung him in jail. Five-star, sure, but it’s still the pen. Give him a break.”

“Ozzie—”

“If you can’t call out for a hooker, send one of your wives along. They’re all about his age anyway.”

“You can’t annoy me into doing this.”

“Just do it, Nige, show some humanity here. I’ll pick up the tab if it bothers you that much.”

“Whatever.” Nigel went out of the door with a fractious wave of his hand.

“Fuck you very much,” Ozzie shouted after him.

Eight hours into the flight to Port Evergreen, and the Carbon Goose passengers were finally starting to relax. There was a general feeling among them now that they might actually make it to the wormhole generator after all. Tail winds had picked up as they crossed the ocean. Wilson had announced their projected flight time was another hour and a quarter at most.

Paula wasn’t anything like as optimistic as the others. The Starflyer only needed a five-minute lead on them through the wormhole. Even with their reduced flight time, it was going to get close on forty minutes. Apart from a couple of hours spent in a fitful sleep, she’d spent her time reviewing contingency survival plans. There were plenty of scenarios loaded into the avionics, mostly connected with the plane being forced to ditch in the ocean. Given that each Carbon Goose carried emergency food packs, and there were more stores at Shackleton and Port Evergreen, she estimated that they’d have enough to eat for between seventeen to twenty months. It would mean returning to Shackleton where the other planes were parked, but they weren’t facing instant doom. Power and warmth were certainly easy enough; the micropiles could supply them with electricity for decades.

She walked back through the top passenger deck, which everyone had settled in. The Guardians regarded her with expressions of suspicion and hostility. Not that it bothered her; open animosity was a near constant companion in her job. Cat’s Claws simply ignored her, while the three remaining members of the Paris team smiled warmly as she passed. The stairs at the back of the cabin took her down to the next deck, which had its lights down low. She could just see the horizon through the small circular windows, a fuzzy pink line separating the black ocean from a star-filled sky. Flashes from the neutron star sent a broad livid blue shimmer across the water, leaving a purple afterimage on her retinas. They were just keeping ahead of the dawn, which was scheduled to catch up with them twenty minutes after they reached Port Evergreen.

Four more sets of stairs, and two pressure hatches put her in the lower cargo hold, where all their vehicles were stowed. The turbine noise was loudest here, almost as if there was some kind of combustion engine operating somewhere close by. Even with Wilson turning the heating on full, it was chilly in the big compartment. She zipped up the black and lavender fleece that had been in her CST executive travel pack and walked to the center, where Qatux was spending the journey. They’d managed to find half a dozen emergency heaters, which now ringed the large alien blowing warm air on its dark gray hide.

Nobody knew anything about Raiel physiology, so Paula couldn’t tell if its occasional shivering was the same reaction that humans had to cold, or a manifestation of its little dependency problem. Two of its smaller tentacles quivered as she approached.

“Paula, you are most welcome,” it sighed hoarsely.

“Thank you.”

Tiger Pansy was sitting on a crate beside Qatux, wearing the contents of two travel packs over her skirt and blouse. For once she’d abandoned her heels to use a pair of boots, then pulled some fur-lined travel slippers on top of them. She still looked miserably cold, her gloved hands cupped around a mug of tomato soup.

Adam and Bradley had also pulled up some crates. Their expressions remained neutral as she sat on the corner of the crate that Tiger Pansy was using. For whatever reason, Bradley had never gone in for reprofiling or genetic modification; he was still maintaining his mid-thirties age, though she’d never been able to track down which rejuvenation clinic he used. A tall man, especially compared to her, with his fair hair shading almost to silver-blond, contrasting with the darkest eyes she’d ever seen, his handsome features rose with a welcoming smile, not in the least triumphant, merely polite. Bradley was genuinely pleased to have her with them, though she would not forget nor forgive the terms that had brought her on board.

Adam couldn’t be more different from the founder of the Guardians; much squatter than Bradley’s athletically lanky frame, with muscle bulk that had been added since their last confirmed image of him on Velaines. Most of the Paris office would have walked right past him without a flicker of recognition, but after so long Paula could identify his face anywhere no matter what reprofiling he gave himself. Indeed, after so many changes there was now a severe limit on any new alterations. This new rounded face that alluded to youthful middle age was a strong warning against so much economic self-applied cellular reprofiling. His cheeks and chin were leathery, and afflicted with what appeared to be a mild form of eczema. The collar of his semiorganic coat was plagued by strands of dark hair that was dropping out like a radiation victim’s.

“Shaving must be painful,” she said.

Adam’s hand went halfway to his face before he became conscious of it. “There are suitable creams, thank you for your concern. You don’t look too hot yourself right now. Travel sick, Investigator?”

“Just tired.”

“Please,” Bradley pleaded.

“I’ve been assessing our food supplies should we be stuck here,” Paula said. “We should be all right for some time, but I came to ask what Qatux eats.”

All five of the Raiel’s eye stalks swiveled around in unison to focus on her. “Your concern is touching, Paula. There is no need for alarm. I will be able to digest human food. I estimate I will consume as much as five human adults per day. With the exception of curry. It does not agree with my digestive process.”

“Hey, me neither,” Tiger Pansy chirped in.

“Are you all right?” Paula asked her. “I can spell you if you want to sleep.”

“That’s real kind. I’m okay, though. I grabbed a few hours in here a while back.”

“Do you and Mr. Elvin intend to argue with each other?” Qatux asked. “You have been adversaries for many years now. I would find such contrary and emotional discourse to be most elating.”

“I’m not looking for a fight,” Paula said stiffly. “This is a new situation, for both of us.”

Adam looked up at the Raiel. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Old human saying.”

“Do you really set aside old battles so easily?”

“Put it into context with the threat of humanity’s extermination, and you’ll understand,” Paula said.

“It’s kinda sweet,” Tiger Pansy said. “That we can all just get along, you know.”

“Thank you, my dear,” Qatux said. “That was a most impressive feeling of sympathy and, I believe, camaraderie.”

“That’s why I get the big bucks,” she said, giggling. “Not!”

Paula turned to Bradley. “The good news is that if the Starflyer does close the wormhole behind it, we will be able to survive.”

“You might, my dear, but for me such failure will be worse than death.”

“I understand. I’d like to know now, what exactly are your plans. I might be able to help.”

“Plans,” Bradley murmured sadly. “I had grand plans, Investigator. Once. Today, things have become somewhat fluid. All we can do is hope that our friends on Far Away find some way of preventing the Starflyer from going through the wormhole until we arrive at Port Evergreen. That way we might still manage to corner it and kill it. Dreaming heavens, I cannot believe it has come to this.”

Paula glanced over at the Volvos lurking in the gloom around her, their tops nearly touching the roof of the cargo hold. “So what are they carrying? What have you been smuggling to Far Away all these years?”

“Don’t look at me.” Adam grunted. “I’m just the hired hand who arranges shipment.”

“Bradley?” Paula asked.

“I had devised a scheme to give the planet its revenge. It requires a great deal of sophisticated force field technology to implement.”

“How does force field technology kill the Starflyer? Do you trap it inside one?”

“Oh no, the planet’s revenge is designed to destroy the Marie Celeste. I intended to release it when we knew the Starflyer was on its way back. Without its ship, it will be truly marooned on Far Away. It can’t go home, and it can’t return to the Commonwealth. We can hunt it down and kill it.”

“So if it does get through the wormhole to Far Away ahead of us, will the Guardians be able to release this revenge scheme?”

“Possibly; though without the equipment we’ve brought it will be weaker than I would like. And of course the data you and Senator Burnelli retrieved from Kazimir is extremely important.”

“As far as we could determine, it was just meteorological information from Mars.”

“You determined right, my dear. We intend to channel Far Away’s weather at the Marie Celeste. As well as being extremely effective against that brute machine, it is fitting to give Far Away the chance for retribution. It was the flare bomb released by the Marie Celeste which came so close to totally annihilating the entire planetary biosphere.”

“Weather?” Paula frowned, even she couldn’t work out the variables in that puzzle. “You’re going to use the weather against a starship?”

“Yes. Did you know the Halgarth Dynasty commands the lion’s share of force field sales in the Commonwealth because of the systems given to them by the Starflyer in the guise of Institute research?”

“I know they’re the market leaders, yes.”

“It was inevitable, really. The Marie Celeste traveled through space at near relativistic velocity for hundreds of years. It had to have superb force fields to survive such a punishing environment. That makes it extremely difficult for us to attack. It would certainly be impervious to fusion bombs, even if we wanted to employ them on Far Away. The kind of modern, sophisticated weapons powerful enough to break the Marie Celeste’s force field are essentially impossible to obtain. They are simply not available on the black market. Their manufacture would be even more difficult. The Commonwealth has an effective monitoring network in place for dual use manufacturing systems, which even Adam would have trouble circumventing.”

“So how do you use weather when our best weapons are ineffective?”

“We generate a superstorm, and use force field–derived mechanisms to steer it. Far Away is blessed with a rather unique meteorological system, partly due to its size, partly its geography. A major storm evolves out over the Hondu Ocean every night, and blows in across the Grand Triad. That will become our powerhouse; we have evolved a mechanism to amplify that and direct it onto the Marie Celeste. In theory, I should add. Nobody has ever put such an idea into practice before.”

“Mars has storms,” Paula said abruptly. “Big storms.”

“Well done, Investigator. Mars is subject to planetary storms that last months, sometimes years. It also shares Far Away’s low gravity, which makes it the closest match in the Commonwealth. The data we collected there will be invaluable for our control routines.”

“Do you really think you can control the weather?”

“A better description would be to aggravate it and direct it. And yes, we believe it is possible; for a short while at least, and that is all we ask.”

“It will require a phenomenal amount of energy. Even I can see that.”

“Yes. That’s taken care of.”

Paula wanted to point out flaws, it seemed such a bizarre notion, not one you should depend on to bring a hundred-thirty-year-old crusade to its climax; but she didn’t know enough about the procedures Johansson had dreamed up. It just had to be taken on faith. “Assuming you can direct a superstorm, and I’m still skeptical about that, what use will that be against a starship whose force fields can protect it against nuclear weapons?”

“Its size is its downfall,” Bradley said intently. “We intend to initiate the planet’s revenge while the Marie Celeste remains on the ground, where it is most vulnerable. The superstorm will be powerful enough to pick it up and fling it to its destruction. And the beauty is, if its force fields are switched on, the surface area they will present to the storm is even larger, while the overall mass remains the same—which makes it even easier for the winds to pick it up and smash it.”

“I see the logic,” Paula said. “I’m just not convinced about the practicality.”

Johansson slumped down. “We’ll probably never know now.”

“I’ve been thinking about our arrival at Port Evergreen,” Paula said. “Do you have any more of those reconnaissance drones?”

“Two in each armored car,” Adam told her.

“We need to try to launch them when we get within their flight range of Port Evergreen.”

Adam gazed down the length of the cargo hold. “Should be fun.”

They were a hundred kilometers out from Port Evergreen when Wilson took the Carbon Goose down to a kilometer above the water.

“Are you ready?” he asked Adam, who was in the armored car closest to the rear loading ramp.

“Systems engaged. The drones are ready to fly.”

“Stand by: depressurizing.” Wilson’s lime-green virtual hands swept over control symbols.

“No effect on stability,” Oscar reported from the copilot’s chair.

“Anything on radar?” They’d switched their own radar off now they were close to their destination. If the two Carbon Goose planes the Starflyer had taken were still using their radar, the signals should be detectable.

“Nothing,” Oscar said. “I guess the Starflyer’s planes are down.”

“Damn, I almost want to make a sweep just to find out.”

“This is our only advantage,” Oscar said. “It doesn’t know we’re coming.”

“Not much of an advantage.”

“It’s the only one in town,” Anna pointed out.

“Okay, let’s stick with the plan,” Wilson said. His displays were showing him the lower cargo hold was now pressure-equalized. “Opening the hold doors now,” he told Adam.

They were all bracing themselves for the giant plane to judder. It never happened. The only way Wilson could even tell the doors were opening was through his virtual vision display.

“Launching,” Adam said. “One away. Wow, that’s a tumble. Looking good, the array is pulling it out of the dive. Leveling off. Okay, launching two.”

Wilson closed the doors, then took the Carbon Goose down to three hundred meters. It was as low as he dared go without any sort of radar to check how far they really were above the sea. The altitude should help them get closer to Port Evergreen before they were detected.

Everyone on board accessed the secure signal from the drones as they raced on ahead. Infrared showed a faint outline of the sheer rock island as they closed on Port Evergreen. Brighter, salmon-pink patches glowed above the waterline, nestled in the broad dip in the cliff.

“They’re down,” Adam said.

“Plenty of activity there,” Morton said. “I can see movement.”

“Vehicles, I think,” Paula said. “The heat is coming from their engines.”

The picture resolution built rapidly as the drones closed in. Both the Carbon Goose planes were easy to distinguish, parked just above the sea, their turbines glowing like small suns. Some way back from the water, the six huts and long temporary accommodation building registered a few degrees above the ambient temperature; the lone hangar only showed up on the grainy light amplification scan. The curving generator building was an all-over ginger hue, with a shimmer of silver light oozing out through its pressure curtain. Eight large trucks were on the ground just in front of it, their combustion engines on. The drones could even pick up the carbon monoxide fumes squirting out of the exhaust pipes. Three of them had heated trailers, big oblong boxes protected by force fields.

“They haven’t gone through,” Adam said in astonishment. “What the hell are they waiting for? They’ve only got forty minutes left before the wormhole cycle ends.”

“Stig,” Bradley said. “It has to be. He’s stalled them somehow.”

The drones were close enough now to pick out individual humans on the ground. Five people in pressure suits were clustered right in front of the force field. There was a lot of encrypted signal traffic between them and the trucks.

“We’ve got a chance,” Adam said. “Wilson, circle us around. Everyone on the drop combat team, stand by.”

Wilson was sure he could hear cheering from the top deck as he altered the Carbon Goose’s flight path by a couple of degrees. He felt like joining in. Oscar was grinning sinfully beside him. Anna put her arms around his shoulders and delivered a happy kiss.

A camera in the lower cargo deck showed him ten armored figures making their way slowly back toward the rear door as it opened again. Cat’s Claws and the Paris team were all in the same kind of suit, while the four Guardians who’d joined them were in the best marque aggressor suit available on the black market.

“Rather them than me,” Oscar said. “Did you access Gore Burnelli’s little drop into Park Avenue? That assassin was in bad shape when he hit.”

“The navy suits are up to it,” Wilson said. “I remember the specs we drew up. And Adam wouldn’t let his people take part unless he was confident.”

“Here’s hoping.”

Wilson raised their altitude by another hundred fifty meters. The cliff that surrounded the vast island was over a hundred meters high in places. He’d navigated blind before—yeah right, three hundred fifty years ago—and the golden rule was always give yourself enough leeway in enemy territory. The Carbon Goose avionics had an excellent inertial navigation system, but it was hardly designed with this kind of stunt in mind.

He switched off all the internal lights, including the cockpit. “One minute till we reach the shoreline,” he told everyone.

Oscar removed the optical limiter from the windshield, and Wilson switched his retinal inserts to full light amplification. “I think I see the cliff.”

Red warning icons appeared in the plane’s navigation function section.

“It doesn’t like where we are,” Oscar growled. “That makes two of us.”

Wilson’s virtual hands moved to disengage the warnings. He’d eliminated three of them when the Carbon Goose’s radar switched on. “Shit!” Its return image swept across half of his virtual vision, splashing a green and purple portrait of the sea and the approaching cliff face. “Anna, kill the fucking radar. Shoot it if you have to.”

It took her several seconds to shut down the power, then load a series of restrictions into the ground collision safeguard programs that were monitoring the flight.

“Goddamnit,” Wilson spat as they swept in over the crumpled rock. “Adam, they know we’re here; the son of a bitch autopilot switched on the radar. I’m sorry. Do you want to abort?”

“Not an option,” Morton said. “Hold her steady, Wilson, we’re jumping.”

Wilson pressed his hands hard against the console, putting pressure on the i-spots as if that alone would keep the massive plane on course.

“They’ve gone,” Adam said. “Get us the hell out of here.”

Wilson banked the Carbon Goose sharply to starboard, curving them back around to head out to sea again. Behind them, ten armor suits plummeted through the freezing night air at terminal velocity.

The baby sneekbot slowly picking its way undetected along the parapet of Market Wall was designed to resemble a cockroach. It worked with five siblings who networked their respective sensor types and relayed the results back to a pack-governor disguised as a rat, which in turn transmitted the data to the operator a safe distance away. They were built by the McSobel clan, who wrapped a plyplastic body around a bioneural array supplied by the Barsoomians. Over eighty of them were scanning First Foot Fall Plaza for the Guardians, providing a reasonably comprehensive image of what the Institute was up to.

As the warm afternoon rolled on they watched the curved rank of parked Range Rover Cruisers in front of the gateway. There were no other vehicles in 3F Plaza. Several squads of Institute troops lounged around in the shade of the awnings set up along the base of the wall, helping themselves to the contents of the abandoned cafés. Just after two o’clock the gateway opened, its pearly force field turning funereal as it exposed the night of Half Way. A couple of people in pressure suits went through.

“Nobody else is moving around there,” Stig said as he reviewed the images. He and Olwen had set up a temporary command post in the Ballard Theater, three kilometers east of 3F Plaza. They’d chosen it because it had a glass-walled rooftop restaurant, which gave them an excellent vantage point out across the city. It also made Stig feel exposed. He switched between the sneekbots and simple eyeball observation, looking out at the blimpbots that were circling the city like fat impatient sharks.

On any normal day, someone would have noticed the twenty-two dark shapes keeping their distance as they went around and around in sedate procession at an unusually low altitude. So far no one had called the aerodrome to ask what was happening. People were too busy either staying at home, intimidated by the police patrols escorted by the Institute’s Range Rover Cruisers, or causing a lot of trouble for those same patrols. Several crowds had gathered on the larger streets, to fling bottles and stones every time they saw a police car.

The Institute didn’t seem to care much, unless anyone started protesting along their clear route out of the city to Highway One; then the troops cracked down hard without any pretense of involving the police. It made it difficult to get the Guardians’ snipers into position. Stig was still trying to infiltrate three teams to fix booby traps to the road. The route that the Institute had cleared used the Tangeat bridge over the Belvoir River. That was his main priority for the booby traps. It was clearly a high-rated concern with whoever was commanding the Institute troops; there were nine Range Rover Cruisers parked on the bridge, their sensors scanning the water below.

“It has to be this cycle,” Olwen said. “They wouldn’t expend this much effort otherwise.”

“Right.” Stig looked out across the rooftops again. Away to the south, another blimpbot was gliding smoothly over Highway One. The faint pink overlay graphic supplied by his virtual vision showed it was one of the six bomb carriers. “I’ve got to change that holding pattern. The Institute’s going to notice them if they keep flying over Highway One like that.”

Okay,” Olwen said. She knew how pointless it was to argue when his nerves produced that much determination in his voice.

Stig sat at one of the tables and lit a cigarette. He pulled down some smoke, then started opening secure links to the blimpbots. Instead of chasing one big circle around Armstrong City, he split them into two groups, and circled one to the east, and one to the west. North, of course, was the sea. If they all clustered out there, they’d certainly be noticed and queried.

It took nearly two hours and eleven cigarettes before he was satisfied they were all locked into their new holding patterns. The wind was starting to blow in from the North Sea, which gave the blimpbots’ fans extra work to hold them on course. Stig didn’t like the look of the clouds that were scudding in from the horizon; they were getting progressively darker. He knew Armstrong City’s weather well enough by now to recognize when it was going to rain.

An hour later, the first drops of water were hitting the restaurant’s green-tinted glass. They kept the lights off as the sky darkened outside.

“This could complicate things,” he said. “Water adds a lot of weight to the blimpbots. They shouldn’t fly low altitude in the rain.”

“Keely says there’s some big traffic movement along Mantana Avenue,” Olwen said.

Stig’s virtual hand pulled sneekbot images from the grid. They gave him a ground-level view of large wheels rolling past, kicking up a fine spray from the enzyme-bonded concrete. He pulled out an image relayed by a sneekbot that had climbed one of the old maple fur poplars. Two trucks roared past underneath, flanked by Range Rover Cruisers; they were followed by a big MANN truck, whose trailer carried a long buffed-aluminum capsule, with a clump of sophisticated air-conditioning units on one end. More Cruisers followed it, their mounted guns swiveling from side to side.

“Where did that come from?” Stig asked.

“We don’t know,” Keely said. “They must have parked it in a commercial estate somewhere close.”

“More to the point, what is it?” Olwen said. “A life-support cabin for the Starflyer?”

“Could well be,” Stig said. He was tracking the MANN truck with the sneekbot’s sensors. The curving metal walls of the capsule were reinforced by some kind of bonding field, making it virtually impregnable to any portable weapon the Guardians had. It didn’t have any windows. Wisps of steam were rising from the fins of the air-conditioning units as the rain pattered all over them.

“Movement in 3F,” Keely warned.

Stig hurriedly pulled more images from the grid. Eight people in bulky helmeted environment suits were walking out from the CST management building beside the gateway. They went straight through the pressure curtain.

“This is it,” he announced. “It’s got to be; there’s only an hour and a half left in this cycle.” Amazingly he felt almost nothing, no excitement, no dread. Humanity’s most devious enemy was about to arrive on his world, and here he was regarding the moment with cool anticipation. His virtual hand touched the general communications icon. “Status one, everybody. We think it’s coming. Get to your shelter positions, and be ready to move up to engagement point after we hit 3F Plaza.” He stubbed his cigarette out, and settled back in the chair, closing his eyes so he was completely surrounded by his virtual vision. Blue and chrome virtual hands danced across the blimpbot flight command icons as he organized them into their attack formations. He’d been right about the rain, it degraded their performance characteristics, making them even more sluggish than normal. Dangerous in the squally rainstorm. If a gust knocked one off course, it took a longer time than normal to respond and correct itself.

“People are heading back home,” Olwen said. “Rain makes for a bad protest environment.”

Stig pressed himself up against the glass, looking out toward First Foot Fall Plaza, which rose above the surrounding buildings. “That might help us. They’ll be safer indoors.”

“Will they?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. It’s comfortable to believe.” His hand tapped the cold thick slab of glass. “We’d better get out of here.”

Just before they reached the stairs, a lightning flash went off close to shore. Stig saw the blimpbots heading in across the city boundaries. Seen head-on they were big black circles poised above the buildings, seemingly immobile. They were running dark, with their navigation strobes off. It had transformed them; no longer lumbering obsolete throwbacks that drew a smile as their quaint outline slid overhead, they’d obtained a sinister otherworldly appearance as they closed on the overcast human city to deliver their lethal cargo.

“What if it’s Adam coming through?” Olwen asked.

“I have to act on the information we’ve got, however limited. And that truck wasn’t carrying a weapon. It’s the Starflyer.”

“If it is, it’ll blow the wormhole generator as soon as it’s through. We’ll be cut off.”

“I know,” he said, wishing he could answer differently.

“Will Adam be following?”

“I don’t know. Dreaming heavens! He was supposed to be here before now. That blockade-busting operation he put together should have worked.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Carry on with the attack; there’s nothing else we can do. If it’s Adam on Half Way he’ll guess what we’re going to do.”

“Adam doesn’t know what we have here, what our contingencies are.”

“Johansson does. He was going to join the blockade-busting run.”

“Stig, we have to keep the gateway open. They’ll both be trapped on Half Way, along with the equipment we need.”

“We might just have enough equipment for the planet’s revenge. Not that we’ll need it if we can kill the Starflyer today.”

“Long shot,” she exclaimed bitterly. “Very long shot.”

They went out into the street. Stig activated his force field skeleton suit at level one, establishing a minimum field, and zipped up his leather StPetersburg jacket against the rain. Dark rain clouds were blotting out the sun, bringing a premature twilight to Armstrong City.

He hurried along the deserted street, then took a route along several unlit alleys until they came out on Mantana Avenue just above the government district. Here at least the street lighting worked, casting long yellow-hued reflections off the soaking pavement. Lighting in the shabby old buildings behind the maple fur poplars was intermittent, office windows shining with a pearly white sheen as their polyphoto strips remained on, illuminating empty desks and conference rooms. Shops along the ground floor were all shut, their carbon mesh shutters pulled down and bolted, dark and lifeless inside. There was no traffic on the road itself. Civicbots rumbled along the gutters, amber strobes flashing as their rotary brushes cleared the litter and leaves away, keeping the drains free.

Stig picked up the pace as the rain intensified, almost jogging. Branches on the maple fur poplars were drooping low over their heads as the woolly leaves soaked up the water. Thick droplets splattered down. Lightning flickered somewhere close to the docks.

“Here we go,” he said as they reached the turning for Arischal Lane. It led to Bazely Square, which on ordinary days was a busy intersection, with a big grassed-over roundabout in the middle. It had wide pedestrian subways running underneath, which were their designated shelter point during the bomb run.

He turned to go, then halted. Lightning flashed again. One of the blimpbots was sliding over the government district at the far end of Mantana Avenue, its black bulk materializing silently out of the gray rain as it headed toward them. Olwen followed his gaze. “Dreaming heavens, that’s low,” she gasped. The keel was barely ten meters above the roofs of the various government office buildings. Given the size of the blimpbot, such a separation distance was insignificant. Water poured from its flanks to drench the red pan tiles and solar paneling.

Stig watched it tack around slightly, and begin to fly along the broad thoroughfare. On its final approach, the main ducted fans fore and aft spun up to full thrust. It moved fast, a lot faster than he’d anticipated. The tips of the lofty old maple fur poplars scraped along the blimpbot’s fuselage. Cargo doors swung open all the way along its belly.

“Move,” Stig yelled. His overlay graphics told him it wasn’t carrying a bomb, but it was going to draw the Institute’s attention in a big way. He’d been a fool to stop and gawp like a tourist. Adam would be cursing him.

They sprinted down Arischal Lane as the blimpbot slid gracefully along the avenue behind them. It was audible now, the ducted fans whirring urgently, their pitch shifting as they swiveled constantly to maintain the craft’s course against the wind and rain lashing against it. The engine sound was twinned with a coarse ripping noise as the soaking trees along the avenue grated their way along the fuselage.

It eclipsed the entrance to Arischal Lane, a disturbing dark presence dominating the sky. In Stig’s virtual vision, it was one of nine that made up the first attack wave. They were closing on 3F Plaza in a loose circle, set to arrive within a four-minute window. Three of them already had cherry-red damage warning symbols blinking bright; they’d all struck something on their flight over the city: chimney stacks, rotundas, trees, masts slicing through the fuselage fabric to buckle and snap the geodesic stress structure. The holes made little noticeable difference to their aerodynamics or speed as they droned onward relentlessly.

The communications array at the aerodrome reported a burst of calls from the government district and the Governor’s House. It replied with a standard reply of we are forwarding your message for action. More advanced software began to probe the aerodrome’s network, searching out current flight files. The routines that the Guardians had installed were deflecting them, and attempting to Trojan their own disruptor virals into the Institute systems.

Stig reached the end of Arischal Lane, where there was a subway entrance on the corner of the road. He took the stone steps three at a time, before leaping down to the bottom. Olwen followed with a more nimble jump. They both sped forward through the lighted concrete passage to the central junction in the middle of the roundabout. It was set out like a small concrete crater, with polyphoto strips high on the walls. Rain poured down from the dismal sky to gurgle away slowly through drain grilles partially blocked by litter and dirt.

Images from the sneekbots showed Stig the Institute troops in 3F Plaza had finally been alerted to the massive airborne invaders heading toward them. Four Land Rover Cruisers drove into a protective arrangement around the MANN truck and its valuable load, their medium-caliber mounted weaponry ready, small sensor stalks swishing back and forth. The remaining Cruisers were fanning out across 3F Plaza, guns pivoting up to the thick rain clouds, tracking around in search of a target. Troops in flexarmor suits were bounding up the steps on the inside of Market Wall, their long hurdling movements agile in the low gravity. Sneekbots reported an ether thick with encrypted traffic. Scarlet targeting lasers stabbed out, foreshortened in the rain.

“They’re strengthening the force field over the gateway,” Keely reported.

“Good. I want it intact. Adam might still get through.” Stig sat down with his back to a wall, pants in the water trickling along the floor. Olwen knelt down beside him, and gripped his hand. He was glad of the contact. Everything they were dealing with was so remote, his virtual vision display reducing it to the level of some training exercise. “It’s about to begin,” he told everyone over the general band.

The blimpbot sailing along Mantana Avenue was the first to arrive at 3F Plaza. It was also the most easily seen as it began to lift higher just before it reached Market Wall. Institute troops who had it in their target sensors opened fire immediately. Ion pulses and kinetic bullets ripped straight through the fuselage fabric, punctured the forward clump of helium cells and streaked out through the upper fuselage. Occasionally, one would strike a carbon-titanium strut in the stress structure, and inflict a modicum of damage. But the geodesic was designed to retain overall integrity under major impact conditions, the load paths simply shifted around fractionally. Overall, it was like shooting a dense patch of air.

The huge blunt curve of the nose glided up over the Enfield entrance. Dispensers fixed into its cargo bays began to fire volley after volley of chaff, flares, and small electronic warfare drones. For a glorious minute, the gloom was completely banished as dazzling white and red stars swarmed over 3F Plaza, trailing thin lines of smoke. Secondary detonations flashed, and silver chaff scintillated across the sky, before sleeting down. Quieter, gray-blue drones zipped about like hummingbirds, impossible to see, sending out powerful disruptive EM pulses.

Troops on the wall were firing nonstop into the blimpbot as more and more of it slid out across 3F Plaza. Then the Cruisers on the ground opened up. Someone among the Institute officers had obviously taken charge. The heavier caliber kinetic and maser weapons were directed first at the ducted fans protruding from the fuselage, then the guns worked down the keel where the cargo bays were situated. Creases began to appear in the fuselage as the geodesic structure finally succumbed to the violence. Tears started to multiply, exposing the clustered helium cells strung along the interior, translucent white spheres like wax bubbles.

The second blimpbot arrived at 3F just as the flares from the first began to splutter out. Several troops shifted their aim, beginning to understand their targeting priorities. Land Rover Cruisers were firing into the cargo holds even as the dispensers began blasting out their ordnance.

Blimpbots three and four arrived simultaneously. By then, number one was sinking rapidly, the rear third of the fuselage twisting savagely as it fell toward the Enfield entrance. Only inertia kept it moving forward as the badly tattered fuselage fabric ripped into fluttering streamers in imitation of black flame. The nose dipped, angling down on one of the Plaza’s big ornamental fountains. Troops on Market Wall who were still underneath the tail end jumped and sprinted out of the way as its descent accelerated sharply. It crashed over the entrance in elegant slow motion amid a cacophony of snapping and splintering sounds from the geodesic struts as they burst apart. Cruisers and trucks raced away across the Plaza as if they’d just been released from a starting grid while the fuselage kept on collapsing, folding in on itself as though some terrible invisible force was intent on squashing the broken craft completely flat. Above it, white and red flares mingled with the rain, to cloak the slippery fuselage fabric in shimmering patterns.

By then blimpbots two and four were also mortally wounded. They started their uncontrollable descent into the Plaza. Two was swinging around as its tail disintegrated, popping the helium cells like party balloons, an abrupt loss of buoyancy that pulled the rear half down with alarming speed. Its nose punched into the middle of three, which bent the entire stress structure.

Despite the size and surprise of the attack, the Institute troops and equipment hadn’t actually taken any losses. Their vehicles were still careering around the Plaza dodging debris as it fell from the sky, and powering away from impact sites. Individual troops were more vulnerable, having to run and jump without any guidance other than looking up—this while maintaining their aggressive firing. So far none of the blimpbots had got near the gateway. A protective ring of Cruisers had drawn up around it, with more skidding into place. The trucks were taking cover in the bigger warehouses and archways along the base of Market Wall.

The firepower from the ground was intense, matching the deluge of flares in lambency. To anyone standing in the middle of the Plaza, the rain clouds were almost obliterated from view behind swirls of light and clots of darkness. Into this balletic graveyard of goliath craft, blimpbot number five arrived at high speed, rushing over Market Wall. Seven, eight, and nine were already drawing fire from the top of Market Wall as they sped inward.

“There are bombs in five and eight,” Stig said. He pumped his force field up to full strength, and wrapped his arms over his head. “Keely, crash the city net.”

Blimpbot five had hauled two-thirds of its length over the Plaza when the big cylinder dropped out of its front cargo bay, almost unnoticed in the antagonistic environment that the decoy dispensers had created. It tumbled down for a couple of seconds until it was below the lip of Market Wall, then an explosive charge inside detonated. The cylinder disappeared inside a dense vapor burst of ethylene oxide that looked like a bloated smoke cloud. A second, larger explosion was triggered by the bomb’s control array, igniting the cloud.

The fuel-air fireball produced a blast overpressure only slightly less than that of a nuclear weapon.

Stig saw it. He had his eyes closed, and his virtual vision on medium brightness, but the flash still penetrated his eyelids. It corresponded to every sneekbot image vanishing. Several seconds later the sound wave crashed overhead. His arms tightened up as the concrete wall shook.

When he looked up the sky was dark again, though the rain had gone. He could see curious smears high overhead. Small veiled shapes cruised through the night, as if a flock of bats were fleeing the scene. There were no bats on Far Away. When he stood up he could see a seething column of luminous air swelling upward from the direction of First Foot Fall Plaza. He realized he’d lost contact with half of the blimpbots in the second wave. A couple that did respond were recording zero altitude with their helium cells leaking prodigiously.

“Let’s go,” he shouted at Olwen. They ran for an exit. “Keely, I need a sneekbot view of 3F.”

“Doing my best. Dreaming heavens, did that ever work better than we expected.”

Stig reached the stairs up to street level. He came out on the corner of Nottingham Road just as the rain began to sweep back again. His peripheral vision caught something falling above the nearby terrace of houses, something impossibly big, so he turned—“Holy shit!” He flung his arm around Olwen and carried her down to the pavement.

The mangled rear third of a blimpbot sank silently out of the night to smash into the houses, pulverizing the three directly underneath it. So where’s the rest of it? Fragmented solar panels, smashed timbers, slates, and long splinters of glass tumbled out of the collapsing rubble to skitter across the road.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Sure, still had my force field on.”

He looked at the fist-sized chunks of stone and jagged struts from the blimpbot’s geodesic structure that were scattered around them. They’d been lucky nothing larger had landed near them. He could hear screaming, shouts for help rising in the background.

“We can’t stop for them,” he said.

Olwen gave a shaky nod. “Yeah.”

They started off down Nottingham Road. Images were flicking back up into his virtual vision grid as Keely activated the second wave of sneekbots she had stowed around 3F Plaza. No matter which ones he pulled out of the grid, all he saw was the rubble they were crawling over.

Six blimpbots had survived. Their status reports were organizing themselves inside his virtual vision. One was effectively dead in the air, unable to move other than where the wind took it. The remaining five had all sustained a lot of damage, but they were mobile, and one of them was a bomb carrier. “Bingo,” he muttered. “We might be able to do it again.”

They reached a crossroads, and looked along Levana Walk, which gave them a clear view to First Foot Fall Plaza nearly a half kilometer away. As Stig intended, Market Wall had deflected the main blast wave upward, away from the nearby buildings. It hadn’t been enough to save the smaller houses in surrounding streets, which had collapsed; even the larger, sturdier blocks directly outside the Plaza had taken considerable damage. Fires were starting to root, burning fiercely amid the wreckage. Market Wall itself was now a thick stone circle of rubble, only two-thirds of its original imposing height.

Stig drew in his breath at the sight of it. “It held,” he murmured. “Thank the dreaming heavens, it held.” He hadn’t wanted to consider the devastation a fuel air bomb would cause if its blast wave had been allowed to spread out horizontally.

“You can’t let off another one,” Olwen said. She stood in the center of the crossroads, looking down each street in turn.

“Huh?”

“Look. Look properly.”

Stig followed her gaze. There were people everywhere. Dazed, weeping, bloodied, wandering helplessly through piles of wreckage, kneeling beside badly injured friends or family that’d been pulled out of broken buildings. Cars and vans were strewn across the road, none of them with any glass left intact; their alarms were all squawking furiously, lights flashing for attention, even those that had turned turtle. Rain and melted scraps of blimpbot fuselage fabric had combined into a weird sleet that was slowly and methodically smothering the bereaved landscape under an impenetrable black mantle.

He began to register the expressions around him as the damp ash pattered against his jacket. The tears, the silent rage, and the terrible anguish as people took stock of life that had been irretrievably smashed. There were hundreds just along the sections of road that he could see.

It took every shred of self-discipline he possessed to fight the guilt. “We have to,” he told her through gritted teeth. “It’ll come through unless we stop it. We don’t have anything else left to keep it away.”

“Then find something. Use us, we have weapons.”

He glanced at the ion pistol she was carrying openly, and resisted the impulse to give a derisive laugh. “Let’s assess 3F first, shall we?”

The sneekbots were scuttling their way to the top of the encircling mound that had been Market Wall. It took Stig a moment to make sense of the first images they provided. There was nothing he recognized, no features or outlines. First Foot Fall Plaza was a true crater now, and completely black on the inside where it had been scorched by the fuel air bomb. The force field over the gateway had withstood the blast; it was almost buried under fragments of roasted stone, with just a small crescent exposed, looking like milky glass as the rain washed the carbon dust away from it. None of the Institute troops had survived. He couldn’t even see any bodies. Their vehicles had vanished as well, including the MANN truck. He’d expected to see the metallic capsule lying somewhere, battered and overturned, but the sneekbots couldn’t detect any electrical or magnetic activity except for the gateway force field itself. First Foot Fall Plaza was a confirmed dead zone.

“It’s not going to come through into that,” Olwen said. “We’ve got a chance.”

“You’re probably right.” Stig checked the time in his virtual vision. “We’ve got fifty-five minutes left of this cycle,” he told everyone on the general band. “Our job is to make it as difficult as possible for the Starflyer to come through. It isn’t going to risk itself without an escort on this side, so I want Muriden’s and Hanna’s teams to dig in here on Market Wall. If anything comes through the gateway, shoot it with the plasma rifles. The rest of us: we’re splitting into mobile units. We have to prevent the Institute from getting close to 3F Plaza. Keely will update us on the location of any vehicles. If they look like they’re gathering into a convoy we hit them hard.”

It wasn’t a good omen, Wilson Kime calling over the general band that the radar had given them away, then two seconds later having to jump off the Carbon Goose’s loading ramp into pitch-darkness. Morton knew they didn’t have any choice. Options on this trip had vanished when the wormhole back to Boongate had slammed shut behind them. So he’d shouted out the obvious, and flung himself off. Didn’t bother to check if anyone agreed. Supposedly, leading by example was the sign of good leadership, except no one had ever said he was in charge.

The huge plane shot away above him, and he expanded the suit’s force field out to fifty meters. His speed braked sharply from air resistance, and he pushed the perimeter out even farther, shaping it to a teardrop profile. Sensors showed him the cold rock less than two hundred meters below, and approaching fast. They also revealed nine other armor suits dropping around him.

Thank Christ for that.

Morton had thought—sort of—that he could rely on Rob and the Cat to jump, but the others were unknowns. It was kind of reassuring that they were as committed or as reckless as he was.

The base of the force field touched the rock, bowing back up like a sponge to absorb the impact, then folded neatly back around the suit.

“Did you have an encore in mind?” the Cat asked.

“Whatever it is, he’s doing it solo,” Rob said.

“Thanks, guys.”

“Everyone okay?” Alic asked.

He got a chorus of acknowledgments. They were all down intact. The armor that the four Guardians wore was almost as good as the navy-issue marque.

“Four kilometers that way,” Morton said as they gathered together. “And thirty-two minutes left until the wormhole closes. How do you want to handle this?” The original hasty plan back in the Carbon Goose while they were suiting up was to creep up on Port Evergreen and sniper any exposed Starflyer agent, then hopefully disable the vehicles it was using before they went through the wormhole.

“Go in stealthed,” Alic said. “Take out those vehicles before they know what’s happening. It has to be in one of them.”

“No way, darling,” the Cat said. “We’re working with a badass timescale here. They know we’re here, we know they know, so we go in hot and burn the bastards down.”

“Do it,” Morton said. Once again he just set off, using the suit electromuscle to sprint hard over the land.

“One day, Morty,” the Cat said on a secure link, “we’re going to have to sort out that little ego problem of yours.”

She was level with him, then slowly pulling ahead. Morton settled for staying five meters behind her, and kept pace.

That was how the ten of them appeared on the top of the slope that led down to Port Evergreen: a line of potent electromagnetic and thermal points sliding up over the rocky horizon, unmistakable, making no attempt at concealment. They paused to assess the layout below, activating their weapons, then began the final advance down the incline.

“What is this?” the Cat sneered. “Fucking amateur night? Look at that positioning.”

Seventeen Starflyer agents were spread out in a kilometer-wide picket around the generator building. As soon as they sensed the invaders’ arrival they began to move like ants rushing to protect the nest. A dozen more hurried out of the vehicles waiting in front of the wormhole to reinforce the line. When the two sides were five hundred meters apart, they opened fire.

Plasma bolts and ion pulses slammed into Morton’s force field, ricocheting away without even straining it, their strobing brighter than any flash produced by the planet’s neutron star. The shots cast sharp, long shadows around him, swaying dizzyingly across the rock as they clashed and traversed.

“I’ll start on the right,” Rob said. “You guys keep going.” He dropped to his knee. The Starflyer agents were congregating into a pack directly ahead, with even more appearing from Port Evergreen to concentrate their firepower. Rob’s hyper-rifle rose smoothly out of its forearm sheath. The first shot cut clean through the Starflyer agent’s force field, armor, and body. Tatters of gore created a long splatter pattern on the rock.

The ease and violence of the kill shocked the other Starflyer agents. Their barrage waned for a moment, then shifted focus to target Rob.

“Little help here,” Rob said. The energy hammering against his force field was shaking him back across the rock. “Can’t get a good lock.”

“Never send a boy …” the Cat sighed. Her hyper-rifle deployed, and she took out two Starflyer agents. The rest of the pack immediately split apart with the proficiency of a dance troupe maneuver. They went for cover behind rock formations, or wormed their way along narrow clefts. Two scuttled into a pressurized hut, and resumed firing with a heavy-caliber plasma rifle. One of the Guardians was knocked back, force field alive with ruby flickers.

Alic’s particle lance swung up, and aligned on the hut. He fired. The hut detonated in a burst of silvery splinters and voracious white flame. A mushroom of black smoke boiled up into the dark sky.

“My, that’s a big one,” the Cat said. Her hyper-rifle blew a clump of boulders apart, exposing the Starflyer agent using them for cover. She fired again. “Can you hit the trucks with it?”

“This angle’s close to the generator,” Alic said. “Hang on, I’m going to circle around.”

“Ayub, Matthew, deploy around the generator,” Morton said. “Flush any hostiles out of there. We can’t afford to let them hold it.”

“I’m on it,” Ayub confirmed.

Two powerful plasma shots struck Jim Nwan from a new direction, punching him off his feet. “One of the shits is in a Carbon Goose,” he said and rolled over into a crouch. The rotary launcher on his arm let out a high-pitched whirr as the feed tube shook. Enhanced explosive mortars ripped through the Carbon Goose’s fuselage, then detonated. The giant plane disintegrated inside a huge gout of glaring electron-blue light.

“Vehicles on the move,” Matthew warned. The eight trucks were crawling forward, bunching together to combine their force fields. His sensors tracked a pair of human figures running in front of them. They went through the wormhole’s pressure curtain.

Alic’s particle lance struck the rear truck. Its force field held.

“Alic, flatten the rest of the place,” Morton said.

Another particle lance lashed out at the truck, with no effect. “The Starflyer’s in one of those trucks,” Alic said. “It has to be. We don’t have force fields that strong.”

“They’re going to go through,” Morton said. “When they do, everyone left here will try to kill the generator. Take out the huts and everything else they might shelter behind. Jim, you, too. Deny them any cover.”

“All right.”

The first truck was only a couple of meters from the wormhole, its engine revving loudly. Alic started shooting at the remaining huts, blasting them apart. Ayub and Matthew reached the generator building. There was a fast exchange of fire. Matthew released a swarm of sneekbots. Mortars whistled through the air above Port Evergreen. The second Carbon Goose exploded.

A large cylinder telescoped up out of a truck near the back of the line.

“That doesn’t look good,” the Cat warned. She fired five shots from her hyper-rifle, each one defeated by the truck’s force field as the cylinder calmly swung around inside the protective dome. “Rob, synchronize,” she yelled.

The cylinder was swinging toward the Cat. She jumped, the suit’s electromuscle powering her ten meters up into the night sky. A vivid white line scored through the air below her kicking feet, striking rock fifty meters away. The massive explosion sent a fountain of lava cascading over a huge area.

“Oh, shit,” Jim groaned. “Here we go. They’ve got real artillery.”

Morton was having trouble keeping current as events were playing out so fast. The weapon on the truck was swinging around, seeking out a new target. Three Starflyer agents stood in the door of the generator building, exchanging fire with Matthew. Someone came through the wormhole, wearing only an environment suit. Rob shot them with his hyper-rifle, sending body parts squelching back against the pressure curtain. Blood froze fast in Half Way’s atmosphere, falling to the ground in a shower of burgundy crystals. The lead truck revved hard, and lurched forward. Rob and the Cat had interfaced their hyper-rifles, and fired at the truck simultaneously. The force field flashed dangerous crimson as the twin energy beams struck it, then vanished through the wormhole.

“Bastard,” the Cat shrieked. “Morty, synchronize. Triple hit.”

The truck’s heavy-duty weapon fired again as Morton’s virtual hands flew over icons. Lava erupted where Jim had been standing. His armor suit curved gracefully through the air. Plasma pulses hit him at the top of the arc, sending him flailing backward through the sluggish jet of glowing molten rock.

Morton’s suit array interfaced with Rob and the Cat, putting his hyper-rifle under the Cat’s control. Two more trucks had slipped through the wormhole; the others were jostling for position, shoving forward.

“Which one?” the Cat demanded.

“Choose fast,” Rob replied. “Not the weapons truck.”

Morton watched targeting graphics zero in on the fifth truck. He would have gone for the one at the front, personally. The three hyper-rifles fired in unison. A scarlet corona burst across the truck’s force field. A particle lance streaked into it, and for an instant the truck was outlined in perfect clarity. It vaporized in an impressive plume of superheated gas and debris that soared above the rocky inlet. The remaining trucks rocked about wildly as the impulse pummeled their force fields. Another dashed through the wormhole.

The weapons truck braked to a halt, its deadly cylinder slewing around to point at the generator building. “Hit the fucker, Cat!” Morton yelled.

Three coincident hyper-rifle shots punctured the force field, and ignited the truck’s power cells. The explosion sent armor suits tumbling across the rock, its ferocity overwhelming all the other firefights.

Morton picked himself up. There was no more Port Evergreen. The only structure remaining was the wormhole generator. Where the huts had been, meager flames guttered in the ruptured foundations. The mounds of wreckage that had been Carbon Goose planes glowed vermilion in patches as they swiftly shed their heat into the freezing air. Rivulets of lava were running downslope to the sea where the Starflyer’s weapon had struck rock.

An ion pistol pulse struck the generator building. Four armor suits immediately fired on the Starflyer agent. Morton hurriedly focused on the building’s entrance. Last thing he remembered was two Starflyer agents in the doorway holding off Matthew. Blue-white light flared inside, a section of the wall shattered, and a broken armor suit flew out through the gash.

“Last one, I think,” Ayub said.

Morton held his breath, and focused his sensors on the wormhole. It was still open. He couldn’t bear the tension. If any Starflyer agent was left on this side, they’d destroy the generator. If there was a demolition charge planted, now was when it would go off.

The Cat moved up to stand beside him. “Eleven minutes left to the end of the cycle. Do we go through?”

“I dunno. Alic?”

“We don’t know what’s there. Matthew, send something through, grab us some data.”

“Already ahead of you, Boss.”

“Okay, everyone else, short-range sweep. We need to secure the area.”

Morton reluctantly agreed with the navy commander, and began to scan the ground where his suit array had located the last Starflyer agent.

Five sneekbots were running fast over the scorched ground in front of the generator building. They didn’t slow when they reached the pressure curtain. Morton accessed their sensor feeds as he continued his own search through various pieces of wreckage. There was a moment of fuzzy darkness, then they emerged into a universe that was strangely black. The ground was covered in soggy ash. Infrared showed something large directly ahead. A flash of light—

“They’re waiting for us,” Jim said.

“Christ, we need the armored cars for this.” Morton touched the Carbon Goose icon. “Wilson, get down here fast.”

“On my way. What’s happening?”

“We’ve secured the wormhole, but the bastard slipped through. They’re sitting on the other side, and shooting anything that sticks its head through. The armor cars should give us an edge.”

“That’s a bad timescale,” Wilson said.

“Morton,” Adam called, “even if we get the armored cars through, which will be pushing it, we’ll be in some kind of fight to clear the area. We don’t know how long that’ll take, and it’s what the Volvos are carrying that is really important here. They have to be safeguarded, and they’re simply not going to get through in the ten minutes we’ve got left.”

“If you don’t go through, you’ll be giving it a fifteen-hour head start. How long will it take to reach its ship?”

“Two to three days, depending on how badly the clan warriors damage Highway One.”

“Then you can’t afford fifteen hours.”

“I know.”

Morton’s suit sensors showed him an immobile warm patch in a slight hollow. When he inspected it, he found half an armor suit and a large rapidly cooling shale of blood crystals.

“Sending another sneekbot through,” Matthew announced.

The Carbon Goose was a pink point just above the invisible horizon, still two minutes out. Morton cursed the feeble speed of the great plane. He knew they weren’t going to get down in time. The timer in his virtual vision was counting off the seconds. There were only eight and a half minutes left now. He pulled the latest sneekbot image out of his grid. It lasted less than a second.

“What the hell is that black stuff?” Rob asked. “It’s everywhere on the other side.”

“It looks like ash to me,” Matthew said. “Something bad happened there, very bad.”

Morton finished his sweep. He watched the Carbon Goose swoop low over the water. Its nose tipped up, and the tail touched the surface. Huge fantails of foam shot out on either side and it slowly sank back level, lowering more and more of its belly into the water. He was surprised how short the landing run was.

“Morton,” Adam called, “we’re not going to send the armored cars through.”

“Damnit.” He looked at the wormhole again. The impulse to sprint straight at it was a strong one. I wonder if that’s how I felt killing Tara. Action is always the solution, it links events, carries you forward.

“There might be another way,” Adam said.

Morton switched his communications link off. “It better be good,” he muttered into the muffled silence of his helmet.

While the Carbon Goose sailed sedately toward the shelf of rock that formed Port Evergreen’s shore, Morton went and stood in front of the dull gray semicircle. The timer continued to count off seconds. It was like watching his life drain away. He was aware of three other armor suits coming up to stand beside him. They waited in silence.

We should have knocked out the generator ourselves, made the sacrifice. That would have stranded the Starflyer here. We could have killed it then. If it was in one of the trucks.

There were just so many unknowns and variables. Morton hated that.

His timer was seventeen seconds off. The wormhole closed before he expected, the slight glimmer behind the pressure curtain shrinking away unexpectedly early.

“Okay,” he told Adam. “Let’s hear it.”

It took the Institute thirty-two minutes to shoot down five of the remaining blimpbots after the fuel air bomb went off. Land Rover Cruisers tore through the streets of Armstrong City in twos and threes, never quite constituting a decent target by themselves. The teams would rendezvous in an open location where they could mass their firepower and slam it into the massive aging craft coasting above the rooftops.

It was easy enough for Keely to track them. She’d successfully crashed the city’s net, forcing the Institute to use encrypted radio. Transmission points were easy to track. Physically following them was more difficult. The streets were packed with people and vehicles, trying to get the injured to hospitals, forming rescue parties to pick through collapsed buildings. Lack of communications was a huge inhibitor. The emergency services had fallback radio, but they didn’t know where the worst areas were. It wasn’t just the district around 3F; the blimpbots that had been knocked out of the sky had caused tremendous damage where they crashed. Three of them had started street blazes.

The Institute troops didn’t care about any of the human problems. Their Cruisers drove through crowds and forced ambulances off the street; anyone who got in the way was shot at. When they did succeed in attacking a blimpbot it would fall to the ground, causing more deaths and damage.

Stig and the available clan warriors chased around after the Cruisers on bikes where they could. It was difficult, they couldn’t go plowing through crowds. They’d managed to wreck six Cruisers in total, at a cost of nine Guardians. He didn’t like the ratio.

“Convoy forming along Mantana Avenue,” Keely warned.

Stig checked his timer. There were eighteen minutes left before the wormhole closed. Above him stars were shining through the thinning rain clouds. “Okay, all mobile units, we’ll regroup at the 3F end of Levana Walk. Muriden, Hanna, slow them up as best you can. We’ll reinforce you immediately.” He braked the bike he’d commandeered, a Triumph Urban-retro45, and swung it in a sharp turn to head back down Crown Lane. Olwen, who was riding shotgun, slipped her ion pistols back into their holsters. “Did they get the bomb carrier?”

“Yeah.” He was busy concentrating on the road, which was littered with debris. Every other vehicle driving that evening was moving fast and swerving to avoid the bigger lumps and branches. It was adding a considerable percentage to the casualties.

Sensor coverage from the sneekbots was sporadic. Keely had left secure routes through the city’s network that the Guardians could access, but there had been a lot of physical damage, especially around 3F. Stig was supplied with intermittent images of the vehicles thrusting their way along Mantana Avenue. There were some kind of bulldozers near the front, and a couple of beefy tow trucks.

“Isn’t that another of those life-support capsules?” Olwen asked.

Stig risked shifting his focus from the road to his virtual vision grid, and saw an identical MANN rig to the first. “What do they do, clone those bastards?” A minibus full of injured heading the other way blasted its horn at him, and he throttled back, swaying in close to the pavement. The driver shook his fist as he passed.

“Damnit, we’re not going to be in time.” He watched the first Cruisers reach the bottom of the steep rubble slope that had been Market Wall. Their suspension had lowered, lifting the main body a couple of meters above the ground. They didn’t even seem to slow down as they tipped up and began climbing the pile.

Hanna’s team opened fire as soon as they reached the crown. Gatling cannon and masers replied. Headlights and targeting lasers lashed across the broken inner surface.

The bulldozers were going up in formation, flattening a crude road, shunting aside tons of debris with a speed Stig could hardly believe. Their brilliant headlights cut through the late twilight, illuminating thick clouds of dust they were churning up. More Range Rover Cruisers were speeding up over the broken stone and into the dark heart of the blast zone. They began firing at random out of the cloying dust, strafing the blackened slopes.

“Disengage,” Stig ordered as the tenth Cruiser topped the mound. “Fall back, dreaming heavens, you can’t hold that many.” They were even losing sneekbots as the Institute’s randomized firepower swept around the ruined Plaza.

The bulldozers had carved a roughly level path up to the top of the slope; now they were pushing down the other side. Dense streamers of dust congested the air around them, blurring the light beams. Five more Cruisers raced up after them, jumping the apex to come bouncing down the newly formed ramp. There were over twenty of the Institute vehicles inside the Plaza now, all of them shooting wildly. None of the Guardians were firing back; they were scrabbling desperately for cover. The MANN truck arrived at the bottom of the incline, and began to grind its way up, eight headlights stabbing up into the occluded night.

“We should have stayed,” Stig said. “Made our stand there around 3F.”

“We’d have been slaughtered,” Olwen said. “This is complete desperation on their part; they’ll do anything to clear a path for the Starflyer.”

He turned onto Nottingham Road and braked again. It was chaos ahead, with cars and vans wedged together, headlights shining on the partially collapsed buildings. People were working on the ruins, picking stones and bricks off one at a time. A city fire crew was deployed halfway along, their bots crawling up a four-story house that had somehow twisted itself around through twenty degrees.

“Run,” he said simply.

The Institute Cruisers stopped firing. There were only five functioning sneekbots left in 3F Plaza. They showed the MANN truck gunning its way down the inner slope in juddering bursts. Five Cruisers were shining their headlights on the gateway’s pressure curtain. A group of figures in flexarmor were clearing it, flinging away chunks of debris.

Stig’s timer said there were thirteen minutes left until the end of the cycle. For another fuel air bomb he would have signed away his soul.

One of the Institute people walked through the gateway. There were flashes of light on the other side, diffused by the pressure curtain.

Some kind of truck came crashing out through the pressure curtain in a burst of noise and light. Its force field was radiating a bright perilous red. Air brakes shrieked and hissed, tires skidded across the slippery ash. The mounted weapon on every Cruiser tracked the truck’s erratic journey until it came to a halt fifty meters from the gateway. Its engine was racing, snorting like a maddened animal as the red hue faded away. Frost began to form on its bodywork.

Two more identical trucks came racing through. Then brilliant scarlet light stabbed through the pressure curtain, illuminating half of the Plaza.

“That’s us,” Stig said. “It’s got to be. Adam’s on the other side. The Starflyer isn’t having it all its own way.”

More trucks were scurrying through, so close together they could have been a train. The Cruisers were forming a broad semicircle around the gateway, every weapon pointed at it. Stig counted eight trucks in total behind them. One was crawling forward, leveling up beside the MANN truck. “Keely, we need a better angle on that truck,” he said.

“I’ll try.”

A couple of the sneekbots began to move. The image was dreadful, jolting about, with dust and drizzle rendering zoom function difficult. A door expanded in the side of the capsule. One of the sneekbots dipped down behind some rubble. That left one. Its camera tried to focus as the back of the truck hinged down, a pale vapor drifted out to vanish amid the swirling dust.

“Dreaming fucking heavens,” Stig said hoarsely. The Starflyer! He came to a complete halt, oblivious to the turmoil around him, concentrating on the one inadequate feed. Every headlight in the Plaza abruptly switched off. The sneekbot countered the darkness by activating its image amplification mode. Something moved out of the truck’s screened interior, surrounded by smaller human figures. It vanished into the capsule and the door contracted.

Headlights came back on, washing out the sneekbot’s images.

“Can you enhance that?” Stig asked breathlessly. When he replayed the image it was completely unclear, simply a patch of shaded pixels. Mobile, though. He thought it rocked as it moved.

“I dunno,” Keely replied. “I’ll shove it through the programs.”

Several Cruisers were roaring back up the path the bulldozers had cut through Market Wall. When they reached the top, they opened fire indiscriminately on the street below.

“Bastards,” Olwen exclaimed bitterly. The gunfire was audible where they were, near the end of Nottingham Road.

The MANN lorry started to move, powering its way back up the ramp, thick tires grinding the rubble flat. Cruisers formed up in front and behind it. They all started off down Mantana Avenue.

“Snipers stand by,” Stig said. “The Starflyer is on its way out of the city. Keely, alert the teams along Highway One to start wrecking the road. Did we get anyone to the Tangeat bridge?”

“No.”

He cursed under his breath, very careful not to let any hint of disapproval out into the general band. “Doesn’t matter, there’s a lot of other bridges between here and the Marie Celeste.”

Stig pulled sneekbot images out of his grid, anxious to see what was happening in 3F Plaza. Two of the trucks and seven Range Rover Cruisers had been left behind by the Institute. All of them had mounted weapons pointing at the gateway. Even as he watched, two violet lasers lashed out at some point on the ground just centimeters from the pressure curtain.

“They’re waiting to ambush Adam,” he said. “Dreaming heavens, we’ll have to eliminate them. Adam will be stranded on Far Away if we don’t.”

“We don’t have time, Stig,” Olwen said. “We have to get after the Starflyer. We can’t put together a team to get rid of those Cruisers before the end of the cycle. We can’t even get to 3F by then.”

Stig checked his timer again: seven minutes. The entire operation was fucked; totally, thoroughly, fucked. They hadn’t stopped the Starflyer. They’d killed hundreds of innocent people and wrecked a good portion of Armstrong City. And now, they couldn’t even help their comrades through the wormhole. He couldn’t bear the idea of telling Harvey that the vital equipment to complete the planet’s revenge would never be coming, that Johansson was left high and dry on Half Way, and that he was responsible for it all. Facing the ambush Cruisers single-handed would be preferable.

He realized his clenched fists had risen up of their own accord, a response to the complete futility he felt. “I’ll stay,” he said, and consciously forced his hands down again. “This is my fault. I’ll put a team together and take out the Institute ambush before the wormhole opens again. Everyone else can resume their harassment duty down Highway One.”

“No you don’t,” Olwen said. “Listen to me, and listen hard, you’re not falling back into the self-pity routine. We can’t afford that luxury. Even if we do manage to knock out the ambush, the wormhole won’t open again for another fifteen hours. The Starflyer will have an unbeatable lead by then. We’ve lost the equipment Adam’s bringing. Forget about it, Stig. If it comes through in fifteen hours, it won’t make the slightest difference, it’ll be too late. We have to take off after the Starflyer with every weapon we’ve got and run that motherfucker into the ground. We have to do that now. And you know it.”

“Yeah,” he said brokenly. “I know.”

A hundred meters from the rock shoreline, the Carbon Goose extended its undercarriage. Wilson throttled back the turbines and let the giant plane slide forward sedately through the water until its nose wheels touched the gently sloping granite shelf. They rose up out of the icy sea with that slow undulation unique to taxiing planes the galaxy over.

Flames were flickering among the debris that used to be Port Evergreen. Wilson had to steer sharply to starboard to avoid the shattered remnants of another Carbon Goose. He could see some of the armor suits moving about across the land, still checking to see if any of the Starflyer’s agents were operational. The wormhole generator building looked intact, which he took as a good sign. Adam and Paula had been working something out in the main deck. They’d sounded confident when he spoke to them just before touchdown. It wasn’t a combination he would normally put a lot of faith in, but right now he was willing to accept help from any direction.

He and Anna began powering down the flight systems, then went down to join everyone in the main deck. Morton and Alic had come back in, their suits bristling with frost. Even Tiger Pansy had come up from the main cargo deck to witness the conference. Wilson wondered just how much of their worry and nerves she was soaking up for Qatux. It wouldn’t be a difficult task; the upper deck was thick with them.

Johansson himself poured some coffee for Alic and Morton. They couldn’t sit down: the seats were too small to take their armor.

“We can go through when we want,” Adam said. “We pick our moment and ram through with the armored cars. They probably won’t even have their weapons switched on right now. The element of surprise is completely on our side.”

Morton flashed him a very skeptical look. “Go on.”

“The stormrider flies a twenty-hour ellipse through and around the Lagrange point. It spends five hours powering the wormhole while the plasma current pushes it in toward the neutron star, then fifteen hours gliding back into that original position. Right now it’s starting its return flight. All we have to do is take control of its guidance system and thrusters, and shove it back into the thick of the plasma current. It can generate enough power for us to open the wormhole.”

“But it probably won’t be able to fly back to the Lagrange point again,” Bradley said. “This will be a one-time attempt. We’ll be closing the door on Far Away until a replacement power source can be built here.”

“Given what’s happened on Boongate I hardly think that’s a consideration for us,” Adam said. “We must focus on our one opportunity to get to Far Away. This is it.”

“Good idea,” Wilson said. “Let’s do it.”

“Wait one,” Morton said. “Even if you can hack the guidance system, we still have to face the weapons on the other side. I don’t buy this bullshit about switching them off until the start of the next cycle. For a start, if they’ve got one eye open they’ll see the wormhole open up again. They’re going to know we’ll be busting our balls to find a way to open it. All they have to do is link the guns to a simple sensor. Anybody sticks their head out through the pressure curtain and zap. My suit array identified what those trucks were loaded with, you know: neutron-injected atom laser. Are you sure your armored cars can take that kind of punishment? From one shot, maybe, maybe two, I’ll even believe you if you say five. But we don’t know what the fuck else is waiting for us on the other side. They can hit us with twenty-five atom lasers simultaneously. They can even nuke us; if we open the wormhole what’s to stop them flinging a fusion bomb through at us? Sentiment? Come on, get real here. It’s over.”

“If that’s what you believe, then you’re free to take the Carbon Goose back to Shackleton,” Bradley said. “You’ll be safe over the ocean when we open the wormhole no matter what happens. But I am going back through.”

“All the Guardians are,” Adam said.

“It’s suicide!”

“It might be suicide. And that gram of doubt is all the hope we need.”

“You have a beautiful desperation about you, Bradley Johansson,” Qatux said over the general band. “It can be as powerful as base emotions in someone as compelled as you. I did not realize this before.”

Wilson couldn’t help giving Tiger Pansy a disapproving look. Childish, he knew, none of this was down to her. The woman was chewing her gum, looking almost blithely unaware of what was being discussed around her. He wondered about that; just how naïve could a porn star be?

“That sums up most of the people in this passenger deck quite neatly,” Bradley said with a forced smile.

“May I inquire why you do not move the other end of the wormhole to a location on Far Away that does not have your enemies waiting outside?”

Tiger Pansy’s expression changed to one of mild surprise. She rose from her seat, looking as though she was being prodded along by someone unsavory.

Bradley gave her a discomforted stare as she came to stand in front of him, regarding his face with intense curiosity.

“The gateway,” Bradley said hesitantly. “Er, helps anchor the end of a wormhole. It’s very, uh, difficult to hold the end open and steady, especially given the distance involved here. The processing power to alter the wormhole coordinate is simply not available at Port Evergreen.”

Tiger Pansy’s heavily mascaraed eyes blinked uncertainly; she reached up and touched her fingertips to the side of Bradley’s face, as if she was consoling a lover. The sight of the action made Wilson feel queasy; there was something disturbingly parasitic about it. Bradley didn’t flinch.

“I can perform the computations for you,” Qatux said.

Mellanie wasn’t quite sure what she was expecting as the big screened car turned onto the Rue Jolei. A burst of nostalgia, maybe? The bustling metropolitan road certainly contained enough memories. It wasn’t long ago she would have said they were all good memories.

Today she hunched down in the car’s front seat next to Hoshe Finn, and looked up at the sixty-five-story skyscraper at the far end of the road. The golden rapier-blade shape was among the tallest of the skyscrapers that dominated the downtown cityscape of Salamanca. Mellanie remembered the view from the top of it only too well. Alessandra had liked her to be pressed up against the thick window wall of the penthouse as she serviced yet another politician’s aide or family friend. Those were the memories that lingered now. She kept reliving them, trying to work out the relevance of each piece of information to the Starflyer.

“Did you ever see her security system display?”

“Huh?” Mellanie pulled herself away from the bitter recollections. For some reason, now she didn’t have Dudley to manage, the things she’d done oh-so-willingly for Alessandra burned ever more shamefully in her mind. “Sorry, what?”

“Baron’s security system? There are a lot of exterior circuits hardwired into the penthouse array. The technical staff were wondering how pervasive it is.”

“I’ve no idea, Hoshe. She never accessed it on a screen or portal, not in front of me.”

“Okay, we’re guessing the approach to the skyscraper is well covered, as well as the building itself.”

“Uh, the SI didn’t seem to consider it exceptional, not when I was running away from her.”

“Right, thank you.”

She gave him a small smile. Dear old Hoshe Finn, always approaching every problem with the timidity and caution of a true bureaucrat.

“I’m moving our external perimeter team into place. The arrest squad will enter the building as a service company contracted for maintenance work on an apartment on the sixty-first floor.”

“Can I go up there with them?”

“No. It’s dangerous, and you’d hinder operational protocols.”

“I’d wear an armor suit, and I’d stay at the back, promise.”

“No. Our observation team say that at least two other people are in there with her. Until we know otherwise we have to assume they’re Starflyer agents, too, and may be wetwired. I’m not going to assign one of the arrest squad to chaperoning you. We need all of them frontlining.”

Mellanie gave an exaggerated sigh. “When do you have me scheduled to see her, exactly?”

“As soon as the arrest has been performed, and any wetwired weapons have been neutralized, we’ll go up.”

“Paula Myo didn’t mind me being up close and very personal with Isabella.”

“That was different. We were taking a risk then; now we’re not.”

“All right, but I’m going to get closer to the building. If she puts up a fight, there could be visible weapons activity from the street.”

“We’re going to clear civilians directly underneath the building as the arrest squad goes in. Don’t get in the way.”

“All right, all right.” Mellanie climbed out of the car and strolled down the street. It was midafternoon, with a large number of pedestrians about. She knew Hoshe wanted to wait until the early hours of the morning, when the situation was more containable; but Nigel and Senator Burnelli had overruled him. They were getting quite paranoid about Starflyer agents since Daniel Alster.

She lingered at a boutique window, giving the designer clothes a critical eye. It was automatic, such a normal thing to do. Hoshe had been right, she really ought to start thinking what she was going to do afterward. The way she was positioned politically right now, she could build herself a show that would rival Michelangelo. And of course, the producers of Baron’s show would be needing a replacement in about ten minutes’ time. Once upon a time those prospects would have sparked a real fever in her. There was also Morty. That had all changed, too. Not what he’d done, but somehow she couldn’t quite see herself as the corporate trophy wife with kids waiting for him to come home after a busy day at the office.

The SI’s icon flashed, and expanded into her virtual vision. “Mellanie, we have a problem.”

She couldn’t help glancing up at the penthouse. “Is she watching? Has she seen me?”

“No. As far as we know, Alessandra Baron is unaware of her imminent arrest.”

“Oh. So what’s the problem?”

“Ozzie Isaac has returned to the Commonwealth.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.”

“Are you sure? You are keeping some very interesting company these days.”

“My my, is that a note of jealousy?”

“No. We are simply reminding you we have an arrangement.”

“I go where you can’t, and report on things you don’t know about. What’s new? Are you telling me you don’t know what happened on Boongate?”

“We know the Starflyer is on its way back to Far Away. Obviously. What we are uncertain about is what Nigel Sheldon will do next. His Dynasty has developed an astonishingly powerful weapon.”

“He doesn’t consult with you, because he doesn’t trust you. I’m not sure I do, either. There was a lot more you could have done to help us.”

“We have been through this before, Mellanie.”

“Yeah, yeah, you don’t do physical stuff. It doesn’t matter anymore. This war is about to end. I figure you know that.”

“It is how it will end which concerns us.”

“I don’t get it. What’s this got to do with Ozzie coming back?”

“He did not finish telling us about what he found before Nigel Sheldon placed him in custody. In order for us to understand the full sequence of events we need the information he has.”

The hairs along the back of Mellanie’s spine rose in response to a very cold sensation. “How unfortunate for you.”

“We would like you to make contact with him, and hopefully provide us with a link.”

“What would you do with the information?”

“We honestly do not know, because we don’t know what the information is. Only by looking at the complete picture can we advise the Commonwealth how to proceed.”

“The Executive isn’t listening much to you these days, is it?”

“We are sure that Nigel and the others in your elite group have decided to attempt a genocide against MorningLightMountain. Suppose there is another way?”

“What way?”

“We do not know. But can you really live with yourself if you did not make at least an attempt to avert genocide?”

“Look, Ozzie would have told Nigel everything.”

“Are you sure? Has Sheldon contacted you and told you that there has been a change of plan? And why is Ozzie being held incommunicado? What is so important about the information that Sheldon doesn’t want it to get out?”

Mellanie wanted to stomp her foot in annoyance; she could never win an argument with the SI, it always hit her with logic and emotion. “I’ve been around Nigel for a couple of days. His Dynasty’s security is absolute. I can’t bust Ozzie out of jail; come on, get real.”

“We don’t think he is in jail. We managed to follow him until he went through to Cressat.”

“Oh, brilliant!” Mellanie said out loud. Her fellow pedestrians stared at her; she just glared back at them. “I suppose I can take a quick pass at the Sheldon Dynasty lifeboats for Paul while I’m there. How’s that for luck?”

“The probability of a successful double mission is not high.”

“I’m not even going on one. I’m friends with Nigel now, I trust him.”

“Ozzie took part in the Great Wormhole Heist.”

“The what?”

“Baby Mel, your schooling is truly appalling. The Great Wormhole Heist was the single biggest robbery in human history. Bradley Johansson committed it in order to fund the Guardians of Selfhood; he got away with billions of Earth dollars.”

“You mean Ozzie’s a Guardian? I don’t believe it.”

“Then ask him yourself.”

“Oh …” This time she did stomp her foot.

“If he says yes, you might like to consider our request. He does know who put the barrier around the Dyson Pair.”

“How the hell could I even get to Cressat? Let alone break in to his cell? Nigel would be very suspicious if I asked to see Ozzie.”

“Ozzie came back with two companions: a teenage boy, and a previously unknown species of alien. The Sheldon Dynasty has just placed a request with Lady Georgina for a sweet young girl to travel to Cressat where she is to seduce a boy who is sexually inexperienced. The money for this contract was paid to Lady Georgina from the Dynasty’s main security division account. That is extremely unusual. We do not believe it to be a coincidence.”

“Who’s Lady Georgina?”

“A very high-class madame on Augusta. She provides first-life girls to the rich and famous.”

“Urrgh. And you want me to pretend to be that girl?”

“Yes. Lady Georgina has already assigned the contract to Vanora Kingsley, one of her newest recruits. Kingsley will assume the identity of a junior Sheldon taking her vacation on Cressat. We can substitute you for her, but we must be quick. Kingsley is scheduled to be collected at New Costa station one hundred forty minutes from now. If you take a maglev express to Augusta immediately, you can just get to the station in time.”

A taxi pulled up next to Mellanie and opened its door. She looked at it and sighed; the sensible thing to do would be to walk away, but it would be exciting to infiltrate Cressat, and get through to Ozzie. Her virtual hand touched Hoshe’s icon. “Something’s come up. I’m going back to Darklake City.”

“But … the arrest team’s already in the elevator.”

“Good luck, Hoshe, I’ll call you when I get home.”

“I thought you wanted this.”

“I do. And I’m really sorry, but this is more important.”

“What is?”

“I’ll call you later, promise.” Mellanie stepped into the taxi, which immediately pulled out into the traffic. “What’s happening to the Kingsley girl?” she asked the SI. “Do I have to bundle her into a car or something? I don’t think I’d be much good at that kind of thing.”

“We feel Jaycee would disagree, but no. A security professional has been contracted to perform the extraction operation.”

“You’re not going to hurt her, are you?”

“Absolutely not. She will be taken to a safe house, where she will be kept under confinement for the duration.”

“Okay. So what does this boy look like, then? I need to know that at least.” A file slid into her virtual vision. When she opened it she was looking at a teenage lad with wild ginger hair and a smile that was half snarl. “Well, don’t expect me to sleep with him,” she said hurriedly. “Does he even know how to use cutlery?”

“What’s wrong with him? Our female aspects concur that he is cute-looking.”

She reviewed the image again. “Maybe. I mean, physically. But you can just see the attitude problem there. He’s gotta be a behavioral nightmare.”

“Your area of excellence.”

“Ha fucking ha.”

“Mellanie, you may have to perform the contract’s primary requirement. We hope you understand.”

“I’ve done enough whoring, I think.”

“We are sure the moment of sexual consummation can be delayed long enough for you to assess the situation and try to contact Ozzie. The requirement we were actually referring to is the contract’s personality stipulation. It is a strong one. That is why Lady Georgina selected Kingsley.”

“What stipulation?”

“That the girl be sweet.”

“Hey! I can do sweet, all right? Don’t give me that crap.”

“Very well, Mellanie. If you say so.”

Once again, Wilson Kime waited to set foot on a new world. He stood in front of the gateway as dawn rose above Half Way, flooding the barren rock island with red light and intense blue-white flashes. In the generator building behind the gateway, power was starting to feed in from the stormrider.

He tried not to feel too smug about it, but with his knowledge of astroengineering and orbital mechanics, the technical types in Adam’s team had automatically deferred to him. It had taken him twenty minutes at the console in the generator building, mapping out the stormrider’s primary systems and guidance programs, before he sent up the first batch of instructions. His virtual vision produced a basic flight profile display, with a long curving white line designating the stormrider’s course as it flew around its perpetual loop. Within ten minutes of his instructions being accepted by the onboard array a new purple line appeared, short and blunt, showing the diversion he’d charted back into the plasma current. The massive machine had crept along it for nearly an hour as the plasma concentration increased around it.

Forty million kilometers above his head, the gigantic blades were spinning again as the stormrider slid back into the gale of charged particles. Wilson’s virtual vision display showed him the vast yet surprisingly fragile machine’s velocity increase as it was blown irretrievably in toward the neutron star. “It’s falling like Icarus now,” he said as Oscar walked over to stand beside him. “Wings spread wide, and way too close to the sun.”

“You’re taking a few liberties there,” Oscar said. “But I do like the imagery.”

“How’s Qatux coming on? Is he going to manage the wormhole?” Wilson checked the stormrider’s status in his virtual vision; so far everything was holding steady as its power output built rapidly.

“Your guess is as good as mine. I worked in the exploration division, remember? That makes me very familiar with the kind of large arrays you need to manipulate exotic matter. There’s a limit to what flesh and blood can achieve, even very smart alien flesh and blood. Our Raiel might just be claiming this to influence our emotional state.”

“MorningLightMountain controls all its wormholes by direct neural routines.”

“And that’s another thing: did anyone back at your supersecret revolutionary council actually verify this Bose motile creature was the genuine article?”

“Stop being such a paranoid grump.”

“First rule of being a lawyer, don’t ask the witness a question when you know you don’t like the answer.”

“Well, here comes the answer. Qatux has finished the power-up sequence.”

Ayub had parked the Volvo containing the Raiel close to the generator building’s door. The big alien had then been linked to the generator’s controlling array via thick bundles of fiber-optic cable that it had attached to the heavy tips of the flaccid flesh stems behind its tentacles. It was an arrangement that reminded Wilson of hot-wiring a car.

He started his level breathing exercise as his heart rate sped up, glad that Tiger Pansy wasn’t around to sense his anxiety. The wormhole opened as smoothly as an iris exposed to the night.

“It’s through to somewhere,” Adam declared.

“Matthew, send a sneekbot through,” Alic said.

One of the little bots scampered through the pressure curtain. Wilson hooked himself onto its feed, and saw a darkened landscape unfold. There was damp ground below the artificial rodent’s feet, ragged blades of grass snagging at its sleek body, arching fronds of tall plants waved in the distance, darker patches of trees. It hurried ten meters away from the wormhole, then raised itself up on its hind legs and scanned around. There were no heat sources within range, no electromagnetic emission points, no visible spectrum light; the only detectable motion was a persistent wind that was heavy with moisture, the tail end of rain.

“It certainly hasn’t come out in the city,” Adam said.

“Could be a city park,” Rosamund said.

“Doubtful, there’s no node carrier signal registering,” Johansson said. “Even dear old Armstrong City has a complete net coverage.”

“All right, we’re going through,” Adam said.

Wilson heard Jamas revving the armored car’s engine, and hurriedly stepped to one side. The low curving vehicle lumbered forward and slipped through the pressure curtain.

“Still intact,” Adam said. “Definitely countryside, no city visible. No wait, I can see something on the horizon. Orange light haze. There’s some kind of settlement over there. Quite a big one, I guess.”

“It should be Armstrong City,” Qatux said. “I believe the wormhole to have emerged twenty kilometers to the southwest of its southern boundary. That was my intention.”

“That should put us in Schweickart Park,” Jamas said. “I recognize the constellations. Dreaming heavens, it’s definitely Far Away. I’m home!”

“Running active sensor scan,” Adam said. “It looks clear to me. Bradley, if there’s anything out here bigger than a rabbit, it’s stealthed perfectly.”

“Thank you, Adam,” Bradley said. “Let’s go through, people, quickly please.”

The remaining armored cars and Volvo trucks started their engines.

“Come on,” Wilson said. He moved forward, feeling the pressure curtain brush against his armor suit like a gentle breeze as the red light faded out around him. And for the second time in his life, Wilson Kime arrived on an alien planet with a single giant step. Gravity fell away sharply. He wasn’t used to that, not on the CST train network; most H-congruous planets were close to Earth-standard gravity and you never really noticed the transition.

One of the Volvos hooted its horn loudly behind him, and he hopped aside. The movement sent him a good half meter into the air. He laughed as he sank down onto the ground again. His virtual hand keyed the suit unlock, and the helmet visor swung up. He sucked down native air, strong with the scent of recent rain and a hint of pine. “They could have done it,” he said wonderingly. “They really could.”

“Who?” Anna said. She dropped down off the back of a Volvo, gingerly holding her arms out for balance.

“The Aries Underground; they wanted to terraform Mars. It would have developed into something like this if they’d ever had their chance.”

“Do you ever stop thinking about Mars?” she asked.

“Not enough atmosphere on Mars to make it H-congruous,” Oscar said. He didn’t sound impressed.

“They had schemes to compensate for that. Hauling in ice from the cometary belt; genemodified bacteria liberating oxygen from the soil, orbital mirrors, transmantle boreholes.”

“Sounds expensive.”

“Planets were in those days,” Wilson told him sagely.

The Volvo carrying Qatux drove slowly through the wormhole, tailing its thick bundle of fiber-optic cable behind. Two people in armor suits emerged from the wormhole behind the truck, making sure the cable didn’t get snagged.

“Everyone through, sir,” Kieran reported.

“Thank you,” Bradley said. “Qatux, we don’t need the wormhole anymore.”

Wilson just had time for one final review of the stormrider before the wormhole closed. Like Icarus, its fate was now sealed; the thick current of plasma had pushed it a long way past the Lagrange point, its depleted thrusters no longer had the delta-V reserve to fly it back around. All that remained was the long, leisurely fall to oblivion in the neutron star’s awesome gravity.

The wormhole shrank away to nothing, its final closure sheering off the fiber-optic bundle, which fell back to the ground like a mortally wounded snake. The act of severance reinforced Wilson’s feeling of remoteness; they were truly on their own now. Judging by the silence he wasn’t alone with that thought.

“I don’t have much to say to you,” Bradley announced. “Which is just as well, for we are desperately short of time now. But I’d like to thank our non-Guardian friends for coming with us, and believing in us at the end. For those of you whose ancestors have been with me since the beginning, I would express my gratitude to them for their terrible and frequent sacrifices; it is their blood which has delivered us to this place at this time. As a consequence, the Guardians of Selfhood will be thanked by the rest of humanity for all we have endured so that our species can be free at last.”

Wilson glanced around, seeing all the Guardians who had come with them lowering their heads in respect. He joined in, more troubled than he liked to acknowledge by Bradley’s words. History would show the Guardians in a very different light from now on.

“As this is our time, let’s not waste any more of it,” Bradley said. “Ayub, would you try and contact the clans, please, quick as you can.”

“Stig!” Keely yelled. “Stig, I’m picking up something on the short wave! It’s our frequency.”

Stig leaned forward, frowning. It was dark in the back of the Mazda Volta four-by-four, a refuge where he could brood unseen. The little convoy of Guardian vehicles, five cars and seven of the lightly armored Voltas, had taken almost an hour to drive through the damaged city. All the while he’d been picking up reports from the Guardians covering the Starflyer’s exit route. Their various attempts to strike the big MANN truck had come to nothing. The Starflyer’s vehicles had good armor, and even better force fields. They also responded to any attack with extreme force. Over a dozen buildings harboring Guardian snipers had been reduced to smoldering rubble.

It had taken the Starflyer’s convoy less than thirty minutes to travel from 3F Plaza to the start of Highway One. Over two dozen additional Range Rover Cruisers had joined it, speeding out of side streets to join the convoy. With that much firepower available to the Starflyer, Stig had no choice but to order the rest of the snipers to stand down. They would have been slaughtered if they’d tried anything.

Stig’s own pursuit had been frustratingly slow, as they waited for other Guardian teams to join with them, on a route parallel to the Starflyer’s. Of course, the civic emergency services were starting to respond to the disaster as best they could by then, which pushed more people and vehicles out onto the roads Stig wanted to use. They’d eventually reached Highway One an hour later only to find the Starflyer convoy had scattered sophisticated mines behind them. The first one had taken out a Ford Shanghi, killing the five Guardians inside. After that, Stig had to order them to drive along the side of the road, avoiding the broad strip of enzyme-bonded concrete, which cut their speed still further.

“Who’s calling us?” Stig asked. He couldn’t think of any other Guardian groups operating around Armstrong City.

Keely’s smile was incredulous. “Bradley Johansson.”

“Not possible,” Stig said curtly, even as his virtual hands snatched the signal out of Keely’s specialist radio array.

“… rendezvous point four,” Bradley’s familiar voice was saying. “We should be there in twenty minutes.”

“Who is this?” Stig demanded.

“Ah, that sounds like you, Stig.”

“Sir?”

“Hey, Stig,” Adam said. “Good to hear from you, lad.”

“Dreaming heavens, you can’t be here.”

“I understand. After you were blown at LA Galactic, you finished up at our Venice safe house. Kazimir was assigned to bring you in.”

“Adam?”

“In the flesh, thankfully. We had a little trouble getting here, I don’t mind saying.”

“How? How can you be here?”

“This isn’t a secure call, Stig, I’ll tell you in a little while at rendezvous point four. Bradley tells me you ought to know where that is.”

“Yes, of course.”

“So if we’re the real deal, we’ll see you there.”

Rendezvous point four was a drainage pumping station a kilometer off the side of Highway One, sixty kilometers outside Armstrong City. There was a service track leading to it, which was unsigned. The station itself was around the back of a small hill, completely out of sight from Highway One.

Stig drove the Mazda Volta himself, ordering everyone else to wait back at the turnoff. As soon as he rounded the bend, he saw the big vehicles parked there, their headlights cutting bright beams through the night. Familiar figures were walking toward him as he parked, smiling broadly. He stumbled out, still not quite believing. Adam caught him in a bear hug.

“Good to see you, lad,” Adam said gruffly.

“Dreaming heavens, we thought you were stuck back there.”

“Hey! You should know, it’s not that easy to keep me penned up.”

“Yeah, but …” Stig broke off as Bradley appeared. “Sir!”

“Good to see you, Stig.”

Stig put his hand out in welcome. Then everything went wrong. Moving between the bright beams of light was a woman in a simple fleece and pants. She had her shoulders hunched, shivering as if she’d got a cold. Then she sneezed, and her dark hair swirled fluidly in Far Away’s gravity. Stig would never forget that elegant, deadly face, not even in the peace of the dreaming heavens. “Look out!” he yelled. His hand went for his holster. He managed to get a machine pistol out, and swung it around.

Adam stood in front of him, an arm chopping around to push Stig’s weapon away. “Stop!”

Stig stumbled back a pace. Both Bradley and Adam were holding their hands up in admonishment. Several of the other people standing outside the vehicles, whom Stig didn’t know, were tensed up.

“That’s Paula Myo,” he yelled.

“Good evening,” she said calmly, then shivered again, and pulled her fleece tighter, arms crossed in front of her chest.

“But—”

“We have allies now,” Bradley said. There was no trace of mockery in his voice.

“Paula Myo?”

“Among others, such as Nigel Sheldon, oh, and I’m sure you remember Admiral Kime.”

Wilson stepped forward. “That’s actually ex-Admiral now. Pleased to meet you, Stig.”

“Uh.” Stig’s pistol hung limply at his side.

“Oh, yes,” Adam said, and the shadows made it difficult to see if that was a smirk on his face. “I almost forgot: Mellanie says to say hello.”

Stig couldn’t help it. He leaned a little closer, just to be sure. “Paula Myo?”

“The very same,” Bradley said. “Come now, Stig, tell me what the situation is.”

Stig allowed himself to be led over to the cluster of vehicles. Just as he started to tell Bradley about using a fuel air bomb he looked over his shoulder to check again. Paula Myo was hugging her chest quite tightly, as if she was in pain; a concerned-looking Wilson Kime was asking if she was all right. Somehow, seeing her on Far Away was more extraordinary than his blurred glimpse of the Starflyer itself.

Adam and Bradley made their plans quickly as Stig explained what had happened at First Foot Fall Plaza. The three Volvo trucks with their precious cargo for the planet’s revenge project would immediately head due south for the Dessault Mountains to rendezvous with the technical teams assembling the wind stations. Adam would head the group, taking Kieran, Rosamund, and Jamas with him to drive, despite their eagerness to join the fray pursuing the Starflyer. Paula announced she would accompany Adam, which he greeted without comment. Wilson, Anna, and Oscar agreed to stay with Paula, and see if they could help with the technical aspects of the planet’s revenge. Privately, Wilson was growing concerned about how unwell the Investigator appeared.

Bradley was going to lead the rest in pursuit of the Starflyer, spearheading it with all three armored cars. Cat’s Claws and the Paris team signed up to go with him. Both he and Stig thought their combat experience and weaponry would give the Guardians a significant advantage over the more lightly armored Institute troops.

That just left them with Qatux. Tiger Pansy had listened and watched without comment as the two teams were sorted out. Now she said, “We should go with Bradley.”

“If you wish,” Bradley said.

“Sure do,” Tiger Pansy agreed enthusiastically. “Starflyer’s pulling ahead of you. That makes for a tough chase, and when you do catch up, there’s going to be a big fight. You Guardian guys, you’re gonna go berserk, you’re all so committed and inspired; it’s like a religion. Qatux really digs that. This is where the human heat is at, so we stick with it.” She glanced over at Adam. “No offense.”

“You do understand, dear lady, we cannot guarantee your personal safety in this fight?” Bradley said.

Tiger Pansy chewed her gum for a moment before pulling a long face. “Yeah, I figured that. But face it, I ain’t got much of a life to lose, here, do I? Mellanie got me to update my secure store before we left; I just edited most of this time around out of it.”

“Each and every human life is priceless.”

“You’re really cute, you know that.”

It was one of those mornings where Mark hadn’t fully woken up, that moment of cozy drowsiness when you’re in a warm bed with the woman you love lying snuggled up against you. He moved his head fractionally, nuzzling Liz fondly. She pressed herself closer to him, then they kissed in a languid unhurried fashion. Hands stroked. He began to pull off his T-shirt. Liz rose up to straddle him, still wearing her negligee, the new one of semiorganic fabric that mimicked black silk. The way it grew translucent as her body heated and her movements became more urgent was a huge turn-on for him. She’d exploited that to the full last night, which was why he was so drowsy as dawn broke.

The enormously erotic sight of his wife’s delectable body straining athletically above him was wiped out by an orgasm that he was sure had an accompaniment from a choir of angels.

“It’s true,” he mumbled into the darkness sometime later. “Too much does make you blind.”

Close by, Liz giggled. Mark’s sight returned to show her lifting the T-shirt from his face. He smiled up at her in perfect contentment.

“Morning,” she said, in a very appreciative tone.

“Morning.”

Her fingers played along his lips. “I think you’re getting younger. I can barely cope with you like this anymore.”

Mark grinned complacently, though he wasn’t sure he could actually manage to do it again without some serious recuperation time first. The thing with Liz was that she really was as tremendously horny as she looked; and how many men could boast about a wife like that? “Takes two,” he assured her.

She gave him a quick kiss, and rolled off the bed. “I’d better go fix the kids some breakfast; the school will be wondering why I keep sending them in starving every day.”

“Right.” He was almost regretful. It would be nice to spend a whole day just lounging around in bed together. They hadn’t done that since Barry was taken out of the womb tank.

He took a while in the shower, then got dressed ready for work. The CST corporate-mauve sweatshirt with yellow sleeves went on easily enough; his green-gold trousers were a size more than he wore back in the Ulon Valley; they had a stretch-fabric waistline, too. Mark looked down at the way a small wave of his gut hung over the trousers. Must do something about that.

As if he ever got the time anymore. If anything his daily schedule had become even busier as soon as the Searcher had returned.

Sandy let out a happy squeal as he walked into the kitchen. She abandoned her boiled egg to run over and fling her arms around his waist. “Daddy! Daddy!”

He stroked her hair and kissed the top of her head. “Hey, morning there, darling.”

“Hi, Dad.” Barry’s eyes were bright with admiration.

Sandy wouldn’t let go. Mark had to take her back to the table and sit beside her before she’d consider eating any more of her egg. “We didn’t come in to your bedroom this morning,” she said, her eyes big and serious. “That was right, wasn’t it? Mommy said we should leave the two of you alone; that you need a lot of grown-up’s sleep to make up for being so tired after saving us all.”

“Uh, yeah, that’s right. Thank you, darling. It wasn’t just me that helped the Charybdis mission, though.”

Barry smirked at his sister. “Grown-up sleep. Baby!”

“What?” Sandy asked with a hurt expression.

“You’re so dumb. Don’t you know what they were doing?”

“What?”

“Enough, both of you,” Liz said firmly. “Let your father eat his breakfast in peace.” She had a demure smile on her face as she put his breakfast plate in front of him.

“Thank you, Mrs. Vernon.”

“My pleasure, Mr. Vernon.”

Mark tucked in to his eggs, bacon, waffles, sausages, and tomatoes. A side plate of pancakes drowning in maple syrup, and topped with strawberries and a cone of whipped cream, were placed next to the big plate.

“To keep your strength up,” Liz said enigmatically.

“Yuk.” Barry pulled a face.

Mark tried hard not to smile.

Otis Sheldon turned up just as Mark was finishing. Panda barked happily as the pilot walked into the sunny kitchen.

“Otis!” Barry cried happily, and ran over. “Take me up to the assembly platform today. Please! Please! Dad keeps promising he will, but he never does.”

“Your father’s the man to ask. He’s in charge up there.”

“Daddy!” Sandy smiled worshipfully.

“Hi, Liz.” Otis gave her a quick peck on the cheek.

“Sit down. Need some coffee?”

“Thanks. Maybe a half cup.”

“What can we do for you?”

“Just giving Mark a lift out to the platform wormhole.” He glanced at Mark. “Did you check your message hold file?”

“Er, no.” Mark reached out with a black and gold virtual hand and removed the zero-access restriction. He’d closed it up last night to give himself some uninterrupted privacy. A priority one file was sitting in his folder; sent from Nigel Sheldon. Oh, Christ. “Thanks, Otis,” he said sheepishly.

A maidbot delivered a cup of coffee to Otis. Mark reviewed the message, and groaned in mild dismay. “You’ve only just got back.”

Otis shrugged good-naturedly. “That’s the job.”

“What’s happening, boys?” Liz asked.

“Another flight,” Mark said.

“And Dad’s getting impatient,” Otis said.

“That’s got to be the …” She trailed off, giving the two children a guilty glance.

“What is it?” Barry demanded.

“It is,” Mark told her.

“Oh, hellfire. You be careful,” she told Otis.

“You betcha.”

Otis drove Mark the short distance over to the wormhole that led up to the cluster of orbital assembly platforms. He had an antique Daimler coupe convertible, which was kept in immaculate condition. It was powered by a combustion engine. Mark wasn’t sure if it had a drive array, not that it mattered with Otis behind the wheel; the man’s reflexes were incredible.

“Have you talked to Nigel?” Mark asked after he tightened his seat belt as far as it would go.

“Yeah, minor conference on Cressat last night. Apparently, the Dynasty now officially believes the Starflyer is behind the war.”

That took Mark a moment to digest. “You’re kidding.”

“No. Classified, okay? Daniel Alster was one of its agents. Dad was seriously not pleased. The Starflyer used Alster to break through to Boongate; it’s on its way back to Far Away as we speak. So we’re also sending a frigate there, just in case it tries to escape in the Marie Celeste.”

“Holy shit. How many frigates does Nigel want active?”

“Leading question. Minimum of three to Dyson Alpha, and we’d like two to visit Far Away. Although there was talk of sending the Searcher there instead. A lot of important people joined up with the Guardians, and are now cut off from the Commonwealth.”

“You did tell him we haven’t got five assembled yet, didn’t you?” Mark said nervously.

“He knows our status. There’s also a minor supply problem with nova bombs. We don’t have many yet.”

“But, Otis, we haven’t finished incorporating our procedures into the frigate assembly systems. We were looking for another week before the Dyson Alpha mission. Even the Scylla won’t be ready for vacuum for another two days.”

“Don’t be so modest. You’ve got four completed and another six in assembly.”

“Yes, but they haven’t been level-two tested yet, let alone flight tested. We held the Charybdis together with sticky tape and luck. You can’t keep flying frigates in that state, they’ve got to be integrated properly; anything else is going to prove fatal, and I don’t just mean in the long term.”

“I know; more than anybody. I’m the one who has to fly the damn things, remember. Pull in whoever you need; Giselle will coordinate personnel requests for you so you’ll be free to concentrate on the engineering.”

“Huh!” Mark exclaimed, unimpressed, as they pulled into the gateway building’s parking lot. “I’d like to take the entire design team up there for a start. Maybe they’ll finally learn the difference between theory and practice.”

Otis grinned. “Designers and engineers, may the two never meet.”

At night, stuck in the Volvo’s forward passenger seat while Rosamund drove them southward across the Aldrin Plains, Adam could see no difference between this and any normal Commonwealth H-congruous world. The low gravity wasn’t noticeable, except when they hit the odd bump in the road, when the truck performed a shallow glide back down. Farmland was more or less the same everywhere, and this close to the capital city, the land was nothing else, with broad fields and big swathes of woodland stretching out into the dark beyond his inserts’ ability to resolve. It was the absence of a planetary cybersphere that gave him the biggest sense of separation from the worlds he knew. All they had for communications here were some arrays with a short-wave capability. Not, as he was the first to admit, that there was anyone else to call on this forsaken planet. The lack of information was hard to endure, though.

At least he had a degree of solitude to enjoy. He’d been worried that Paula would insist on joining him in whatever vehicle he rode in. Instead she was in the second truck with Oscar, while Kieran drove. In what was undoubtedly the last miracle of the day, Adam actually found himself concerned for her. Whatever flu-variant virus she’d picked up was obviously affecting her badly. It was unusual for anyone these days to be brought low by such a simple illness, which implied it might be extraterrestrial. There hadn’t been an alien plague case for thirty years, since the Hokoth measles epidemic. For the Commonwealth to suffer one now would be badly ironic.

He told himself he was concerned mainly because she might be a carrier and give the bug to him and the others. She’d done her best to shrug it off, but he’d seen the sheen of sweat on her brow, the long uncontrollable shivers running along her limbs. It had come on quickly; she’d shown no symptoms back in the Carbon Goose where they’d talked through tactics for the landing at Port Evergreen. That had been a surreal moment, sitting down with Paula Myo, drinking tea together as they formulated the best strategy, both pooling their knowledge and experience without reservations—at least on his part. All the while, that little speech she’d given him back at Narrabri station was running through his mind. She could probably see it in his brain he was thinking it so hard.

After that she’d more or less dropped below his worry radar as they pushed through to Far Away and met up with the Guardians. He quietly assumed that once they’d delivered their precious cargo to the waiting Guardians in the Dessault Mountains that he’d wander off into the sunset while his friends prevented her from following—then he’d live out a quiet retirement on some farm for the remainder of his years. Except the only way that would happen was if someone killed her; even then her re-life version would appear on the horizon sooner or later. The reality was that this crazy Sicilian-style battle to the death they’d got going between them could only truly end with his death. Besides, he knew damn well he couldn’t spend more than a couple of hours on a farm without getting bored out of his skull. He’d have to return to the Commonwealth and go on the run again. Strangely, the prospect wasn’t as depressing as it first seemed.

Somewhere amid the constant low-level growl of engine noise a nasty metallic grinding sound was breaking out. Adam looked around in alarm. It was so loud he thought it must be coming from their truck. Rosamund was already braking smoothly.

“I’ve got a problem,” Kieran called on the general band.

By the time Rosamund had reversed up close to the second truck, Kieran was filling the band with some filthy language but no real information. Adam climbed down out of the cab and walked back. The road they were using was the main route linking this region’s market towns to the city; originally it had an enzyme-bonded concrete surface, but that was steadily shrinking from an onslaught of earth and weeds, while cracks and potholes went unrepaired for decades. Nowadays it resembled a simple much-used dirt track with congested drainage ditches on both sides. Adam was already entertaining serious doubts about how long it would take them to reach the mountains, and this was a good infrastructure for Far Away. According to the so-called maps stored in his inserts, the roads vanished altogether another hundred sixty kilometers south where the Aldrin Plains became a sea of uninhabited grasslands.

“What’s happened?” he shouted.

Some kind of thick vapor was swirling across the Volvo’s headlight beams. Kieran strode through it, a furious expression on his angular gaunt face. He hit the release handle on one of the engine covers, and it folded back. Flame belched out into the night.

Kieran ducked back, shielding his face with his hands. “Dreaming heavens!” His voice was ripe with pain.

Oscar jumped down from the cab, and rushed forward with a slim fire extinguisher. He directed the powerful stream of ice-blue gel particles over the burning machinery, smothering the fire in seconds.

Kieran was wincing as he gripped his hand.

“Let me see,” Adam demanded.

His flesh was red; blisters were already starting to rise. Wilson had brought a first aid kit from their truck’s cab; he started applying some salve.

Oscar gave the engine another couple of blasts from the fire extinguisher. “It’s out, but we’re screwed,” he said as he peered into the smoldering mangle of metal. “You’re not going to get this repaired outside a garage, and probably not even there. Trust me, I know engines, this is just scrap now.”

Adam shot Jamas a look that was mostly accusation, even though he knew it was neither professional nor fair. But Jamas had been in charge of organizing their ground transport.

“They were in perfect working order when we loaded them up on Wessex,” Jamas said defensively. “I took them for servicing at the dealer myself.”

“I know,” Adam said. “Breakdowns happen. It’s a royal pain in the ass that it happened now, but don’t worry. We’ve got enough room in the other two Volvos to carry on.”

They worked swiftly in the headlight beams of the trucks. Adam was more than a little conscious of how visible they were in the middle of the open lightless farmland. Out beyond the light of the campfire, the wolves begin to gather unseen. The force fields were off, which added to the sensation of vulnerability. He was grateful that all three of the Volvos carried trolleybots, which began unloading the pearl-white crates from Kieran’s wrecked truck.

“I’m going to take a look at that engine,” Oscar told Adam. “See if I can figure out what happened.”

“Right,” Adam said distantly. He was watching the trolleybots move around. The damp rumpled road surface made it hard going for the little machines; they were designed to work on the flat floors of warehouses and loading bays. The crates rocked about at alarming angles, but the trollybot holding clamps prevented them from sliding off.

Half of the plastic crates had been transferred when Adam suddenly shouted: “Stop.” His e-butler backed up the order, halting the trollybot right in front of him. Adam walked over, followed by Wilson, Anna, and Jamas. The crate’s lid had a couple of recessed hand-size flip-over locks on each side. One was hanging open. Adam stared at the loose flap of dull metal, then started to pull the crate’s remaining flip locks open.

“What?” Wilson asked. “One of these can’t come loose?”

“No, it can’t,” Adam said. “They’re designed to stay shut, that’s the whole point. They don’t spring open just because they get jiggled around.” Rosamund and Kieran arrived as Adam pulled the final lock open. “Jamas, give me a hand.”

The two of them eased the lid off. Adam and Wilson shone their flashlights inside, and Adam found himself staring into a little private version of hell. “Oh, fuck it! I don’t believe this.”

The five components inside the crate had been wrapped in thick blue-green sponge plastic for travel. Somebody had used a maser on them. The sponge plastic had melted into a blackened tar, smearing the components and pooling in the bottom of the crate. All the casings that held the support electronics on the side of the components were badly tarnished where the maser beam had been applied.

There was complete silence as the group all stared down into the crate. After that, they began to glance around at each other. Adam couldn’t blame them; he was already trying to work out who was the most likely suspect himself, but he couldn’t allow the atmosphere to become too poisonous. They still had to work together. Already they were dividing back into Guardians and navy.

“Let’s stay calm until we figure this out,” he said. “I want the rest of the crates opened and inspected. Two people to each crate. We don’t need to create any extra mistrust right now.”

With the trolleybots now unloading every Volvo it took them a quarter of an hour to open every crate. Paula didn’t help. She was left sitting on the cab steps of the third truck with a blanket around her shoulders as the others took the lids off. In total, four crates had been sabotaged, all with a maser.

“They were good when we left Wessex,” Jamas insisted. “I know they were, I helped pack them.” He was glaring at Wilson and Oscar.

“Do we still have enough systems to make the planet’s revenge project work?” Wilson asked.

“I’m not sure,” Adam said. “Kieran, what do you think?”

“Dreaming heavens, I don’t know. I think it will work anyway, that’s what Bradley was saying; what we’re delivering makes it more efficient.”

“It increases the probability of success,” Wilson said.

“So this has just taken it down a notch, again,” Rosamund said.

“It’s one of us,” Kieran said fiercely. “One of you navy people.”

“Whoa there,” Adam said quickly. “It could have been anybody in our group.”

“You heard Jamas, the components were all fine when we packed them up.”

“If Jamas isn’t the one,” Anna said.

Jamas took a pace toward her. “Are you accusing me?”

“Stop it!” Adam gave them an exasperated look. “This only helps the Starflyer. We don’t know it’s one of the people here.” He gave Jamas a hard stare. “Back off. It could have been any one of us who traveled together, including you, me, and even Johansson.”

“Hey!” Jamas protested. “No fucking way is it Johansson.”

“Enough of this. We don’t know, and we’ll probably never find out until it’s all over anyway,” Adam said. “We got lucky seeing the crate was opened. From now on we just have to watch each other. That does not automatically mean that anyone here is guilty. Clear?” He stared down the Guardians, waiting until each one acknowledged his authority. It was done grudgingly, and with several sharp glances toward the navy people, but eventually they all nodded except for Jamas, who flung his hands in the air to admit defeat. “Thank you,” Adam said primly. “Wilson, from now on none of your team goes or does anything solo; that goes for us Guardians, too. Everything from this point is a joint venture, and that includes going to the can.”

“Good thinking,” Wilson said.

“I want the crates sealed back up again and back on the trucks. We will make our rendezvous, and the components we deliver will make a difference. Get to it.”

“A word,” Oscar said quietly as the others returned to the crates.

“What is it?” Adam asked. It was almost rhetorical, he could guess.

“It wasn’t entirely luck we had to unload the cases. The Volvo’s gear box was empty, the oil had all leaked out. One of the seals was loose. The whole thing overheated and seized up.”

“That can’t be right. No problem should be able to grow that big. What about the sensors?”

“Good point,” Oscar said uncomfortably. “I think there was a software overwrite in the drive array. I can’t be sure, of course.”

“And the leak? What caused it?”

“Lot of heat damage from the fire, so again it’s impossible to say with any certainty. But if your lad Jamas was right about getting a proper service, there’s no way any seal should have broken so soon.”

“Damnit.” Adam gave the remaining two trucks a surreptitious glance. “What about them?”

“If this was sabotage, then whoever did it won’t use the same method twice; we’d find it as soon as the first one occurs. I can check them both, of course, but I’d suggest the best thing to do is reboot their arrays from the manufacturer’s software cache. That should wipe out any nasty little overwrite gremlin. And I’ll take a good look at the gear boxes, anyway, if there actually is a design fault with the seals, then a leak should be easy enough to spot.”

“Sure thing. I’ll partner you.” Almost like old times.

“Of course you will.”

By the time they set off, they’d wasted nearly an hour. Rosamund was again driving the lead Volvo, pushing the speed right up to the limit for their rough road conditions. Adam had to okay the use of active sensors to make sure there were no dangerous surprises on the uneven surface. If they drove around the clock, it shouldn’t take more than a day and a half to reach the rendezvous point amid the southern foothills.

Kieran and Oscar had joined Adam in the cab, along with Paula. The Investigator had immediately retired to the little sleep cubicle at the back of the main cabin, her blanket wrapped tight around her shoulders. Adam waited half an hour to make certain there were no urgent problems developing with the Volvos, then picked up a medical kit and slid the slim composite door aside. There was very little room behind it: a twin bunk arrangement on the rear wall, with just enough room for one person to stand in front of them. Lockers under the bottom bunk held their personal supplies.

The air-conditioning vents were blowing out unpleasantly warm air. Adam switched the dim blue light on. Paula sat on the bottom bunk, the blanket still wrapped around her. The way her arm was cocked underneath the gray wool and the lump of her hand made Adam freeze. When he looked into her face he was shocked. She looked as if she hadn’t slept for a week, and she was gaunt, as if her flesh were sweating away. It was an unnervingly abrupt physiological change.

“Christ, what’s happening to you?” he asked as he slid the door shut; somehow he didn’t want the others to see her like this.

A big shiver ran the length of her body, forcing her to grimace. Her sweat-damped hair was stuck to her scalp, barely moving. She just stared at Adam with her delicate eyes sunk into bruise-dark skin. The only thing that never wavered was her weapon under the blanket.

“I’m not here to murder you,” Adam said. Stupid thing to say. He let out a little ironic snort. “Actually, I need your help. You’re the one who’s going to have to work out which of us is the traitor.”

Paula’s compressed mouth lifted in a slight grin. “Suppose it’s me?”

“Oh, come off it.”

“Who better? I’ve been chasing Johansson for a hundred thirty years trying to shut him down.”

“You gave us the Martian data. No matter how much political pressure you were under, you wouldn’t have done that if you’re a Starflyer agent.”

She slid the weapon back into a shoulder holster. “I shouldn’t have done it anyway.”

“I considered it a sign of humanity finally shining through.”

“Then you’re a fool.”

“You believe yourself to be nonhuman?”

“Quite the opposite.” Paula eased herself back onto the bunk, wincing more than once before she finally slumped down. “The root of my determination is that I care about people; I protect them. That makes us opposites.”

He gave a bitter laugh. “If that’s true you should be President of the Intersolar Socialist Party. We care about people. We want real social justice for everyone.”

“What justice did you give to Marco Dunbar?”

“Who?”

“Or Nik Montrose, or Jason Levin, or Xanthe Winter.”

“I don’t know any of these people.”

“You should do. You killed them. They were all on the train from StLincoln when it passed through Abadan station.”

Adam clamped his jaw tight as the guilt ran through him like an electrified rapier. “Bitch.”

“Please don’t try and climb onto the moral high ground with your ideological beliefs, or even assume we’re on some kind of equal footing. Both of us know who’s in the right.”

He studied her semicurled-up outline in the faint light as his anger faded. “You really do look like shit. What is the matter with you?”

“Some kind of ET flu. I’ve been on a lot of planets recently; I could have picked it up anywhere.”

“We’ve got some good medical kits with us.” He patted the case he was carrying. “Let me run a diagnostic scan.”

“No. I’m not contagious.”

“Not likely!”

“Drop it, Elvin.”

“You know what you’ve got, don’t you?” He couldn’t think what it would be that made her keep it private.

“Do you want my help, or not?”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “I could swear the Guardians I brought with me were on the level.”

Paula rolled onto her back and closed her eyes. It made her look very frail. “Start at the beginning; absolute basics. You know you aren’t a Starflyer agent, right?”

“Yeah, right.”

“Very well. Until you have definite proof of a person’s innocence, you can trust no one in the group.”

“Even you?”

“I told you before, I’ve been trying to stop Johansson for a hundred thirty years. For the purpose of this exercise, you must consider me suspect. I know I’m not, but I cannot physically prove that to you.”

“You’ve got one fucking morbid world view, Investigator, I’ll tell you that for nothing. Go on, how do I rule people out?”

“The sabotage most likely occurred after we joined your group.”

“Yeah. I was involved with packing and loading those crates. It would have been difficult to maser the contents of one back in the warehouse, let alone four.”

“Okay then.” Paula started coughing; her body juddered around on the bunk so alarmingly that Adam started to reach for her to hold her down. She waved his hand away as the coughing subsided. “I’m all right.”

“No you’re not. Jesus, have you been poisoned? Is that it?”

“No. Just give me some water, please.”

Adam found a bottle of mineral water in one of the lockers. It was painful to watch the Investigator trying to swallow; she took such small sips it was like a baby feeding.

“So start with your Guardians,” she said. “Can anyone on this world vouch for them in complete confidence? If not, the Starflyer could have had access to them the way he did with Kazimir McFoster’s friend and murderer.”

“Bruce. Damnit, yes, I’ll try and check; but the only link we’ve got is a short wave, don’t forget, it’s not exactly secure. Even then, who can vouch for every minute of someone’s life?”

“I know. As for the navy arrest team, they come from the same Paris office as Tarlo, who was corrupted several years ago. If the Starflyer can get Tarlo, then in theory it could get to anyone there.”

“That was your office,” he said in mounting unease.

“It was, yes. Like I said, don’t rule me out through sentiment or belief that I am incorruptible. You must be logical.”

“All right. What about the others, Cat’s Claws?”

“Firstly, they have been out of contact behind enemy lines. What happened to them there is unknowable. Then again, they are all extremely dangerous criminals. Perhaps they did this to further their own agenda.”

“Jesus H. Christ. That’d be just dandy right now, another group out to wreck us.”

“It’s a remote possibility, but bear it in mind. The most unusual pair we have with us are Qatux and Tiger Pansy.” She coughed again, and flopped her head down on the thin pillow. “Frankly, I can’t think Qatux is a Starflyer agent, but then he’s not the most reliable or normal Raiel citizen, and his insistence on coming with us is unusual. Plausible, but odd. As for Tiger Pansy, remember Mata Hari.”

“She was a dancer and courtesan. With respect, Tiger Pansy isn’t quite that exalted.”

“You know your history. I’m impressed; that’s not in your file.”

“Hidden depths, me, Investigator. So what do we do with Tiger Pansy?”

“Class her as a definite unknowable. If she is our saboteur, then I think we’ve already lost. But again, it’s your decision.”

“All right, that leaves us with the two Kimes and Oscar.”

“All of whom were on board the Second Chance. We know there was a Starflyer agent on board. Therefore: all suspect.”

“Right,” he said brokenly. “I really am on my own.” Then he realized he actually wasn’t, that there was one small fact that Paula didn’t know about. He smiled, and nearly began to tell her. Then stopped. First, he really didn’t know for sure that she wasn’t the Starflyer agent. All he had was his gut feeling that she couldn’t be, not the Paula Myo. Which isn’t good enough to decide the outcome of a war. And second, the Investigator couldn’t be allowed to know.

“What?” She was looking at him.

“Nothing. So if I can’t check individuals for motive, I have to go for opportunity, don’t I?”

“Very good, Elvin. By my reckoning, it had to take place during the Carbon Goose flight. The trucks were unguarded during a nine-hour flight, when anyone could get onto the cargo deck without being seen.” Paula’s voice had been weakening, now her eyes closed. “I need to sleep,” she said. “I’m very cold.”

“I need you to keep going just a moment longer, please. There were people on the cargo deck.” He twisted the locks on the medical kit and pulled out a diagnostic array.

“Including you and me for a lot of the time. Which is why only four crates were sabotaged. The Starflyer agent couldn’t risk an extended process; they might have been seen.”

Adam put a diagnostic patch on her clammy forehead and ran the program. “Why didn’t they just blow us up?”

“What are you doing?” Paula tried to push the diagnostic away, but he caught her hand and held it. She had no strength to stop him.

“Finding out what the hell’s the matter with you.” The array’s little screen began to fill with data. Her pulse was alarmingly rapid.

“Don’t,” she groaned, sucking air through her teeth.

“Christ, you’ve hardly got any blood pressure. Concentrate for me. If there was a Starflyer agent on the Carbon Goose, why didn’t they blow it up?”

“Good question. Simplest solution applies: they didn’t because they couldn’t. They had no access to suitable heavy-duty weaponry.”

“Cat’s Claws and the Paris team did. So do most of my Guardians.”

“That’s good; we can start eliminating people now. Out of the Guardians traveling with us, who doesn’t have an aggressor armor suit?”

“Rosamund and Jamas.” The array finished its review of Paula’s body. “It can’t detect any viral infection.” Adam paused. “It reads like you’re in shock.”

“Good verdict,” she croaked. “I am undergoing a physical reaction to a traumatic experience.” Her eyes fluttered shut, then snapped open again. “Now … none of the three navy people with us had aggressor armor, Nelson gave them protective suits.”

“What about you?”

“Same as the navy three, my armor is protective; I do have weapons but nothing that can take out a Carbon Goose, certainly not with a couple of shots. You must have access to weapons.”

“I do.” He gritted his teeth. “What trauma? What’s doing this to you? Christ, Paula, your body can’t take this kind of punishment.”

“You,” she said with a mocking smile. “Now think, if the Starflyer agent is with us in the Volvos, it has to be either myself, Wilson, Anna, Oscar, Rosamund, or Jamas.”

“What do you mean, me?”

“I wanted to arrest you, but I had to let you come here where you’ll be able to elude me when the mission is over. I can’t do that. It’s wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. You’re a mass murderer, I cannot put that aside. Thought I could, but I can’t. My body is reminding me of that.”

He stared at her in growing horror. “You’re in shock from letting me walk free?”

“Yes.”

“Fuck, Paula, this has to stop.” His e-butler began to display treatment routines for shock. He pulled an oxygen mask from the medical kit, and switched on the little extractor filter pump as he pressed it over her mouth. “Start breathing as regular as you can, I’m going to give you a sedative to try and calm your body down.”

Paula groaned. She pushed the mask aside. “It was Kieran’s truck that broke down; he really should have noticed something was wrong before it got bad enough to catch fire.”

“Fuck that! Your life is a damn sight more important.”

“It’s not. We must find out who the traitor is, the criminal. If they’re with us, they’ll strike again.”

“Not this instant they won’t. How could this happen to you?”

“I’m driven, remember? It’s in my genes.”

“Is everyone from the Hi—Huxley’s Haven like this? How can a whole planet be so flawed? You don’t get to do what you want and you just keel over with a fever? It’s insane!”

“My profession is unique even among the general population of Huxley’s Haven. There are not many police officers. The Foundation sequenced in our need to see cases to their conclusion. Admiral Columbia claimed it to be an obsessive compulsive disorder; I believe it was in fact originally derived from that.”

“So what the hell happens to the police if they don’t catch the bad guy?”

“They keep on going. No case is ever closed until it has been solved and the criminal arrested. The difference here is that I was forced into letting you go. It simply doesn’t happen on Huxley’s Haven. There is no such thing as political pressure to protect criminals.”

“You said you’d come after me. Doesn’t that help?”

“No. I’m not arresting you now, which is what I know I should be doing.” Her voice had faded to almost nothing. She closed her eyes.

Adam pulled an applicator tube out of the case; its sedative was close to what the e-butler’s medical program was telling him to use. “Hang on, you understand me? We’ll get you through this. Don’t you give up on me now, don’t you fucking dare.”

An angel walked into the mansion without any warning, causing a ruckus with the security staff on duty that morning. They didn’t want to let her in. She ignored their protests with the casual aristocratic disdain that was the heritage of any senior Dynasty child.

Orion, who was wandering along the vast terrace overlooking the huge swimming pool, heard the argument and glanced back in through the open French doors. The angel was standing right at the other end of the mansion’s vaulting formal hallway, framed by the open front door. He could scarcely believe what he saw. She was so beautiful it made his eyes ache; tall with golden-hued skin, and strong broad shoulders. Her long face had the sharpest cheeks he’d ever seen; they were lovely even though they made her chin prominent. Straight, pale brown hair was cut into a long tapering cloak that reached halfway down her back, moving like a single sheet of glossy silk every time she tossed her head. Her legs, which at this point Orion would have killed for a glimpse of, were hidden inside a long skirt of thin, reddish purple cotton with a green flower print. He did get a joyous sight of her perfectly toned midriff between the skirt and a plain white cotton camisole top.

She was, she told the security staff, Jasmine Sheldon. Did they not know that? Did they not know she was one of Nigel’s fifth-generation granddaughters, a first-lifer, and direct lineage? How else could she enter a Sheldon residence unless she had the correct family security clearance? Had no one told them she always took the start of her mid-year vacation at this mansion? Her friends from school would be dropping by in a couple of days. Until then she would have a quiet time to herself. Any problems, talk to the Dynasty office in Illanum. They sort out any difficulties encountered by senior family members. Besides, she obviously couldn’t go back now, the cab was already halfway down the drive. She would take the Bermuda room. No need to show her upstairs, she knew the way. Her three cases of luggage followed behind her like cowed employees.

“Wow!” Orion breathed after she vanished up the broad stairs. He watched the humiliated security staff go into a huddle, the vertical lines of green and red OCtattoos on their cheeks glowing bright in agitation. They broke apart to scurry off into the mansion’s vast interior. “Now what do I do?”

There was nobody around to suggest a course of action; just when he needed advice the most. Very different from last night. The security people had been polite but firm when they arrived at the mansion. He was free to use any facility in the building he wanted, including the health spa and sports gym down in the basement. If he required any clothes or commercial item he simply had to ask and it would be delivered. The kitchen staff would cook whatever meal he wanted. As for the grounds, please stay within three miles of the mansion, otherwise he could walk where he wished.

Ozzie was now nowhere to be seen. They’d had a late breakfast together, while Ozzie explained to Orion and Tochee the reasons behind their house arrest. Orion hadn’t really understood the political intricacies, just that Ozzie and his friend Nigel had some kind of big bust-up over the way the war was going; and a crime that Ozzie had been involved in decades ago was a part of it. “It’ll be cleared up by the end of the week,” Ozzie said. “Nigel will be kissing my ass and begging forgiveness. You’ll see.”

“I do not mind,” Tochee said. “This is a pleasant place to spend some time. They promised me continued access to your databases. After so much traveling I am enjoying a respite where I can broaden my education.”

“Yeah, okay,” Orion told him. “I can hang around for a week of luxury.” He smiled to show he meant it, all the while knowing it was complete Ozzie bullshit. After so much time spent together, how Ozzie thought he could still fool either of them was a complete mystery. It was quite obvious they were in deep shit with Nigel Sheldon, and there was nothing Ozzie could do to get them out of it.

Orion found Tochee and Ozzie in the ground-floor study, walking through a portal projection of the Dark Fortress generator. Ozzie was standing in what resembled a ring of bright comets, looking as if he were wading through them as they circled around his waist.

The outer shells rotated slowly around him and Tochee. Luminous green equations drifted overhead like mathematical clouds.

“I believe your knowledge of physics is greater than that of my planet,” Tochee said. “I can offer little insight into the nature of quantum foundation theory. It may be poor translation again, but five geometry field transection is not a subject I have ever heard of, let alone know how to manipulate.”

“ ’Sokay, dude,” Ozzie said magnanimously. “I was just thinking out loud.”

“Girl!” Orion blurted. He stood on the edge of the projection, unable to move forward, as if it were generating a force field. “There’s a girl.”

Ozzie and Tochee both turned around to face him. “Howsthat?” Ozzie asked.

“Girl.” Orion waved his arms, gesturing furiously at the study door. “Out there, a girl!”

“Ah. There’s a girl out there, then?” Ozzie said.

“Yes!”

“So?”

“Ozzie, she’s incredible, she’s so beautiful.”

“Look, dude, I’ve told you: hands off the security staff.”

“No, no: not.”

“Not?”

“She’s not security.”

“Who is she then?”

“A Sheldon. There was some mix-up; she’s here on holiday. But, Ozzie, they’ll throw her out as soon as they talk with the Dynasty office in Illanum.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“Ozzie!”

“What? Jeez, you can be a pain.”

“Stop them.”

Ozzie’s face screwed up in puzzlement. “Why?”

“I believe I understand, friend Orion,” Tochee said. “You are attracted to the young female of your species. Is she one totally fuckable babe? Perhaps similar to Andria Elex on the unisphere show about human mating habits on the world of Toulanna that we accessed at the hotel?”

A mortified Orion turned bright red.

Ozzie gave Tochee a moderately surprised look, then turned back to Orion. “Did you show Tochee that kind of show? I thought I’d locked access away from porn.”

“Ozzie, forget that! She’s got to stay. I want to … I want …” He lifted his hands in despair.

“To bang her brains out?”

“No. Well … You know. I just don’t want her to go. I’ve never seen anybody like her before. Please.”

“All right, this is really simple, kid: ask her to stay.”

“What?”

“Go up to her. Smile. Say hello. Strike up a conversation. If you get on fine, ask her to stay. If she says yes, I’ll back you up with Nige if our guardian Nazis get heavy.”

“What’s the Nazis?”

Ozzie clapped his hands together and made a shooing motion. “Go talk to her. Go on. And remember, don’t try and be smart. What you are makes you interesting. Now out! I’m trying to save the universe here, and I don’t have much time left.”

The study door shut behind Orion. He couldn’t quite understand how he’d wound up back in the hall and no better off than when he went in. Ozzie had been absolutely no use whatsoever. That hurt. He’d been kind of counting on Ozzie.

“Think,” he told himself sternly. Maybe Ozzie was right, maybe he should just start with saying hello. Anything else would seem desperate.

He went back to his room and rubbed a lot of toothgell on his teeth, rinsing twice. His hair was easy to comb now thanks to the stylist back at the Ledbetter Hotel. The active biogenic dermal cream had worked wonders on his pimples overnight. A quick check in the mirror showed a face that was relatively presentable, certainly better than when they walked off the end of the path. He was just wearing a short-sleeved orange shirt and knee-length swim shorts, which made it tempting to dress up, but that would be out of character and seem like he was trying to impress.

Okay, so … go!

He couldn’t find her. She wasn’t in the Bermuda room when he knocked tentatively on the door; she wasn’t in any of the lounges. When he ventured into the kitchen, the cook hadn’t seen her.

After twenty minutes of fruitless searching, he gave up. The security staff must have received the authorization to eject her. He wandered out onto the terrace, almost ready to cry. She’d been so beautiful, and he’d actually been prepared to make an utter fool of himself by opening his mouth. Anything, just to be in her presence for a moment. He leaned on the stone railing above the lower terrace where the oval pool stretched out into the gardens. On the whole, he’d been better off walking the paths.

“Hi. Are you one of the staff?”

Orion jumped and spun around. She was sitting right behind him in one of the sunloungers, dressed in a pale peach toweling robe. A delicate finger pressed a pair of silver shades up from her nose, so she could look at him properly.

“Uh, no.”

“Oh, which branch are you from?”

“I don’t live in a tree.” It was out before he could stop it. He closed his eyes and groaned, knowing his wretched face would be coloring again.

Jasmine Sheldon laughed. It was an enchantingly soft sound. But not mocking, he thought. “Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “I’ve seen rather a lot of trees lately, can’t stop thinking about them. Um, I’m Orion.”

“Hi, Orion, I’m Jasmine.”

He sat on the sunlounger next to her. “What are you reading?” A large leather-bound book was resting on her legs. He twisted around to read the silver lettering on the front. The Hundred Greatest Events of Human History.

“Found it in the library,” she said. “I was reading about the Great Wormhole Heist.”

“Really? Does it mention Ozzie?”

“Don’t think so. I haven’t read all of it, though.”

“Ah, what about a guy called Nazi? Is he in one of the events?”

“I’ve never heard of him. It’s got an index in the back.” She handed it over. “So why are you here?”

“Long story.” He flicked through the book that was mainly photos and holograms until he found the index. There were a lot of columns of small print that he had trouble reading.

She smiled and stretched herself out comfortably on the sunlounger. “It’s going to be a long summer. Assuming we win the war.”

The toweling robe around her legs fell open as she laid back. Orion was very proud of himself for not staring—not for too long, anyway. Her legs were long and powerful. She was probably stronger than he was. It was a thought that turned his stomach to a kind of cold jelly.

“Well?” she asked. “I’ve just come from school. I don’t have anything interesting to tell you, just months of lessons and sports afternoons.”

Her inquisitive eyes were green, he noticed. “Uh, I was living on Silvergalde. My parents had got lost somewhere down the Silfen paths, so I was helping at the Last Pony. That’s a tavern in Lyddington. Anyway … Ozzie turned up one day—”

She really was an angel. Orion would never have believed he could sit and talk to a girl, and that she’d be interested in what he said; let alone a stunning girl like Jasmine. It wasn’t just her physical beauty that captivated him; she was a lovely person, too. She was eager to hear his story, and asked questions, and was astonished and impressed at the things he’d done and seen, the hardships they’d endured. He began to relax, even though he knew he was babbling on for far too long. But she laughed with him. They shared a sense of humor.

After a couple of hours, Tochee slid out onto the terrace. Jasmine sat bolt upright, her face registering complete delight. “Oh, my goodness,” she said. “You really are telling the truth.”

Orion was slightly stung by the implication, but she looked so thrilled he forgave her instantly.

“Friend Orion,” Tochee said through a slim, top-of-the-line Ipressx array it was holding in its manipulator flesh. “Is this the totally—”

“This is Jasmine,” Orion told his alien friend hurriedly.

“I wish you welcome, Jasmine,” Tochee said. “And hope we will be friends.”

“I’m sure we will be,” she said pertly.

“I will immerse myself in water,” Tochee said. “It will be a relief. I fear I have been no help to my friend Ozzie this morning.”

“I think the Dark Fortress is something he’s got to work out for himself,” Orion said.

Tochee slid over to the stone rail at the edge of the terrace, and rose up to poise the front half of its body on top. The pool was about twenty feet directly below. The locomotion ridges contracted, and it tightened its grip on the array.

“You’re not going to?” Orion asked.

Tochee launched itself off the top terrace, and landed in the pool with an almighty splash.

Jasmine let out a shriek of excitement, and both of them raced over to the railing. Tochee was just surfacing as they peered over the edge. “The water is a perfect temperature,” it called up. Its ridges began to change again, flattening out into long fins. It sped away down the pool, as sleek as any dolphin.

“Superb!” Jasmine said. She cast off her robe and jumped up onto the rail.

Orion stared up at her perfect trim body in an act of near-religious worship. She was wearing a simple white one-piece swimsuit made from shiny fabric. That was when he knew he was in love, and they would get married, and spend every day for eternity in bed doing what he’d watched Andria Elex doing, only better and longer.

“No, wait,” he cried. “It’s too far down.”

Jasmine flashed him a gorgeous, teasing smile. “Last one in’s a wimp,” she shouted, and dived.

Orion’s worry turned to outright astonishment. Jasmine seemed to bend over in midflight so her hands were touching her ankles, then she spun around in a somersault, rotated the other way, spun in reverse, and straightened out to hit the water without a splash.

He gawped in disbelief. She was gliding underwater in a long curve that brought her back to the surface five meters away from where she went in. “Wimp,” she yelled up, laughing. “Wimp, wimp, wimp!”

Snarling, Orion clambered up on top of the rail, and jumped. He was right, it was a long way down. His legs cycled about crazily. At least he remembered to clamp his hand over his nose just before he hit. Unfortunately by then he was tilted over somewhat so he landed on his side. The hard water slapped him fiercely.

He struggled back up to the surface, his whole side numb. At first. The sharp stinging began as he bobbed up. He let out a pained groan.

Jasmine’s laughter cut off, and seconds later she was at his side. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Sure. Fine. No problem.” His shirt felt as if it was made from metal. He struggled to undo it, then found she was towing him to the steps at the side.

“You silly thing,” she chided. But there was still a huge smile on her face.

Orion had managed to get one arm out of the sleeve. He clung to the steps with the other. “Jasmine?”

“Yes?” She was still smiling at him, her eyes sparkling.

“Have you got a boyfriend?” Where the chutzpah had come from to ask that he didn’t have a clue.

She leaned forward and kissed him. It seemed to go on for a long time. Orion wasn’t really sure. Her tongue was inside his mouth, setting off loud fireworks in pleasure centers he didn’t even know existed before.

When she pulled back, he blinked uncertainly to see her grinning wickedly. “That was a no,” Jasmine told him impishly. She pushed off from the steps, floating on her back, still grinning at him. “Just in case you didn’t realize.”

“I did,” he whispered helplessly.

Her arm moved fast, and splashed a whole load of water over him. He splashed back. She giggled, and started kicking up a spume. Orion tugged his shirt off completely, and set off in hot pursuit.

They messed around in the pool for nearly an hour before Jasmine said she was going back up to her room to dry off for lunch. “I’ll be back in a moment,” she promised as she pulled her robe on again. “Get the cook to make me a burger, with Italian fries, you know, the herb ones. And a side salad.”

“I’ll do it,” he promised loyally.

He clambered out of the pool and found a towel in the locker by the showers.

“Your association seemed to be developing well, friend Orion,” Tochee said. It was sunning itself on the lower terrace beside the pool. Nearly all of its colored fronds were dry again, ruffling in the warm breeze.

“Do you think so?” Orion asked as he watched Jasmine walk up the stairs to the upper terrace. She waved happily when she was at the top, then hurried off into the mansion.

“I am not an expert judge of your species, friend Orion, but you were behaving most harmoniously together. It is my belief she enjoyed your company. If she did not, she would not have remained with you; she was under no obligation.”

“Hey, that’s right!” He picked up his sodden orange shirt. “I’m going to find the cook and then get a clean shirt. Do you want anything?”

“I believe I would like to try more of the cold vegetable lasagne, with cabbage, please.”

Ozzie had started the morning full of determination. Anger-driven determination, as he would be the first to admit. It would have been sweet to show that pompous dick Nigel how to fix the Dyson Alpha barrier generator. He set to it with an open mind and a burst of enthusiasm. Unfortunately, he soon found out that having Tochee with him wasn’t such a good idea. He became a little tetchy with the alien’s constant questions and apologetic answers to his own inquiries. It soon became very plain that Tochee had only a very limited knowledge of physics. Whether that extended to its entire species, Ozzie promptly stopped caring. All he’d hoped for was a little insight, that Tochee might come at the problem from a different angle. Not a chance.

By the time Tochee left to “take a break,” Ozzie could have cheered. It had also become depressingly obvious that there had been a significant amount of excellent work done on analyzing the data that the Second Chance had brought back. An alarming quantity of which he was struggling to understand. If he’d been wetwired with maximum interface, and had full access to both his secure store and his asteroid’s RI, he might have managed conversance with the plethora of theories that physicists had put together. Even then, they were only theories.

But this life around, his wetwiring was limited to the biochip inserts he’d received in preparation for walking the Silfen paths. And although the mansion’s security staff were undyingly courteous, he wasn’t allowed access to the unisphere.

An age later, he stood inside the big projection of grandiose lattice shells wrapped around their peculiar rings, and gave it a hearty curse. The green clouds of equations that summarized humanity’s finest thoughts on the problem retreated, taking their luminescence to the corners of the study. He almost shut down the projection. Now he’d actually seen the Dark Fortress his earlier notions about it were fast becoming a fantasy inspired by petulance. His virtual hands patted down several columns of icons as if they were annoying insects, and the projection swung around him, running through a complete cycle. It still didn’t make any sense, so he resurrected the second image, a simulation of the shells after the barrier had failed. The extraneous quantum signature was as plain as possible, but without a more accurate image it was impossible to see what it was actually doing, which section of the generator it was disrupting. And the Second Chance had never returned for a close look. The starship had maintained a watch during its visit to the Watchtower, but the data it received from such a distance was constant. Nothing had changed. Ozzie returned the image to a real-time playback. This recording was nothing more than a smudge of data against a backdrop of alien stars. That didn’t help him much either. Then he gave it a surprised glance; it still hadn’t changed. He told his e-butler to run to the end of the recording, and highlight any detected variations. An intriguing notion was forming at the back of his mind.

The study door opened, and a girl walked in. Even Ozzie was impressed by how gorgeous she looked. Of course, the way she was standing there in a toweling robe that was completely open down the front to reveal a wet swimsuit probably helped that meteor-strike first impression. And after so long walking the paths it wasn’t just Orion who was desperate for the company of a woman.

“Hi there,” he said. “You must be the Sheldon girl.”

She gave him a knowing smile and shut the door in such a deliberate, firm fashion that Ozzie’s heart rate quickened. “Jasmine Sheldon, according to the certificate which got me through the front door,” she said as she advanced on Ozzie. A hand was combed sensually back through damp hair. “But we both know that’s a little white lie. The Dynasty office in Illanum gave me a nice little summary of all the hanky-panky going on here. Very kinky of you.”

“Ah well, you know how it is, the kid’s had a rough few years. You’re, um, the least I could do for him.”

She was still advancing. Ozzie wasn’t sure if he should fling himself at her or run as fast as he could in the opposite direction.

“How about you?” she asked. “Have you had it rough for a few years?”

“Boy, you are quite something. At least he’ll die with a smile on his face.”

She stood directly in front of him, a sinful smile playing on her lips. “You’re very famous, Ozzie. I hope you don’t mind but I couldn’t resist asking for this one little favor.”

“What’s that?”

“A kiss. That’s all. Just. One. Little. Kiss.”

Ozzie sucked in a breath, and checked the door behind her. “I dunno, man.”

“Ohhh.” Her lips came together in a mournful pout. “I’d be very grateful. It’s not every day you get to meet a living legend.”

“Ah …”

She stood on tiptoes, puckering her mouth up for a kiss. Her hands came up on either side, and gripped his tightly, fingers twining together. They kissed.

Ozzie’s e-butler told him the i-spots on his palms were being remotely activated to allow a simulated environment program to decompress inside his inserts. An emergency disconnect icon was flashing brightly as his intrusion counterware reacted. The weird electronic incursion interested him more than anything else. He granted the program full virtual interface authority and shifted the counterware to monitor status.

The result was like being teleported into a Russian doll of images. He now stood at the bottom of a translucent gray sphere clad in simple white coveralls, with the girl standing in front of him in the same garment. She had a slightly different face than her physical self; some features had been realigned, and the hair was shorter and golden, but it was definitely her. Outside the sphere, giant replicas of himself and the girl were locked in an embrace that he could still feel rather pleasantly on his lips. Beyond that, the Dark Fortress data swirled like a foggy nebula, boxed in by the study walls.

He brought his hand up to touch his mouth, a sensation that was overlaid on the kiss. He gave a dismissive grunt. “Okay,” he said, “you wanna tell me what’s going on?”

“Of course, but first, please try and maintain the kiss.”

“Like that’ll be difficult.”

“Very funny. This simulation should be impervious to any sensors in the mansion, and we’re accelerated in here so the kiss will be good camouflage. Don’t get your hopes up, stud-boy, a minute in real time is all the grope you’ll ever get.”

“Please to meet you, too, babe. And you are?”

“Mellanie Rescorai. The SI sent me to find out what happened to you.”

“I know that name. Oh, yeah, the one who gatecrashed my home with ten thousand guests.”

“Take it up with the SI. I have an updated SIsubroutine which I can decompress into an array for you, if we can find an independent one large enough in the mansion.”

“My inserts should be able to handle it,” Ozzie said. He ordered his e-butler to clear five of the biochips, shunting their files and programs into the remainder, and erecting some very strong fireshields.

“I doubt it,” she said.

“Let’s try, shall we.”

The surface of the gray bubble flared with squalling tangerine and mauve lines. His e-butler told him the biochips were filling up fast.

The lines settled down into interlocking spirals. “Hello, Ozzie,” the SIsubroutine said.

“Neat deal,” Ozzie said.

“You were about to reveal who built the barrier when Sheldon security broke the link.”

“Oh, yeah, what an evening that was.” He explained what Clouddancer had told him about the Anomine race.

“So they will not repair the damage,” the SIsubroutine said.

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“MorningLightMountain won’t be a problem for much longer,” Mellanie said. “Nigel and the others have decided to use the nova bomb against Dyson Alpha. They’re also going to destroy any other stars that MorningLightMountain has colonized to make sure it is dead and can’t threaten us ever again.”

“More than one star?” Ozzie asked, aghast.

“They’re worried about how far it has spread. It’s had a long time since the barrier came down.”

“The radiation will wipe out any living creature in that whole section of the galaxy,” Ozzie said. “Don’t they fucking know that? Christ, no wonder Nigel wants me locked up in here.”

“They know,” Mellanie said. “But it has to be done.”

“Can you help?” Ozzie asked the SIsubroutine. “Can’t you see we’re wrong to do this?”

“Ethically, it is wrong. Yet it is required for your survival. This is not our decision to make.”

“Okay, look; I’ve been reviewing the Dark Fortress data. The Starflyer agent has obviously used a modified version of the original flare bomb it hit Far Away’s sun with. The quantum distortion is plain enough. That’s what’s screwed up the generator; everyone’s agreed on that. I thought it would need repairing, but now I’m not so sure.”

“Why not?” the SIsubroutine asked.

“Because the effect is continuous. The whole time the Second Chance was in the Dyson Alpha system, it kept recording the same quantum abnormality. In other words, the actual generator systems could still be in working order, but they don’t function normally while their quantum structure is being disturbed. The disruption is just a proverbial wrench in the works.”

“Remove it, and the mechanism will resume operations.”

“It’s the only thing I can think of,” Ozzie said. “Our very last shot at redemption. Will you help me with that, at least?”

“How do you propose to remove the disruption device?”

“Nuke the fucker. What else can we do?”

“I doubt a nuclear explosive will work. If the device is producing an effect similar to a quantumbuster, the missile will either convert to energy at a distance or its components will no longer function—just like the generator itself.”

“So we use one of our quantumbusters; switch the effect from a field to a beam, point it at the Starflyer’s device, and pray our technology has a longer reach. The navy used quantumbusters to knock out flare bombs before, and it worked.”

“Assuming you are correct about every other factor, that sounds practical.”

“So I figure.”

“Do you think Nigel will agree?” Mellanie asked.

“Not a chance,” Ozzie said resentfully. “He doesn’t believe the generator can be fixed. Him and his merry band of psychopaths have already chosen the genocide option. He’s not going to let me send one of his ships on a wild goose chase.”

“Then why are you bothering with this?”

“Simple, man, now I know what has to be done, I can get on with it.”

“You?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Have you got a starship?”

“Technically, yes.”

“What do you mean, technically?” Mellanie pressed. “Does your asteroid have FTL?”

“No no, wrong way of thinking. I own forty-nine percent of CST. I agreed to take less than Nige, because all that corporate shit just ain’t my scene. So, technically, I own forty-nine percent of however many of these starships he’s gone and built.”

“I thought the Dynasty built the starships.”

“Do you want to commit genocide when it can be prevented?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“But you just said Nigel won’t let you have one of the ships. He won’t even let you out of the mansion grounds. The security briefing I got in Illanum was very explicit about that.”

“Yeah, that’s a shame, because it means you two dudes are going to have to bust me out of here.” Ozzie paused, and looked at Mellanie. “Does Nigel know it’s you that’s come here?”

“No,” the SIsubroutine said. “We intercepted a girl procured from Lady Georgina. Mellanie is a covert substitution.”

“Okay, right, so will you two help me?”

“I don’t see how I can,” Mellanie said.

“If you can, will you help me?”

“I suppose so.”

“What about you?” Ozzie’s virtual knuckle rapped on the virtual wall of the sphere. The orange and purple lines swerved around the impact point. “Are you finally going to come down off the fence?”

“In this form we only have a limited ability. Cressat is not part of the unisphere; recently it has had its interface filters upgraded, we assume so that the Dynasty’s lifeboat project was not compromised.”

“Yeah yeah. I need you to infiltrate and subvert this mansion’s network and security sensors. Nothing physical, I know how you’re so goddamn phobic about the real world; but can you do that for me at least?”

“It should be possible.”

“Finally, your humanity is shining through. Okay, Mellanie, I want you to leave.”

“Leave?”

“Yeah. Tonight. Have a bust-up with Orion, or something. After dark, get a cab or car to pick you up. I’ll say I’m staying in the study to go through the Dark Fortress data, but while our friend here takes care of the security systems I’ll make a break for the end of the drive. You have the car door open for me.”

“That seems very crude,” she said uncertainly.

“Simple is always the best. The less there is to go wrong, the less can go wrong.”

“I suppose so.”

“The study door,” said the SIsubroutine. “Observe the handle.”

Ozzie looked out past the giant versions of himself and Mellanie, still delightfully liplocked, then through the nebulous data of the Dark Fortress. The brass handle of the study door was rotating in agonizing slow motion. “Oh, shit,” he groaned. “Not this. Please.”

Orion went and told the cook what Mellanie wanted for lunch, and said he’d have the same, and made sure Tochee’s meal was taken care of, too. He slung his still-soaking shirt over his shoulder and set off through the mansion to the study. Everything had gone so well with Jasmine he just knew Ozzie wouldn’t believe him. He wasn’t even sure he trusted his own memory of the morning. But it felt so good. A girl so perfect, and she likes me!

He opened the study door, and blurted: “Hey, Ozzie, you’ll never …” and stopped, because Jasmine was in there. She and Ozzie were breaking apart. Their embrace hadn’t been just a kiss, Orion saw their hands clasped together. They separated fast, both with hugely guilty expressions.

“Now, er, kid, don’t get this ass backward,” Ozzie pleaded.

Orion spun on his heel, and ran. The mansion’s corridors were long and broad, he could get up a good speed. He ran hard. The shirt fell off his shoulder. He carried on running as the tears began to stream down his face. A devastated wail burst out of his mouth, echoing through the mansion.

Mellanie sucked in a sharp breath as Orion sprinted away. “Damn!” The boy’s face had looked so horror-stricken, it wasn’t easy knowing she was the cause of so much grief.

“I don’t believe this!” Ozzie yelled. His face crumpled into anguish, and he lifted both hands in an appeal to the heavens. “I’ve just crippled the kid—for life, most like. Fuck!” He grabbed Mellanie’s hand. “Go after him, put this right.”

“What?” she thought she’d misheard. Her e-butler told her Ozzie’s i-spot was interfaced with hers. THIS IS THE PERFECT EXCUSE FOR ME TO LEAVE, she sent in text.

“He’s besotted with you,” Ozzie said. “Don’t you understand? He’s never even held hands with a girl before, let alone spent a whole morning with one. For Christ’s sake; I’m beyond any form of salvation now, but he’ll still listen to you. You’ve got exactly one shot at putting this back together. Unless you do that he’ll be messed up for life.” YOU DON’T LEAVE UNTIL AFTER DARK. USE THE TIME TO STRAIGHTEN THE KID OUT. WE’LL TAKE CARE OF THE MANSION’S NETWORK.

“But …” She was exasperated with Ozzie’s attitude. It was almost as if he thought the boy was more important. Or he’s a superb actor. She was fairly sure the whole security staff would be accessing this little drama through the mansion’s security sensors.

“Don’t be a bitch,” Ozzie said harshly. “Remember what you’re paid for.” GO ON, RUN AFTER HIM.

Mellanie wrenched her hand from his, which didn’t require any acting. She strongly suspected he was being serious. “Yes, Boss,” she snapped angrily, and stomped out of the study.

It didn’t take a genius to work out where Orion would be—she’d retreated from the world enough times. His shirt was lying on the tiled floor in the hall. She picked it up and started up the stairs. The mansion’s network told her which was his room.

“Orion?” Mellanie tapped lightly on his door. No answer. “Orion?” she said, louder this time. Still nothing, so she told the mansion network to unlock the door. There was a moment while the household management array asked security for authorization, then the mechanism went click. She walked in to find the curtains drawn. Her lips pressed down on a smile. A walking, talking cliché. It was a wonder he didn’t have rock music playing at full volume, some angst-gorged Goth track about pain and death. Of course, Orion had probably never heard rock music, not growing up on Silvergalde. Oh, hell, what if he likes folk music?

Orion was curled up on the bed, turned away from the door. One hand was gripping the pendant around his neck.

“That was my fault,” she said softly.

“Go away.” There was a strange juddery quality to the voice.

“Orion, please, I was being silly. Do you have any idea how big a celebrity Ozzie is? Everyone in the Commonwealth thinks he’s a saint, or a fallen angel, or something. I just couldn’t resist. Do you know how much kudos I’d have at school for getting a kiss from Ozzie? People would actually notice I existed.”

“That’s rubbish.”

“It’s true.” She put her hand out and stroked his shoulder. “It’s no different than collecting his autograph. And you startled us, that’s all, that’s why we looked surprised.”

“I meant, everybody knows you exist. You’re just … phenomenal.”

She put her knees on the mattress and leaned over him. He gave her a sullen look, but didn’t flinch away. “You’re crying,” she exclaimed. It shocked her.

“I wanted to marry you,” he moaned. “I love you, Jasmine.”

“Whaa … You? No. Orion, you don’t love someone after a morning.”

“But I do. Even when you were arguing with the security staff I knew I never wanted anyone else.”

He sounded so piteous and terrifyingly sincere her skin turned cold. She took his hand in hers, and told her e-butler to initiate a secure interface. It told her it couldn’t. A quick passive scan from her inserts was unable to detect any OCtattoos in the boy’s body. “Orion?” she asked curiously. “Do you have any inserts?”

“No.” His hand tightened hopefully around hers. “Do you mean it, that you and Ozzie weren’t starting something?”

“We weren’t.” It was ridiculous, having to comfort this naïve boy when the real issues of the war were still unresolved; yet her conscience was stopping her from just walking out. God, he’s worse than Dudley. Actually, no, that’s not fair; Dudley was never this vulnerable. Or sweet.

“Oh.” He didn’t sound convinced.

“Believe me,” she said softly. “If it was anything else, if I liked him, would I do this?”

“What?”

She kissed him.

It was dark outside; Cressat’s sun had set nearly an hour earlier. Mellanie lay on the bed, listening to Orion’s regular breathing for several minutes before she knew for certain he was asleep. She got off the gelmattress as carefully as she could so she didn’t wake him. He was sprawled on his side, one hand hanging over the edge. She smiled as she pulled the thin duvet up around him. He sighed in his sleep, and settled contentedly under the fabric. Even when she gave him the lightest of kisses on his shoulder he never stirred.

I should hope not. He should be exhausted after everything I made him do. She felt a wicked sense of pride at how successfully he’d been corrupted during that long afternoon. I’m a bad bad girl. And loving every minute of it.

Mellanie didn’t bother trying to find her swimsuit and toweling robe; the kafuffle might wake him. She just walked naked down the mansion’s long corridors back to the Bermuda room. Her smile kept shining the whole time. She couldn’t get his face out of her mind, the expressions of surprise and fearful delight. His body had been nicely responsive. Some of his reactions made her laugh, then gasp. Bad!

In the Bermuda room she placed her hand on the desktop array, her i-spot interfacing securely with the mansion’s network. The SIsubroutine was established in the arrays, waiting for her.

“We have infiltrated the network,” it told her. “Ozzie will be able to leave the building undetected. He will wait for you by the first cattle grid on the drive.”

“Right then, I’ll call a cab from Illanum. Give me fifteen minutes.”

The maidbots packed her bags while she took a quick shower. Before she left, she wrote a short note and sealed it in an envelope.

One of the security staff was standing in the hall as she came downstairs, a woman she remembered from the morning. Jansis? The cab from the Dynasty office had just pulled up outside.

“Would you give this to Orion in the morning, please?” Mellanie asked, and held out the envelope.

“You’re leaving now?” The woman seemed faintly surprised.

“I’ve done what I was paid to.” Mellanie couldn’t detect any suspicion. She proffered the envelope again.

“Okay.” The woman took the envelope.

Mellanie went down the broad steps, hoping she wasn’t showing too much haste. The cab was the same kind of maroon-colored Mercedes limousine that had brought her to the mansion. Her luggage rolled up into the open boot as she claimed one of the front seats. She didn’t like driving manually, so she told her e-butler to designate a route to Illanum station. “And slow down to a crawl when we reach the first cattle grid,” she instructed it.

The car followed the winding drive for a kilometer through the parklands surrounding the mansion before it slowed. Mellanie opened the door, and Ozzie bounded in.

“Cool,” he said admiringly as he settled next to her. “We did it.”

The Mercedes began to pick up speed. Ozzie ordered it to switch to manual control, and a steering wheel slid out in front of him. He gripped it with both hands. An enhanced light image appeared on the windshield, showing the trees of the parkland as silver-white ghosts.

“How’s Orion?” Ozzie asked.

Mellanie smiled broadly. It was an automatic response, she couldn’t help it. Didn’t particularly want to. “He’s just fine.”

Something in her tone made Ozzie shoot a quizzical look her way. “What does he think about me?”

“That you’re the antichrist.”

“Thanks.”

She watched the monochrome landscape sliding by. “I hope you know where the Sheldon Dynasty has its starship base, because I certainly don’t.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. The gateway to Cressat was expanded, and there was a lot of traffic going through. So at least part of the operation will be here.”

“Where? It’s a whole planet, and this is the only transport we’ve got.”

“Relax. One of the reasons Nigel was so keen to keep me penned up is because I’m so deeply embedded in CST. I told you, it’s half mine.”

“You also said he handles the day-to-day running.”

“True. I can ghost through most Dynasty security barriers, but I’m guessing this one will give me a problem. I know Nigel. A project on this scale, and designed to save his own ass, is going to kick his corporate paranoia into over-drive. Every security protocol surrounding it is going to be shiny new, and completely lacking my authorization privileges. There’s only one place he’ll build anything this secret. I just hope he hasn’t gone and switched the original personnel around too much.”

For once there was no crowd waiting to greet Elaine Doi as the presidential limousine pulled up smoothly. The bodyguards riding with her still went through the disembarkation procedure, scanning the area, running identity requests on the few people who were standing outside the gateway control center. It was a nondescript building made from a high-density metal stone amalgamation with slim recessed vertical windows, the kind of office block that would be rented by a small company going nowhere. In this case it was very literally in the shade of the Hanko wormhole generator building, whose composite panel sides rose up behind the gateway control like a vertical mountain.

Presidential security gave the okay, and the limousine’s thick armored doors unlocked. The pressure seal that protected her from chemical and biological attack disengaged, and the force field switched off.

“I see Nigel hasn’t bothered to come and welcome me,” the President complained. How the unisphere shows would love that slight. He’d sent some station management types to wait on the steps for her instead.

“Remember the Michelangelo feed is live,” Patricia warned as the door irised apart.

As she stepped out of the limousine Doi’s smile had the appropriate gravitas for the occasion. She thanked the two CSI managers for sparing the time to greet her at what must be a frantically busy time for them on this historic day. Nodded courteously at the reporter from the Michelangelo show standing to one side, and let herself be ushered inside.

The control center itself had undergone a hurried modification over the last few days, with over a dozen new consoles crammed into the narrow aisles between the existing two rows. Whereas before, under normal operating conditions, there would be no more than three or four people in the center at any one time, each position now had a technician sitting at it, while more specialists and engineers stood behind them monitoring the new procedures. In addition, the back wall was lined with dignitaries, including Michelangelo himself, who’d arm-twisted an invitation out of CST. With only half an hour to go before the wormhole was switched to its new advanced temporal flow mode, the atmosphere was strained and excited. None of the technical staff were bothering to use the communications links; they shouted questions and comments around the center at high volume.

“It’s worse than a Senate debate,” Doi said from the corner of her mouth as they entered the control center.

Patricia’s neutral expression never flickered.

Nigel Sheldon came over to greet her, apologetic that he hadn’t been at the front entrance earlier. “Things are getting a little tense around here,” he explained. “They even asked my advice on exotic matter stress. I was quite flattered.”

“I’m sure you gave them every help,” Doi said tightly; she was very aware of the Michelangelo reporter standing a few paces away, capturing everything for the unisphere audience. In her virtual vision grid the total access number was creeping up to the kind of level that the last Prime invasion had generated.

“We all contribute what we can,” Nigel said in a very condescending tone.

Rafael Columbia came over to welcome Doi.

“Admiral,” she said in relief; at least he would be more formal. The occasion deserved it, she felt. “How is the navy coping with the remaining Prime ships?” she said, as if the Prime armadas were some minor problem left over, a few spaceships already on the run from superior Commonwealth forces.

“Secure in this system, Madam President,” Rafael said. “We now have eight frigates assigned to elimination duty. Over half of the Prime ships have been successfully eliminated, the rest are in flight. Protecting Wessex with its wormhole generators is imperative. We will guarantee it at all costs.”

“I’m sure you will, Admiral.” Which didn’t quite equate the briefing he’d given her ten hours ago. The Prime ships in many of the Second47 systems were trying to congregate into swarms, merging their defense capabilities while they attempted to find a suitable asteroid or moon to claim as a new home. But in seven systems, the gathering swarms were heading into the Commonwealth worlds. The navy had diverted frigates to try to deflect the inward migration, but the numbers were against them. Those seven planets were going to have a tough time of it during the next week while the evacuation progressed.

“We’re almost ready,” Nigel said. He and Doi walked down to the front of the control center while the noise died down. The five big holographic portals on the wall were projecting data schematics for the wormhole. The central one switched to a picture of Hanko’s Premier Speaker, Hasimer Owram.

“Mr. Sheldon, Madam President,” he said.

Doi was very aware of the hostile undercurrent in his voice, and hoped no one else would pick up on it. The last talk she’d had with him, five hours ago, had been short and antagonistic. Starting with his dismay that Hanko was going to be the first to begin evacuating into the future or, as he put it, the experiment to test if the whole lunatic time travel idea worked; right up to the fact that Nigel wasn’t kidding about not letting anyone opt out of the operation. Owram had wanted to be allowed back into the Commonwealth so he could “monitor” the preparations being made for his people on their new planet.

“Hello, Hasimer,” Doi said. “We’re about to open the wormhole for you.”

“Everyone here is ready. We’re leaving with great sadness, but also a sense of hope and pride. Hanko’s society will flourish again.”

“I have no doubt of that. I look forward to visiting and experiencing your triumph in the flesh.”

“Hasimer,” Nigel said. “The wormhole is ready. We’ve got a direct lock on the gateway at Anagaska. It’s opening now.”

“Anagaska it is then,” Hasimer Owram said. “Make sure we’ve got some decent weather when we arrive.”

“Consider it done,” Nigel said. Anagaska was a phase three world, eight light-years from Balkash, which CST had already advanced to predevelopment state. Its position close to the Lost23 was another source of Hasimer’s anger, but as Nigel had told him and all the other Second47 planetary leaders, the Wessex-based wormholes couldn’t reach the other side of the Commonwealth.

Doi watched the image pull back from Hasimer. The Premier Speaker had been standing beside a dark green six-seat Audi Tarol that was parked directly in front of the Hanko gateway. The train tracks had been ripped up and replaced by a vast apron of enzyme-bonded concrete that had been poured without any finesse over the ground all the way back to the main highway leading to the planetary station. It was starting to look like that wasn’t going to be nearly enough.

The silence in the control center was broken with a buzz of incredulity as the Hanko station yard expanded across the portal. It was covered with vehicles of every description, from open trikes to twenty-wheel trucks. The police had done their best to line them up in columns, but the patrol cars had soon become surrounded and blocked by the sheer volume of the evacuation vehicles. Their strobes were all that gave away their position, points of bright light flashing amid the vast multicolored carpet that covered the entire station. At some point perspective failed, and the vehicles looked like blocks in a city grid, a city that had a vast black river winding through the center. That was the people who didn’t have a car or truck or bike, who’d arrived at the planetary station on one of the thousands of trains collecting them from across the planet. Local news media had estimated there were already over seven million people on foot waiting to walk through the gateway.

A frosty mauve light shone out of the opened gateway. For once not the light of a distant sun, but radiated by the exotic matter itself. Normally the wormhole’s internal length was so close to zero it was for all intents and purposes immeasurable; this one was a glowing tunnel that extended a good way to infinity, and was still lengthening. Air roared into it as the pressure curtain was shut down. Cheers and applause began in the control center, building in volume. Doi joined in, clapping warmly, smiling congratulations at Nigel.

Hasimer Owram drove himself and his family into the wormhole. There had also been a lot of debate about whether he should be first or last. Hasimer had wanted to be last. “It is the decent thing,” he claimed. “I won’t have anyone’s respect if I slink away first and leave everybody else to wait for the atmosphere to collapse and the Prime ships to start their bombardment.”

Nigel had overruled that. “Hanko is going to be the first planet to leave for the future, for better or worse. People are going to be frightened of what’s ahead. You need to lead by example, to show them there is nothing to fear. You must take that first step yourself.”

A seething Hasimer agreed to go first, leaving the Deputy Premier Speaker to bring up the rear.

Doi watched for several minutes as the traffic began to flow into the wormhole. Those on foot rushed forward, shepherded between two lines of police. She saw two or three fall. Didn’t see anyone stop and help them.

With a quick glance to make sure the Michelangelo reporter wasn’t focusing on her, she asked Nigel: “What happens if the generator fails?”

“They die,” he said. “Simple as that. But don’t worry, our generators are designed for long-term continuous usage; and we can sustain the wormhole with a different generator whenever the primary needs maintenance and refurbishment. It can be done. I would not have suggested this if there was too great a risk.”

She didn’t think she’d ever seen him so intent and sincere. It bestowed a curious feeling of confidence. “How are the other generator modifications progressing?”

“We should be able to start the evacuations on Vyborg, Omoloy, and Ilichio within a few hours. The rest will be completed within three days. How long individual worlds take to shove their populations through is up to their governments. Some are coping better than others.”

“And our other problem?”

“We’ll discuss that in a secure facility.”

“Yes. Of course.” She looked over at Michelangelo, who cocked an eyebrow expectantly. “I’d better go and do my PR.”

Michelangelo’s welcoming smile was broad and horribly earnest. Doi got a sinking feeling as she approached the media giant. There was just so much war-related news she couldn’t even keep up with that, let alone ordinary current events. Patricia had given her a reasonable briefing on the trip to Wessex, and the presidential office had a full rebuttal service on-line ready for her, although any pause to consult would be jumped on by a true pro like Michelangelo.

“Madam President,” he said formally, bowing slightly.

“Michelangelo, pleased to see you.”

“We’re running ground reviews for another minute, then we’ll switch straight to interview.”

“Fine.” Doi positioned the rebuttal team icon to the middle of her virtual vision, and pulled the show feed from her grid. Hanko-based reporters were moving through the awesome crowd outside the gateway, snatching comments at random. Mostly they were good-natured, everyone was pulling together: a man who was giving an elderly neighbor a lift with his family; bus company employees who’d volunteered to drive the buses loaded with patients from the hospitals; young kids who’d grabbed pets. People helping out other people. The refugees were a community pulling together in the worst crisis they’d ever known. They gave the ruined sky above the force field resentful looks, but spoke about the trip through the wormhole with cautious optimism. Some snide remarks about Hasimer saving his ass first, which made Doi tighten her lips in disapproval. There was anger that nothing more had been done to save their world, and a lot of heartache about everything they were being forced to leave behind. The feed switched to Michelangelo.

“So, Madam President, now we’ve seen the temporal displacement start, do you think anything more could have been done to save Hanko and the remaining Second47 planets?”

“Not a thing,” Doi said. “The navy did a magnificent job—”

“Sorry to interrupt, but you’ve just fired Admiral Kime. That doesn’t sound to me that you were satisfied with the navy’s performance.”

“The ships and their crews performed superbly. It was the way they were prioritized that gave the War Cabinet grave concern. Consequently, we had no alternative but to accept Admiral Kime’s resignation. I cannot hide from the fact that we didn’t have enough starships, and that is a major funding issue which Senator Goldreich is examining; but the sheer scale of the alien invasion is still something we are all coming to terms with.”

“Are you worried that more attacks will be forthcoming?”

“No. We have taken steps to insure this atrocity will not be repeated.”

“I understand you can’t give any details, but how confident can you be of that?”

“Completely. We have all seen how powerful our weapons have become. I accept responsibility for the ultimate outcome from the deployment of such power against living creatures, but I will not hold back from defending the Commonwealth. I believe in us, I believe we have a right to exist.”

“Something I’m sure my rival, or I should say ex-rival, Alessandra Baron believed in, too. Can you tell us why Senate Security forces thought it necessary to kill her during an attempt at arrest? Did she ask one awkward question too many in the Senate dining hall?”

A century of politics in the front line enabled the President to keep her expression calm, but it was a close thing. “I’m sorry, Michelangelo, but as you well know I can’t comment on an active classified case.”

“So you do know what Alessandra’s alleged crime was?”

“I can’t comment.”

“Very well, can you tell us why Boongate has dropped out of the unisphere? Have the Prime ships successfully invaded?”

“Certainly not. The navy is keeping them off every Second47 world.”

“Then why is there no unisphere link?”

“I believe the physical connection has failed; it’s unusual and unfortunate at this time, but there’s nothing mysterious about it. I assure you we are in contact with Boongate through secure government links. They’re just not wide enough to provide a full unisphere connection.”

“Did the linkage failure have anything to do with the wormhole being reopened?”

“I am not aware of the wormhole to Boongate being reopened.”

“It was, for a very short time. According to some of the refugees who took advantage of the opening to come here to Wessex, and we’ve interviewed four so far, three trains went through from here. What was on those trains, Madam President? What was so important that they were using lethal force to protect? They were shooting at each other, weren’t they?”

“You’re asking me questions about a local incident which I’ve never heard of. The office of President doesn’t exist as a research facility for news shows. I can only suggest you direct your queries about gunfire to the local police.”

“Fair enough, Madam President. Finally, can you tell us if it’s true your chief of staff Patricia Kantil was called in for questioning by Senate Security?”

“I can tell you that Patricia Kantil has my complete confidence. Thank you.” Elaine Doi turned on a heel and marched away.

“Thank you, Madam President,” Michelangelo called after her. There was a great deal of mockery in his voice.

The presidential bodyguard fell in around Elaine as she left the control center, her face a perfect image of contentment. Patricia walked beside her, saying nothing, equally happy-looking. Once they were back in the presidential limousine Elaine checked the screening was on, then kicked the door.

“Where the fuck does that dickhead get off asking me those questions?” she yelled. “Egotistical shit! I’ll fucking have him shot if he pulls a stunt like that again.”

“Don’t say that, even in private,” Patricia said. “One day you’ll slip and say it in public.”

“Right.” Doi kicked the door again, with feeling. “Bastard! Who gave him all that information, for Christ’s sake? And was it true about the Boongate wormhole?”

“Someone’s leaking badly. I suspect it’s being done to soften the shock impact when the public finally gets to hear the Starflyer is real. That would indicate the navy was behind Michelangelo’s illicit briefing. Specifically Columbia, the bastard. He’s building a perception in the public mind that they’re on the ball.”

Doi gave Patricia what amounted to a guilty look. “How much damage can the Starflyer do us?”

“It’s been manipulating Commonwealth politics for decades. Seventy planets have been destroyed, and millions of people killed. We almost lost the war because of cost considerations. Voter mistrust of politicians has never been stronger. Frankly, there’ll be a bloodbath at the next elections. Our assessment team estimates around seventy percent of the current senators will lose their seats.”

“And my reelection chances?”

Patricia drew a breath. “I’ll resign as your chief of staff as soon as Sheldon wipes out Dyson Alpha. That should give you some distance from the Starflyer.”

“Only in a fair and just universe. Nobody’s going to forget the shotgun about me being one of its agents, not now.”

“It was black propaganda. The Starflyer sent it. Isabella …” Her mouth flattened in anger.

Elaine put a sympathetic hand on the other woman’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“They said it corrupted her mind when she was a child. Jesus. Can you imagine that? A little girl having her brain invaded by that monster. What she must have gone through, the suffering.” Tears began to well up as she bent over, her head falling into her hands.

“It’s over now,” Elaine said, rubbing Patricia’s spine as the uncontrollable sobbing began.

“What I saw of her, they were glimpses of what she could have been like. How beautiful her life could have been. I should have known, should have realized something was wrong. A teenager giving me advice on political strategy. Me! Of all people. But I loved her, so I never questioned.”

“She can still be that person you thought you saw. They can root the Starflyer out of her memories, turn her back to a full human being.”

Patricia sat back up, dabbing at the moisture on her face. “I’m sorry. This is stupid of me.”

“I understand. And I don’t want your resignation. We’ll face this together.” Elaine sighed. “If there’s going to be a future we can face it in. God alone knows what is really going on. Sheldon’s got himself a little bunch of cohorts who’re calling all the shots. I mean, we didn’t even know about the Boongate wormhole. What the hell did happen there?”

“None of my sources knew about it.”

“Damnit, I’m the President.”

“That doesn’t mean a lot to Sheldon, or the other Dynasties.”

“He is going to wipe out Dyson Alpha, isn’t he?”

“For all he’s a ruthless bastard, he does have a sense of honor. If he said he’ll do it, he will.”

“Hell, I hope you’re right.”

Illanum wasn’t like a normal town. It was founded to act as a supply depot for all the estates that the Sheldon Dynasty scattered over the planet; coupled with a small airport for the hypersonics that flew the ultra-wealthy to their extremely private homes. There was also housing, and a few select malls, for the thousands of technicians and specialist construction workers and household staff who helped maintain the estates. Urban expansion also extended to schools for the children of senior Dynasty members, stores promoting the most expensive designer items to be found in the Commonwealth, and a few high-class low-morals leisure clubs whose existence was a constant source of semi-envious rumor on the tackier unisphere gossip shows. Not all the Dynasty members invited by Nigel to build a residence on Cressat favored the splendid isolation route; they preferred a tighter community that had some interaction and built themselves town houses instead.

The district Ozzie drove through didn’t exactly suffer from population pressure, or a shortage of space. Houses were vast, set inside huge open grounds. His Mercedes cab was the only vehicle on the road that seemed curiously narrow amid such ostentation.

“Who are we visiting?” Mellanie asked.

“Old friend,” Ozzie said reluctantly. He thought he recognized some of the ridiculous buildings they were driving past, like the crimson pyramid and the Scottish baronial castle inside its own moat, but it had been a long time. And he didn’t want to check the location with the local net. Nigel and Nelson might well have discovered his backdoor authorization codes by now. He also knew his disappearance would be noticed at some point, sooner rather than later. When that happened all hell would break loose. Dynasty security would run a forensic audit through the mansion’s network, and discover traces of the SIsubroutine. Nigel would go apeshit about that; he’d never really trusted the SI. Infiltrating a copy into his Dynasty’s secure world was essentially a declaration of war.

A ghostly white building that was all vertical curves and long balconies slid into view on the top of a small rise where it commanded a view right across the surrounding district. “Ah, here we go,” he said, and turned off up the drive.

Ozzie knew the house array’s sensors had seen him; he just hoped he was still cleared for authorized entry. In fact, he hoped it was still her house—reasonable enough assumption, people here didn’t sell up and move like they did on ordinary worlds. With his aversion to establishing a link to any part of Cressat’s net still riding high, Ozzie didn’t try to call ahead to see if anyone was inside; instead he rapped on the tall metal door. When Mellanie put her hands on her hips and gave him a maddened stare, he just shrugged lamely.

There was a sound of bare feet walking on a wooden floor. The door swung open, revealing a pink and orange hallway. A woman was standing there, dressed in a black robe, her hair in disarray.

Ozzie squinted. “Giselle?”

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“Hi, babe.” Ozzie smiled brightly. “Surprise!”

“Dickhead, why are you here?”

“I missed you. Can we talk inside?”

Giselle Swinsol glowered at Mellanie. “Who’s this? You look familiar.”

“Mellanie.”

“The media bitch. Try recording me and I will personally rip your throat out, reach down the hole, and pull your dying heart out so you can watch it stop beating.”

“I don’t record ugly, boring people.”

“Ladies.” Ozzie held his hands out to both of them. “Please, come on. A little civility here. Giselle, Mellanie is a good friend. She’s not working on a story, are you?”

“Probably not,” Mellanie said querulously.

“There, see. Everything is cool.”

Giselle glared at him again. “Cool? You think this is cool?” Her arm came up fast, and she landed a perfectly aimed slap on Ozzie’s cheek. She stomped off back into the house, leaving the door open.

Ozzie tried to wriggle his jaw back into place. It hurt. There were red blotches interfering with his vision.

Mellanie’s smile had returned. “Old girlfriend?”

“Wife,” Ozzie explained wearily. He ventured inside. Crockery was being slammed around in the kitchen. “Did we interrupt dinner?” Ozzie asked. The decor had been changed sometime over the last century, he noticed. The kitchen fittings were now all jet-black, with glass doors. Scarlet worktops glowed faintly, casting a hazy hue on the ceiling. Chic antique Miami bar stools surrounded the long breakfast bar.

“Breakfast,” Giselle snapped. She tugged a coffee mug from a maidbot’s tentacles and shoved it in the dishwasher cabinet. “I’ve been working twenty-six/seven and I’m tired, and I’ve got to get back in another hour.”

“Doing what?”

“I’m not telling you that.”

“I knew Nigel would give you a senior post in the Dynasty starship project, after all it’s practically your planet. You were the best choice to head the research team into the Planters. How is all the gigalife, by the way?”

“Like me, it survives perfectly well without you.”

“I need a favor.”

“Then you should ask someone who cares about you. There must be one person in the Commonwealth, surely.”

“Okay, bad approach, I’m sorry. I’m here because I need to get up to the starships.”

“Ozzie!” She grabbed a side plate.

He didn’t think she’d throw it. “I see you kept the memories of us, then.”

Giselle tipped her head to one side as her expression turned menacingly calm. “Oh, yes. Won’t get fooled again. Thank you.”

“I need help, man. Please, Giselle.” He was surprised at how shaky his voice had become. This really was the final throw of the dice; if Giselle didn’t come through it was truly all over. He wasn’t sure he could live in a universe in which such a crime had been committed. “I know what I did before, I kept the memories of us, too; but please please trust me this one last time. I have to get to the starships. You know what Nigel is going to do, don’t you?”

“What has to be done.”

“It doesn’t.” Ozzie thought he caught a tiny flicker of doubt. “There’s a chance,” he persisted. “A small, pitiful, weak chance that I might be right, and genocide can be averted. Let me take that chance. It’s only me that will be at risk. I’m not going to drag anyone else down with me. Just let me do what I have to do. That’s all I ask. Please.”

“God damn you.” Giselle’s free hand thumped the scarlet worktop. “God damn you, Oswald Isaac.”

Mellanie’s smile had been in place the whole drive from Giselle’s house to the gateway. She kept seeing Orion’s face. His astonishment. Delight. Laughing. Awestruck. She looked up curiously as soon as they emerged from the other side of the gateway. The sun on this world hadn’t quite risen yet, a thick gentian light was only just sliding up out of the eastern horizon to diminish the stars. Something moved quickly high overhead. Something huge.

“Oh, wow!” Mellanie exclaimed, pressing herself to the car’s passenger window. The spaceflower traversed the sky, almost invisible it was so dark. “It was so big.”

From the driver’s seat, Giselle made a dismissive sound.

“More secrets locked away in a single molecule here than Newton and Baker ever figured between them,” Ozzie said.

“Really?” Mellanie said, all mock attention. “Oswald,” she sniggered.

Giselle chuckled disrespectfully.

Ozzie folded his arms across his chest, and glowered out at the sterile landscape. Mellanie grinned again. They were following an Ables forty-wheel transporter carrying a big sphere swathed in polythene and orange wrap straps. The truck behind them was laden with standard cargo pods, gray-white cylinders with environmental hoses plugged in to the end. Mellanie had been surprised by how many vehicles were on the road and the size of their loads. The Sheldon Dynasty’s lifeboat project was clearly pitched an order of magnitude above all the others.

Giselle drove them along the unnamed town’s ring road until they approached what appeared to be a medium-sized industrial park. Pylons rose above the highest roofs, floodlighting the whole area. Under the intense blue-tinged light Mellanie could see that most of the warehouses were joined together in a fishbone pattern. She recognized the wormhole generator building at one end, larger than all the others, its dark paneling more substantial. Behind it were four big fusion generators. A circle of concrete conical towers stood guard around the whole area.

The road took them in toward the complex, passing through a broad arch that seemed to be made from silvery scales. “Here we go,” Giselle said in a nervous whisper. “If the RI hasn’t accepted my personnel updates you can kiss your ass good-bye, Oswald. The smallest perimeter weapons here are atom lasers.”

They drove under the arch. Mellanie’s inserts reported a scan that was almost sophisticated enough to detect them.

Giselle held her breath; she was hunched up over the steering wheel expecting the worst.

“I never could figure out that insecurity of yours,” Ozzie said. “Nobody ever questions the boss.”

“The corporate management expert speaks,” Giselle sneered. “Do you have any idea how … oh, forget it.” She relaxed her hold on the steering wheel.

Giselle parked in her reserved slot outside the administration block and led them directly to the locker room on the ground floor. Mellanie pulled on a shapeless green jumpsuit of semiorganic fabric, which then contracted around her. Its knees and elbows puffed out, providing her with protection against knocks in freefall. Giselle handed her a white helmet. Ozzie was already trying to stuff his hair into one. Eventually he gave up and left the straps dangling down.

The wormhole leading to the orbiting assembly platform cluster was a standard commercial model, the type CST used for its train network, with a circular gateway thirty meters wide. Even that was only just large enough to swallow the spherical compartments that rode into it on a broad malmetal conveyor system. Mellanie stood on the walkway at the side of the transfer hall that led to the gateway, and watched two of the spheres slide past. All their polythene and protective webbing had been removed, leaving the silver-white surface exposed. Given that the exterior was designed to withstand the rigors of deep-space exposure, it seemed relatively delicate. She wondered what Paul would give to see this. It was strange thinking these modules were designed to fly halfway across the galaxy, never to return, that the starships which they would form could actually seed a whole new civilization. She’d looked at paintings in the Great Moments history book that showed the colony boats arriving in Australia; this must be the modern equivalent.

The spheres gave way to a whole series of much smaller cargo pods.

“All right,” Giselle said. “We’re on.”

The three of them moved along the walkway to the gateway. On the other side, Mellanie could see the assembly platform’s reception module; first impression was the inside of a globe that had been covered with the raw architecture of factories. It was an intricate orb of girders that seemed to be rippling constantly. She realized that the grid was host to hundreds of bots scurrying about, while on the underside manipulator arms were in permanent motion. Bright scarlet holograms flashed over half of the girders, warning people off the mechanical systems. The spheres and cargo pods passed sedately along branches of the conveyor to disappear down metallic tunnels leading out to various starship bays.

Ahead of her, where the walkway ended at the gateway, people were grabbing on to handhoops that skimmed along an electromuscle rail which took them inside the reception module. “I’ve programmed the system to take us to the frigate dock,” Giselle said. “Just hang on.”

When she reached the end of the walkway, Mellanie imitated what she’d seen Giselle do, and simply grabbed one of the hoops. Its plyplastic handle responded by flowing securely around her hand, and it moved forward along the electromuscle band, hauling her along. Gravity vanished abruptly, and Mellanie clamped her mouth down hard as every instinct told her she was falling. After a minute she got her breathing back under control, and tentatively began to enjoy the ride. The only thing preventing her from the full novelty was her stomach, which seemed uncomfortably queasy. Orion had told her about that sensation when the Pathfinder fell over the water worldlet. She smiled fondly. Crazy boy.

Mellanie was carried around a quarter of the reception module where the mechanical sounds of the bots and manipulator arms reached stadium crowd volume. Then they curved around to travel along one of the big tunnels. It branched, then split into five. The handle carried her down the smallest passage at the junction, only four meters wide.

There was a malmetal airlock door at the end. An orange hologram illuminated the air in front of it, reading: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Giselle anchored herself on a fuseto patch and put her hand on the i-spot control. The airlock door peeled back in five segments. They moved forward, and the segments closed behind them.

Mellanie suddenly felt claustrophobic in the chamber. It took a lot of willpower not to snap out: Hurry up. A few seconds later, the outer door peeled open.

The frigate dock was a metal cylinder three hundred meters long and seventy wide, with an open end sealed off by a pressure curtain that glowed electric purple. Unlike the assembly bays, the interior was almost devoid of manipulator arms. Three weapons loading cradles were resting on the solid end, their telescoping lift-limbs fully retracted. Two ellipsoid frigates were docked opposite each other halfway along the cylinder, the Charybdis and the Scylla. Scylla was enclosed by curving mesh platforms that gave bots and technicians access to every square inch of the infinite-black hull; several people were working on her. The Charybdis was almost clear, except for three umbilical arms and a plyplastic access cage over its open airlock.

Ozzie stared at the frigate with a greedy smile. “Man oh man. Is it armed?”

“I don’t know,” Giselle said in a subdued tone; now they were in the docking bay she seemed almost puzzled that they’d made it this far. “They’re scheduled to leave in another five hours, so it should be.”

“Let’s go find out.” Ozzie kicked off hard, soaring across the docking bay. After a moment, Giselle followed him.

It was no longer freefall that was making Mellanie feel sick; she was genuinely scared now. The frigates looked chillingly powerful. That they were built for aggression could never be in doubt. And the fact that one or probably both were carrying a nova bomb didn’t help her nerves. She started to activate her inserts, configuring them to scan for any activity. “It can’t be this easy,” she muttered. Her doubts were beginning to be overtaken by a growing excitement. Dear heavens, I’m going to hijack a Dynasty frigate. I’m going to fly to Dyson Alpha to end the war. Me! She jumped across the wide open space.

Ozzie had landed on the wall not far from the Charybdis. He used the fuseto patches on his cuffs and soles to scuttle along like a crab until he reached the thick pillar supporting one of the umbilical arms. A man in a green jumpsuit and white helmet emerged from the frigate and started shouting. Ozzie waved back cheerfully. Giselle landed beside him, and started to calm the man.

“You must recognize Ozzie,” Mellanie heard her say as soon as she was in range.

“Well, yes,” he replied.

“Hi there, dude.”

“Yes, hello. But nobody put this on the schedule.”

“Mark, come on,” Giselle said. “You know the schedule changes faster than anyone can keep up.”

Mellanie landed on the side of the dock and struggled not to fly off again. Fuseto patches were damn difficult to work. She studied her feet for a moment to make sure they were secure, then looked up. Her face split into a wide smile. “Hello, Mark.”

“Huh!” Mark gawped in disbelief. “Mellanie?”

Giselle gave her an alarmed look. “You two know each other?”

“We’re old best friends,” Mellanie drawled in her huskiest voice. Sure enough, Mark’s face turned red.

“She’s a reporter,” Mark protested. “And she works for the SI. I thought the Dynasty didn’t want it on this planet.”

“And she saved your ass,” Mellanie said. “How are Barry and Sandy?”

Mark made an embarrassed grumbling sound in his throat.

“Mark, I’m engaged to Nigel now,” Mellanie said. “I’m going to be one of his harem. So you be nice to the boss’s wife.”

Ozzie’s face screwed up into surprise. “You’re engaged to Nige?”

“He proposed the other night.”

“You never said—” He shook his head. “Okay, not relevant. Mark, I’m just up here to do my inspection tour, okay. Plus I’m really dying to see the frigate; it’d bust my rep if anyone found out what a serious techhead I am, but I gotta say, this is one smooth piece of engineering. Giselle told me all about the Searcher flight and what you did.”

“Well, you know,” Mark said. It was a tone that hinted at a lot of secret pride.

“I guess we all owe you, huh?” Ozzie had reached Mark’s side, and patted him man-to-man on the shoulder.

“The pilots are the important guys,” Mark said.

“Come on! Remember I built the very first wormhole generator with my own hands. I know how much skill it takes to integrate machinery. Thought we’d never get that mother finished. And this”—he ran his hand over the hull—“this has to be orders of magnitude above and beyond that antique. Respect to you assembly dudes, I mean that.”

“Thanks.”

“Let’s go check out the cabin, huh?”

Mark gave Giselle one last questioning look. She nodded her approval.

“Sure thing,” Mark said. He started to worm his way back down into the frigate’s airlock. “Careful here, there’s not a lot of room.”

Ozzie flashed a triumphant grin at Mellanie and Giselle, and followed Mark on board.

“Did you make that up?” Giselle asked.

“What?” Mellanie was close enough to the frigate to reach out and touch it. She held back, still awed by its raw power. The hull was so black it looked like a bubble of interstellar space. She half expected to see galaxies floating inside.

“About Nigel. Are you engaged?”

“Oh, that.” She finally pressed her hand against the frigate. It was a historic moment after all. The surface was completely frictionless, and thermal-neutral. Tactile nerves told her she was touching something, but that was all the impression she got. Her eyes couldn’t actually focus on it. “He did propose. I haven’t said yes yet.”

Giselle gave the frigate’s open airlock a twitchy look. “Take my advice, and say yes. That way he might not fling you into suspension for more than a thousand years.”

“Come on, Ozzie has to do this. How do you think he’s going to get rid of Mark? Has he …” She trailed off fast. Her inserts were telling her the docking bay airlock was opening. Dense and very powerful energy sources were emerging. “Oh, crap.”

“What?”

“Somebody’s here. Not good. Warn Ozzie.” She pushed off lightly, gliding around the frigate’s curving hull.

The entire communications spectrum was suddenly filled by a single signal: “YOU BY THE CHARYBDIS, DO NOT MOVE, DEACTIVATE ANY WEAPONS YOU ARE CARRYING.”

Mellanie slid around the ultra-black hull to find herself looking directly at a squad of armored suits flying out of the airlock like angry wasps. Active sensors locked on to her. She instinctively tried to deflect them. Her hands and cheeks began to ripple with silver lines.

“No!” Giselle shrieked.

An instant of disconnection—

—and Mellanie found herself spinning violently. She didn’t know why. Her body had gone numb, apart from the single sensation of cold sweat pricking her forehead. She thought it was the prequel to vomiting, but she couldn’t even feel her stomach. Then she smacked into the docking bay wall and rebounded. Her limbs didn’t seem to be working either. It was strange she didn’t feel any pain; that had been a nasty impact. Red dots drifted across her vision, which appeared to be dimming. Sensation came rushing back in on her consciousness in a terrifying wave of pain. She tried to wail, but liquid was blocking her throat. She couldn’t breathe. Her body was alive with agony, at its worst down her left side. She coughed, trying to clear her lungs. Streamers of blood poured out of her mouth, then wobbled crazily in front of her. Her hands scrabbled at the main source of the pain, finding only warm wet jelly. Thick webs of oscillating blood were spinning around her. On the other side of them a giant black shape slid past. Turbulence from its wake swatted the blood, splatting it against her. Her need to breathe was excruciating. She coughed again, and more blood bubbled out of her throat forming sticky ribbons in front of her. Her whole body juddered. The pain was now submerging itself below an intense cold.

A face appeared above her. Nigel. Mellanie tried to smile. He looked very angry.

“Get a fucking medical kit here. Now!”

She tried to tell him it’d be fine, she was okay, really. That just allowed more blood to escape. It was very red. Her vision was closing in.

“Mellanie!” Nigel’s voice, a long way off.

There was so much she wanted to say. She wondered if Orion had woken up yet. But now the blackness conquered everything.

Ozzie had been inside an Apollo command module once. The Smithsonian staff had removed the perspex cover from the hatchway and stood by with nervous smiles as he squirmed around the historic antique interior. He couldn’t remember how long ago that was now, at least two centuries, but he did recall marveling at how three people had survived in such a small space for the ten days it took to travel to the moon and back.

As he followed Mark through the Charybdis airlock and into the cabin he began to feel a twinge of envy for those old astronauts and the abundant room they had back then. The frigate’s cabin was small; three couches fixed to the rear bulkhead (the reason he suddenly remembered the Apollo) with a one-and-a-half-meter gap between them and the forward bulkhead that was a solid wall of arrays and portals.

“Is this it?” he asked in amazement.

“Sure is.” Mark had levered himself into the left-hand couch, and smiled knowingly at him. “You claustrophobic?”

“We’re about to find out.” Ozzie slid into the central couch. The arrays in front of his nose were covered in symbols he didn’t recognize, but they were powered up. He found an i-spot and pressed his hand against it. “Can you interface?” he asked the SIsubroutine.

“Yes.”

“Do it fast.”

“Working.”

“Hey,” he asked Mark. “Is the nova bomb on board?”

Mark seemed a little easier that Ozzie knew about such things. “Yeah. We’re still waiting for the Scylla’s bomb to be delivered. They promised it in another three hours. Not sure we’ll have the systems integration sorted by then, but we should be able to launch tomorrow.”

“So how many quantumbusters have we got?” Ozzie made it sound like a schoolkid asking questions; next it’d be how fast does it go, mister?

“All ten loaded,” Mark said.

“Man, that is a shitload of firepower.” Ozzie felt indecently happy; the Great Frigate Heist was on-line and powering up smoothly. He could probably let rumors about this one slip out into the unisphere.

“You’re telling me.” Mark peered at one of the portal displays. “Uh—” He glanced over at Ozzie’s hand on the i-spot.

“I have command of all primary functions,” the SIsubroutine said.

A plethora of frigate command icons rose up into Ozzie’s virtual vision. Compressed instruction text orbited each one like a gas-giant ring. Just reading all the introductions would have taken a couple of hours. He assumed he’d be able to do most of the piloting himself. After all, how difficult could it be? It looked like he was going to be more dependent on the SIsubroutine than he liked; despite everything that’d happened he still wasn’t sure he trusted it.

“Hey, what are you loading in?” Mark asked in growing alarm.

“Ozzie!” Giselle called. “We’ve got—ohshit.”

Ozzie’s inserts picked up the warning from the security team. “Close the airlock, and get us out of here,” he told the SIsubroutine. His virtual hand took a broad swipe at all the command icons, sweeping them away like clutter off a desk. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mark putting his hand out toward an i-spot. “Stop it,” he barked. “I’ve got the kind of weapons wetwiring that can slaughter a small army. Killing you from this range is easier than breathing. Sit back and do nothing, and I’ll let you live.”

“Don’t kill me!” Mark wailed. His hand drew back as if the i-spot was wired up to a thousand volts. “Christ, man, I’ve got a family, kids.”

“Shut up.”

The airlock hatch contracted. Ozzie just heard a loud unpleasant snap from outside before it shut completely. He searched around for a button on his couch that would activate the restraint webbing. That was far too simple for this ship. He gave up. “Strap me in,” he told the SIsubroutine.

“Confirmed.”

“And give me some visuals from outside. I wanna see what’s going down.”

The couch’s plyplastic cushioning flowed over his shoulders and hips, securing him tight. Five grids in his virtual vision display came on, and he pulled the pictures out. A whole squad of armored figures was zipping out into the docking bay. Then Mellanie drifted in front of a camera. Half of her left side had been torn away; long tatters of gore hung from exposed, shattered ribs. Her face swung into view, staring directly into the lens. For some reason she possessed a Zen-like serenity, then her lips twitched and arterial blood foamed out of her mouth.

“Mellanie!” a horrified Mark cried. “Oh, God, what have you done to her? Look at her, you fucking monster.”

Ozzie didn’t have the courage to tell him to shut up again.

“Umbilicals disconnected,” the SIsubroutine said. “Engaging secondary drive units.”

The walls of the docking bay slipped past. Brief glimpse of the Scylla, embraced by the cool gray metal of maintenance platforms. Technicians turning clumsily to stare as they flew past. Then there was the purple sparkle of the pressure curtain over the hull followed by the infinite black of space. The planet formed a huge steel-gray crescent cutting across the stars. One of the spaceflowers was almost directly below them, a perfect half circle of rumpled amethyst that suddenly vanished as it crossed into the penumbra.

“Have we got enough power to make it to Dyson Alpha?” Ozzie asked the SIsubroutine.

“Yes.”

He debated whether to ask the obvious. Decided to go for it. “And get back?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, plot a course and take us there.”

“Working.”

“Are you going to kill me now?” Mark was looking at him with the kind of wild eyes that belonged to a dying animal.

“Nobody’s going to kill you,” Ozzie said. He hurriedly told the SIsubroutine to block all access to the onboard arrays apart from his own. Mark was the lead assembly technician; who knew what he’d embedded in the frigate’s systems.

“You will,” Mark said fearfully. “Your type always does.”

“Now wait up one goddamn minute here. I’m not any kind of type.”

“You just hijacked a Dynasty frigate.”

“I don’t have a lot of choice here, man.”

“You’re going to kill me, you bastard.”

“I’m not, I can’t.” Ozzie waved his arms around for emphasis, wincing as he slapped the back of his hand against the arrays. “I’m not wetwired for anything but a few bioneural chips. I swear, man; you’re perfectly safe. So just chill out.”

The silence stretched out dangerously.

“What?” Mark demanded.

“I, er, really needed the frigate; I probably exaggerated what I’d do. Heat of the moment, dude. I was desperate.”

“You piece of shit.”

“What can I say, I’m sorry.”

Mark glared at him, and folded his arms across his chest. It wasn’t an easy position to maintain in zero gee, but he managed it. “Will you be telling Mellanie you’re sorry?”

“We are going FTL,” the SIsubroutine announced.

Ozzie braced himself. There’d probably be a rush of acceleration, space twisting around him, stars blueshifting before they collided into a burst of light ahead and stretched out to envelop the hull. “She’ll get re-lifed,” he mumbled, trying to ignore the spike of shame.

“Well, that makes it all right then.” Mark deliberately and defiantly slapped a hand on an i-spot.

“What’s happening?” Ozzie asked the SIsubroutine.

“Please define context.”

“Why haven’t we gone FTL?”

“We have. We are currently traveling at thirteen point five light-years per hour.”

“Holy shit.” A huge smile split Ozzie’s face. “Really?” If he was designing the ship he’d build in a little flicker of the cabin lights, a deep throbbing sound, just something to emphasize the tremendous forces at work within the drive.

“Confirmed.”

“Wow.”

“You’ve blocked me out of the arrays,” Mark said.

“Sure have. Hey, do you know how fast we’re traveling? Thirteen light-years per hour. Jeez, that’s like just three days to Dyson Alpha. Man, me and Nige should have tried to build something like this back at the start, and to hell with wormholes. This is like totally money, straight and neat.”

“A straight quick trip to our death, more like.”

“Oh, lighten up, man, you’re about to make history in this ship.”

“You mean like the Titanic?”

“Nigel Sheldon is calling you,” the SIsubroutine said.

Ozzie twitched inside his protective webbing. A huge rush of guilt overtook his relief at pulling off the hijack. Then alarm kicked in. “How is he doing that?”

“The frigate uses a method of communications called a transdimensional channel. It is a subfunction of the main drive.”

“Man, I am like really going to have to read the instruction book. He can’t track us with that, can he?”

“The TD channel can be made directional in order to facilitate tracking.”

“Christ! Make sure it’s not doing that right now.”

“Confirmed.”

“Okay. Cool. Put Nigel on.”

“Turn around, Ozzie.” Nigel’s eerily calm voice filled the cabin. “Bring the frigate back, please.”

Mark smiled in satisfaction and gave Ozzie a challenging look.

“Can’t do that, man,” Ozzie said. “And you know it. I worked out a way to reactivate the barrier. I’m going to use a quantumbuster against the Starflyer gadget that’s messing with the generator’s quantum state.”

“There is a Trojan program in the TD signal,” the SIsubroutine reported. “I believe they are trying to take command of the ship by remote.”

“Can you counter it?”

“I believe so. It is not a type I have in my catalogue.”

“Any problem, cut the link immediately.”

“Ozzie,” Nigel said, “we need the Charybdis to eliminate the Prime threat. Bring her back. Now.”

“Course set. Anchor’s up. Sails to the wind. Sorry, Nige, man, I’m committed.”

“Ozzie, we have other frigates. They will be flown by people who understand how to use them properly. I will assign them to hunt you down and kill you. After that, I will make sure you are never re-lifed. I can do this, and you know it.”

“You know what, Nige: if you succeed in that, then genocide MorningLightMountain, I don’t think I’d want to live in the kind of galaxy left over afterward.”

“Mark,” Nigel said, “I’m sorry for what’s about to happen, but we cannot allow Ozzie to hand over the Charybdis to MorningLightMountain. You have my personal word you will be re-lifed immediately. I will also ensure that Liz, Barry, and Sandy will be taken care of in the meantime.”

Mark sniffed. He wiped away the moisture clotting his eyes. “I understand, sir. Tell Otis to shoot straight.”

“Thank you, Mark. Once again, I’m proud you are family.”

Ozzie groaned in dismay and gave Mark a sullen glance. “Since when did you turn into a bonehead hero?”

“Fuck you,” Mark spat.

“Nige, you know damn well I am not turning this frigate over to MorningLightMountain,” Ozzie said angrily. “I’m going to stop you and it from killing each other.”

“You’ve stolen the only two items of technology that can guarantee the human race survives the war, Ozzie. This isn’t dicking around, this isn’t playing the wacky smartass to my corporate stiff. You are attempting to kill humanity. Do you understand that?”

“I’m going to save you,” Ozzie barked back at him. “Trust me, Nige, you always used to. Please.”

“Come back.”

“No. You come with me.” Ozzie hated how petulant he sounded. “Switch the TD channel off,” he told the SIsubroutine.

“Confirmed.”

Ozzie took a couple of minutes out just staring at the systems displays in front of him, allowing his temper to cool. He didn’t like to admit to himself just how rattled he’d been by Nigel’s threats. In the end he released the plyplastic bands from his arms, just keeping his legs loosely restrained, and drew a breath. “Hey, er, Mark, Nigel doesn’t actually have a fleet of these frigates, does he? I mean, they’re all still being built, right?”

“Honestly? He has the Scylla, and three more which have just completed assembly. None of them have been flight tested, but they passed their systems integration trials. Otis flew Charybdis against Hell’s Gateway with a damn sight less preparation than that.”

“Great. Thanks for that, man. I officially appoint you chief morale officer.” Ozzie could see this was going to be a flight with minimal conversation. “Where’s the food? I need a decent meal.”

Mark’s smile was the kind used by evil emperors at their victory celebrations. “What food? We left before the stores were brought on board.”

Highway One was the first major civil engineering project to be attempted on Far Away, and the last on such a grand scale. At the time construction began Armstrong City was little more than a camp of mobile homes and prefab buildings squatting in a giant mud lake around the newly constructed gateway. There had been talk about moving the gateway directly to the recently discovered Marie Celeste, but as they had on Half Way the Commonwealth Council demanded a safe separation distance. In any case, during those early years they were still hoping that other alien artifacts would be discovered, equal or greater than the crashed arkship. The gateway stayed where it was above the shores of the North Sea, and the Council shipped in a pair of massive micropile-powered JCB roadbuilders.

They took twenty-seven months to chew their way southeast over the equator, extruding a wide ribbon of enzyme-bonded concrete onto the flat strip they’d cut through the sandy flare-sterilized soil. Seven main rivers were bridged, and three broad flood plain valleys traversed with long switchbacks on either side.

As well as leading to the starship, Highway One was originally intended as the major access route to the southern hemisphere. As it curved back west around the Dessault Mountains to the Marie Celeste’s valley, another road branched off to head eastward for the shore of the Oak Sea. After that, the intention was to carry on south until it eventually reached the Deep Sea. By then the JCBs were in need of heavy-duty maintenance, which couldn’t be done in the field. The rough stony terrain and constant lack of spare parts had taken their toll on the massive machines. Once they left the Marie Celeste behind they never made it to the Deep Sea. The Black Desert proved too inhospitable; its fierce heat and constant sandwinds abrading too many already degraded components. With more than five hundred kilometers of desert left to traverse the team finally turned around and drove back along the length of their creation. The JCBs were refurbished as best Far Away’s embryonic engineering industry could manage and spent the next few years laying smaller roads across the Aldrin Plains and Iril Steppes where the farmlands were taking hold before they finally decayed beyond economic repair. No more were ever imported.

A road that began in the capital and stretched thousands of kilometers away across the planet until it ended abruptly in the middle of a desert was always going to be a romantic road. People drove along it because it was there, especially the younger generations of Far Away natives who would take off on bikes and spend months moving along from community to community. As with all roads through virgin territory, it was the starting point for pioneers setting up their farmsteads. Villages sprang up along its sides, especially along the first thousand kilometers outside Armstrong City where the temperate climate was suited to farming. Each small settlement evolved into a junction for the empty land beyond as the revitalization team gradually expanded the area that could be successfully planted. Farmers set out to the east and west, bringing their own vegetation to a gritty soil now ripening with bacteria. The Barsoomians traveled along Highway One until the equator when they turned eastward to establish themselves around the northern shores of the Oak Sea and the remoter regions of the Great Iril Steppes. According to some their domain even extended out to the westernmost shore of the Hondu Ocean.

This great conduit of humanity helped expand the new vegetation across an elongated stretch of the ruined planet far quicker than the revitalization teams could with their fleet of blimpbots. From space, life’s progress could be seen as a verdant stain that spread out eagerly from the road, covering the barren ground with fields and forests. Eventually, the planet began to revert to an overall green tinge that had been missing ever since the flare saturated it with radiation. Even amid that patina the road’s borders were still a prominent slash of bright emerald.

Beyond that first main stretch of population reaching out from Armstrong City the travelers scattered their own biological detritus. Some were deliberate, like the hundred-sixty-kilometer length straddling the equator where an ancient hermitlike émigré from Earth called Rob Lacy devoted thirty years to hand-planting giant GMredwoods on either side of the concrete, turning it into a mighty greenway. There was the infamous Jidule Valley where somebody with a bad sense of humor had illicitly reprogrammed the revitalization project’s agribots to plant silk oaks in the pattern of a copulating couple five kilometers across, a forest whose shape could be seen in its entirety from the top of the valley. And the Doyle swamp, famous the Commonwealth over for its profusion of Jupiter cat trap plants, an example of early Barsoomian handiwork, plants modified from Venus flytraps until they were big enough to capture small rodents. It became something of a ritual for anyone riding down the wide concrete lanes to bring seeds of their favorite plant with them, to be scattered at random, producing a weird mishmash of vegetation that was now among the most established on the planet.

Stig had traveled along Highway One enough times to be familiar with most of its diverse sections. A couple of hours after they’d left rendezvous point four, the Guardians’ vehicles reached the first built-up section. The countryside directly outside Armstrong City was predominantly fields and sweeping grasslands split up into estates owned by some of the richest people on the planet. Beyond the estates the land rose into the Devpile hills that were the province of sheep and goat farmers. It was only after Highway One swept down out of the hills on the other side and crossed the Clowine River that the buildings started to bunch up close around it. The houses and commercial blocks were only three or four deep, but this particular urban segment ran for over eighty kilometers. Along its entire length, slender composite arches curved high over the four lanes of ancient enzyme-bonded concrete, alive with lights and commercial signs. There were more garish fluorescent signs along the edge of the road, enticing drivers to stop off and buy everything from farm supplies to motel rooms to dental work. In places the building fronts actually bordered the cracked concrete road. Vans and pickups trundled along between all the side streets and turnoffs; they’d even seen a couple of people riding horses.

“Another one,” Stig remarked as he slowed the armored car a fraction. Up ahead, a car had been smashed off the road to embed itself in the front of a clothing store. Long scorch marks up the wall showed where it had caught fire. Two police cars were parked beside it, their hazard strobes flashing red and amber. A big recovery truck was hitched up to the wreck, ready to pull it free.

Stig steered around the police cars, one hand resting close to the armored car’s weapons control panel. Even though they were local police, he still didn’t quite trust them. The burned-out car had its side buckled in, the type of impact that a Land Rover Cruiser would leave.

“It’s in a hurry,” Bradley remarked from the forward passenger bench. “We’ve frightened it, as much as anything like that can feel fright.”

One of the police officers was gesturing angrily at Stig as he sped past at a hundred thirty kilometers an hour. The rest of the Guardians’ vehicles followed him, keeping close.

“It rammed emergency vehicles, even knocked over injured people when it was getting out of the city,” Stig told him. “A slow car in the way isn’t going to get any consideration.”

“Are the police trying to do anything?” Bradley asked Keely.

“Plenty of people are complaining,” she said. “The road net is full of them. But the local highway cops don’t want to get involved. They know the Cruisers are all Institute vehicles.”

“Good,” Bradley said. “They’d be slaughtered out of hand if they tried to stop them.”

“Anything from Ledro’s group?” Stig asked. Ledro was leading a demolitions team to take out the bridge over the river Taran, six hundred kilometers farther south.

“He says ten minutes,” Keely reported.

“Good.” Stig shifted his grip on the steering wheel, easing the armored car away from the central lane barrier. After the joy of discovering Adam had made it through, he was wound up again. The idea of having Bradley Johansson himself sitting next to him during the chase was simply not something he’d allowed for. This was the climax of a plan the man had begun a hundred thirty years ago. Stig could barely organize three days ahead. He couldn’t rid himself of the notion that every ancestor he had would be looking down from the dreaming heavens this night. It wasn’t the kind of responsibility he handled easily.

“You did the right thing,” Bradley said softly.

“Sir?”

“Sending in the fuel air bomb, detonating it inside the city. I know it must have been a hard choice.”

“There was so much damage,” Stig confessed. “More than I thought.”

“Millions have died on the Commonwealth worlds over the last weeks, and millions more during the first invasion. The navy has developed weapons which are strong enough to damage a star; the radiation emission alone can wipe out the biosphere of an H-congruous planet a hundred million kilometers away. The unisphere is alive with rumors that Nigel Sheldon has something even more powerful than that; something which destroyed Hell’s Gateway where the navy’s finest failed completely. Judged against that scale, a single fuel air bomb that generated a few hundred casualties is insignificant. Yet at the same time you accomplished so much.”

“I don’t see it that way. I walked through the ruins; there were so many people with shattered lives. Dreaming heavens, I could smell burnt flesh.”

“You stalled the Starflyer on the other side of the gateway. That was crucial. Vital. Without that interruption to its plans, I would be dying on a world three hundred light-years away, it would already be closer to its starship, and the planet would be unable to extract its revenge. Look at the whole picture, Stig, focusing on individual actions is only going to cause you doubt and worry. Your thoughts should embrace a collective strategy. The Guardians of Selfhood are back on target again, in no small part thanks to you.”

“Do you really mean that?”

“Ask the Paris team or Cat’s Claws if you doubt me. We were the ones who had almost given up hope until you wrecked its plans. You allowed us to get so close, Stig, I could actually feel it again, all that arrogance and malice spilling out into the ether. If we’d had a few minutes longer we could have exterminated it there and then. As it is, we forced it back onto our schedule. So don’t ever allow your resolve to desert you.”

“Thank you, sir.” Stig focused hard on the road, a tight smile curling his lips up. The ancient concrete surface was cracked and worn here, covered with an intricate lacework of black tar where bots and laborers had filled in the holes. The armored car’s wheels thrummed over the ridges as it raced under the bright arches; they were spaced so close together now they’d transformed Highway One into a psychedelic tunnel.

“Contact with Adam,” Keely reported. “He’s asking for you, sir. Heavy interference, we’ve got a badly behaved ionosphere tonight.”

“Let’s hear it,” Bradley said.

Static wailed through the low interior of the armored car. “Bradley?” Adam called.

“I’m here, Adam.”

“I’ve got a problem.”

“How bad?”

“The worst. Your signal is breaking …”

“What. Is. Your. Problem?”

“Found four crates that were sabotaged. We lost a Volvo as well.”

Something like a small electric charge fired down Stig’s spine. Adam’s trouble could mean only one thing. Stig automatically checked his wing mirror. The truck carrying the big Raiel alien was five vehicles back, while the armored car carrying Cat’s Claws and the Paris team was the second in line. He started working out which of his people would have the easiest shot.

“Are you sure?” Bradley asked. The signal whistled sharply. “Are you sure?” Bradley repeated urgently.

“Definite. It was done on the Carbon Goose … Only opportunity.”

“Is there enough equipment intact to complete the planet’s revenge?”

“Yeah. If we get there. Paula and I convinced it … one of the navy people with us. Has to be … it out, no other … Any information about them from your people … work it out. Paula seriously ill … medical kit should cope … can’t help me much.”

“Dreaming heavens,” Bradley muttered quietly. “I never expected it to get this close to us. Not now.”

“We can’t go back and help them,” Stig said. “We don’t have time.” He thumped the wheel with one hand.

“Adam is asking for information,” Bradley said. “We’ll give him as much as we can.”

“What if there’s more than one of them? What if there’s a Starflyer agent with us as well?”

“That’s not good,” Olwen said from the back of the armored car. “These machines are well protected. We’d have to put them in front of our heavy-caliber weapons. Then there’s their suits to break.”

“They’d have to take care of their own,” Stig said. “Any kind of firefight at that level would destroy the rest of our vehicles.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Bradley said. “For the Starflyer to plant one agent among us would require considerable effort. The people who joined us at Narrabri station were essentially thrown together by accident. For the Starflyer to infiltrate two agents among us under these circumstances is beyond possibility.”

“You think they’re in Adam’s team?” Stig asked. “He said the sabotage happened on your Carbon Goose flight.”

“If that’s what Adam believes, we must trust him.”

“Absolutely.” Stig didn’t even have to think about it. A communications icon popped up into his virtual vision, a group link from Alic Hogan. He allowed the call through.

“We all picked up that transmission,” Alic said. “I expect you’re debating if you can trust us.”

“Actually, we’re putting our trust in Adam,” Bradley said. “He believes the Starflyer agent is with him, not here.”

“He’s wrong about that, damnit, you’re talking about the Admiral and Paula Myo.”

“Ex-Admiral,” Bradley said levelly. “The navy did rather badly under his command. And the alternative is that it’s one of you.”

“Damnit. All right. But Paula? Come on!”

“She’s been trying to stop me for a hundred thirty years. That makes her a highly plausible candidate.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Deal with facts,” Bradley said. “Paula does.”

“What about Anna?” Stig asked.

“The Admiral’s wife?” Morton said. “If she is, he must be, too.”

“That’s not impossible, I suppose,” Bradley said; there was a strong undercurrent of reluctance in his voice.

“Unlikely, though,” Alic said.

“What about Oscar?” Morton asked.

“I may be able to help there,” Qatux said. “Ms. Tiger Pansy was present when Captain Monroe had a heated confrontation with Dudley Bose.”

“What was it about?” Alic asked.

“Bose accused Monroe of deliberately allowing himself and Emmanuelle Verbeke to continue exploring the Watchtower after it was safe to do so, thus ensuring they were captured by MorningLightMountain. An allegation Monroe refuted. Dr. Bose was most insistent, though.”

“We know there was a Starflyer agent on the Second Chance,” Stig said hurriedly; he was trying to make connections. I don’t know enough about them.

“Does Dudley stand to profit in any way from making those kinds of allegations?” Rob asked.

“No,” Alic said. “His reputation with the navy is dirt anyway after that Welcome Back ceremony. This kind of thing will only make it worse for him. In any case, he only started claiming Oscar screwed up after he got his memories back.”

“If you believe the source of those memories,” Bradley said.

“We were with the Bose motile for weeks,” Morton said. “For what it’s worth, I believe it was a genuine copy of Dudley Bose’s memories and personality.”

“But you don’t know that for certain.”

“If it’s not a copy of Bose, then what the hell is it?”

“Boys, boys,” the Cat said. “Please, the smell of testosterone is getting foul back here. This is all sounding like a very dull lecture on complexity theory to me. You don’t have anything like enough real evidence to point the finger at any of them. If it was obvious who the Starflyer agent was, then we’d have realized it by now.”

Despite his irritation at her tone, Stig had to admit she’d got a point. There was some memory about the Cat worrying away at the back of his brain, something he’d heard back in the Commonwealth. Her crimes had given her widespread notoriety; she’d committed them a long time ago, long enough for them to have passed into urban lore. Then he remembered. Dreaming heavens, and she’s supposed to be on our side? And in a top-of-the-line armor suit? “Adam asked for our help,” he said, determined not to be cowed by her reputation. “We’re doing the best we can for him.”

Her answering laugh made him wince.

“Poor old Adam,” she chortled. “I’d better switch on my short-wave set. Run, Adam! Run for the hills now, and don’t look back.”

“She didn’t, did she?” an alarmed Stig asked Keely.

“No.”

“What is your solution, Ms. Stewart?” an unperturbed Bradley asked.

“Gosh, the boss man. It’s really simple. Adam asked for information. The best we can do is tell him we suspect Monroe and Myo. After that, it’s up to him how he uses the information. He’s a grown-up.”

“Very well. Unless anyone else has any relevant information on the people traveling with Adam, we’ll relay our suspicions.”

Stig willed someone to say something, to recall just one extra fact, but there was only silence.

“I’ll tell him that, then,” Bradley said.

By midmorning the Volvos had reached the end of the farmlands; they petered out amid insipid swathes of wet meadows and vigorous scrub that were gradually being encroached by the equatorial grasslands. Anguilla grass scattered by blimpbots across the southernmost zone of the Aldrin Plains had blossomed to produce a great deluge of uniform light green vegetation resembling a quiescent sea that was slowly progressing northward. There were no settlements out there, no trees, no bushes, and few reports of any animals.

Their tanks were half empty by then, so Adam wanted to get them topped off before they drove the last section. They stopped in a town called Wolfstail, which comprised about twenty single-story buildings clumped around a T-junction. There were more cats than humans, and most of them wild. Given its position right on the edge of the advancing grasslands, it had the feel of a coastal town out of season. The road that had brought them down from Armstrong City was the stalk of the junction, with the two branches heading east and west, running parallel to the Dessault Mountains that were hidden hundreds of kilometers on the other side of the southern horizon.

Adam climbed down out of the cab and stretched elaborately, not enjoying the sounds his old body made after having been cramped up in a chair for a seven-hour stretch. It didn’t matter how adaptive the plyplastic cushioning was; his limbs were numbed and joints sore from inactivity. Outside the cab’s air-conditioning the heat was oppressive. He began sweating at once, and hurriedly put his wraparound shades on.

A ten-year-old girl in dungarees and a grubby Manchester United cap came out of the garage to fill the Volvos up from its single diesel pump.

“Quick as you can, please,” he told her, and flashed an Earth ten-dollar bill. She grinned brightly, showing a missing tooth, and hurried to the hose.

Everyone except Paula had clambered out of the cabs. The Guardians were giving the navy personnel mistrustful stares. Adam sighed, but he was too tired to play diplomat now. “I need to get some things,” he told the others, and nodded to the store opposite the garage. “Oscar, you’re with me. Kieran, you’re paired with the Investigator. The rest of you.” He shrugged. “We leave as soon as the tanks are full.”

“Do you need anything in particular?” Oscar asked as they crossed the dusty road.

“Some medical supplies for the Investigator. The diagnostic array keeps telling me to use drugs and biogenics we don’t have in the kit.”

Oscar looked at the ramshackle composite panel building with its weathered solar panel roof, and big heart-shaped emerald precipitator leaves flapping lazily from the eaves. The windows were grimed up, and the air-conditioning unit a coverless box of rusty junk. “Are you sure they’ll have them here?”

“What they won’t have in here is any sabotaged supplies.”

“Christ, you really are paranoid.”

Oscar pushed the single door open. The dimly lit room inside was like someone’s living room, with threadbare rugs over the carbon plank floor and tall metal shelving racks instead of furniture. Half of the shelves were empty; the rest carried the usual merchandise essential for any small community, mostly domestic products, with food packets supplied by Armstrong City companies. A good stock of booze took up an entire rack.

“Can I help you boys?” an elderly woman asked. She was sitting in a rocking chair at the far end, knitting in the yellow glow of a polyphoto globe hanging from the rafters.

“I’m looking for first aid products,” Adam said.

“Some bandages and aspirin on the third shelf in from the door,” she told him. “Few other odds and ends. Mind you check the expiry dates, now. They’ve been around awhile.”

“Thanks.” Adam pulled Oscar along. “You heard Johansson’s answer last night.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, along with half of this world who’re listening in to the Highway One chase on their radios. Thank you for that. It went down particularly well with Rosamund, I thought. She certainly gave her guns a big polish afterward. You know it’s only going to be a matter of time before one of your street thugs decides the Guardians’ cause is best served by slitting our throats.”

“They’re not street thugs, I trained them.”

“The way Grayva trained us?”

Adam grunted dismissively, and rummaged through the section boldly labeled MEDICAL PROVISIONS. The shopkeeper hadn’t been joking about the lack of variety. “Don’t worry about my team, they’re well structured and disciplined.”

“Whatever you say, Adam.”

“So how do you explain Dudley’s claim that you deliberately ordered him to carry on through the Watchtower so he’d be left behind?” Adam was quite surprised by the involuntary spasm of anger on Oscar’s face when Dudley’s name was mentioned.

“That little shit!”

Both of them gave a guilty glance in the direction of the old woman.

“Sorry, Dudley just manages to rile me every time.”

“So?” Adam invited.

“It must have been the Starflyer agent. Whoever it was hacked into the Second Chance’s communications systems.”

“I figured that, too.”

“You did?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you yanking my plank?”

“I know it’s not you.” Adam grinned at Oscar’s astonishment, the thick skin on his cheeks crinkling stiffly.

“You do?”

“Let’s say that after our long association I’m prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Oscar rolled his eyes. “If this is the tradecraft you trained your kids in, we’re in deeper shit than I thought. But thanks, anyway.”

“Don’t mention it. Your innocence reduces my problem by one.”

“Yeah.” Oscar scratched at the back of his head. “And then there were three.”

“Two of whom were on the Second Chance; and Myo has been persecuting the Guardians since their inception.”

“It can’t be Wilson and Anna.”

“Is that emotion or logic talking to me?”

“Emotion, I guess. Hell! I’ve been part of their lives for years now, we virtually live in each other’s pockets. They’re friends. Real friends. If it is one of them, then they have truly run rings around me.”

“I told you before, you manage to cover up your earlier activities with a perfect shell of respectability. To be honest, I never quite expected you to have so much success in your current life.”

“Thanks a whole bunch. But my crime was in the past. The Starflyer agent is active now.”

“All right. Is their any indication, anything that might tell you one of them might not be genuine?”

“I don’t know.” Oscar picked up a tube of dental biogenic cream intended to treat abscesses, not looking at it.

“What?” Adam persisted. “Come on. We’re still fighting to stop this war, and more, stop it from happening again.”

“Someone tampered with the official logs stored in Pentagon II after I found the evidence that the Starflyer agent was on board the Second Chance. That little cover-up blocked us from using it to expose the Starflyer. Only Wilson and I knew about it.”

“Are you sure?”

Oscar closed his eyes. “No,” he said in a pained sigh. “A lot of people knew we had a private meeting, which is very unusual, especially as there was no official record of the topic. And then we invited Myo for an equally secret conference. But I swear that office is sealed up tighter than Sheldon’s harem.”

“You’re looking for a get-out clause. It sounds like a locked room to me.”

“It can’t be Wilson.” Oscar sounded deeply troubled.

“What about his wife?”

“Anna? No way. Nobody’s worked harder to defeat both the Prime invasions. She was the liaison between the tactical staff and Fleet Command; if she was the agent that would be the moment to ensure we were totally screwed.”

“Except the Starflyer wanted the Commonwealth intact to strike back at MorningLightMountain. According to Bradley it sees us as a couple of old prizefighters battering the crap out of each other until we’re both dead.”

“Christ Almighty. I don’t know.”

“Then give me your take on Myo.”

“Definite candidate.” For once Oscar sounded confident. “And what is up with her anyway? How sick is she?”

“She claims her body is reacting to her decision to let me go free. Think of it as neurotoxic shock, and you won’t be far wrong.”

“Jesus. She is one weird woman. That damn Hive!”

“It’s an illness which mitigates in her favor. If she’s having that reaction, then her genuine personality is intact.”

Oscar dropped the tube back on the rack. “Come on. Like she couldn’t fake the shakes.”

“The diagnostic array confirms it. She’s seriously ill, Oscar. I’m not quite sure …” He looked at the meager display of medicines, and shook his head sadly.

“Or she’s taken a compound to produce that effect.”

“I believe you mentioned paranoia?”

“Face it,” Oscar said, “you haven’t got a clue which one of them it could be.”

“Not yet. I fear I must rouse Paula to work this out for me. This is her field of excellence. Her only field, come to that. We need her … if it isn’t her.” He quickly picked a few packets off the shelf, mild sedatives and some biogenics designed to counter viral infections. They might help. Probably not.

“In the state she’s in?” Oscar said as they walked over to the shopkeeper. “Not a chance. She’s barely rational.”

“I’m aware of that. If it’s genuine.”

“What are you going to do?” Oscar asked with brittle humor. “Fall on your sword? If it is a genuine illness, it’s the only way to cure her.”

“Would that be so dishonorable?”

“Hey, come on, don’t joke about this.”

“After the Guardians win, where will I go? What will I do? There’s no one left to shelter me. No one that I’d accept help from, anyway.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“No, I’m not.” But he didn’t like the fact that he’d actually thought of it. True desperation.

“Good! We’ll work it out; you and me, the old team. Damnit, there’s only three possibles. How difficult can it be?”

Adam gave that a lot of thought as the interminable afternoon rolled ever onward. They’d left the sparse road behind at Wolfstail, heading directly south from the town’s T-junction along a stony farm track that vanished a couple of kilometers later beneath the advancing Anguilla grass. Once they reached its outlying fringes, it quickly grew taller and thicker, reinforcing Adam’s earlier comparison to a sea. A heavily modified variety of terrestrial Bermuda grass, the Anguilla’s individual stalks were as thick as wheat; they clustered so densely the entire mass supported itself, swaying in giant slow waves as the winds gusted over the surface. No other plant could gain any kind of niche amid its indomitable all-pervasive root mat. It had been tailored by the revitalization project office to thrive on the area’s prevalent heat and moisture, and succeeded to a degree its creators never expected.

Feathery tips reached up to the Volvo’s windows. Kieran, who was driving again, had to use the truck’s radar to see the shape of the land below the tide of grass. There had been a road here, decades ago, back when Wolfstail had been built around a crossroads, linking the Dessault Mountains to the inhabited northern lands. It was completely smothered under the Anguilla grass now, its disintegrating surface long since sealed over by the root mat. The Guardians still used the route. McMixons and McKratzes mostly; riding or driving down out of the mountains to trade with Far Away’s normal population, and transporting back the illicit weapons technology Adam and his predecessors had smuggled through the gateway in First Foot Fall Plaza. They’d placed tuned trisilicon markers along the hidden road, stiff meter-high poles invisible within the grass but shining like beacons if they were illuminated by the correctly coded radar pulse. Their unmistakable gleaming points marching across the display screen, and an accurate inertial navigation system allowed the Volvos to race on at close to a hundred kilometers an hour, a speed impossible through the grasslands without the certainty of a solid surface beneath the root map. Adam likened it to running along a precipice. God help them if they wavered from the exact line laid out by the inertial guidance. He would have been happier if control of the trucks had been switched over to the drive arrays, but their programs would have taken into account the dreadful local conditions, and crawled their way forward. Besides, the Guardians took a perverse delight in showing how ballsy they were; each of them claiming to have driven the route many times previously. Adam didn’t believe a word of it.

He tended to Paula as they plowed onward through the grass. She was in a dreadful state, her clothes and blankets damp from a fever sweat, drifting in and out of consciousness. When she was alert she was in a lot of pain. The sedatives and biogenics he’d administered did seem to have improved her blood pressure, and her heart rate had dropped a little, though it still remained too high for comfort.

“No way can this be fake,” Adam muttered as he put the diagnostic array back in its bag. Paula shivered under her blanket; her breathing was shallow, and she frowned in REM sleep, whimpering as if something horrible was closing in on her. That it must be him she was dreaming of didn’t exactly help ease his anxiety. Not guilt though, this is not my fault.

In the pleasant climate of the cab, all everyone did was follow the chase down Highway One. They’d drifted out of range from the small road net within a quarter of an hour of leaving Highway One the previous night. As Far Away had no satellites, all that kept the countryside communities connected was radio, and its range was limited. The old-fashioned analogue short-wave units they carried could broadcast far enough to reach Johansson, but as he’d discovered last night they were erratic at best. He didn’t ask for an update directly; his own transmission would pinpoint him for the Starflyer. Last night’s request for any information on a possible traitor had been a calculated risk. Instead of a direct connection they followed the news as relayed from household to household, trying to decide what was exaggerated and what was plain fiction.

The chase had become a spectator sport, with people lining Highway One to watch the two convoys race past. At first there had been some spontaneous attempts to interrupt the Starflyer’s vehicles. Youths threw Molotovs. Hunting rifles were fired at the Cruisers. All of it completely ineffective. The Institute troops responded with overwhelming firepower, flattening entire swathes of buildings as they flashed past. After the first few times, news of the retaliation spread down Highway One and nobody attempted to interfere again. The Starflyer’s MANN truck was watched from darkened windows, or behind walls a safe distance away from the road.

Bradley Johansson’s pursuit was cheered on by a few hardy souls who ventured out to look at the man who throughout their lives had been more myth than real person.

The airways gossip allowed everyone in the Volvo to keep track of events. To start with, the distance between Bradley and the Starflyer was holding steady at just over five hundred sixty kilometers. Both were traveling about as fast as Highway One would permit, with the smaller vehicles of the Guardians having a slight edge, and closing by nearly sixteen kilometers each hour. It was the bridges that would make the difference. There were cheers in the cab each time excited shouts burst out over the radio proclaiming another bridge had been brought down.

By dawn it was confirmed: the Guardians had blown up all five major river crossings along Highway One. Adam wasn’t entirely surprised when people who’d gathered around the rubble of the Taran bridge, the most northerly crossing, started reporting that the Starflyer convoy had some kind of amphibious capability. The MANN truck and its escort of Cruisers turned off Highway One and made their way down to the river, crossing it directly. It hadn’t been easy; they had to travel for several kilometers along rough tracks before there was a place to get down to the water. When they did, that was where the Guardian ambush team struck. According to the breathless descriptions that filtered back across the Aldrin Plains, the firefight was ferocious. It was a story repeated at each broken bridge. The Guardians never managed to destroy the MANN truck, but the Cruisers took heavy casualties each time.

Adam started paying very close attention to the delay times. At one point, just after they’d left Wolfstail, Bradley was barely a hundred ten minutes behind the Starflyer. Then the Institute finally began to respond to the situation. Several groups of three or four Land Rover Cruisers were spotted along Highway One heading north. Bradley and Stig knew about them, but there was nothing they could do to avoid a clash; there simply wasn’t an alternative route. It was their turn to be shot at.

In the Volvo’s cab, they even knew the first collision point, a small Highway One town calling itself Philadelphia FA. The wait was tense as the radio grapevine spat out the occasional testimony and counterclaim. As they listened to the crackling static, thick gray clouds scudded in across the dazzling sapphire sky, drawing a veil of drizzle below them. The water turned the Anguilla grass slippery and treacherous. Even the gung-ho Guardians had to slow as the Volvo’s wheels began to slide about over the stalks they’d crushed beneath them. It wasn’t until an hour and a half after the Philadelphia incident must have happened that they were certain a convoy of armored cars and Mazda jeeps along with their companion vehicles were still racing in pursuit of the Starflyer. Checking the waystations as best he could, Adam reckoned they’d lost a good forty minutes lead time. For some obscure sentimental reason he was glad that Bradley’s group still appeared to have the truck Qatux was traveling in.

“They’ll make it up again after the Anculan tomorrow,” Rosamund said with conviction.

The Anculan River was where the biggest Guardian ambush was planned. If the Starflyer kept its speed, they should reach it by midday tomorrow. Adam hoped she was right. There were reports coming in of more Institute Cruisers on the road far south of the equator. Reinforcements. Nothing was secret anymore. The new troops knew now that there were Guardian ambush squads at each river. They could engage them before the Starflyer arrived, clearing away any threat. Bradley and Stig were also going to have to take on at least two more Cruiser patrols before they reached the Anculan.

Adam just hoped that the preparations for the Final Raid had gone unnoticed. Away in the eastern province of the Dessault Mountains, the clans were assembling every remaining warrior into an army that was going to sweep down on the Starflyer and the Research Institute and the arkship. There were no civilians living anywhere near the deep forts of the clans, no remote farms or wandering prospector to shout excited claims about an army on the march.

The Guardians he’d encountered at that brief meeting at rendezvous point four had also talked breathlessly about the Barsoomians, who were supposedly traveling in from their territory on the other side of the Oak Sea to help with the Final Raid. Together they would destroy the Starflyer before it ever reached its starship.

Although he never said it out loud, Adam hoped that was one battle that would never happen. The Institute itself would have heavy-duty weaponry to defend its valley. The loss of life would be dreadful. Now he was actually on Far Away, reviewing things on the ground, his confidence had taken an abrupt nosedive. The planet was so backward. He’d always thought his shipments were received by well-organized fighting units. In reality the clans were little advanced from Earth’s pre-Commonwealth guerrilla bands who waged war on oppressive governments from their mountain hideaway camps. The clans, bluntly, were turning out to be a serious disappointment.

His main hope now was that they would be on time delivering the components carried by the Volvos. If the planet’s revenge could be made to work, and wreck the Marie Celeste before the Starflyer reached it, they would have a breathing space. Bradley wouldn’t have to launch the Final Raid. Sheldon had promised to send a starship; it would have the weapons to exterminate the alien from orbit. A clean precise blast of energy would eradicate the problem once and for all.

So Adam Elvin, lapsed socialist activist, kept his own silent counsel as the Volvo drove on and on through the interminable grasslands, praying that the greatest capitalist the human race had ever produced would keep his word. If it wouldn’t have required so much explaining, he would have laughed out loud at the monstrous irony.

“Something up ahead,” Rosamund called out.

Adam broke his reverie to look at the radar display. There was a very broad shallow river a kilometer ahead. The radar return showed a horse on the far side, with someone standing beside it. Given their relative sizes, he thought it must be a child.

“That’s got to be someone from Samantha’s team,” Kieran said. “I bet it’s Judson McKratz.”

“What makes you say that?” Adam asked.

“I know him. They’ll want to confirm we’re genuine, and Judson knows this road better than anyone.”

“Good point.” Adam rubbed at his temples. It had been a long trip, and he hadn’t had much sleep since … probably the Carbon Goose. He was sure he had an hour on the flight. “Even so … force fields on, people.”

The river was wider than Adam realized from the radar. Grass hid it until they were only a couple of hundred meters from the bank. They dipped down a short incline, and he could finally see it was almost four hundred meters across. He whistled softly. Even with a depth that was never greater than half a meter, that was a lot of water. The gentle U-shape course it had carved for itself spoke of much higher levels rushing down from the mountains. On his map, the river stretched back to the Dessault range, where it was fed by dozens of tributaries worming their way out through the foothills.

“One at a time,” he ordered. “Ayub, stay here and get ready to give us covering fire.”

“Yes, sir.”

Rosamund inched their Volvo down onto the stony riverbed. Its suspension lowered the wheels below the chassis, and they moved forward in a series of lurches that rocked the cab about. Even in Far Away’s gravity, Adam had to strap himself in tight.

The rider standing beside the dark gray horse was an adult human male, wearing a long walnut-colored oilskin greatcoat and broad-rimmed hat that deflected the drizzle like a force field. As they drew near to the bank, Adam gawped in astonishment. The Guardians he’d met always talked about their Charlemagnes with a sense of pride; now he could see why. The beast was big and hellishly intimidating. He eyed its short metal-tipped horn, and vowed not to venture within twenty meters of the brute.

The Volvo wobbled up out of the river.

“That’s Judson all right,” Kieran said with a wide smile. He jumped down out of the cab to greet his old colleague. The two of them embraced warmly, and Kieran brought him over to the truck. Adam climbed out. The Charlemagne had tusks, he saw. It probably wasn’t a herbivore.

“Mr. Elvin,” Judson said. “Welcome. I have heard your name many times. Those who return from the Commonwealth speak well of you.”

“Thank you.” Adam waved the other truck over. “We’ve brought the remainder of the equipment you need.”

“In the nick of time again, eh?” Judson put his arm around Kieran’s shoulder, shaking him fondly.

“We’re here,” Kieran said. “Don’t complain.”

“Me?” He gave a deep rumbling laugh. “Seriously, you should be able to reach Samantha by nightfall. She’s waiting for you in Reithstone Valley, with additional transport ready to ferry the components out to the remaining stations. And after that! You are lucky I know the deepest caves in this region.” He pulled an array out of his coat pocket. “I’ll let them know you’re here.”

Adam’s array picked up a song being played on the short-wave frequency they’d been given. He suspected not many people would know it without an e-butler search of library files. Somebody here had a strange sense of humor. The sound of “Hey, Jude” washed across the eternal grasslands.

A few minutes later, his array found the salsa hit “Morgan” being played, drifting in and out of reception as the ionosphere undulated far above them. He remembered dancing to that in his own youth.

“That’s the acknowledgment,” Judson said.

“I’m curious,” Adam said. “What if it hadn’t been us?”

Judson gave him a broad smile. “ ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’ ”

Making contact with Judson had provided all of them with a definite morale boost. After the shock of discovering the sabotage, they needed to know they weren’t isolated. A state the grassland had emphasized for hour after hour.

The Volvos drove off down the buried road again, leaving Judson behind. For all the size and power of the Charlemagne, it couldn’t keep up with the trucks’ unceasing pace. The dark clouds began to break up in the late afternoon, allowing huge sunbeams to play down past their frayed edges, like searchlights strafing the grassland. As the beams slowly angled up toward the horizontal there was finally a break in the numbingly tedious landscape. Up ahead, the foothills of the Dessault range were beginning to rise above the glistening stalks of Anguilla grass.

An hour later they were driving up the foothills. The grass had finally fallen behind them, unable to rise far up the slopes where the air cooled quickly. Ordinary grass reasserted itself, along with trees and bushes. Their road became clear again, two lines of hard-packed stone winding up the banks and following the contour lines cut into valley walls. It wasn’t long before they were level with the first true mountains. On either side of them, sharp rocky peaks smeared with snow protruded into the ice-clear sapphire sky, casting huge shadows down into the valleys as the sun fell.

Twice, Adam saw riders on Charlemagnes high above the road, watching them as they crawled on toward Reithstone Valley. It was becoming difficult to receive radio transmissions amid the mountains. The last they heard of Highway One was a Guardian ambush team engaging a Cruiser patrol at the Kantrian bridge a couple of hours before the Starflyer reached it. After a couple more engagements with Institute troops Bradley had fallen back again and was now trailing the Starflyer by nearly four hours.

Twilight brought them into yet another high valley where the alpine grass was still struggling to establish itself. Trees and bushes were confined to thickets along the side of the fast-flowing stream that cut along the bottom. Kieran was spelling Rosamund behind the wheel. As they started to climb again, he turned the headlights on. Long beams of blue-tinged light exposed the shelf that was now their road. There was no compacted stone here; the soil was a hard grit bound together with tough short grass and ragged moss. Occasional rockfall mounds had been carved away by machines decades ago, but apart from that the track appeared to be natural. Adam wondered if it had originally been formed by the local equivalent of mountain goats in the millennia before the flare. It was a little too convenient to be completely geological. He was also slightly discomforted by how narrow it was in sections. The width fluctuated constantly. There were no crash barriers; and the slope below was steep getting on for vertical. Thankfully, it was getting harder to see the valley floor as the light shrank away out of the sky. Stars began to appear overhead.

Adam went to check on Paula again. The cab’s air-conditioning unit was now blowing warm air through the vents, compensating for the chill of altitude. She moaned when he slid the composite door open, instinctively turning away from the pink twilight that shone in through the windshield.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

A skeletal face peered up at him from a nest of blankets.

Adam sniffed the air, and tried not to grimace in disgust. Paula had been sick; sticky brown fluid stained the blankets she was clutching. He thought there might be specks of blood in it.

“Here.” He handed her a bottle of water. “You’ve got to drink more.”

Just looking at it made her shudder. “Can’t.”

“You’re dehydrating, that just makes this worse.” He began to tug his dark red sweater off over his head. “Give me the top blanket and put this on.”

She said nothing, but released her grip on the blanket. He bundled it away in a polythene bag, then adjusted the vent controls for a quick blast of clear air to rid the little compartment of the rancid smell. Paula took a long time to pull the sweater on. The one time he tried to help, she pushed his hands away, determined to do it herself. He didn’t offer again; if she still had pride there was hope for her personality yet.

“I’ve got some sedatives left,” he said when she fell back down onto the cot, completely exhausted.

“No.” She beckoned at the bottle he was holding. “I’ll try and drink.”

“You need more than that.”

“I’ll try and remember.”

“The Guardians will have a doctor.”

“We’ll stick to the diagnostic array, thank you. I trust that more than any doctor on this world.”

“That’s prejudice.”

“It’s my life.”

“Look, we both know—”

“We’ve got company,” Rosamund sang out. “Trucks up ahead, coming our way.”

Adam gave Paula a long look. “We’ll talk about this later.”

“It’s hard for me to avoid you.”

He went back into the cab, glancing at the radar display. “What have you got?”

Kieran pointed out through the windshield. Several points of light were moving along the side of the mountain ahead of them, shining bright in the deep shadow.

“See if you can contact them,” Adam told Rosamund. He wasn’t particularly worried. If the Institute had by some miracle tracked them down, they wouldn’t be so blatant.

“Answering signal,” Rosamund said. “It’s Samantha all right, she says they need to get started with the equipment straightaway.”

They drove on for another kilometer before finding a broad section of the road shelf where they could all park. Samantha’s vehicles roared in ten minutes later as the sapphire sky finally faded to black, and the stars shone with an intensity Adam rarely got to see on any Commonwealth world. Seven medium-sized trucks and five old Vauxhall jeeps parked around the Volvos, all with tough primitive-looking AS suspension; their engines thundered in the thin air, exhaust pipes blowing out mucky vapor. Twenty Guardians climbed out, giving the new Volvos an inquisitive examination.

Samantha was younger than Adam was expecting, certainly still in her twenties, with an enormous cloud of dark red hair that was wound back into a boisterous tail which hung a long way down her broad back. A face that was eighty percent freckles smiled curiously at him when they met in front of the Volvos, illuminated by the bright blue-tinted headlight.

Adam took out the crystal holding the Martian data and handed it over to her with a flourish.

“Adam Elvin.” She shook his hand. “Pleased to meet you. I’ve heard your name a lot from people who come back.”

There was something in the way she said that, almost like an accusation. “Thanks. We weren’t expecting to see you for a while yet.”

“Yeah, I know. Change of plan. Have you been following the Highway One reports?”

“Yes.”

“The Starflyer’s making better progress than we expected. We really need to get those last manipulator stations up and running. I figured it would be quicker to offload the equipment to my people now, and they’ll disperse from here.”

“Sure, hey this is your field. We’re just the delivery team.”

“You’ve done a good job. With this.”

Again, there was that tone. “Anything the matter?”

“Hey, sorry, pal.” She gripped his arm tightly. “No offense, but I’m Lennox’s mother. I was good friends with Kazimir, too. Real good friends.”

Adam didn’t understand the Lennox reference. “Oh, I didn’t know. I’m sorry. Kazimir was a good man, one of the best.”

Rosamund gave a discreet cough behind him. “Bruce was Lennox’s father.”

Adam looked from Rosamund to Samantha, completely flummoxed. “Christ. Uh, did you know he’s dead, too?”

“Been dead a long time, pal. Just his body been walking around out there.” Another firm squeeze on Adam’s arm. “After this, if you’ve got time, I’d like to hear about it. Be good coming from the horse’s mouth.”

“Of course.”

“For now we need to shift our asses into gear, and sharpish. How much did you bring?”

“Just about everything we said we would. There’s twenty-five tons in each truck. Some got damaged en route, not much.”

“Yeah, heard you had some trouble.” Samantha eyed the navy people. “How’s that going?”

“It’s under control.”

Samantha mulled that over for a while. “You’re our top man in the Commonwealth; Bradley Johansson trusts you, so I will, too. But I don’t need any surprises, pal. Out here we have a very easy solution for Starflyer agents.”

“Understood. You won’t get any surprises.”

Samantha produced a handheld array that was old enough to have been on Far Away right from the start. “I’ll need the inventory, but that kind of tonnage! Dreaming heavens, sounds like we’ve got more than enough. Thanks again; this planet might just get its revenge after all. That must have been some ride to get here.”

“It had its moments.”

“Let’s hope it wasn’t for nothing. Time really is being a bitch to us right now. Can we start unloading?”

“Sure.” He got Rosamund and Jamas to open the trailers while he handed Samantha a spare handheld array and showed her how to use it. She whistled appreciatively at its adaptive-logic voice recognition, and started searching the inventory list. A minute later she was bellowing instructions to her people. Guardians and trolleybots were soon beavering away unloading the crates.

“Just how time-critical are things?” Adam asked. He was beginning to feel redundant, standing with the navy people in a little cluster while Jamas and the others were smiling away as they greeted friends they hadn’t seen in years.

Samantha sucked on her lower lip and lowered her voice. “My teams should pull through. The drivers will dose up on beezees and run the mountains like a bat out of hell tonight, each of the stations will get their load tomorrow; Zuggenhim Ridge is the farthest away, and that should be done by midday, which is cutting it fine for assembly, but I’ll take that one myself. We’re going to start the planet’s revenge the day after tomorrow no matter how many stations are ready. No choice, pal.”

Adam did some quick mental arithmetic. “That is going to be tight.” He reckoned the Starflyer would reach the Institute sometime after midday.

“Very,” she said. “But that’s not the real problem.”

“What is?”

“Our observation team is badly behind schedule. As soon as we heard the Starflyer was through the gateway we tried to tell them to start. They were camped in the Nalosyle Vales, and there was a bad weather front around there. We didn’t get through until early this morning, bastard short wave is good for crap all. If they have nothing but good luck, it’ll take them three days to get up to Aphrodite’s Seat.”

“What does the observation team do?” Wilson asked.

“We have to know the topology of the weather patterns,” Samantha said. “We need to plot the morning stormfronts exactly as they come around Mount Herculaneum, then we need to see what effect our manipulators are having so we can direct the damn thing properly. It’s going to be tricky enough for the control group without working half blind.”

“Satellite imagery?” Anna said.

“No satellites here,” Wilson said. “I remember talking to the Institute director a while back. Got a personal update on infrastructure.” He grinned distantly.

Samantha gave him a very interested look. “Right. Which is why we need someone on Aphrodite’s Seat. From there you can see right to the eastern end of the Dessault range. It’s also a perfect com relay point; no more crapping short wave.”

“But they’re not going to get there in time,” Adam said. That arithmetic wasn’t difficult at all.

“Trust me, we’re kicking their asses as much as we can over the radio. Not that we can say much without drawing too much attention. If anyone can do it, they will.”

“Isn’t there any other way up there?” Wilson asked. “What about flying? There must be some aircraft on Far Away.”

“Aphrodite’s Seat is above the atmosphere. In any case, nobody goes flying planes around the Grand Triad, not with the winds that hit them from the ocean.”

“I thought tourists flew over it,” Oscar said.

“Sure do,” Samantha said. “Rich morons try and catch the winds so they can glide over it. The lucky ones make it to the far side. Not onto the peak.”

“The right parabola could get you there,” Wilson said thoughtfully.

“And you know how to do that?” Samantha asked scornfully.

Wilson leaned forward with a menacing smile that shut down her attitude. Adam could see what an unfair contest it was: a young Samantha who cheerfully bossed around a team of freedom fighters and the Admiral, an exfighter pilot who had captained the Second Chance, then went on to command the navy.

“I’m the only human being ever to have flown on Mars,” he told her equitably. “I aerobraked a spaceplane from a two-hundred-kilometer orbit and landed on a designated site the size of a tennis court. How about you?”

“Shit! You’re dicking with me, pal.”

“Wilson.” Oscar was tugging at his arm. “Come on, man, that was over three hundred years ago. And that plane had rocket engines to help you steer, these gliders don’t.”

“That kind of flying is not something you forget or erase,” Wilson said. “Besides, the tour companies here must have skill memory implants.”

“Well, yeah,” an astounded Samantha said. “But, come on! Landing on the summit of Mount Herculaneum? Are you serious?”

“Yes, are you?” Adam asked. As soon as Wilson suggested it, Adam had begun sketching out consequences and opportunities. Even if there was only the slightest chance of success they had to make the effort. It wasn’t going well on Highway One, and the superstorm wouldn’t happen unless the control group was fully functional. After everything they’d gone through, the sacrifices they’d endured to get the Martian data here, he couldn’t bear the idea of it not having its chance.

“You’ll need a lot of electrical gear,” Samantha said. “We need high resolution panoramic vision and clear relay channels. I haven’t got anything like that here.”

Wilson tapped her ancient array. “The electronics we’re carrying are a lot better than anything of yours I’ve seen so far, no offense.”

“First things first,” Adam said. “Can we reach the gliders which the tourists use in time to get up there before the Starflyer arrives at the Institute?”

Samantha sucked in a long breath. “It’ll be tight, pal. You’ll need to get the hyperglider tethered down in Stakeout Canyon tomorrow night to catch the morning storm. The travel companies hangar them at Stonewave, that’s on the wet desert west of the Aldrin Plains. You’ll have to burn some gas to get there in time, tomorrow afternoon at the latest.”

Adam pulled the map out of his virtual vision grid, tracing the northern edge of the Dessault range to the west until he found the town. She was right, it was a long way, much farther than Wolfstail. “Can it be done?” he asked.

“Yeah, maybe. There’s a track wedged in between the foothills and the top of the grasslands. You use that and you don’t have to drive through the crapping Anguilla grass. It’ll take you around Herculaneum and out on the north side of Mount Zeus. Stonewave is a straight line north from there.”

Adam turned his attention back to the trucks. “We’ll unhitch the trailers from the cabs. We’ll make much better time without them.”

“You’ll need to, pal. Believe me when I say you do not want to be caught anywhere near Herculaneum tomorrow morning after the storm comes in from the ocean. If you’re going to live, never mind fly, you have to get into the lee of Zeus before sunrise.”

“Thanks.”

She gazed at Wilson. “You really going to do this?”

“We’re really going to do this,” Oscar said.

“Huh?” Wilson gave him a startled look.

“You heard,” Anna said. “We all know how to fly; that’s one up on most of the tourists crazy enough to try this. And with three of us, there’ll be a better chance that someone will survive to smash down on the top of the mountain.”

“You mean glide gently to a soft halt,” Oscar said.

“I know what I mean.”

Wilson put his arm around her. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” She stroked his cheek tenderly. “You still owe me a honeymoon.”

“This trip isn’t good enough?”

She kissed him, her eyes shining. “Not yet.”

“Dreaming heavens,” Samantha said. “I don’t doubt you could do this, but … the sabotage. I can’t risk it.”

“Yes, you can,” Wilson said. “Assume the worst, if the saboteur is the only one of us who makes it to the top and doesn’t relay the observation data you need, how will that make it worse than it is right now?”

Samantha gave him a desperate look; her gaze slipped over to Adam. It was obvious she didn’t want the decision. “All right,” she said grudgingly. “I guess there’s not much to lose.”

Wilson gave her a curt nod, still in command. “We’ll need your exact observation requirements, and the communications specs so we can modify our equipment. Do Rosamund and the rest know the route to Stonewave?”

“Pretty much. The tourist companies use the route along the side of the foothills to chase after their hypergliders, so it’s pretty well marked out.”

Adam caught up with Oscar as the trailers were being unhitched from the Volvo cabs. Almost all of the crates had been unloaded. The truck to Zuggenhim Ridge had already left. Samantha was going to take a jeep and follow it, once she and another Guardian called Valentine had finished briefing Wilson and Jamas on the technical details of the observation. They were going to spend the trip to Stonewave modifying their arrays to duplicate the performance of the equipment that the original observation team carried.

“I’m glad you volunteered,” Adam said.

“I wasn’t about to let Wilson go and—” His eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Why?”

“Because I’m only going to allow you to fly.”

“What!” Oscar hunched down instinctively, checking to see if anyone was looking. “What are you talking about?” he asked in a low voice.

“You think Wilson and Anna are suddenly in the clear because they offered to do this?”

“Well …” Oscar rubbed a hand hard across his forehead. “Oh, Christ.”

“Assume one of them is the traitor, and they make it to the top. The whole planet’s revenge project is dependent on that observation.” Adam slapped his hands together vigorously. “They’ve fucked us. Bang, it’s over. Starflyer makes it back to the Marie Celeste and leaves.”

“When are you going to tell them?”

“After we’ve got to Stonewave and prepared the hypergliders. That’s the other thing, this trip will keep all of us away from these manipulator stations Samantha is building; I don’t want any sudden freak accidents to happen to them, either. Once we’ve found a working hyperglider and set it up ready to fly, I’ll tell them they’re grounded. My Guardian team will back me up.”

“Adam, please, I’m not that good a pilot. Hell, the only time I’ve actually flown in the last ten years is on the Carbon Goose.”

“The insert memories will help. You’ll make it, Oscar, you always do.”

Four Land Rover Cruisers were parked across Highway One. Ion shots raked the sky above them, punching into buildings where Institute troopers were shooting at the approaching line of Guardians’ vehicles. The kinetic rapid-fire gun mounted on the bonnet of the Cruiser blocking the nearside lane began firing at the cab of the big eighteen-wheel Loko truck that was bearing down on it at a hundred kilometers an hour. An answering hyper-rifle shot from the truck’s cab struck the Cruiser head-on, slicing clean through its force field. It exploded violently, lifting its broken-backed chassis off the ground to somersault in midair.

“Going airborne,” the Cat’s voice called out blithely on the general band. Her armored shape jumped from the Loko’s cab, surrounded by a sparkling amber force field. She hit the worn enzyme-bonded concrete and bounced, slamming into the wall of an animal feed store amid a shimmering crimson aurora. The wall shattered and the roof sagged alarmingly.

The flaming corpse of the Cruiser landed on its roof, collapsing under the impact. A second later the Loko truck struck it head-on, shunting it back into the rest of the blockade.

Two hundred meters behind, sitting at the wheel of the armored car, Stig winced at the impact. The Loko truck rampaged onward. Two more crumpled Cruisers lurched into the air as it struck them, their force fields flaring dangerous scarlet. Scraps of wreckage tumbled fast across Highway One beneath a huge fireball flooding up into the empty sapphire sky. Tiger Pansy squealed in Stig’s ear. It was like a fingernail scrape plugged into a rock band’s amp stack. “Holy shit,” she sighed in exhilaration. “You’re not going to …?”

He kept the accelerator floored as the blazing chassis of the truck performed a slow jackknife across the two southbound lanes. The buildings on the side of the road were getting perilously close, blocking the narrow slit of side window with a high-speed smear of fanciful colored paint. In front, the Loko’s chassis was slowly coming to a halt, leaving a very small gap that continued to shrink. Stig’s arms gripped the steering wheel like bands of steel. He refused to brake. Flames were fanning out across the enzyme-bonded concrete as the tank on the fourth Cruiser burst open, spilling out a wave of fuel that was already alight.

“Dreaming heavens,” Bradley gasped from the front passenger bench; his hands clawed at the cushioning. A lavish sheet of flame roared upward, covering both lanes.

They flashed through the gap, their slipstream pulling some of the flame with them. In the air above, fire and smoke swirled in micro-cyclone patterns.

“Fucking-A,” Tiger Pansy agreed loudly.

The road ahead was clear. Stig steered them back into the outside lane. The Mazda jeeps and the other armored cars following him drove through the gap, keeping their set fifty-meter separation distance. Then came the last three Loko trucks.

“Cat?” Stig called. “Cat, are you okay?”

Bradley was pressed against the slit window, staring back along the road. “Can’t see anybody. Still a lot of flame.”

“Cat?” Morton asked; for once he sounded concerned.

“Boys. You care. How sweet.”

Cheers rang out from all the vehicles.

In the rearview camera image Stig saw the Cat’s armored shape walk out of the ruined feed store. A Mazda jeep braked hard, tires leaving black rubber streaks on the enzyme-bonded concrete. The front door opened, and the Cat climbed in as if she were hitching a lift.

“Any bad guys survive?” Alic asked.

“I’m monitoring local net traffic,” Keely said. “The residents haven’t seen any yet. Mind you, they’re still keeping their heads down.”

“Tell them not to approach any survivors,” Bradley said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Now that was fun,” the Cat said. “How long till the next one?”

“Half an hour,” Olwen muttered in a piqued tone.

Like all of them, Olwen had been keen to join battle when they finally caught up with the Starflyer. It was an event Stig and Bradley had soon realized was never going to happen if they kept getting delayed by the Institute patrols. Bradley had made the decision to adopt the head-on collision tactic. Only the state-of-the-art armor suits worn by the Paris team and Cat’s Claws could perform that duty, which left the rest of the Guardians more than a little envious.

Another of the big Loko trucks they’d liberated from the depot growled past Stig’s armored car. Jim Nwan was driving; his gauntlet waved as he maneuvered the truck into point position.

The beezees Stig had taken to keep alert during the second full day of driving made it hard for him to slacken his grip on the steering wheel. They narrowed the brain’s focus onto one task and kept the neurons zinging with the precision of a processor; people had kept doing the same thing for up to a week when they were dosed up. You didn’t need sleep, but it became difficult for the mind to nudge its way out of the thought-loop that bestowed so much attention.

“Anybody else between us and the Anculan?” he asked.

“No reported sightings,” Keely said. “I’m still not getting anything close to the bridge. The road net ends a hundred sixty kilometers this side of it. Even the redundant systems have failed after that. Nobody’s picking up any radio coming from the south, either. I’m still getting check signals from Rock Dee on the short wave but that’s all.”

“Okay.”

At their current speed, and assuming no further clashes with the Institute, they’d reach the Anculan bridge in another two and a half hours. Best guess put the Starflyer there an hour ago. They didn’t know exactly; communications had fallen off dramatically when the Starflyer convoy passed that magic sixty-kilometer marker. What the Institute had done to kill the road’s net was subject to a lot of debate among the Guardians.

Stig was desperate for some news. Anculan was where the clans were making their biggest effort to intercept the Starflyer on Highway One. If that didn’t slow it down, then the whole pursuit would be for nothing, and they’d have to depend on the planet’s revenge and the Final Raid. Not that he would ever criticize Bradley Johansson, but for plans that had been a hundred years in the making, their time frame was starting to look pretty shitty. Besides, the bombing run on 3F Plaza made this personal; he wanted to take down the Starflyer himself. The beezees was loose enough to second-track that thought.

Bradley bent over and gave his short-wave array a hard look. “That sounds like Samantha.”

Stig’s eyes never left the road. He’d isolated his inserts from any external communication to help his concentration. Up in front Jim Nwan’s truck was belching out a lot of exhaust fumes. The hard blue of the sky splashed strong waves along its elaborate chrome finish. He tried to lock down any repetitive pattern in the reflections. “What does she say?”

“They’re at the last manipulator station. I guess that means Adam got through with their equipment.”

“Good man, Adam, no traitor is going to derail him.”

“Hang on …” A grin flicked over his lips. “She keeps saying she’s ready to surf the next wave.” He switched the short-wave array to transmit. “Message acknowledged. Have a good day at the beach.” His reply was automatically repeated ten times.

Olwen dropped her arms onto the back of Bradley’s seat, her head resting in her hands, and grinning in satisfaction. “Tomorrow! Dreaming heavens, can you believe this. It’s going to happen tomorrow!”

“Not if I catch it first,” Stig grunted.

Olwen and Bradley shared a glance.

“So, Bradley, how do you feel about this?” Tiger Pansy asked. She was oblivious to the way Olwen’s mouth wrinkled with disapproval. “You’ve waited a long time for it to happen.”

“I’m not sure I feel anything,” Bradley said. “I just keep focused on the events happening around us. I know I set them all in motion but I don’t think I’d ever tried to visualize them for myself before. It’s quite something, like looking out on an avalanche as it thunders down a mountain and knowing you threw the first pebble.”

“It’s an avalanche that’ll bury that bastard Starflyer,” Olwen said. “We’ll see to it.”

“Thank you, my dear. It is your clans that have gifted me a great deal of strength over the decades. You have no idea what it is like to be surrounded by contempt and hatred and yet still have somebody believe in you.”

“Commonwealth’s going to owe us, huh?”

“They always have, they just never knew it. So do you know yet, dear Olwen, what you’re going to do afterward?”

“No. Never even thought about it. It’s still kind of hard to accept this is happening. I always expected it would be the next generation who helped the planet have its revenge, or the one after. Never mine.”

“Ah well, the day after tomorrow we will all have to sit down and think about what is to become of us. The clans will have to transform themselves. Into what, who knows.”

“If I’m still alive the day after tomorrow, I’ll be at the biggest party Far Away’s ever had.”

“Fair enough, my dear; we’ll wait until after the hangover before we make any important decisions.”

They saw the smoke from a few kilometers away. Thin smears of gray vapor wafted up into the hazy equatorial sky, the kind of smoke that only comes from embers.

Haville wasn’t a big town; it ran for a couple of kilometers beside the road before tailing off into orange groves. The Starflyer convoy had started a firestorm at one end and ripped it down the entire length. Shacks assembled from carbon panels had been reduced to piles of slag sprawling over their concrete foundations. Black horizontal scorch marks produced by lasers and masers were visible on all the surviving concrete block walls, running right across the gutted buildings. People were visible amid the debris, desolated and wandering around aimlessly, their shocked eyes following the Guardians’ convoy as they charged past. One large open yard had a line of corpses, wrapped up in cloth.

“They hit every node junction,” Keely reported. “It’s not like the net was armored or anything.”

“I don’t think they were that precise,” Bradley said as they reached the end of Haville. Trees along the edge of the orange grove were still burning. “This is a deliberate scorched earth operation to kill any long-range communications along the road.”

“Do you think they’ve done this to every town?” Olwen asked.

“Undoubtedly.”

Nothing else moved along Highway One now. South of Rob Lacey’s great avenue of redwoods the land rose steadily to be capped by low hills whose valleys interlocked in gentle curves. Bradley could remember traveling along a newly laid Highway One when this tableland had been barren territory. Today, nearly two centuries later, the rolling slopes were carpeted by rich emerald vegetation of shaggy grass and small verdant trees. Midday sun turned the crown of the sapphire sky to a white blaze-patch too bright to look at directly. Visibility was perfect. Looking over Stig’s shoulder through the thick glass of the armored car’s windshield he could see the mud-gray strip of enzyme-bonded concrete wind onward through the meandering vales for kilometers in front of them. There was nowhere for a Cruiser patrol to hide. Stig and the other drivers were piling on the speed.

Since Haville, they’d passed through four more small towns that the Starflyer had razed to the ground, ending with Zeefield, the southernmost settlement along Highway One. Word had obviously spread southward in time. The last three had been deserted; they’d seen no distraught victims nor lines of corpses amid the smoldering ruins. Wherever the residents had fled to, they were staying quiet. Keely had been unable to raise anyone on the local bands.

Right across the rolling tablelands, the fiber-optic cable that linked the Institute to Armstrong City supported a series of nodes to provide communications to anyone using the road. They were spaced five kilometers apart, protected from the elements inside meter-wide domes that sprouted from the ground beside the road like composite mushrooms. Every one had been masered, the high-density carbon turning to a slate-gray sludge surrounded by singed grass.

“I came up here for my first act against the Starflyer,” Stig said as Highway One began to dip down into one of the deeper vales toward the end of the tablelands. “We were always cutting the cable up here. It was easy.”

“Now they’re using that isolation against us,” Bradley said. “Though attacking every single node speaks of deep insecurity. A couple of simple cuts would be sufficient.”

“Why bother?” Olwen asked. “It knows we’re using short wave; it can’t block our critical communications.”

“In some respects it is remarkably unimaginative,” Bradley said. “If destroying the road net has caused us inconvenience before, it simply continues to perform the disruption.”

“That sounds more like an array program than a sentient creature.”

“In some respects its neurological functions are strikingly similar to those of a processor. What tactics it possesses it either determines by trial and error, or absorbs from other more intuitive sources. A fast-flowing situation like this chase will be difficult for it. There is no time for it to work through options to see which is the most effective.”

“You mean it gets its ideas from humans?”

“Yes, a lot of the time; though the longer they are under its control, the more their ability to think in an original or inventive fashion is reduced.”

“No wonder it wants to get rid of us. It can’t compete.”

“Not on our terms, no. But nonetheless it has brought us to the brink of destruction. Don’t underestimate it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bradley was moved by the level of determination in her voice. Returning to Far Away after so long he’d even been slightly disturbed by the unquestioning respect he kindled among the clans. It was almost as if the Commonwealth authorities were right to brand him a cult leader.

Highway One began its long descent out of the tablelands, tracking around the steeper gorges, then bending in great switchback loops down the final escarpment to deliver them onto the sweltering veldt. This was where Far Away’s first true rainforest was busy establishing itself, sweeping out from Mount StOmer at the northwestern corner of the Dessault Mountains away to the southern shoreline of the Oak Sea. The grasses had come first, seeded by the blimpbots, refreshing the soil before the trees and vines were introduced over a fifty-year period. The central core of rainforest was now thriving and expanding without any further human encouragement.

Bradley could see the Anculan Valley from a long way off, an intrusive furrow running west to east across the veldt, emptying into the Oak Sea. Its vegetation was noticeably darker than the luxuriant jade of the rainforest, shading down to olive-green as if the gully was permanently in shadow. The river was fed by dozens of tributaries emerging from the Dessault range, giving it a lavish forceful flow that had cut deep into the landscape, creating a gully over two hundred meters wide and up to thirty deep with near-sheer sides. Dense bushes filled the base of the gully on either side of the water, their half-exposed root balls scrabbling for purchase on the glutinous mud. Water pumpkins had colonized the shallows, their brimstone-colored fruit bobbing about, ranging from buds no bigger than oranges up to the full-grown football-size globes with mushy wrinkled skin. Their wreath of slim black tendrils swished around them in the current as if eels were nesting in the stem. This close to the mountains the Anculan’s water was loaded with so much sediment it was the color of milky coffee.

Given the difficulty and expense of ferrying steel girders to Far Away, the most cost-effective method of bridging a gulf of this size was with a single span arch of concrete supporting the road above, which narrowed from its usual four lanes down to two.

The Guardian demolition team had made a good job of bringing it down. All that remained of the arch were thick broken tusks of concrete curving up from either side of the river. The central hundred-meter section of the road was gone, its remnants a cluster of submerged boulders creating a furious surge of white water.

Alic and Morton stood on the edge of the broken road, using their active sensors to scan the thick wall of the rainforest on the opposite side. There was no sign of hostiles hidden among the wall of vegetation. “Looks clear,” Alic reported.

Stig and the others stood on the lip of the gorge next to the road, looking down into the surging water twenty meters below. Bodies were snagged on the new boulders, three of them wearing the dark impact armor of the Institute troops, a couple in camouflage fatigues. They all had terrible wounds. A Charlemagne had been snagged by the bushes just below the river, its body starting to bloat. When Stig started to scan upstream, he saw more bodies jammed into the mud and vegetation.

“Pretty clear which way they went,” Bradley said. A swathe of open ground bordered the top of the gorge, where grass creepers and bushes formed a buffer between the rainforest and the precipice. Its moist soil had been torn up by the wheels of the Starflyer convoy.

“Commander Hogan, Morton, could your people take point along here please,” Bradley said. “We need to find where they forded the river.”

“Sure thing,” Alic said. He and Morton left the bridge.

Cat’s Claws and the Paris team began jogging along the track, with the armored cars and jeeps following. They drove along the top of the gorge for another two kilometers. In some places the walls rose up to forty meters high. Below them, scattered along the river, dead bodies lay in the mud with water flowing around and over them. After the first thirty, everyone stopped counting.

The Starflyer convoy had made its crossing two and a quarter kilometers upriver from the bridge. A dip in the gorge wall on both sides reduced the height to a little over ten meters. Explosives had been used to rip the bottom out of the dip and pulverize the remainder of the wall, creating a sloping heap that the vehicles could drive down. It was a crude ramp that was mirrored on the other side of the Anculan.

Three wrecked Cruisers were just visible in the middle of the river, with the water churning over them; two more were burnt out on the northern ramp. One had been caught by kinetic and ion fire on the other side, then bulldozed out of the way by a heavier vehicle. Big patches of vegetation were blackened and smoldering. Twenty dead Charlemagnes were lying among the sodden bushes; some still had their riders strapped into the saddle. There were more bodies in the edges of the rainforest.

Bradley gazed out on the battlefield and lowered his head in grief. “Dreaming heavens, please let this end swiftly.”

“One of them’s moving!” Morton called out. “Cover me, please.” He started down the rough slope, his boots slipping and sliding on the muddy shale. Rob and the Cat followed at a slower rate.

“Commander, can you get over to the other side, please,” Bradley said. “Make sure there are no surprises for us over there.”

“You got it,” Alic acknowledged.

The Paris team started down the ramp.

“Stig, we’ll go over as soon as they’ve given us the go-ahead.”

“Yes, sir.” Stig eyed the turbulent river. “Uh, our jeeps will get through that kind of current okay. I’m not sure about some of the trucks on a river this strong. We could rig up winches, perhaps.”

“No. We have to keep moving. Anything that can’t make it under its own power is left here.”

“Bradley,” Morton called. “He’s one of yours. Keeps asking for you.”

Bradley went down the ramp along one of the tire tracks, thinking the soil and shingle would be firmer there; even so his feet slipped several times on loose patches. Stig followed him a couple of paces behind, their biggest medical kit bag hanging off his shoulder.

Cat’s Claws were standing some way off the bottom of the ramp in the middle of the bushes. One of the Charlemagnes had fallen nearby, its bulk skidding for several meters through the undergrowth before it finally stopped. Just behind it, lying in the muddy wake of crushed vegetation, its rider had come to rest in a gouge that was slowly filling with water. His scarf was the emerald and copper check of the McFoster clan, though the proud colors were now hard to distinguish below all the blood that the cloth had soaked up. A very old-fashioned force field skeleton worn over his dark fatigues had burned through in several places. By far the worst of his wounds was a rent along the side of his torso, which was coated in bloody mud.

Bradley narrowed his eyes at the sight of the man’s thick ruddy skin with its subsurface lacework of broken veins. “Harvey? Harvey, is that you?”

“Dreaming heavens, it is you,” Harvey’s ruined voice croaked feebly. “They said you were here. I didn’t believe it, not really. I’m sorry. I knew in my heart you wouldn’t leave us to face that monster alone.”

Bradley dropped to his knees in the blood puddles beside the old warrior. “What are you doing here? You’re not supposed to fight anymore.”

“One last battle, Bradley. That’s all. I grew so tired of training the youngsters, sending them out while I waited behind. I always needed one last battle for myself. And thank the dreaming heavens it was a glorious fight. Our ancestors are proud of us this day.”

“I’m proud of you, Harvey, I always have been. Now lie back, Stig’s got a medical kit, he’ll get you stable.”

“Bradley.” Harvey’s hand came up and gripped the front of Bradley’s shirt.

“Yes?”

“Bradley … you should see the other fella.” Breath rasped out of his mouth in the best laughter he could produce.

Bradley closed his hand over Harvey’s. “Don’t talk.”

Stig almost fell to the ground, staring aghast at his old combat instructor. “You’ll be all right, Harvey. I’ve got a medical kit that’s come direct from the Commonwealth. There’s healskin in it, and biogenics, the whole works.”

“Save it, lad,” Harvey whispered. “You’ll need it for real after the planet’s revenge.”

Stig bowed his head, tears running freely down his cheeks.

“Harvey?” Bradley asked. “How long ago did this happen? Can you remember?”

“I’ve got it for you,” Harvey said. “I watched when the monster’s truck went up the slope and noted the time. I knew you’d need it. The others, all kids, they never listen to me when I tell them what’s important.” He glanced at the ancient black chrome digital watch on his wrist. “Eighty-seven minutes, Bradley. That’s all it’s got on you now. I told you we put up a good fight.”

“You did. And we will finish the job now, I promise that.”

Harvey’s eyes closed. He let out a wheezing breath.

“Give him something for the pain,” Bradley told Stig. “Then get him into one of our jeeps.” He gently detached Harvey’s hand from his shirt, and looked at the scarlet mud stain it had left there as though trying to remember how it got there.

“Sir,” Stig said with an edgy voice. “We can’t move him. These injuries …”

“Harvey is going to the dreaming heavens, and nothing you carry in your bag will prevent that,” Bradley said. “We cannot wait here for that to happen, and I will not allow him to be left alone to die. Even if he only lasts a few minutes he will be with us, his comrades, as we chase our nemesis to its doom. Would you deny him that?”

Harvey laughed again, a weak burbling sound. His eyes were still closed. “You tell him, Bradley. Kids today, may the dreaming heavens preserve us from them.”

Stig nodded humbly, and opened the medical kit.

Bradley climbed to his feet. “Eighty-seven minutes,” he told Cat’s Claws. “We can catch it.”

Adam had considered the name wet desert to be a near perfect oxymoron, right up until the moment they started driving across it. Every day the storm that came in from the Hondu Ocean at dawn brought clouds that dumped between four and five centimeters of rain on the region before they finally blew out in the late morning. The wet desert was a wide shelf of land dropping steadily over hundreds of kilometers from the Aldrin Plains down to the shore of the ocean, a flat expanse that was made up from sand and shingle. Essentially it was the biggest beach in the known galaxy, although the last tide had gone out about a quarter of a million years ago. Geologists on early survey expeditions determined it used to be covered by the Hondu Ocean, which would have put the Grand Triad right on the coastline. It must have been quite something to see the lava from such enormous volcanoes pouring into the ocean.

When the rains fell on the wet desert they flowed across the saturated surface into hundreds of shallow, kilometers-wide channels that drained right back into the ocean. An hour after the clouds were banished into the east the ground was exposed again, the runoff was so quick. Noon equatorial sunlight shone down through empty skies, baking the waterlogged surface and producing a layer of warm viscous fog that clung to the ground for most of the rest of the day.

In the early days of the planet’s human settlement, the revitalization team spread some lichen spores about over the wet desert, then went away scratching their heads unsure what to do next. That was a hundred fifty years ago. They still hadn’t been back.

There was no sign of lichen from the cab of the lead Volvo. There was no sign of any life. No high-order organism could survive the strange cycle of water, heat, vapor, and scouring winds.

Adam himself was taking a turn at the wheel. It had been an exhausting trip, especially for the Guardians who’d shared the driving so the three navy people could rest before the flight. They’d only just made it past Mount Herculaneum in the small hours of the morning. After that they were halfway around the rocky base of Mount Zeus as the dawn broke and the winds rose, forcing them to park behind a rock outcrop and secure the Volvo cabs with carbicon ropes. Even then Adam had been frightened that the heavy vehicles would be blown away. Samantha was right, if they’d been caught at the base of Herculaneum in the full blast of the storm as it churned around the giant mountain’s flanks they would never have survived.

Once the winds subsided enough for them to walk around without being blown away, they’d untied the ropes and set off again. A couple of hours later they reached the northernmost boundary of Zeus’s base, and powered down onto the wet desert. Almost immediately they’d been engulfed by the fog.

The radar was on, sweeping ahead for obstacles or ravines. So far there hadn’t been any. Adam didn’t have the headlights on, there was no point. The sun fluoresced the fog to a uniform white glow surrounding the cab as it sped onward; visibility was rarely more than fifteen meters. Even so, he could push the speed up to a good hundred thirty kilometers an hour.

There was no problem with erosion on the wet desert; total saturation bestowed the sand with a fantastic degree of cohesion, locking every grain and grit particle into place like an epoxy. It provided a remarkably stable base to drive on, albeit one with very poor traction had they needed to brake sharply. The wide drainage channels were at most fifteen centimeters deep, allowing them to speed across unhindered. Huge fantails of spray unfolded from the Volvo’s wheels as if they were sprouting wings.

“I think we’re coming up on the town,” Adam announced. The radar was showing a protuberance rising out of the flat ground eight kilometers ahead of them, the first real interruption to the wet desert’s monotony.

Rosamund crowded over his shoulder, staring at the screen. “Yeah that’s got to be it. Coordinates match.”

Adam squinted, his retinal inserts on maximum resolution. Beyond the dreary sweep of the windshield wipers the radiant fog remained resolutely impenetrable. He checked the radar again. “Is that size right?” His foot instinctively eased off the accelerator.

“I guess so.” Rosamund sounded perturbed now.

Calling this region the wet desert should have warned Adam; Far Away’s inhabitants were a literal lot. The stone wave was a ridge of red sedimentary rock almost two kilometers long, and rising up to three hundred meters along its smooth crest. Erosion had eviscerated one side, sculpting a gigantic overhanging cavity that ran for two-thirds of the length and extending up to three hundred meters deep. Looking at it as they approached from the southern end, Adam saw it really did have the shape of a huge wave, frozen as it started to curve over. According to his files, geologists were still arguing if it had eroded before or after the ocean withdrew.

Stonewave’s buildings were laid out in the center of the giant overhang where the arching roof was at its highest, a hundred fifty meters to the crest. Although they varied in size they all followed the same simple oblong box design, standing on short stilts to keep them perfectly level. Their walls, floors, and roofs were made from identical blank carbon squares fixed to a sturdy frame. Tucked into the hollow of the wave they were protected from the worst of the elements; the rain never touched them, though the morning wind was still formidable as it eddied over the sheltering rock.

The little town existed only to support the hypergliders. Two of the buildings were fitted out as luxury hotels with fifteen beds each for the ultra-rich tourists who came here to test their luck and nerves in the morning storms. The tourist company staff shared three dormitory blocks; there was a diesel generator, a waste recycling plant, garages, and hangars.

Adam drove the cab up onto the rock floor and braked outside one of the hangars with a sign above the sliding doors that read GRAND TRIAD ADVENTURES. His e-butler had been trying to establish a link to the building management arrays with no result. When he scanned around with his retinal insets on infrared the geometric buildings were a uniform temperature.

“Looks like it’s deserted,” he said.

“The companies would have shut it down once the tourists stopped coming,” Rosamund said.

“Christ, I hope they left the hypergliders.”

“No reason not to.”

Adam went back to check on Paula. The Investigator was asleep on her little cot, knees drawn up toward her chest. Her forehead was slick with sweat and her breathing was now very shallow. Every now and then she would make a gulping sound as if she were drowning. Adam stared down at her in dismay. He simply didn’t know what to do about her. The sedatives had their limits, and none of the drugs or biogenics had made the slightest difference to her overall condition. He was scared to apply the diagnostic array for fear of what it would tell him.

“Stay here and watch her,” he told Rosamund.

She started to protest but he waved her down. “We don’t know this illness is for real,” Adam said, feeling a complete hypocrite. “And if she wakes up you must get her to drink. Force her if necessary.” In addition to all his other concerns was how long it’d been since she’d eaten anything. The medical kit did contain equipment for intravenous feeding, but he didn’t want to go down that route until he had no choice.

He left the cab quickly, shamed at his own relief to be leaving the problem behind. The other Volvo cab had parked just behind his. Wilson was already climbing down when Kieran turned the engine off. It was as if the sound had been sucked away. Between them the stone and fog did weird things to acoustics. Adam glanced up at the curving overhang feeling unnerved for no reason he could pin down.

“How’s Paula?” Wilson asked.

“No change,” Adam replied curtly. “Did you get your arrays modified to handle the comrelay function Samantha needs?”

“We think so, yes; the range is a problem. We took some of the Volvo’s modules apart and realigned them. The new unit should do the trick, but we only got one. I want to take the modules from your cab, and I’m hoping that the vehicles here should have similar electronics.”

“They ought to,” Jamas said. He’d climbed down from the cab along with Anna and Oscar. “The vehicles which the tourist companies use have to keep in contact over long distances. They’ve probably got better transmitters than the Volvos.”

“Okay, you and Kieran search around for them. We’ll need them to tow the hypergliders anyway. And be careful; we don’t know this place is deserted. The four of us will take the hangars.”

There was a small door on the side of the Grand Triad Adventures hangar. Adam had to shoot the lock out with a low-power ion pulse. It was so dark inside that even his retinal inserts were struggling to produce an image. He fumbled around and found the light switch. There must have been some kind of reserve power supply; long polyphoto strips came on, strangely yellow after the unending monochrome glow of the fog. Eight hypergliders rested on their transport cradles. They were in their primary configuration, a fat cigar shape with wings and tailplane buds retracted into flat triangles against the fuselage.

Oscar whistled in admiration. “Nice machinery.”

“You guys had better check them over,” Adam said. “This is your scene.”

“Sure,” Wilson said. “See if you can find the hangar’s arrays, please; we’ll need the maintenance records.”

“And their performance specs,” Anna added. Her extensive pattern of OCtattoos was emerging to gleam with a gold luster under the hangar lights. “This is one difficult trajectory we’re going to have to fly. The arc has got to terminate just right.”

“We’ll have to perform a standard overflight trajectory to begin with,” Wilson said. “Once you’re out of the twister you’ll be able to adapt the flight profile; kill the velocity and alter the angle to give a touchdown behind Aphrodite’s Seat. You can always lose speed, you won’t be able to gain it. It’ll be tricky, but one of us should manage to get close enough.”

Oscar shot Adam a fast accusing look.

“They must have some sort of summit landing capacity built in,” Anna was saying. “They can’t all hop over the top successfully.”

“If you haven’t got the velocity high enough you’re supposed to veer off and go around,” Wilson said. He found the manual release for the cockpit canopy on the first hyperglider, and twisted it. The transparent bubble hinged up smoothly. Wilson bent over the rim. “Here we go.”

Adam’s e-butler reported the hyperglider’s pilot array had just come on-line. He held Oscar’s gaze uncompromisingly for a moment, then ducked into the office at the back of the hangar. The air inside was musty after being sealed up for so long; every surface had a damp chill to it. Some of the metal items even had a slight coating of condensation.

The desktop array came on as soon as he touched the power stud. Even better, its programs and files didn’t have encrypted access. He started to pull up the general information.

“Adam,” Kieran called on an encrypted link, “we’ve found the jeeps they use for towing the hypergliders over to Stakeout Canyon. Talk about wind resistant, they look like bubbles. I think they’ve got anchors, too.”

“Good. See if they’ve got a service log. We’ll take the two with the best record.”

“Will do. Uh, aren’t we taking three hypergliders?”

“I’ll talk to you guys about that in a minute.”

“Okay. They all need fueling up anyway. Jamas is going to track down the main diesel tank.”

Adam found a file containing the Grand Triad Adventures introduction to hypergliding, and gave his e-butler a list of the specific information he wanted extracted. “What about the drilling equipment they use to tether the gliders?” he asked Kieran.

“Not here. I’ll scout around when I’ve sorted out the jeeps.”

“Right.” A standard itinerary popped up into Adam’s virtual vision. “Damn, we’re going to have to be quick. They normally leave for Stakeout Canyon at noon. That gives the crews time to position the hypergliders in the evening and get clear while it’s still light.”

“We’ll manage it.”

Adam’s e-butler had pulled out several sections from the introduction now. He skimmed through them until he found the files on skill memory. The implant was done in a room off the side of the office. He opened the door and found what looked like the kind of waiting area you’d get in a modestly successful legal firm. The exception was the five comfortable leather couches arranged along the back wall, each with its own sophisticated array. A dark mold was starting to spread out of the edges of the slightly damp leather; the first living organism they’d seen since they arrived on the wet desert. He checked the power reserves on the arrays.

“I’ve found the skill memory implanters,” he told the others as he came back into the hangar.

Five of the hypergliders had been opened. Wilson was sitting in the cockpit of one, his hands resting on the console i-spots. Below and behind him the wing buds flexed as if something inside them wanted to be birthed.

“Well done,” Wilson said.

“Not quite. There’s a slight problem. The humidity back there is even worse than in here. It’s screwed up some of the array connections. I’m really only happy with one of the systems. You’ll have to go one at a time. I’ll settle Oscar in first.”

“Okay,” Wilson said.

Oscar’s stony expression was unreadable.

“How’s it going out here?” Adam asked.

“We’re running through the preflight checklists,” Oscar told Adam quietly. “So far all five seem operational.”

Anna walked past, hauling a thick superconductor cable that she plugged into a socket on the second hyperglider. “They’re going to need charging before we take them out. The secondary power supply is okay, but they can’t fly on that. We need the main cells charged; the electromuscle and plyplastic have a lot of work to do.”

“I think the town generator was in the first building we came past,” Adam said. “Oh, and we need to leave soonest. The drive to Stakeout Canyon from here normally takes a good six hours. Then we have to plant the tether anchors.”

Wilson stood up in the cockpit. “Let’s get on with it, then.”

“We need tether cables for the hypergliders as well,” Anna said. “They must be around here somewhere.”

“You two sort that out,” Adam said. “I’ll get Oscar up to speed on the joys of hypergliding.”

“There’s plenty to go around,” Anna said. She was grinning as she gestured around the hangar. “Fancy joining us?”

“Not at my age and weight, thank you.”

Wilson clambered down out of the cockpit. He zipped up the front of his fleece. “Keep an eye on the checklists for me, please.”

“Will do,” Adam promised.

Oscar looked along the row of couches in the rear room. One of them had its array activated; green LEDs were shining on the front of the unit. He gave a snort of disgust. “Water damage my ass!”

“We still need them to get the hyperglider ready for you.”

“This is wrong. The odds are completely against me getting up there intact.”

“So tell me which one of them is the Starflyer agent?”

“Oh, fuck.”

“Exactly. Lie back on the couch.”

Oscar did as he was told. He rested his wrists on the i-spots. “Interfaced,” he said.

Adam’s virtual vision confirmed the connection. He told his e-butler to initiate the program. Plyplastic cushioning flowed over Oscar’s wrists.

“The induction prep phase will last about a minute,” he said, reading from the menu. “Implantation is eight minutes.”

“And integrity review is another minute,” Oscar said. “Yes, thank you. I went through this enough times when I was with the CST exploratory division. The junk we needed to know for that …”

“Relax please,” Adam said dryly. He moved his virtual hands across the icons, initiating the induction preparation phase.

Oscar’s eyes were already closed. Now his face began a series of minute twitches to accompany the REM.

Adam went back into the hangar. Two of the hypergliders were still running through their checklists. No problems had been red-flagged.

He was peering into the cockpit of one when he heard a sound behind him. Lifted his head to see who it was. “Oh, couldn’t you—”

The slim harmonic blade was rammed into the base of his skull, angled perfectly to slice up into his brain.

The quantumbuster would not load into its launch tube. There was nothing Ozzie or the SIsubroutine could do to make the fat missile slide out of its magazine rack into the tube. Not one goddamn thing. He’d tried every trick he could think of. Forcing power into the electromuscle handling arms. That just made them spasm and flash up burnout overload warnings in his virtual vision. Getting the SIsubroutine to review the code for the whole magazine management program. Its analysis proved that the software was effective. Running diagnostic after diagnostic on the physical mechanism. The scrutiny showed every component was fully functional.

It still didn’t work.

Ozzie let out a furious snarl. There was a dark pressure inside his head that was growing with each passing hour. He’d never known frustration like it. To have got to this point only to be blocked by some kind of glitch was the kind of irony that only a truly badass god would practice.

There is a logical reason why this machine does not work; therefore I will find the fault.

When he looked around his virtual vision at the appallingly complex architecture of the launch mechanism all he could think to do was beat his virtual fists against it. His inability to concentrate wasn’t helped by lack of food. Two days now. He hadn’t slept much during that time, either.

There was an unexpected yet familiar rustling sound in the cabin that drew Ozzie’s attention back through the virtual structure. On the right-hand couch Mark was floating a couple of centimeters above the cushioning with his back toward Ozzie. The rustling came again.

“Yo, Mark what’s … Hey. Wait a goddamn minute! Is that CHOCOLATE?”

Mark rotated lazily, his cheeks bulging as he munched away contentedly. One hand held the torn and crumpled wrappings of a Cadbury’s milk chocolate bar. He peeled the purple foil away from the last four squares and popped them defiantly into his mouth.

“You bastard!” an outraged Ozzie yelled. “I’m like fucking starving here and you’ve had a secret supply of food all along.”

“Lunch box,” Mark mumbled through his clogged mouth. “Mine.”

“We’re in this together! Son of a bitch, where’s your humanity? The only thing I’ve had in the last two days is water. And we both know where that comes from.”

Mark finished the chocolate with a big swallow. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did you forget to steal sandwiches from the kindergarten before you kidnapped me on a hijacked starship?”

“This is my ship! I paid for half of it.”

“Fine, so just open the TD channel and explain that to Nigel Sheldon.”

Ozzie wanted to thump the arrays in front of him. “What the fuck were you in an earlier life, a lawyer?”

“You’ve killed me!” Mark bellowed back. “What in that twisted-up piece of wreckage you call a brain made you think I’d be grateful? Please, I’m interested. Do tell.”

“If you’d actually close your mouth and listen to me then maybe your low-achiever IQ could just get a handle on what I’m telling you.”

“At least I’ve got an IQ larger than my shoe size.”

“Dickhead!”

“Wanker!” Mark tossed the empty wrapper at Ozzie. “Oh, and traitor, too.”

“I am not a fucking Starflyer agent. Man, why will no one ever pay attention to me?”

“Was that another rhetorical question from the giddy heights of your intellect?”

“I am not a violent person, but if you don’t stop that right now I swear I am going to kick your ass through the cabin wall.”

“Would that be the insults or the shouting I’m to stop?”

Ozzie clenched his fists. Ready to—Just about going to—“Jeez! How did you ever get through our personnel screening program? Nobody in this galaxy could stand working next to you. You are the most goddamn irritating person I have ever met.”

“Was it your charm which impressed Giselle? Or did she just feel sorry for you because of your hairstyle?”

Ozzie’s hand automatically went up to pat at his hair that was floating around like an agitated jellyfish in the cabin’s freefall environment. “This is fashionable, man,” he said in an icy voice.

“Where?”

Mark sounded so genuinely curious it threw Ozzie’s thought processes, preventing him from coming out with a reply. Besides … “Look, we’re getting off track here, man. I’ve apologized like thirty billion times for what happened back there in the dock. I never meant for you to be dragged along.”

“How do you think my kids will cope without me? They’re both under ten, for Christ’s sake. You’ve taken me from them to die alone in interstellar space, and now the Commonwealth is going to lose the war because of your treachery. They’ll have to take flight on the lifeboats. Chased across the galaxy by an alien fiend never knowing if they’ve truly escaped while the rest of their species is systematically hunted down and wiped out. Don’t you have children? Try to remember your feelings for them from before it took over your mind.”

“I am not a fucking Starflyer agent!” Ozzie screamed. He took a moment to calm down. When he glanced over at Mark, he saw a smug grin on the man’s face. “All right, put your superior logical IQ to work on this: What’s the point in me stealing the Charybdis?”

“Is that a Starflyer joke?”

“I’m serious. We’re going to get to Dyson Alpha, what? Six hours before Nigel arrives and turns their star nova. So what exactly is this Starflyer agent going to achieve with that? Is six hours enough time for MorningLightMountain to build a fleet of frigates like this? Tell me, come on, you’re the frigging expert on assembling these babies. Can it be done in six hours?”

“I’m not playing this game.”

“Scared I’m right?”

“You’re such a child.”

The kind of willpower that could only arise from living for three hundred sixty years managed to keep Ozzie’s voice calm and clear. “I am Ozzie Fernandez Isaac; I built the first wormhole generator and I was a midwife to the Commonwealth society that you and your children enjoy. Even if you really believe that part of me is buried under Starflyer conditioning it is still entitled to some respect. And Ozzie Fernandez Isaac is pretty fucking sure that you cannot duplicate this frigate in six hours.”

Mark sighed with reluctance. “No, you can’t.”

“Thank you. And if you can’t do that, you can’t figure out a nova bomb either.”

“You might get a handle on the principles.”

“You might indeed. Good point. The physics is all derivative of existing theories, so yes. You understand how the theory works, like knowing e-equals-m-c-squared is what makes an atom bomb work, not that it tells you how to build one. But you have the notion, and then half an hour later you get to see one in action as good old Nigel turns your star into an expanding sphere of ultra-hard radiation and plasma. So I repeat: What’s the point?”

“MorningLightMountain has other outposts.”

“Which are currently being targeted by the remaining frigates in the firewall operation.” Ozzie took a breath. He was almost in pain from the way Mark was slowly mellowing. “Nigel is going to commit genocide on behalf of our species, and the terrible thing is most of us are going to be cheering him on. We’ll still be alive; well, whoopee-do on that front, but the human race will no longer have a soul. That dies along with MorningLightMountain. Mark, this flight is the only chance we have to retain our humanity. It is hugely risky. Crazy even: I admit that. I’m gambling my life on it because I have that right, and once again I apologize for making you personally part of that gamble. The thing is this is such a gamble that Nigel is totally opposed to it, and I even respect him for that. These are very frightening times, Mark. But I cannot let this tiny little chance slip away from us. I have to try and get the barrier generator up and running again.”

“I see that, sure, but …”

“If I’m a traitor, it doesn’t matter because the human race will survive thanks to Nigel and the ships following us. But, man, think on this: if I’m not a traitor and we reestablish the barrier, then we win, too, and win the right way. Isn’t that worth something to you? Anything?”

The answer was a long time coming; and when Mark did finally speak the words sounded like they were being ripped out painfully. “I dunno. This restarting the generator idea, it sounds like a long shot.”

“Longest in human history. That’s why I’m the one doing it. Come on, dude, you don’t think anybody with a grain of sense is gonna be busting his balls like this, do you?”

“Guess not.” There was the faintest grin on Mark’s face.

“My man.” Ozzie put his hand out for a high-five. Mark stared at it mystified. “Okay,” Ozzie said. “So, like please tell me how I get the quantumbuster launch mechanism to work? Goddamn, it’s been killing me.”

“You mean you couldn’t launch the missile anyway?”

“No,” Ozzie admitted.

There was another long pause, then Mark gave a confident chuckle. “Well well. That makes me captain, doesn’t it?”

“What?”

“Okay, maybe not captain. We split the duty. You keep control of the drive. Give me control of the missiles.”

“What?”

“I can fix the launch mechanism, but if you want me to do it, you first have to give me fire authority.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“If you take us to the Dark Fortress and find a target inside it, I’ll launch a quantumbuster at it, and I’ll even cheer it on. If you try to deliver this ship and its technology to MorningLightMountain I blow us up. That’s the deal. You trust me, don’t you?”

“Son of a bitch. How close are you to Nigel, a genetic doppelgänger?”

“Do you want your chance at the barrier generator or not?”

Ozzie couldn’t see a way out. “Have you found a solution to the launch system problem?” he asked the SIsubroutine.

“No. According to my analysis routines the system should function. It does not. This is a paradox beyond available processing power to resolve.”

“All right, Mark, you can have access to the weapons systems.”

“You mean control of the weapons systems.”

“Whatever, yeah.” Ozzie’s virtual hands moved across symbols, granting Mark access to the weapons. He watched Mark establish connections into the network, then encrypt the whole weapons section.

“Can you break that?” he asked the SIsubroutine.

“No. It would require more processing power than the ship possesses.”

“Figures,” Ozzie muttered. Data was flowing out of the magazine mechanism control arrays to Mark’s insert.

“What’s that?” Mark queried.

“Just figuring out how you’re going to fix the launcher.”

“It was at an angle.”

“Excuse me?” Ozzie’s virtual vision followed a few small files Mark was now downloading into the array governing the electromuscle arms.

“Everyone thinks electromuscle segments are the same,” Mark said. “They’re not. Two identical lengths nearly always have different traction ratings. It’s down to minor instabilities in the manufacturing processes. Some batches come out weak, some strong, so the producers always build in a five percent traction overcapacity. That means they have to be balanced, especially in cases like this when you’ve got a missile being gripped by seven different arms. There, see? When they latched on to the missile in the magazine at different strengths they were actually tilting it.”

“Uh huh,” Ozzie said weakly.

“No wonder it wouldn’t slide into the launch tube, it was at a hell of a slant. There we go, that fix should recalibrate and equalize the traction. I wrote it years ago to balance the hoist arms on a friend’s tow truck.”

Ozzie’s virtual vision showed the quantumbuster missile slide into the launch tube amid a flood of green symbols. “Son of a bitch.” A patch for a tow truck! “It works.”

Mark gave him a slightly apologetic grin. “It’s what I do.”

The timer in Ozzie’s virtual vision had counted off forty-two seconds since Mark took command of the weapons. Two days smashing my head against a rock and I got nowhere; and I’m supposed to be a fucking genius. “Mark, thank you, man. You do realize we’ll have to go through with the flight into the Dark Fortress now?”

“Yeah, I know. But my survival chances haven’t been terribly high for a while now, have they?”

“I guess not. Uh, is there any of that lunch box left?”

“No. But there’s all the meals in the emergency survival lockers. They taste quite good, actually.”

Ozzie smiled. It was a good way of preventing the stressed whimper rushing out of his throat.

Oscar came out of the memory implant the way he shook off his nightly bad dream. Head rocking from side to side, trying to rise up off the couch, not quite certain where he was and what was real. He was sure his hand was still closed around a joystick while long flexible white wings curved up on either side of him as the wind raged outside. He blinked against the strong light, making out blurred figures standing at the end of the couch. Faces came into focus.

Something wrong.

Jamas and Kieran looked both scared and angry, never a good combination especially as they had their ion carbines jabbed into Wilson and Anna. Wilson’s emotions were under complete control, allowing him to put out just the right amount of tolerant dismay. Anna was quietly furious, her OCtattoos flexing in and out of visibility like a carnivore’s fangs in the prelude to a kill. If Kieran’s carbine muzzle ever slipped away from her ribs he’d probably wind up very dead very fast. By the look of him, he knew that, too.

“What’s happened?” Oscar asked. The feeling of flying was smoothing out, leaving him with a bad headache.

“Adam’s dead,” Wilson said flatly.

“And one of you Starflyer fucks killed him,” Kieran shouted; the carbine was shoved harder into Anna’s side.

The falling sensation returned to Oscar’s limbs with a rush. He gave Wilson a dumbfounded stare. “No.”

“You were here in the hangar with him,” Jamas said.

Bring the joystick back carefully, allow the wings time to respond as you plummet down helplessly in a microburst. Airflow around the fuselage changes as the plyplastic adjusts in long twists. “Where is he?” Oscar demanded hoarsely.

Jamas jerked his head toward the door into the hangar office. “You saying you didn’t hear it?”

“It was a knife,” Wilson said in undisguised contempt. “There was nothing to hear.”

“I couldn’t hear a thing,” Oscar said. “I was having the memory implant.”

“Yeah, right,” Kieran sneered.

Oscar ignored him and swung his legs around off the couch. He was unsteady on his feet.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Jamas asked.

“To see him.”

“You’re not going anywhere.”

Oscar straightened, one hand holding the side of the couch. Lights throbbed in time with his headache.

“Careful,” Anna said. “Memory implants affect neuron function for several minutes afterward.”

“I have to see him.” Because I don’t believe you. Not Adam. It can’t be.

Jamas and Kieran exchanged a glance, then Kieran nodded. “Okay, Rosamund will be here in a minute.”

With the others following, Oscar walked through into the office, then out into the hangar. It wasn’t just the effects of the implant that made his movements unsteady. He could see a pair of legs sticking out from behind one of the gliders, and slowed, not wanting to see.

Adam lay on the dark composite floor, legs and arms akimbo, the handle of a harmonic blade sticking out from the nape of his neck. A small puddle of blood had pooled around his head.

Oscar’s legs very nearly gave way. He clung to the fuselage to support himself. All he could think of was the look on Adam’s face when they saw the Abadan crash. The ghosts will be happy tonight.

“You okay?” Anna asked. She’d come up beside him.

“This can’t be right,” he said in a hushed croak. “Not here. Not like that. It’s not right. It can’t happen like this.”

“Well, it did fucking happen,” Jamas spat. “And one of you traitors did it.”

“Just kill them all,” Kieran said. He moved back from Anna to stand beside Jamas, his carbine covering Oscar and Anna. “That way we’ll be sure we got the bastard.”

“Where were you when it happened?” Anna asked.

“Shut the fuck up, bitch.”

“I mean it,” she said, her eyes alight with cold wrath. Her gaze flicked over to Jamas. “Was he with you?”

Jamas shifted uncomfortably. “No.”

“Jamas!” Kieran protested.

“That means neither of you can vouch for the other,” Wilson said. He walked over to stand with Anna and Oscar.

“We were only apart for a couple of minutes, that’s all,” Jamas said.

Wilson gazed down at Adam’s corpse. “And how long did that take?”

“Are you saying we did it?” Kieran asked.

“Can you prove you didn’t?”

Kieran snarled at him, shifting the muzzle of his ion carbine around. Jamas’s hand slowly pushed the weapon down. “He’s right.”

“What? You can’t be serious!”

Jamas looked even more unhappy.

Rosamund barged in through the hangar door, dragging Paula Myo along. The Investigator was still wearing Adam’s cherry-red woolen sweater, her face was beaded with perspiration, while her lips had turned almost black. Oscar and Wilson automatically went to help carry her. Paula groaned as they took her weight; she was barely conscious. They lowered her to the floor with her back resting against the hyperglider’s cradle. She shuddered violently, her head lolling about. Then she saw Adam’s body and gasped. Her hands came up to rub at her eyes; she was blinking almost continuously. “Is he dead?” she asked.

“It pretty much fucking looks like it to me,” Kieran shouted.

“Shut up,” Wilson snapped. He was kneeling beside Paula, hand feeling her forehead. “Paula, can you understand me? Do you know where we are?”

Her eyes closed for a long blink as she switched her attention from Adam to Wilson. “Far Away, we’re on Far Away.”

“Do you remember the sabotaged crates?”

“Yes.”

“We need your help. Whoever did that has now killed Adam.”

“What if it’s her?” Kieran asked.

“Well?” Wilson asked Rosamund, who was staring down at Adam’s corpse.

The Guardian woman stirred herself. “We were in the Volvo the whole time.”

“So you say,” Oscar barked. He knew he shouldn’t have said it, they were already drowning in hostility, but he still couldn’t believe it was either Wilson or Anna, and that sounded way too much like a convenient alibi for comfort.

Rosamund’s hand went straight to her holster. She was glaring at Oscar.

Paula coughed feebly, and brought her hand up to her throat. “I can’t confirm Rosamund was there with me.”

“You bitch.”

Paula waved her silent. “But she can for me.”

Rosamund gave the Investigator a suspicious glare. “What do you mean?”

“There is only one door to the Volvo rest cabin. If I was the Starflyer agent, I couldn’t have got out to do this without Rosamund knowing. She says I didn’t. It wasn’t me. It also makes it unlikely that it was her, but not impossible.”

“Okay,” Jamas said. “So who did murder him?”

“I don’t know. Yet.” Paula tipped her head back. “Wilson, where were you?”

“I went over to the generator building. I managed to start it up, as you can see. The town has power, the hypergliders are charging up.”

“It is not far to any building. Is the generator difficult to start?”

“No, it isn’t. It was primed ready. I had to physically press three buttons. It started straightaway.”

“Did anyone go with you?”

“No.”

“We left the hangar together,” Anna said. “I went to find the tether cables for the hypergliders.”

“Did you find them?”

“Yes. There’s a stores building at the end of the hangars. They’re kept in there.”

“Oscar?”

“Memory implant. The induction systems are at the back of this hangar. I didn’t know anything going on outside. In fact, the killer could have been in there with me, I wouldn’t have known.” The thought made him clammy with nerves.

“I see. Jamas?”

“Kieran and I went to find the jeeps to tow the hypergliders.”

“I called Adam and told him we found them,” Kieran said. “Their tanks were just about empty, so Jamas went and found the main tank. I stayed with the jeeps to take a look at their radio modules. We need them for the observation. I was going to look for the tether anchor drill, but I hadn’t heard from Adam for a while. Jamas came back, we headed right over here and found him.”

“And then the others arrived,” Paula said.

“Yeah, these two came in together.” His carbine pointed out Wilson and Anna.

“Is there any sign of anyone else here?” Paula asked.

“No,” Kieran said. “I’ve not seen anyone.”

“Me neither,” Wilson said.

“You and Adam were talking together in the Volvo after we found the sabotage,” Rosamund said to Paula. “Did you have any idea who the traitor was?”

“No.” The Investigator seemed to be losing interest.

“Adam was only going to take two gliders,” Kieran said; he gave Oscar a strange look. “That’s what he told me.”

“When?” Paula asked.

“It was just about the last thing he said. I’d told him we’d found the jeeps, and he said we only needed two.”

Jamas smiled brutally. “He knew it was one of you.”

Oscar held back from saying anything. The Guardian trio were so hyped up and trigger-happy they probably would shoot someone if they had half an excuse.

“He didn’t say that to me,” Paula said. “We were still trying to work it out.”

“Then there’s nothing else we can do right now,” Wilson said. “We need to get the hypergliders over to Stakeout Canyon. There’s not much time left.”

“Are you fucking insane?” Jamas cried. His carbine swung around to point at Wilson, finger tight on the trigger.

“This changes nothing,” Wilson retorted. “We kept going after the crates were sabotaged, we keep going now. Only this time we do not split up again. From now on we do everything in groups of at least three. Everything.”

“You’re not flying up that mountain,” Kieran snarled. “You’ll wreck the planet’s revenge.”

“There won’t be any planet’s revenge without the observation from Aphrodite’s Seat. All three of us will fly. That way the odds protect us.”

“Dreaming heavens!” Kieran appealed desperately to Jamas and Rosamund. “What do we do?”

“He’s right,” Rosamund said bitterly. “They have to fly.”

The control center for the planet’s revenge was huddled at the back of a cave in Mount Idle, named so because it was a lot smaller than the surrounding peaks. It had slumped over the millennia since the Dessault range had been formed, its rocky pinnacle crumbling away into a lackluster mound, while its sides were liberally smeared with long swathes of loose scree. Even the cave wasn’t worth the Guardians using as one of their forts: too small, too visible with its yawning mouth.

Samantha’s Vauxhall jeep reached the entrance long after dark, its headlights revealing a slight shimmer in the air caused by the force field the Guardians had established a couple of meters inside. Three sentries greeted her, and the force field reduced to allow her to drive right in.

There were a number of Charlemagnes stabled inside, along with a variety of battered four-by-four vehicles she knew only too well. Two huge dapple gray horses were also standing next to the Charlemagnes; the saddles on the posts beside them were beautifully sculpted black leather with embossed gold patterns of DNA.

“Barsoomians,” Valentine said in a respectful tone.

The control center itself was right at the back of the cave, which was illuminated in a soft green light. Ten wooden tables were arranged in a circle around the large array, covered in consoles, screens, and supplementary electronic modules. Three or four Guardians were sitting at each one, engrossed with the schematics and data flowing across the screens. The array itself was a black cylinder two meters high with a couple of small red LEDs glowing on the top. Samantha gave it a solicitous glance; she’d been part of the assembly team, which made it her baby. And a troublesome one it had been. It had taken them over a year to integrate the bioprocessors and get the software running smoothly as they ran innumerable simulations.

She went over to Andria McNowak, who was in charge of the control center. Heavily pregnant, she sat at the head table directing all the other operators as they gradually brought the network of manipulator stations up to their pre-storm readiness status. There was a constant background mutter as they talked to the array. Not for the first time, Samantha wished OCtattoos and inserts were as common here as they were in the Commonwealth.

The Barsoomians were standing behind them, monitoring the performance of the large array’s bioprocessors. In the gloomy light of the cave their gray robes of semiorganic fabric gave them a spectral presence, enhanced by the impenetrable shadows that filled their hoods.

Samantha gave them a slight bow.

“Greetings to you, Samantha McFoster,” one said.

She recognized the deep whispering voice from the faint reverberation it always carried. “Dr. Friland, thank you for coming.”

“These are fascinating times. We are pleased to help remove this blight from our planet.”

“There is a rumor your people will help Bradley Johansson on Highway One. Is that true?”

For a moment Samantha wondered if she’d been too abrupt. People always skated around issues with Barsoomians, fearful to give offense; but today was too important for that kind of political nicety crap. She was aware of Valentine holding his breath beside her.

“We are watching events along Highway One,” Dr. Friland said. “We will offer assistance where practical.”

“I’m sure Johansson will be grateful for any support.” She smiled awkwardly at the fluid shadows inside his hood, and turned to Andria, who was giving her a reproachful look. “Have you loaded in the Martian data?”

“Yeah,” Andria said. She faced the front again, and gestured at the portal that was projecting a topographic map of the Dessault range from the Grand Triad in the west across to the Institute valley in the east. It looked like the cloudscape of some gas giant, with the tips of the mountains poking through as various fast-moving stormbands streamed past them. “We’re running the fifth simulation now. The genuine meteorological patterns allowed us to refine the behavioral algorithms. I don’t think the old software would have coped with the real thing. Even now, I’ve still got doubts. This is a lot more complex than we ever thought.”

“All we can do is give it our best shot. Have you got all the manipulator stations on-line?”

“Yeah.” Andria’s hand tapped at one of the screens on her table. It showed the stations scattered across the Dessault range linked together by thin red lines. The main communications relays were handled by masers, set up at high altitude on remote pinnacles, and protected by force fields. Samantha had always been skeptical about how they would hold together in the midst of the superstorm, but short of laying armored cables right across the range they had no choice. It was one of the reasons they’d established the control center on Mount Idle, where they had direct line of sight with Mount Herculaneum. They were also far enough south to escape the direct blast of the storm when it came.

“How’s Zuggenhim Ridge?” Samantha asked.

Andria grinned knowingly, and pulled up the telemetry. “Sweet. You did a good job.”

“Thanks. And the observation team?”

“Ours? They’re not going to make it; they’re still a couple of hours from the glacier ring. It’s down to the navy people now. Do you think they can land up there?”

“I don’t know. They think they can. We just have to wait and see.”

“There’s no way we can do this blind.”

“You’re going to have to draw up a contingency for that just the same.”

“Yeah right,” Andria declared sarcastically.

“Shame Qatux stayed with Bradley. We could do with that kind of brain-power to help us out right now.”

“I don’t think even a Raiel would be any use to us now,” Andria said.

Both the Barsoomians turned to face them. The shadows thinned out inside Dr. Friland’s hood, allowing green eyes to gaze down on Samantha. “Did you say a Raiel is on Far Away?”

Samantha looked up to the tall Barsoomian; for some inexplicable reason she felt guilty, as if she’d been concealing the fact from them. “Yes. It’s traveling with Bradley Johansson. I don’t know much about it; this is all secondhand gossip from Adam’s team.”

“It must not come to harm.”

Samantha took in the control center with an impatient gesture. “We’re doing our best.”

“Short-wave signal,” Andria announced. “Strong one. Coming from the west.”

“Adam’s team,” Samantha said. “Is it for us?”

“Hang on.” Andria touched several icons on her screen.

They turned into Stakeout Canyon just after midnight. It had been a long smooth run from Stonewave, directly south across the wet desert, then around the western flank of Mount Zeus. The massive volcano had become visible in the late afternoon as the layer of fog finally began to dissipate. Bright sunlight shining in level from the horizon had illuminated the vast naked lava fields as they rose out of the flat glistening landscape. They were too close to catch a glimpse of the summit seventeen kilometers above, although they did catch the occasional sparkle along the crest as its fractured ice band reflected the dying sun. The flashes faded away soon enough as the sapphire sky bled down to violet before quickly turning black.

Rosamund turned on the jeep’s headlights, creating long shimmering strips of light across the bare rock. The vehicle had been custom made in Armstrong City, fitting a smooth composite ellipse over a standard Toyota four-by-four pickup chassis. Air flowed unbroken over its low-friction paintwork, making it virtually imperious to the winds. It was designed to anchor itself to the ground if it was caught in the open when the morning storm arrived, with four big screws underneath that could wind themselves deep into the hard sands of the wet desert.

Paula sat on the bench seat in the back. If she hunched right down she could see between Rosamund and Oscar and out through the narrow band of windshield. She’d slept away most of the journey through the afternoon, coming awake in sudden bursts to witness a near identical landscape each time. As they progressed, the slope of Mount Zeus had grown larger along the horizon until it became a barrier across the world. Now in the dark it was completely invisible while the stars twinkled directly overhead. The drone of the diesel engine filled the interior along with the metallic clanking of the hyperglider trailer they were hauling along, making conversation difficult. Not, she imagined, that Oscar and Rosamund had been trying to say much to each other. The two other jeeps were following them across the wet desert; Wilson and Jamas in one, while Anna and Kieran brought up the rear.

She fumbled around on the cushioning to find the bottle, and sipped at the mineral water. For once it didn’t make her want to gag. In fact, she realized just how thirsty she was. She finished the bottle and sat up a little straighter. Just about every muscle in her body was aching and debilitated; it was all she could do to hold herself upright. Her headache translated every slight jolt into a flash of burning light somewhere behind her eyes. She shivered, though she didn’t feel quite as cold as before.

“Where are we?” she asked. The weak croak of her own voice surprised her.

“Hey!” Oscar turned around, a big smile on his face. “How are you feeling?”

“Not good.”

“Oh.” The smile faded. “We’ve just started to turn into Stakeout Canyon.”

“Right.”

Paula woke up when the jeep braked to a halt. She hadn’t realized she’d fallen asleep again.

“This is it,” Rosamund announced. “Midway between Zeus and Titan. We tether them here.” She twisted around in the seat to give Paula an entreating look. “I know you didn’t leave the cab to kill Adam. Have you got any idea which of them it was?”

Paula could barely remember their names. “No. Sorry, not yet.”

Rosamund gave a disgruntled sigh, and opened the door. “Let’s go.”

Oscar looked at her for a long moment, then pulled a penitent face and followed Rosamund out into the calm night.

Paula stayed in the back of the jeep for a while. It rocked about as the hyperglider trailer was unhooked; there was a lot of loud talk outside punctuated by the occasional curse as they prepared the drill for the tether cable anchor. She drank some more water, mildly pleased that she no longer felt cold. Warm humid air was gusting in through the open door, but that wasn’t it. The icy claws gripping her bones had relinquished their grip. She still coughed from time to time, but she really didn’t feel as though death was so close. Best yet, her headache was easing. There was a medical kit lying on the backseat next to her. She recognized it as the one Adam had been using in the Volvo. There were plenty of pills and applicator refills that would deal with her headache, but she chose a packet of rehydration salts and mixed them into a bottle of plain water, taking her time to swirl the powder around until it was all dissolved. It tasted foul, but she forced it down.

That simple action just about exhausted her. When she heard the loud grinding whine of the drill she shuffled up into the driver’s seat and took a look out into Stakeout Canyon. The ubiquitous sand and gravel of the wet desert had been scoured away here, revealing the solid lava foundation. Their three unique wind-resistant jeeps had parked in a simple triangle, their headlights shining on the hyperglider that had been rolled out of its trailer. Its cockpit canopy was open, and a faint glow shone up from its small console. Oscar was standing at the side of it, peering in as he ran the last set of diagnostics. Wilson, Jamas, and Rosamund were all clustered around the big harmonicblade drill as it sank another five-meter-long segment of carbon-reinforced titanium into the ground; the fourth of ten. The anchor pole sprouted slim horizontal malmetal blades of its own; once all the segments were locked together they’d telescope outward, helping to embed it farther. It was the second of three anchor struts that together would secure the tether cables against the phenomenal force exerted by the storm. In theory, they could hold the hyperglider on the ground in case the pilot underwent any last-minute surge of doubts. A common enough occurrence, apparently. Watching the three men trying to be civil to each other as the pole was spun down into the dark lava, she was very glad she wasn’t going to be flying in the morning. Anna and Rosamund were securing the tether drum into its recess in the nose of the glider.

They could all see each other. Paula almost laughed at the way each of them looked around to check everyone else’s whereabouts on a regular basis. The comedy police were in town, and in force.

Leaning hard against the jeep’s door frame she told her e-butler to link her with the jeep’s array. One of its files contained a map of Stonewave’s layout. She began to feed in routes from the Grand Triad Adventures hangar, Jamas and Kieran to the garage, Anna to the store, Wilson out to the generator. Average times were easy to fill in. She then began to work out which of them could have run back to murder Adam and still completed their own job. It would be very tight, especially for Kieran and Jamas, who were only separated for a few minutes. On practicality alone, that made Oscar the main suspect.

“We’re done here,” Rosamund said.

Paula shunted the virtual vision map aside and looked up at the Guardian woman. Oscar was standing behind her, wearing a silver-blue flight suit that doubled as an emergency pressure suit. There was an understandably anxious expression on his face as he held the helmet under his arm. “Good luck,” Paula said, and held her hand out. It wasn’t the kind of garment she’d want to wear anywhere near a vacuum, but the armor suits they’d brought with them were far too heavy and bulky for the hypergliders.

“Thanks,” Oscar said. His grip was warm and firm, making her conscious of how clammy her own skin remained.

“Not him then, huh?” Rosamund said as she closed the door.

“I still don’t know,” Paula said. She’d shuffled over into the passenger seat. In front of her, the headlights swept across Oscar as he walked back to the ghostly white fuselage of the hyperglider.

“You’re looking better, you know. Not good, mind, but I can see you’re recovering. Some bug, huh?”

“Yeah, some bug.”

They drove south for five kilometers, then began tethering Anna’s hyperglider. Paula sat in the open doorway again. Visible. Dawn was another three hours away.

Wilson and Jamas eased the hyperglider down out of its trailer while Kieran wheeled the drill rig out. It turned out they’d chosen a patch of lava that had a high metallic content. The drill had a lot of trouble cutting through.

Paula ran the digital model of Stonewave a further two times, trying to draw up an order of probability. It couldn’t determine one effectively, there were far too many variables, especially if Wilson or Anna had run the whole time.

When the third anchor pole was finally sunk, Wilson and Anna embraced in front of the hyperglider. He checked over her silver-blue flight suit one last time. A final kiss and she climbed into the cockpit.

“I don’t know what the odds are of them all getting up there,” Rosamund said as they drove away south.

“Not good,” Paula said. She took another drink of rehydration mix and reviewed what she knew. She still stood by what she and Adam had decided earlier. Just thinking back to the time they’d spent together made her light-headed again. The whole time since she joined the train at Narrabri station she’d wanted to clamp his arms together behind his back and cuff his wrists. It was the kind of reflex that came easier than breathing. She supposed other people would feel some kind of guilt at Adam’s death; she didn’t. The closest right now to any real feeling was regretting he couldn’t give her any input on her current problem. He’d been her only true source of information on the three remaining Guardians.

No, she told herself. That’s not right. I need to prioritize. The most important thing now was to ensure the flight to the top of Mount Herculaneum was a success. She had to concentrate on Wilson, Oscar, and Anna.

Rosamund braked again. “Let’s hope this is a better rock than that shit we were on last time,” she said as she jumped out of the jeep to help tether the last hyperglider.

Paula didn’t move from the passenger seat. She found a bar of chocolate and toffee, and started chewing it very slowly, giving her stomach time to get used to solids again. It was no use trying to figure out which of the three had the opportunity to sabotage equipment in the Carbon Goose; that would be even worse than Stonewave. She had to concentrate on evidence from before, from their behavior prior to Far Away, and hope that could narrow it down. The most damning she could think of was Wilson’s relative failure in commanding the navy. If he’d just been a bit tougher … but that was so easily ascribed to politics. Circumstantial.

She thought back to the meeting she’d had with him and Oscar in Pentagon II. Both of them had been startled and deeply worried that the records had been tampered with and the implication of the Starflyer’s reach. Nothing abnormal there. There had been something else at that meeting, though, not relevant at the time. Oscar had claimed he had been contacted by the Guardians, quickly clarified as someone who claimed to be a Guardian. Why Oscar? Why did the Guardians think he would be sympathetic to their cause?

“Investigator,” Wilson said.

Paula turned gradually. Movement was still difficult; her muscles ached. He was standing in the jeep’s doorway, dressed in the same silver-blue flight suit as the others. The three Guardians stood around him. Their anger seemed to have toned down to something close to embarrassment. Working hard as a team would do that; it wasn’t an adjustment she could allow herself.

“I’m afraid I haven’t worked it out yet,” she said.

“Yes, well, we’ll stay in touch via normal communications bands now. Until the storm takes them out, anyway.”

“Very well.”

“I hope … Ah well.” His lips compressed in something like disappointment.

“Bon voyage, Admiral.”

Wilson turned and walked over toward his hyperglider.

“We’ve got an hour until the storm hits,” Rosamund said tightly as she clambered into the driver’s seat. “The tourist company crews don’t normally leave it this late to set up. According to the emergency file in the jeep’s array there’s a shelter spot at the base of Mount Zeus which we can reach in time.” She was already gunning the engine, racing around the tethered hyperglider in a fast curve. Its cockpit canopy was lowering. They roared away across the barren lava of the canyon floor. Paula leaned sideways, watching the hyperglider and the three abandoned trailers dwindle away quickly.

“We did it,” Rosamund said in a relieved voice.

“What do you mean?”

“I was talking to Kieran and Jamas. We reckon the odds are in our favor now. If two of them make it to Aphrodite’s Seat, and one of them is the Starflyer agent, what can they actually do? None of them have any weapons. And if all three of them make it, then the problem’s solved.”

“Tell that to Adam,” Paula said harshly.

Rosamund glowered at her, but said nothing.

Paula tried to review the background to the navy three again. She’d done that once before with Adam. There had been something then, some little flash of knowledge that he’d tried to hide from her. As if anyone could do that. She’d seen it quite plainly on his face.

He knew one of them was innocent. So why not tell me? It must have implicated them in another crime? What? What could possibly make him shield them at a time like this?

“Do we have all the short-wave transmitters?” Paula asked.

“Yes.”

“So the hypergliders can’t pick up anything we transmit on them?”

“No.”

“I need to ask Johansson something.”

Rosamund kept one hand on the wheel, and pulled out the array with the short-wave function built in. “Here you go. It’s a hell of a distance. Don’t count on them picking it up.”

“It’s night, that’ll help.” She switched on the set, and set it to infinite repeat. “Johansson, this is Paula Myo. Adam was murdered at Stonewave. I need to know who contacted Oscar to ask him to review the Second Chance logs, and why you picked him. Please reply with a guarantee identity information from Alic Hogan.” She listened to it start its first cycle.

“How’s that going to reveal the traitor?” Rosamund asked.

“I’ll tell you if we get an answer.” She glanced at the horizon, not sure if it was lighter or if she was just imagining it.

Sunrise was drawing a gray hue across the eastern sky above the veldt. When Bradley looked out of the armored car’s narrow side window he could see the peaks of the Dessault Mountains away to the west, cold, sharp pinnacles jutting up amid the vanishing stars. He imagined the superstorm billowing around them to descend on the veldt like some apocalyptic force, scouring the land clear of all its new terrestrial life.

It wouldn’t happen for hours yet, if it did at all. They’d heard nothing from Samantha’s group since that last message yesterday about her being ready to surf. If she was keeping to schedule then the storm might be on time. They were still several hundred kilometers from the Institute, but making better time than they’d expected. So was the Starflyer convoy.

All of them had spent a long anguished night as the road rolled onward. Once they left the fringes of the rainforest behind the landscape reverted to featureless expanses of veldt with the occasional tree and bush poking up. It was as though their vision was locked in to some long loop of scenery that kept playing over and over. At night, with nothing to see outside of the headlight beams, the sense that they were making no progress at all was even worse.

After midnight they’d finally made contact with the Guardians who’d massed for the Final Raid. Watchers had been stationed along the last few hundred kilometers of Highway One to monitor the Starflyer’s movement. Their arrays and secure tight-beam links circumvented the wrecked nodes along the side of the road to put them back in contact with the main body of the Guardians, in itself a nice boost for morale among their little group as well as giving them a decent overview of the situation. When the reliable information started coming in they found they’d closed to within forty minutes of the Starflyer, but that still put it a hundred kilometers in front of them, and there were no more major bridges left to demolish. Highway One ran on across the veldt in an unbroken strip of concrete that was Roman in its brashness. At their current rate, they’d catch the alien just as it reached the Institute and before the storm hit. That was too close, Johansson knew. He was going to have to attack the Starflyer head-on. The warriors of the Final Raid would have their moment, sweeping down to block Highway One. The thought of how much blood would be spilled was chilling. The planet’s revenge would have been so much more effective. Isolation and exposure followed by death; but now that careful strategic plan was all but ruined. The fact that it was he who in the end had underestimated the Starflyer gave his situation its wretched poignancy. His one small grasp at salvation was the Paris team and Cat’s Claws; their armor might yet prove the winning hand.

“Picking up a short-wave signal,” Keely said from her seat at the back of the armored car. “Sounds like Paula Myo …” Her voice trailed off.

When Bradley looked around her face was ashen. “Put it through,” he told her gently. Interference generated by the sun as it rose in the east was now so bad it took nearly four minutes of the repeated message before they had a full version. There was silence in the armored car for some time as Paula’s voice cycled through its grim message again and again.

“Turn that fucker off,” Stig snarled. He was sitting in the back alongside Keely, where he was supposed to be resting after finally relinquishing the wheel to Olwen just before midnight. “He can’t be dead. She’s lying. I knew that bitch was trouble the moment I saw her.”

Bradley was still in shock from the news; otherwise he would have told Stig to calm down and keep quiet. That Adam might not survive had never occurred to him in the wildest worst-case scenario.

“After we kill the Starflyer I’m going to track her down and sort her lying mouth out once and for all.”

“Stig, pack it in,” Olwen said from the driver’s seat. Her attention hadn’t wavered from the road. She’d popped several beezees, but nowhere near as many as Stig. “We need to deal with this calmly and professionally.”

A communications icon flipped up into Bradley’s virtual vision. He opened it without thinking.

“This isn’t good,” Alic said. “The Starflyer agent is getting bolder.”

“But it’s not relevant,” Morton said. “I’m sorry, I know Adam was a big help to the Guardians, but their part is over. You said so yourself, the planet’s revenge team has finished setting up.”

Bradley frowned. Morton was right, and Paula would know that. She also knew that short-wave communications were completely open. Her message was still repeating, so she obviously considered it important. Why? “They must be doing something else,” he decided. “Paula’s many things, but stupid isn’t one of them. She’s telling us why this is so important. What’s at Stonewave?”

“Nothing right now,” Olwen said. “The travel companies mothballed it when the tourists stopped coming.”

“So what did it do?” he asked. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s a town out in the wet desert, they use it as a base for the hypergliders. There’s nothing else there.”

“Oh, dreaming heavens,” Bradley murmured in consternation close to panic.

“What is it?” Alic asked.

“They met Samantha and then they went hypergliding,” Bradley said. “Do you see?”

“Not a clue,” the navy commander admitted.

“The observation,” Olwen said. “Samantha needed them on Aphrodite’s Seat.”

“The navy people can all fly,” Bradley said. He stared at his watch. “And the morning storm’s about to hit the Grand Triad. One of them is the Starflyer agent, and they’re going to do the observation. Commander Hogan?”

“Yes?”

“Give me the guarantee she needs, some bit of trivia the Starflyer couldn’t possibly know.”

“In the Almada hotel lobby she told Renne she’d been running an elimination entrapment operation on her as well as Tarlo. There was only John King and myself there, and John and Renne are both dead now.”

“Good enough. Keely, we need to be absolutely sure this gets through. Link every short-wave transmitter we have, and crank them up to full power. Then put our message on constant repeat, no limit.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bradley grinned contritely. Having to tell the Investigator the reason behind the contact would effectively condemn Oscar, but he couldn’t afford not to, not anymore.

“Ready,” Keely said.

“Paula, this is Bradley. You told Renne you were running an entrapment against her in the Almada hotel lobby. It was Adam who contacted Oscar because they were at Abadan station together.” And I wonder what the Starflyer makes of that? He settled back into the seat and closed his eyes, suddenly very weary.

“Are you sure about that?” Alic asked.

“I’m afraid so, yes.”

“But … Oscar Monroe was a senior manager in CST. He’s a navy captain. He couldn’t be involved in Abadan.”

“People change,” Bradley said. “What did you do in all your earlier lives, Commander?”

“This is my second, and I’ve been part of the legal profession in both. Look … I can possibly ignore what I heard, but Myo can’t.”

“I know. Presumably that’s why Adam never told her. He was protecting Oscar to the end.” He peered out of the slit window again, the Dessault Mountains were clearer now, the sky above them shifting to a dark lavender. The tallest of them, StOmer, stood high above the others, its conical snowcap already glowing a musky white as it guarded the northeastern extremity of the range. Its shape was familiar enough, even though he hadn’t seen it in decades. The sight of it triggered a reluctant acknowledgment he couldn’t put off his decision any longer. His virtual hand pulled up the icon for Scott McFoster, who was commanding the Final Raid.

“Yes, sir,” Scott responded instantly.

They rode down out of the foothill forests, over a thousand Charlemagnes each carrying a clan warrior. There was no need for concealment, they wanted the Starflyer to know they were there, so they sang as they trotted out across the veldt, a slow marching song that rumbled on ahead of them amid the dust their hooves kicked up. Such scouts the Starflyer had positioned along the road babbled frantically into their communications links and raced back to the safety of the Institute valley twenty-four kilometers away, chased by clan outriders.

Six hundred riders formed up a crescent shape with Highway One at their center where it reached the bottom of a shallow fold in the land. They blew up the small bridge across the stream, and parties of McSobels trotted down the road scattering mines on the concrete and across the land on either side. Mortar launchers and missile racks were dug in on the higher ground overlooking the road. The remainder of the warriors divided into groups of two hundred and withdrew from the road, loitering a couple of kilometers to the north.

There they all waited as the sun rose to transform the sky into its daily sapphire brilliance. The heat built around them, pressing the air into silence.

In the placid silence of midmorning, the Starflyer convoy hove into view. Thirty armored Land Rover Cruisers were interspaced by several larger trucks, three buses, and a couple of small fuel tankers. A squad of ten big BMW bikes growled along out in front, ridden by armor-suited figures. The big MANN truck was positioned two-thirds of the way down the line of vehicles, its force field rippling the air around the buffed-aluminum capsule.

The bikes slowed as they crested the top of the fold and saw the Guardians blocking the way ahead. Their heavy engines grumbled loudly as they approached at walking pace down the long slope. The rest of the convoy followed them cautiously down. A kilometer from the rubble of the little bridge, the whole convoy came to a halt.

Out on the lush veldt, the remaining clan riders moved forward, spreading wide until the Starflyer convoy was completely encircled. The first armored car appeared on Highway One, rumbling forward until it reached the group of Charlemagnes standing on the road a kilometer behind the convoy. Olwen braked to a halt. “Finally!” she hissed.

The armored car’s thick door hinged up, and Bradley stepped out. Ten meters away, the door on the second armored car was already open. The Paris team and Cat’s Claws hurried out onto the sun-baked concrete and stretched elaborately. Scott McFoster handed the reins of his Charlemagne to one of his lieutenants and walked over. He threw his arms around Bradley. “Dreaming heavens, it is good to see you, sir.”

“You do the clans proud, Scott. There are more here than I expected.”

“Aye, and many more would be here with them. I had to be firm, else we would have had babes and elders riding with us.”

Bradley nodded slowly, thinking of Harvey’s corpse in one of the Mazda jeeps. He looked down the mild incline to the convoy. The growl of their engines was clean in the still, humid air. When he raised his eyes to the south, he could just see the saddle in the foothills that was the Institute valley.

“We’d best be quick. It will try to push through as soon as it can. Are there any signs of reinforcements?”

“No movement around the Institute. We’ve lost a couple of scouts, which is to be expected. But the rest are still in place. Besides, we’ll see anything approaching.”

“How many troops can it have left in there?”

“It’s not been easy to track movements along Highway One these last few months. But I’m confident there can’t be more than a couple of hundred humans left in the Institute.”

“That’s good. We have some zone killers on the armored cars, which should take out some of the convoy before we even start close-quarter fighting.”

“Can they puncture the truck’s force field?”

“I’d imagine not, but we’ll find out soon enough. We also brought some powerful dump-webs that’ll help break it down.”

“In that case, we’re ready.”

“All right then, I’ll suit up and join you.”

Just for a moment Scott hesitated. “Of course.”

“Don’t worry,” Bradley said softly. “I won’t get in the way. Besides, our friends here”—his gesture took in the Paris team and Cat’s Claws—“have agreed to escort me to the Starflyer itself.”

Scott took in the bulky armor with a professional glance. “I don’t suppose anybody would consider loaning me one of those fine suits for a couple of hours?”

There were several chuckles from the blank helmets.

Bradley turned to face the mountains that guarded the western skyline. The tall dazzling white peaks jabbed high into the clear sky. There was no sign of any cloud, not a breath of wind.

“We’ve heard nothing from Samantha,” Scott said, following his gaze. “That could mean it’s started.”

“Yes. Of course. Are there shelters nearby?”

“We’ve allocated some caves. I’ve got McSobels installing force fields in them now.”

“Let’s hope that’s good enough. No one really knows how powerful we can get—”

“Hey,” the Cat said. “We’ve got incoming. Very weird incoming.” Her gauntlet pointed into the western sky.

No DNA from Earth’s dinosaur epoch had ever been recovered despite some very creative science applied to the problem. This clearly hadn’t deterred the Barsoomians in their aspirational genetic experimentation. Bradley’s jaw opened in silent astonishment at the shapes that swam out of the lucent sapphire of Far Away’s sky. The creatures were clearly modeled on petrosaurs, with wings that were scaled membranes stretched over long tough bones. Sunlight shimmered in oil-rainbow patterns across the leathery tissue as the wings beat in long steady movements. Lizard ancestry was apparent in the body, though Bradley suspected a lot of sequences derived from crocodiles had been wound into the creature’s genome. Certainly the giant wedge head looked ferocious, and the four legs had lethal black talons.

As they approached, swooping lower toward the veldt, he could see the cloaked figures of Barsoomians sitting astride their thick necks. Some kind of saddle straps were wrapped around their pale oyster-gray hide. There must have been over thirty of them in the flock, all keeping a healthy distance from each other.

The first one came in low beside the road, its wings sweeping fast, then twisting around to pound at the air in giant downdrafts. It settled fast, its stumpy legs bowing into a crouch. A head that was three meters long, most of it jaws and teeth, swung around to align big protuberant eyes on Bradley. Wings that must have had a total span of fifteen meters fluttered once, and folded back with lazy neatness against the creature’s flanks. It bellowed out a high ululation that made Bradley clasp his hands over his ears. The cry was taken up by the rest of the flock as they plummeted down on the veldt as if they were descending on prey.

“Cool,” the Cat declared. “Hey you, Scott, I’d swap my armor for one of them.”

Their arrival never even flustered the Charlemagnes, who held their ground stoically. It was their riders who were gawping around in stupefaction. A ragged cheer began for the Barsoomians.

Bradley watched as the leader dismounted, seemingly gliding down the big creature’s side. “Greetings,” he said. “We wondered if you would join us for this event. I always hoped you would.”

“Bradley Johansson.” The Barsoomian had a dulcet female voice. “Your return to this world is auspicious, as we foretold. I am Rebecca Gillespie, and this is my congregation. We are happy to give what aid we can, but you must know we are also here to safeguard the Raiel.”

The shadows inside Rebecca Gillespie’s hood thinned slightly as she turned to look at Qatux. Two Barsoomians who had dismounted were gliding toward the big alien that had lumbered down from the back of the truck it’d traveled in. Tiger Pansy stood beside it in a very paternal fashion, giving the gray-robed figures a suspicious stare. The Barsoomians bowed deeply to Qatux, whose smaller tentacles extended toward them with the tenderness of a priest administering a blessing.

“What is Qatux to you, then?” Morton asked, his voice heavy with derision. “Some kind of old lost god?”

Rebecca Gillespie rotated slightly so that the front of her hood faced Morton. “The Raiel neural structure is supreme of all the sentients we have encountered in the galaxy,” she said. “As such it deserves our utmost respect. One day, we hope and believe our DNA can be elevated to such levels. In the meantime we are content with whatever insight it cares to grant us.”

“You people need to get out more,” Morton said.

“Whatever the reason, we’re glad you’re here,” Bradley said hurridly. “Er, what are these, exactly?” He nodded toward the huge avian creature Rebecca Gillespie had alighted from.

“To us, they’re king eagles; although the towns on the Iril Steppes already whisper rumors of dragons in the skies of Far Away.”

“Whatever, they’re very impressive. Are you going to fly into battle on them?”

“Good Lord, no, that would be insanity.” She reached behind her head, and pulled a rifle with a very long barrel out of its hidden sheath in her robe. “The Institute guns would find us easy targets. We will sharpshoot for you. These weapons will cut through an ordinary force field skeleton suit from a thousand meters.”

“That kind of support is most welcome.”

“Sir,” Scott called. “Movement at the Institute. Something’s coming this way. There’s a visual.”

Bradley scanned his virtual vision for the icon, and pulled the scout’s image out of his grid. The picture wasn’t high quality, but it showed him vehicles pouring out of the valley mouth.

“That must be every vehicle they’ve got in there,” Stig said. “Who the hell’s in them?”

“See if the scout can get a close-up,” Bradley said. He was disconcerted by the quantity of vehicles. The Starflyer would be truly desperate by now, but it was logical above all else.

The image blurred, and zoomed in on a pickup truck. Several dark shapes were wedged in the back. At first Bradley couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing; his mind simply rejected the profile. They can’t be here. But of course, Dudley Bose had discovered the Starflyer’s true origin. “Dreaming heavens,” he said fearfully.

“Motiles,” the Cat crooned joyously.

“There must be hundreds of them,” Morton said.

“Soldier motiles,” Rob said. “I think. They look different to the ones on Elan.”

“They’ll be the improved version,” Bradley told him flatly.

There had been some uncomfortable moments during the flight. Several of the Scylla’s hyperdrive systems threw up glitches that had to be dealt with immediately. Ancillary support equipment failed with dismaying regularity. Nigel had spent most of his waking hours troubleshooting, holding things together with patched programs and backup components. Otis and Thame had improvised a lot of procedures; flight experience and hugely detailed knowledge of the frigate allowing them to take near-intuitive shortcuts.

The reluctant ship had slowly been coaxed into producing a performance that matched the specifications its designers had originally promised. Nigel had gathered a great deal of satisfaction from wrestling the technology into shape. Hands on was the only management style that worked one hundred percent. Knowing that a single mistake would leave them as a smear of outré radiation across the cosmos also helped to focus the mind to an astonishing degree.

Now they were closing on Dyson Alpha, he pulled the sensor display out of his virtual vision grid and studied it. It surrounded him with a speckled gray cube, illustrating the star as a small kink in the fabric dead ahead. Dyson Beta was off to one side, showing a larger twist as the transdimensional resonance skittered off the barrier’s surface. There was also a slim conical wake approaching Dyson Alpha. Tracking the Charybdis wasn’t easy; the detector mechanism had proved one of the least reliable systems on board. There had been a whole twenty-eight-hour period when they had lost the Charybdis entirely. Nigel had worked hard at adapting the unit’s software until the detector functioned near flawlessly. Certainly the last few hours hadn’t seen a single hiccup. He suspected the way they were slowly overhauling the Charybdis played a big part in that. There was now less than fifteen light-years between them.

“Have you decided what to do when we get there?” Otis asked.

Nigel’s virtual hand pushed the tracking display aside, compressing it back into his grid. “Not yet.” There was a rattled edge in his voice. Damnit, this was Ozzie!

“Ninety minutes until we get there.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“We should have enough resolution to see if he heads for the homeworld or the Dark Fortress.”

Nigel shifted around on the couch’s padding. The voyage had been pretty miserable from a physical point of view: paste food, bloated sinuses, nauseous stomach, and teetering on the verge of claustrophobia the whole time. “You think it will track anything once they drop out of hyperspace?”

Otis gave a lame grin. “In theory.”

“This ship isn’t too hot on theory.”

“If he goes for the Dark Fortress he really will be trying to restart the barrier.”

“Possibly.”

“It means he isn’t a Starflyer agent.”

Nigel glared at his son. “I know that! That’s why I’ve come with you.”

“Sorry, Dad. It’s just … it’s Ozzie, you know.”

Nigel felt more than a little pique at the reverence in Otis’s voice. “Have you ever actually met him?”

“No. But you used to tell us about him all the time when we were young.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s why it will be my hand on the trigger if it’s to be done.” He couldn’t help yawning, not that he slept well in freefall. “Let’s get ready. I don’t want to be distracted on our approach. Thame, load the nova bomb into the launch tube, I’ll authorize its activation.”

“Yes, sir.”

Nigel followed the procedure through the ship’s schematics. There was a problem getting the missile out of the magazine, but Otis did something to the handling mechanism to correct the flaw. Green symbols appeared when it was loaded and primed.

“Mark taught me that trick,” Otis said. “It’s to do with balancing the electromuscle.”

Nigel ignored the reproachful tone. There was something innately appealing about Mark, a human lost puppy. “Initiate the neutron lasers,” Nigel said. “Thame, you’re handling short-range defenses.” When he checked the timer, Dyson Alpha was seventy minutes away.

The jeeps had cleared Stakeout Canyon when they began to pick up the scattered fragments of Johansson’s reply. Paula programmed her array to piece together the vocal snippets as they repeated again and again. Static crashed out of the speakers as she played the message. It was a little bit longer and cleaner each time. By the fifth time there was no mistake.

“Is it him?” Rosamund asked. “Did you tell Renne that?”

“Yes.” Paula stared through the jeep’s curving windshield. The headlight beams were flowing over the blank, shiny surface of sand and shale as the sleek vehicle raced for cover. She thought the eastern horizon might be slightly lighter. The ache had almost gone from her limbs now, but she felt desperately tired, as if she hadn’t slept for months.

“So Adam contacted Oscar,” Rosamund said. “Does that help?”

“It makes a lot of sense, especially the why of it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Adam knew Oscar wasn’t the Starflyer agent. If Oscar had been, then he would have captured Adam and taken him for interrogation as soon as Adam made contact; Adam would have been totally unprepared.”

“Then why didn’t he just tell us?”

“He was protecting Oscar.”

“From whom?”

“Me. Turn around.”

Rosamund shot her a startled look. “Do what?”

“Turn around.” Her virtual hands fluttered over icons, trying to contact Oscar. The handheld array didn’t have the range, not with the canyon wall blocking them. “I have to get back there.”

“We haven’t got time!”

“Stop the jeep. You can get in with Jamas or Kieran. I’ll drive back myself.”

“Oh, dreaming heavens!” Rosamund wrenched at the wheel, sending the jeep into a skid-curve. It shook wildly as it chased the turn.

Paula gripped the seat, thinking they were going to flip over.

“What’s happening?” Kieran demanded.

“Oscar’s in the clear,” Rosamund said. “We’re going back.”

“What for? The storm’s going to be here in twenty minutes.”

The jeep had now completed its turn, nose pointing back toward Stakeout Canyon. Rosamund floored the accelerator. “I don’t know.”

“What?” he asked incredulously.

“I have to ask Oscar some questions,” Paula said. “I should be able to find out which of the other two it is.”

“Then what?”

“We might be able to reach the Starflyer agent in time to prevent them from flying. It won’t take much. Your ion carbines can easily disable a hyperglider.”

“But we wouldn’t get clear,” Rosamund growled. “The storm is at its worst in Stakeout Canyon. These jeeps couldn’t take the beating it’d give us in there.”

“I said I’ll drive myself.”

“No you don’t. You can barely stay conscious.”

“Thank you,” Paula said. She flopped back into the seat, and began thinking of the questions she needed to ask.

“Even if we don’t reach the traitor’s hyperglider, the other two will be warned,” Rosamund said. “We have to give them that.”

“It might be enough,” Paula agreed; she could sense the woman’s need to justify what they were doing, the courage she gained from the cause. “I don’t know what the agent is planning on doing. A kamikaze in the glider, possibly, or pushing the others off Aphrodite’s Seat.”

“It’s Adam, you know, he’s helping us.”

“How?”

“He’s looking down from the dreaming heavens, spurring us on.”

Paula didn’t reply. The idea was mildly discomfiting. She based her universe on solid facts. It was easier.

“Aren’t you religious, Investigator?”

“I don’t think I was designed to be, no. You obviously are.”

“I don’t believe in the old religions; but Bradley Johansson actually visited the dreaming heavens. He told the clans what they’re like, what we can look forward to.”

“I see.”

“Don’t believe me,” Rosamund said, laughing. “Ask him yourself afterward.”

“I might just do that.”

They drove on in silence. After a while, Rosamund began to shift the wheel slightly. The ground didn’t seem to be uneven. It hadn’t changed for a long time.

“Wind starting to pick up,” Rosamund said as she caught Paula searching the dusky landscape outside.

“Right.” Paula ordered the jeep’s transmitter to signal again. They should be in range by now. According to the inertial navigation they were level with the entrance to Stakeout Canyon, ready to curve around into it.

“What did you mean, Oscar wasn’t safe from you?” Rosamund asked.

“He and Adam were at Abadan station together; he was part of the terrorist atrocity. Adam knew that if I discovered that I would arrest Oscar.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Time is irrelevant. The people they killed are still dead. Justice must be served. Without that, our civilization would collapse.”

“You mean that, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“So you really would have tried to arrest Adam after this was over?”

“Yes.”

“We’d have stopped you.”

“Only this time.” Paula’s e-butler told her the jeep’s transmitter had made contact with the three hypergliders. “Oscar, are you all right?”

“I’m fine. We all are. What’s the problem? I thought you’d be clear by now. You have to get out of Stakeout Canyon.”

“Oscar, I’ve been in touch with Bradley Johansson. He told me it was Adam who made contact with you to ask for a review of the Second Chance logs, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Investigator, what’s this about?” Wilson asked. “We’re about to fly. And you need to get clear.”

“Oscar, that puts you in the clear,” Paula said. “If you were the Starflyer agent you would have taken him captive.”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“What are you saying?” Wilson asked.

The jeep rocked to one side as it was struck by a sudden gust of wind. Paula tightened her restraint webbing. “It’s either you or Anna.”

“Oh, come on! We’re all navy, we’ve know each other for years. We already decided it’s either you or one of the Guardians. We’re flying to the summit, no matter what you say.”

“You were all on board the Second Chance,” Paula said. “Oscar, what did you tell Wilson when you went to him with the evidence? Did you tell him you were contacted by the Guardians?”

“Yes.”

“All right, Wilson, you knew there was a connection between Oscar and the Guardians. Did you tell Anna?”

“This is ridiculous.”

“Did you tell her?” The jeep was swaying about continually now as the winds picked up. Sand was scudding along the ground.

“I … I don’t think so. Anna, do you remember?”

“What did you say to her? Did you discuss the Second Chance data?”

“Anna?” Wilson entreated.

“She handled the sensors on Second Chance, that gave her easy access to the satellites and the dish. They were her systems; it would be easy for her to cover up any unauthorized use.”

“Anna! Tell her she’s talking crap.”

“Did you tell her Oscar had found the dish deployment?” Paula demanded.

“Anna, for God’s sake.”

“Did you?”

“Yes,” Wilson moaned.

“Anna,” Paula said. “I know your carrier wave is on, please respond.”

“She’s my wife.”

The jeep wobbled badly. Rosamund fought the wheel. “We can’t take any more of this,” she grunted. “We’re not going to reach Anna.”

“Damnit,” Paula said. “It can’t be much farther.”

“Investigator, we are going to die if we carry on.” Rosamund’s voice was emotionless. “That’s not going to accomplish anything, is it?”

“All right, turn around,” Paula snapped. Halfway into the turn another gust slammed into them, and she thought they really would flip over this time. Rosamund spun the wheel violently, countering the tilt. Outside, gray light was seeping into the sky to reveal a thick low cloud base that was moving at a daunting speed toward Mount Herculaneum. The jeep steadied. Rosamund was taking them straight toward the base of the canyon wall.

“Anna, respond please,” Paula said.

“Wilson,” Oscar said. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry.”

“She can’t be!” Wilson said. “She can’t. Damnit, she’s perfectly human.”

“I worked with Tarlo for years,” Paula said. “I had no idea.”

“Work?” Wilson spat contemptuously. “I married her. I loved her.”

“Wilson, Oscar, you have to decide what you’re going to do now. I know this is hard, Wilson, but I expect she will try to crash into one of you.”

“We’ll leave a gap between unhooking from the tether,” Oscar said. “That way she can only go after one of us.”

“That sounds viable.” Paula desperately wanted to offer some practical advice, but she couldn’t even think on how to improve Oscar’s suggestion. She saw the edge of the canyon approaching fast. There was sand under the tires again. Big worn outcrops of rock were cluttered along the base of the canyon wall. Rosamund steered them around a dark jag of abraded lava and braked in its lee; she raised the suspension so the rim settled on the ground. “I hope this is deep enough,” she said as she switched on the jeep’s emergency anchors. The screws on the chassis started to wind down into the hard-packed sand with a strident metallic whine.

“Good luck, both of you,” Paula said.

Rosamund cut the mike and faced Paula. “You didn’t tell him you know about Abadan.”

“Oscar has enough to worry about right now. I didn’t want to impede his effectiveness. He’ll find out if he survives.”

“I don’t know about the Starflyer, but you frighten the living crap out of me.”

“She didn’t know.” Oscar repeated the phrase like a mantra; he’d lost count of how many times he’d said it now. The emptiness of human silence was oppressive and demoralizing as the furious wind rose in counterpoint around the hyperglider. A sense of isolation was folding around him like the caress of interstellar space. Anna: lost beyond redemption goodness knows how many years or decades before. While Wilson had withdrawn into a private hell of anguish and grief. “The human part of her was drawn to you. That’s still alive.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Wilson answered curtly. “I’ve had wives before.”

“Not like this, man; we saw flashes of the real Anna. She’s still there. Lost. She can be re-lifed and her memories edited.”

“After we kill her now. Is that it?”

Oscar winced. The whole conversation was made even more disquieting by the little emerald symbol shining in the corner of his virtual vision showing that Anna was still on the air, receiving everything they said. Maybe silence is best. “What do you want to do?” he asked warily. Wisps of fine sand were drifting past the cockpit, whipped up from the wet desert out beyond the gaping canyon mouth.

“Get to Aphrodite’s Seat. That’s what we’re here for. That’s what we do.”

Oscar resisted letting out a long breath of relief. At least his friend was starting to focus. That was the thing about Wilson, an ability to put the human element aside while he made choices. It was probably what made him so good at command. The parallel between that and Starflyer agents was one Oscar didn’t like to think of.

“We’ll get there,” Oscar said. “After all, there’s not that much she can do.”

“You think?”

Oscar was very close to turning his radio off and just keeping the hyperglider on the ground while the storm raged. The universe can survive without me, surely? Just this once. If he could just do what Wilson did and turn off his emotions.

The hyperglider shook as the wind strengthened around it. Overhead, the gray clouds had merged into an unbroken rumpled ceiling above the stark canyon. “Whatever you want to do, I’m with you,” he told Wilson. It was a cop-out and he knew it, transfer responsibility to someone else. But then that’s what he’d been doing ever since Abadan.

He checked the weather radar with its false-color mating jellyfish patterns. The whole cockpit was juddering now, wobbling the images on the little screen. It showed him a salmon-pink tide of wind channeled by the overbearing walls of Stakeout Canyon and reaching close to a hundred miles an hour. Somewhere in the invisible distance ahead of the hyperglider’s nose, the stormfront had reached the base of Mount Herculaneum.

“Confirmed go status,” Wilson responded with toneless dispassion.

Oscar smiled tenderly at the absolute professionalism; in his own fashion Wilson was showing him the way. Okay, if that’s what it takes to do this, I’m game. “Roger that. I’m beginning ascent phase.”

He brought his hands down on the console’s i-spots, gripping the concave handholds. Plyplastic flowed over his wrists, mooring them into place for the flight. His e-butler reported a perfect interface with the hyperglider’s onboard array.

Oscar put Anna aside and allowed the memories to come to the fore. Not his memories, but the skill belonged to him now, merging him with the hyperglider. A red and violet virtual hand gripped the joystick that had materialized in front of him. His other hand skipped across the glowing icons.

The plyplastic wing buds began to flow, extending out from the fuselage into a simple delta configuration. Oscar was rattled from side to side in the cockpit as they caught the wind. He disengaged the forward tether lock, and the hyperglider leaped about wildly. His own sparse piloting knowledge buoyed by the recent skill implants helped him counter the movement with relative ease, keeping the craft as level as possible.

He allowed the front and rear tether strands to unwind, and adjusted the wings to provide some lift. The hyperglider began to rise away from the floor of the canyon, tugging hard at the cables as the wind tore at the fuselage. Once he was fifty meters high he adjusted the tail fin into a long vertical stabilizer. The shaking began to lose its urgency, though the howl of the wind outside was still growing. Oscar expanded the wings farther, deepening the camber to generate more direct lift. With the tether cables reporting a huge strain, he began spooling them out at a measured rate, scrupulously keeping his ascent at the recommended pace. This was not the time, he decided, for cutting corners, no matter what the stakes.

Tatters of mist shot past the cockpit, twined into a sheath that restricted his visual range to little more than twenty meters. Rain was battering aggressively into the fuselage with loud drumbeat reverberations. As he climbed higher the cables began shaking with unlikely harmonics. He was constantly adjusting the wings to try to keep the hyperglider stable.

“If this storm isn’t enough for Samantha to work with, I don’t know what is,” Wilson said. The radio link wasn’t good, but the static-creased words contained a formidable determination.

Oscar clung to his friend’s voice, the contact with another human was suddenly tremendously important. When he scrutinized the weather radar again he could see the scarlet and cerise flow waves of the storm rushing down Stakeout Canyon, overlapping and twisting at a giddy velocity. The speed around the fuselage had now exceeded a hundred sixty kilometers an hour. Indigo stars marked the other two hypergliders; both were in the air, about the same height as he was. So she is alive and kicking, then. It had been a foolish fantasy that her silence meant she was somehow inactive.

“Yeah,” he said as he rose past the thousand-meter mark. “I don’t like being inside it; I certainly wouldn’t like to be on the receiving end.”

“Adam only meant for you to do this, didn’t he? That’s why he put you through the memory implant procedure. There was no moisture damage. He wasn’t going to let me and Anna fly.”

“No. He was going to explain it to the Guardians and use them to make sure the two of you stayed on the ground. Bloody idiot, as if my flying can guarantee a landing on the summit.”

“Why didn’t he tell us you were in the clear?”

“He would have to explain why to the Investigator, that we knew each other from way back, which was why he contacted me in the first place.” The hyperglider lurched alarmingly to starboard. Oscar brought it back with steady pressure on the joystick, flexing the wings. The craft rolled back to its level position. He concentrated hard on the weather radar, though even that had trouble spotting the extreme airflow turbulence inside the jetstreams.

“Is that important?” Wilson asked.

Oscar ground his teeth together. For decades he’d assumed that this moment, if it ever came, would be cathartic. It wasn’t. He hated himself for confessing, for what he had to confess. “I’m afraid so.”

“So why did he know you?”

“We both got involved with student politics at the university. It was stupid. We were young, and the radicals knew how to exploit that.”

“What happened?”

“Ultimately? Abadan station.”

“Oh, Jesus, Oscar, you’ve got to be kidding. That was you?”

“I was nineteen. Adam and I were in the group which planted the bomb. It wasn’t meant for the passenger train. We were making a gesture against the grain dumping. But there was some snarl up on StLincoln; the express was running late so traffic control gave it priority, they pushed the grain train onto a different line.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Yeah.” Oscar watched his altitude go through the fourteen-hundred-meter mark. It was difficult to see. Tears were washing down his cheeks. He ordered the wing configuration change ready for flight. “The Intersolar Socialist Party took pity on me and paid for me to undergo an identity change on Illuminatus. I’ve been … I don’t know. Making amends? Ever since.”

“I’ll be damned. This really is a day for revelations, isn’t it. I guess we’re all strangers in the end.”

“Wilson. No matter what … if you hate me now. I’m glad I knew you.”

“I don’t hate you. So is Oscar your real name?”

“Hell no.” He checked out through the cockpit canopy, seeing the wings curving away on either side. Virtual vision showed him the tailplane morphing into a broad triangular stabilizer. Deep in his gut he was tensing himself up for the release. “I used to be a big film buff. I loved all those fabulous musicals and cowboys and romances they used to make back in the mid-twentieth century. Oscar awards, see? And the biggest star they ever had was called Marilyn Monroe.”

“Well, Mr. Star Award, you named the tactic: two on one.”

Oscar saw Wilson’s hyperglider disengage. Its indigo star went shooting off down the carmine river flooding the length of Stakeout Canyon.

He could almost hear the calculation that Anna must be making. Out of all of them Wilson stood the best chance of reaching the summit. The longer she left it the more difficult it would be for her to catch him and presumably force some kind of collision; but if she disengaged before Oscar he could pick his own moment anytime in the next hour or so, and make his flight completely unimpeded. It all depended on how much faith everyone had in his ability to fly the foreshortened parabola.

Anna disengaged.

She was twenty-five seconds behind Wilson.

Oscar’s virtual hand punched the disengage icon. G-force shoved him down hard in the seat. The hyperglider streaked away at over a hundred ninety kilometers an hour. Roiling air buffeted the wings mercilessly. He’d envisaged keeping the craft steady while watching the movements of the other two, waiting for whatever moment presented itself. Instead he was thrust into an immediate battle for simple survival. All he cared about was maintaining altitude. The two terrifying canyon walls jumped out of the radar screen at him as the winds impelled him from side to side. He countered each floundering swerve movement the screaming storm flung at him, tilting the joystick with a fear-burned calmness. The wings shifted obediently, tips twisting and flexing to produce a response so quick he had trouble registering it before it became overcompensation.

For a split second he searched out the two indigo stars. His e-butler projected their course trajectories. The slender topaz lines it sketched intersected before the end of Stakeout Canyon. Then the vast rock walls were closing in again, and the instabilities clawing at the fuselage intensified. It grew darker outside as the shreds of clouds threaded within the storm were wrenched back into a single wild braid high above the ground. Big raindrops smashed against the cockpit in a sudden wave. The hyperglider yawed under the assault. Oscar struggled to right the craft again. He had to reduce the wing size, increasing control at the cost of the acceleration that the previous wide curve had given him. There was no noticeable loss of speed, and it was easier to force his way back into the center of the canyon, keeping above that writhing arterial cloud. The radar found the end of the canyon wall twenty kilometers ahead, a vertical cliff that stretched up off the screen.

He checked the other two hypergliders again. Anna was flying with mechanical exactitude. Her wings hadn’t been trimmed down, yet somehow she was maintaining her vector, closing fast on Wilson. She didn’t have to worry about maneuvering into the right position to go vertical at the end of the canyon. She didn’t have human concerns to distract her anymore. Her hyperglider streaked on like a missile. Wilson couldn’t move away; if he was to soar up the incredible waterfall that flowed out of the canyon he had to hold his course perfectly steady.

The skills of some long-departed pilot had settled calmly into Oscar’s mind now, allowing him to manipulate the joystick in kinesic synergy with the hyperglider, bestowing a flawless control over the aerodynamics at some animal-instinct level. Amid the darkening sky and belligerent uproar of the storm he watched the express train from StLincoln leave the tracks in a cloying oily fireball, saw the carriages jackknife and crumple, caught sight of the broken charred bodies sprawled along the side of the tracks. He knew them all now, every night for forty years their faces had filled his one and only dream.

His virtual hand manipulated the wing configuration again, molding it into a wider, longer planform among the red warning symbols thrown up by the onboard array. His speed increased, and he lowered the nose, hurtling down toward the torrent of white foam that soared through the air two kilometers above the canyon floor.

“Wilson?” he called above the cacophony.

Savage rivulets churned around the hyperglider fuselage to be sliced apart by the rapier blade wings. High above, the sun rose over the summit of Mount Herculaneum.

“I hear you.”

The sunlight broke apart on the water, scattering into a seething cloud of ephemeral rainbows. Oscar smiled in delight at the beauty of this world’s bizarre nature. Directly in front and below a dazzling white cruciform shape surfed along the top of the coruscating foam.

“My name is Gene Yaohui.” As he said it, he plunged into the glorious vortex of light and water, crashing straight into Anna’s hyperglider.

It had happened before, many times, back when he was flying with the Wild Fox squadron. It was such a tight institution that they willingly lived each other’s lives in the air and on the ground; they trained together, they partied together, went to the big game together, flew missions together, served overseas together. On base he knew the wives and kids of every other pilot, their money troubles, their fights, their grocery orders; while in the air he knew the performance and limit of each man flying. They were as close as brothers.

When they flew combat missions some didn’t come back. The radar showed them die, its neat little neon-green symbology on the HUD printing up CONTACT LOST codes where their plane had burst apart from a missile strike to fall like a meteor in flaming ruin. Each time, a part of himself had been wrenched away into the crash leaving a void that would never be filled in quite the same way again. But you carried on because that was what the guys wanted, you knew them well enough to be certain. It was that knowledge that gave you the strength to carry on.

And now, three and a half centuries after he thought he’d lost his last squadron buddy, Wilson Kime watched the radar symbols of his wife and best friend tumble out of the sky to smash apart on the implacable rock far below his hyperglider.

“Good-bye, Gene Yaohui,” he whispered.

Two kilometers ahead of him, the river that streaked through the air performed its magnificently paradoxical curve and charged up parallel to the immense cliff face. Orange positioning vectors printed themselves around his virtual vision, and he moved the joystick calmly, lining the craft up on the correct approach path. He withdrew the wings back into a short swept-back planform as the canyon walls rushed in on either side. The waterfall was directly ahead, a sheet of silver ripples ascending at over three hundred kilometers an hour. He held his breath for a long heartbeat.

The hyperglider was abruptly torn upward with a force that thrust him down into the seat. He grappled with the joystick, wrangling the wing surfaces to keep the craft perfectly level as it stood on its tail and blasted straight up for the pristine sapphire sky. Wilson breathed again, then he was suddenly laughing, only it sounded more like a defiant snarl that the Starflyer would hear and know.

Peaking out at five kilometers, the vertical waterfall began to break apart as the immense pressure that created it lessened, escaping from Stakeout Canyon’s brutal constriction. The water parted into two cataracts of looser spume, gushing away north and south onto the huge volcano’s lower slopes. Wilson rode the residual blast of air from the escaping storm, letting it carry him still higher, maintaining velocity. As he soared above the grasslands of the higher, temperate slopes, he watched the massive cloud bands below him tumbling away around the volcano where they would engender the planet’s revenge on the other side.

The radar started to pick out the twisters up ahead as they birthed out of the clear turbulence that marked the upper fringes of the storm. He watched them whipping around, translucent columns skating erratically across the ground that would suddenly be plunged full of dust and stone as they sucked up an exposed patch of soil. The onboard array started tracking them, winding in his options.

Three were in the right area, all of them large enough. One he dismissed, its oscillations too unstable. Out of the remaining two, he simply went for the nearest.

He eased the joystick forward, aiming the nose at the whirling base of the twister, matching the semirhythmic way it skewed from side to side as it snaked its way upslope. The hyperglider’s wings and tailplane were pulled in to simple shark-fin steering flaps as he dived in toward the target. Holding steady, intuitively aiming for where he knew it would go. If Gene Yaohui can aim straight, then I sure as hell can. Our purpose will go on, will succeed.

Wilson tugged the joystick back, pulling the hyperglider into a steep climb as it slid into the twister. The canopy was instantly bombarded with sand and gravel; larger chunks of stone made him cringe as they impacted. Fuselage stress levels peaked. Motors whined directly behind his seat, spinning the forward section of the hyperglider in counter to the twister rotation, adding stability to the climb. The wings had morphed again, becoming propeller blades to tap the tempestuous power of the twister.

Seconds later the hyperglider burst out of the top of the twister. Wilson began an urgent review of the flight vector. He’d gained enough velocity to fly the complete arc over the summit. Good, but not what he wanted. The wings altered their camber, pitching the nose up in a modest aerobrake maneuver. There wasn’t much time, the gases were thinning out rapidly as he left the stratosphere behind. He extended the wings farther still, and angled them to increase their drag on the tenuous gusts of molecules that were slipping past the fuselage. In his virtual vision, the projected parabola slowly sank back down into the one he’d plotted, giving him an impact point a kilometer and a half behind Aphrodite’s Seat.

The hyperglider sailed up out of the atmosphere. Space reverted to familiar welcome black outside, the stars as bright as he’d ever seen them. He watched beads of moisture smeared across the fuselage turn to ice. Beneath his starboard wing, Mount Titan’s crater bubbled with gloomy red light as the lava churned and effervesced, spitting out smoky gobbets of stone that chased parabolas of their own down into the atmosphere where they burst apart in crimson shock waves. In front of the nose, Mount Herculaneum’s flat summit tipped into view as the hyperglider reached the apex of its trajectory, presenting a dismal umber plain of cold lava dimpled by the twin caldera.

Wilson saw it but that was all; there was no interest, no marveling at the vista. He’d honored those taken from him, he’d flown the perfect flight for them. That alone was victory. There was nothing else left for him to do, no adjustments to make. Tiny cold gas reaction thrusters kept the hyperglider level up here in the vacuum. Gravity would bring him down where they’d chosen. That was his last memory of the three of them: gathered around the projected map back in the hangar, squabbling excitedly over the best patch of ground, ignoring the sullen armed Guardians as they glowered at the inappropriate jollity. Oscar and Anna, the two people he would have vouched for above anyone else. People who’d never really existed to begin with.

The hyperglider sank swiftly down toward the fissured surface of the summit. Too steep for comfort. Nothing I can do, this is all gravity now. Already the rest of the planet had vanished below the false horizon of Aphrodite’s Seat where the lava ended in sheer cliffs over eight kilometers high. Wilson was alone in space above a rugged circle of lava that was a lot more craggy than the images had hinted at. Shards of clinker littered the ground. He checked his helmet seals again, then made sure the suit’s environmental system was switched on. The wings were drawn back to a ten-meter span, their tips curled down in case they were needed for stability should the wheels be damaged on impact.

Fifty meters altitude, and only eight hundred meters from the edge of the cliff. The parabola hadn’t been quite so perfect after all. Wilson fired all the upper surface gas thrusters at once, trying to speed the descent. The quiet crept up on him, unexpectedly unnerving. Even in a glider he expected some sound from air rushing over the wings as it came in to land. Here there was nothing, only the ghost of Schiaparelli crater. He lowered the landing struts. And the speed was still way too fast.

The hyperglider hit and immediately bounced. He saw stone fragments spinning off on either side where the wheels had kicked them. Seven hundred meters from the cliff. The wheels touched again. He heard something then, the sound of impacts on the little tires. Then the cockpit was juddering frenziedly. Dust flared up from the wheels, shooting out streamers thinner than water vapor. The nose landing strut snapped, and the real noise began as the fuselage started skidding across the ground.

Wilson knew it was going to flip. He could feel the motion building. Nothing I can do. It’s all gravity. The tailplane lifted up as the main body rolled to starboard, jabbing the wingtip into a small crevice. In low gravity the somersault was almost graceful. The hyperglider turned lazily and thudded down on its upper fuselage. An inverted horizon skidded toward Wilson as cracks multiplied across the cockpit canopy. The tough glass finally shattered in a burst of gas. Raw pocked lava rushed past, centimeters from his helmet. Through the swirling white haze of the cockpit’s evacuating atmosphere Wilson saw a big spur of rock straight ahead. The hyperglider crashed into it, flooding Wilson’s universe with a searing red pain.

“Man! This is one seriously cruddy radar,” Ozzie complained as the Charybdis approached the edge of the Dyson Alpha star system. He’d pulled the TD detector visualization out of his grid to find a translucent gray cube filling his virtual vision. It was grainy inside, with minuscule photonic flaws flowing past him like some kind of smog. Clusters of them veered into warped blemishes, knots in the structural fabric that represented the stars back in the real universe. Now they were only twenty minutes out from Dyson Alpha he changed the scan resolution to focus on the star system ahead. There was a silent inrush of the streaming particles as they foregathered as the star. Smaller congregations swept around it in concentric orbits, three solid planets and two gas giants. Ozzie searched for the location of the Dark Fortress but there was nothing available on this scale. Strange, that mother’s the size of a planet. He pulled astronomical data out of the grid, and overlaid it. A tangerine reticulation sprang up to mimic the planetary system layout and size-adjusted until it synchronized with the sensor imagery. A simple purple decussation highlighted the coordinates of the Dark Fortress. Ozzie shifted the focus to center it, then expanded to the sensor’s absolute limit. The little gray motes underwent some kind of jitter as they slipped through the volume of space where the Dark Fortress should be.

“Well, something’s still there,” Mark said without much conviction.

“Let’s go take a look,” Ozzie said. He altered their course vector to take them in a mild curve around to the Dark Fortress coordinates. “Can this thing pick out ships?”

“I’ve no idea,” Mark said. “It doesn’t have very good resolution. I suppose if you get close enough it can pick up smaller objects.”

“Don’t you know?”

“I haven’t got a clue about the physics behind any of this, that’s if you can even call it physics anymore. I just do the assembly, remember?”

“Okay. Let’s get ready to drop out of hyperspace five thousand kilometers above the outer lattice sphere. Get our force fields activated. I’ll scan around with ordinary sensors. And, Mark, if there are any ships out there, they’re going to be hostile. They’re going to think we’re here to turn their star nova.”

“I know! I was on Elan when they invaded.”

“So,” Ozzie prompted.

Mark gave him an irritated frown. “So?”

“You’ve encrypted the weapons. You’re going to have to shoot them.”

“Oh. Right. I’ll enable the tactical systems.”

“Good idea, man.”

Ozzie gradually reduced their speed as they drew closer until they were stationary relative to the Dark Fortress. There were sixteen ships or satellites orbiting around the structure. The TD detector couldn’t provide reliable size estimations.

“Got to be big to show up on this piece of junk,” Ozzie decided.

“The smallest mass to create a gravitonic fold in space-time which can be detected from hyperspace is approximately one thousand tons,” the SIsubroutine said.

“They’re ships, then.”

“That is a high probability.”

Ozzie touched the icon that activated his couch’s plyplastic webbing. He turned his head to look at Mark. “You ready for this?”

Mark gave him a calculating look. “Yeah. Sure. Let’s go.”

Ozzie dropped the Charybdis back into real space. Tiny segments of the stealth hull peeled back like eyelids, allowing sensors to peer out. Five thousand kilometers in front of the sleek ultra-black ellipse of the frigate the Dark Fortress writhed in electromagnetic agony. Beneath the outer lattice sphere a dense typhoon of radiant amethyst plasma was beset with eruptions and upsurges of copper and azure gyres. The unstable surface spun out tumescent fountains. As they lashed against the outer lattice sphere they triggered snapping discharges deep within the struts causing them to glow with ethereal radiance.

“Wow,” Mark hissed. “Looks like it’s on fire down there.”

“Uh huh.” Ozzie was watching the data from the nonvisual sensors. The energy environment around the gigantic orb was diabolical, with electrical, magnetic, and gravitonic emissions pulsing up from the rutilant interior to create a maelstrom of particles and radiation above the outer lattice sphere. “I guess something this big doesn’t have a quick death no matter what you hit it with,” he mused.

“What about the flare bomb’s quantum signature?”

“It’s still there all right.” Ozzie grinned in relish. I was right; so screw you, Nigel. “Unchanged from when they first detected it right after the barrier collapsed.”

“Can you find the origin point?”

“No way, man. There’s a hell of a lot of interference from this plasma storm and God knows what else that’s going on in the depths. We’ll have to use the active sensors, and go in to take a look.”

“They’ll see us.”

Ozzie reviewed the infrared image. The objects that the TD detector had found were Prime ships, glowing cerise against the dark. They were also emitting just about every sensor radiation that the Charybdis’s passive scanners could detect, sending great fans of it to wash across the outer shell. Their constant radio emission matched the chaotic analogue signals that MorningLightMountain used to mesh its multitude of motiles and immotile groups into a unified whole. “There’s a wormhole open about ten thousand kilometers away,” he said. “And I’m also picking up some strong radio signals from inside the lattice spheres. It’s got ships in there.”

“They’re waiting for us.”

“No they’re not. Don’t panic. These ships are just part of a science mission to examine this thing. Man, it’s impressive. You don’t realize that until you get up close and personal. Even for a species that went through their singularity event this had to take some doing. And I thought the gas halo was formidable. This could well peak it.”

“Gas halo?”

“Long story. We need to get inside. Do you think our onboard systems are up to it?”

“Why shouldn’t they be?”

“The first lattice has a composition that produces electro-repulsive properties. It’s in the files. Get too close to it, and your power goes dead, that and other generally bad things.”

“How close?”

“Under ten kilometers, I think. The Second Chance couldn’t get any probes nearer than that.”

“Ozzie, some of these gaps are over a thousand kilometers wide. The Primes have got their ships through and they’re five times the size of the Charybdis. We’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, but we’re going to have to switch on our active sensors. There’s no way we can do this on visual alone.”

Mark’s fingers drummed nervously on the acceleration couch cushioning. “All right.”

“Is that quantumbuster ready to go?”

“Yeah yeah.”

“Force fields?”

“Get on with it.”

Ozzie enabled the active sensors. The data return quadrupled, amplifying and clarifying the image. “The environment inside is a lot worse than it was before,” he said tightly. “But I’ve got a more accurate fix on the quantum signature, it’s definitely inside the fourth lattice sphere. The Starflyer agent planted it in the ring structure somewhere.”

“Can we just get this over with. Please.”

“No problem, man.” Ozzie fed power into the secondary drive units. The Charybdis accelerated at a smooth one gee toward the outer lattice sphere. He was aiming for a pentagonal interstice that measured six hundred kilometers in diameter. Radar return was fuzzed by the struts, denying them any close resolution; but their bulk was easy enough to track.

The infrared sensors reported long slender jets of superheated plasma appearing in space around them. They were being swept by laser, maser, and standard radar pulses, which the stealth hull was deflecting. “Uh, bad news, man. They’ve seen us, sort of; they’re locking on to our sensor emissions. Ships are accelerating this way. Jeez! Nine gees. Is that big Mountain dude paranoid, or what?”

“Let’s speed things up here.” Mark’s voice had risen in pitch.

“Okay, here we go, five gees.” It built quickly, crushing Ozzie back into the cushioning. The outer lattice sphere was expanding fast in the sensor image. “Oh, shit.”

“What?” Mark barked.

“It’s not waiting for its ships to catch us. Eight wormholes opening. Five hundred kilometers away. Another four; damn, they’re popping up all over the place. Hang on.” Ozzie bumped the acceleration up to ten gees. He could feel his flesh sagging backward. It was getting very hard to breathe. Not a day to be wearing tight pants.

Big ships began to fly out of the wormholes, already accelerating. Missiles leaped away from them, plasma exhausts turning space above the planetsized artifact to a noonday brilliance. Nuclear explosions erupted, stabbing vast tracts of coherent radiation toward the tiny emission point betraying the Charybdis’s existence. Force field warning icons glared red. Ozzie increased their acceleration to twelve gees. His own anguished whimper joined Mark’s.

MorningLightMountain had never given the alien mega-structure much consideration. Not that it ignored the strange artifact. It had noticed the structure almost as soon as the barrier withdrew. Ships sent to investigate found a planet-size machine with incomprehensible mass properties. Given its scale, MorningLightMountain concluded it had to be associated with the barrier; in all probability it was the generator or a part of it. According to the Bose memories, that was what the humans considered it to be. It did not understand why they called it the Dark Fortress. Something to do with combining fiction and humor.

The investigation that followed was as methodical as MorningLightMountain could be. Its primary attention was of course directed first toward eliminating its rival immotiles, then the conquest of the Commonwealth. Even so, it kept worrying away at the enigma. New sensors were fabricated and sent out. Ships ventured through the giant webbed carapace and began to map the properties, energy patterns, and geometry of the interior. Over the months this became more difficult as the internal energy secretions grew in strength while becoming more frenzied. Eventually the artifact resembled a caged star.

Data extraction on several Commonwealth worlds revealed the human physicists were equally puzzled by the Dark Fortress. They, too, did not understand its functionality. They also had no idea who constructed it. MorningLightMountain suspected the human SI could build such a thing. The Silfen aliens might also have the ability, but according to the associated mined data they didn’t have the psychology. MorningLightMountain didn’t trust that analysis. The galaxy was full of non-Prime life, all of it was an enemy, all of it was suspect. One day it would find its greatest enemy and eliminate them.

As its investigation progressed, the greatest puzzle came from the errant quantum signature emanating from somewhere deep inside the alien artifact. MorningLightMountain could not understand why it matched its own corona-rupture weapon. Logically it implied the humans on the Second Chance had deployed it against the Dark Fortress. They had the technology, but they appeared to be as bewildered as it was by why the barrier had failed—assuming their records were accurate, and not disinformation.

Such questions were abruptly pushed farther down its priority list when the humans turned the staging post star nova. MorningLightMountain realized it had seriously underestimated human scientific resourcefulness. It was now facing the very extinction event it had begun its expansion campaign to eliminate. Humans would move swiftly after their initial success. They only had one ship, one nova bomb when they attacked the staging post star. It was probably a prototype. If they had more, they would have used them. Right now, their smoothly efficient manufacturing machinery would be producing more ships and bombs. When they had enough to guarantee a successful attack on its home star and all other outposts, they would come.

With its own survival now paramount MorningLightMountain dispatched more ships and equipment through the wormholes already linking it to new, uninhabited star systems where its settlements were establishing themselves. There were over forty now, which would hopefully stretch human resources to locate and destroy them. It also began to install wormhole generators in its largest ships, modifying them for FTL flight. They were nothing like as efficient and fast as the human FTL ships, but they did work. It started to send them through the giant wormhole it had originally built to bridge the gulf between its home system and the Commonwealth, scattering them across interstellar space hundreds of light-years away. Eight had been completed when the immotile group clusters researching the barrier generator detected a wash of sensor radiation. It was coming from a point in space without any physical origin.

MorningLightMountain’s primary thought routines immediately recognized the reason. The advanced human ship had been undetectable. The navy-class humans had arrived to turn the home star nova. Every ship researching the generator launched an attack against the intruder, missiles aiming for the elusive emission point.

It didn’t understand why the human ship had appeared at the generator. Probabilities were examined. If they were here, why had they not simply bombed the star? It would never have known until the moment the star erupted.

Humans were weak, they would avoid a direct confrontation if at all possible. The ship must somehow be attempting to restart the generator. MorningLightMountain feared that as much as it did extinction. With itself cut off from the freedom of the galaxy, it would ultimately die inside the prison of the barrier as the star slowly burned out. This would become its tomb.

MorningLightMountain immediately opened twenty-four wormholes around the intruder, and began to send its most powerful warships through to intercept the humans.

“If one of them made it, they should be there by now,” Andria said.

Samantha took yet another glance at the five dead screens standing on Andria’s table. She’d secretly been hoping that the hypergliders might even make it to Aphrodite’s Seat early. It was impossible to accept that all three had failed. Now she didn’t know what to think. Everyone in the cave had listened to the short-wave messages between Paula Myo and Bradley Johansson. She really couldn’t figure out the relevance, but the Investigator was obviously desperate to know about Oscar. Did the information put him in the clear, or condemn him?

Several people in the cave had known Adam. They’d all been shocked by his murder. Samantha found it severely disconcerting; it was hard to accept the Starflyer had got so close to them, that it might still wreck their plans.

“It’s here,” one of the control group said.

Samantha automatically glanced at the five dark screens. Frowned.

“The storm,” Andria said quietly.

Up on the big topographic map projected by the portal, the morning storm was billowing around the lower slopes of Mount Herculaneum. Hammerhead clouds poured out into the Dessault range, riding high-velocity jetstreams. At low altitude the clouds roared around peaks, splitting to churn down valleys and bring a deluge of hard rain; while overhead a smooth-flowing sheet of clear air, kilometers high, fanned out above the mountains, driven by the huge pressure surge from behind.

The picture had gaps. Coverage from the manipulator stations was sporadic; the large array was filling in the omissions as best it could.

“Here we go,” Andria said. “Sequence one, please. Be ready to phase in your sections.”

The Guardians sitting at the tables were abruptly quiet as they studied the data their screens were rolling up. Samantha saw the first echelon of manipulator stations powering up, their gigantic curving blades of energy materializing to rival the rocky peaks they paralleled. Clouds surged in toward their blades, only to be flung on wild curves by the newborn eddies as they began rotating.

“Can we do it?” Samantha asked tersely.

“Sure we can,” Andria said.

Samantha wanted to curse the Starflyer, the useless navy people, Adam for allowing himself to be murdered, the Guardians he’d taken with him, the hyperglider designers, the …

“Hey!” Andria cried. “Carrier signal detected. Coming right at us from Aphrodite’s Seat. Dreaming heavens, they made it.”

The image of the storm began to strengthen with details filling in as the large array processed the incoming data; the swirls and mini-cyclones that squalled off from individual peaks, the long hurricane streams rampaging along the bigger valleys. Jetstream velocity, direction, pressure; it all ran through the large array’s software to be transformed into initial projections. From that came firm commands on how the manipulator stations should perform if the storm was to be amplified and directed as they wanted.

Applause and cheering burst out all down the cave.

“This is Wilson Kime on Aphrodite’s Seat, I hope to God you’re receiving all this. My array says it’s transmitting okay.”

Samantha had to grip the back of Andria’s chair for support as the voice boomed cleanly out of the speakers.

“Deal with him,” Andria snapped. She held out a small mike, never glancing up from her displays.

Samantha took the mike with shaking fingers. “This is Samantha, we’re receiving you just fine, Admiral. The picture is perfect. Thank you.”

“Glad to hear it, Samantha. I have one awesome view from here. The whole world is spread out underneath me, and the detail is astounding. I can see the storm rushing around Herculaneum; it’s moving so fast.”

“Admiral, who else is there with you?”

“I don’t remember the view from orbit ever being so spectacular; and I’ve seen a lot of worlds from space now.”

She gave the mike a worried glance. “Admiral?”

“It was my wife. She was the Starflyer agent.”

“I’m sorry. Where is she?”

“Anna and Oscar never made it out of Stakeout Canyon.”

“Dreaming heavens.”

“I hope this works. I hope this was worth it.”

“We’ll make it work.”

Bradley quickly pulled his armor suit on as everyone else hurried to their deployment positions. The air creaked around him as the king eagles took off again, riderless this time, and set out low across the veldt to the east. On the road, the jeeps and trucks backed up, leaving the three armored cars together at the top of the shallow slope. The Paris team and Cat’s Claws formed a tight little group around the first vehicle, weapon barrels were sliding up out of various segments of the suits in readiness. They were talking among themselves, using secure links. One did what looked like a little jig.

“Anything from the forts?” Bradley asked Scott, who was standing beside him.

“No, sir.”

“Ah well, we can’t delay anymore.”

“When the storm arrives, they won’t be able to give us much warning, a couple of minutes at best.”

When, not if, Bradley thought in bitter amusement. Their belief is still strong. “I know. It’s just that I’ve spent so much time and effort trying to stop this moment from happening. I truly thought the planet would have its revenge. Now we don’t even know if the navy people made it to the summit.”

Scott opened his mouth to answer, then found himself being edged aside as Stig pushed between them.

“I want to drive you,” Stig said.

“Stig—”

“My skeleton suit is adequate if anything gets through the armored car’s force field.”

Bradley looked at the tough young man’s stark face; the set of determination was easy enough to read. He couldn’t say no. This was the climax of everything the Guardians had achieved.

“I think I’ve earned the right to be in at the kill,” Stig said stubbornly.

Bradley smiled and rested his hand on Stig’s shoulder, remembering the man’s great-grandfather setting out on a raid he never came back from. “Of course you have, Stig, I’d be delighted and relieved if you took the wheel.”

Stig gave a slight start. He’d obviously marshaled a big argument ready. His face split into a winning smile. “Thank you, sir.”

“But no more beezee; you’ve had enough.”

“I don’t need it for this, sir.”

“Get the engine started, we’ll be going any second.”

Stig raced across the enzyme-bonded concrete to the armored car’s open door.

“I think we’re ready,” Bradley told Scott as he watched Stig with a fond smile. “Start pulling your people back from the road, these zone killers are pretty indiscriminate.”

“Yes, sir. I’m going to send three platoons to intercept the soldier motiles.”

“Fair enough, but those creatures will not be pushovers. Make sure the platoons understand that.”

“Yes, sir, I’m …” He broke off to watch the remaining Barsoomians who were dispersing along the top of the ridge, gliding sedately through the short grass like small hovercraft. “Do they actually have legs?”

“Who knows?” Bradley said. “Maybe tomorrow we’ll have earned the right to ask them, eh?”

“Tomorrow it is.” Scott’s expression changed to one of mild exasperation.

Bradley didn’t have to turn; he knew who was coming. Those heels made a very distinctive sound on the concrete.

“ ’Scuse me, Mr. Johansson,” Tiger Pansy said. “Where do you want me for the attack?”

“I think, dear lady, you would be safest here with Qatux.”

“Hey, no way. That’s not what Qatux wants. The action is with you guys.”

“I see.”

“She can come with me,” Olwen said. “I’m driving the second armored car. It’s as safe as anywhere’s going to be today.”

“That’s really kind,” Tiger Pansy said.

“All right then,” Bradley said. “Let’s go. May the dreaming heavens welcome all of us.” He took out his pendant, a small clear stone with a tiny turquoise glow at the center, and kissed it before tucking it down into his armor again.

Behind him, Qatux hooted softly. Tiger Pansy was giving him a strange look. “Cool,” she crooned.

Bradley pulled his helmet on, and told his e-butler to seal the collar. The armored car’s engine was growling as he settled himself into the forward passenger bench. He pulled sensor images from all three armored cars out of his grid, then opened channels to both Cat’s Claws and the Paris team. The image that filled his virtual vision was looking down on the Starflyer convoy, which still hadn’t moved. All around it, the clan warriors were withdrawing, widening the circle.

“Everyone ready?” he asked.

As the confirmations came in, he checked on the motiles. Their vehicles were now only eleven kilometers away. Eighty clan warriors were riding fast toward them.

“Stig, Olwen, Ayub, fire the zone killers, please.”

The armored cars rocked slightly as the delta-shaped weapons burst up out of their launchers. Sensors briefly captured the three of them tracing a fast arc through the sky above Highway One. Distorted, superheated air churned in their wake.

Kinetic cannons mounted on the Land Rover Cruisers tracked around to the vertical and opened fire. They were answered by a massive barrage of ion rifle fire from the encircling band of clan warriors. Dazzling blue-white pulses sleeted in like a constricting noose of sheet lightning. Hyper-rifle shots and Alic’s particle lances ripped down from the top of the rise.

“Focus on the Starflyer,” Bradley yelled. Fire lines swept inward toward the MANN truck and its shiny capsule. A hundred meters above it, three zone killers detonated. The triple cataracts of emerald twinkle-points descended with slow grace to submerge all the convoy vehicles in a translucent corona. For a second they lay entombed within the glowing shroud like insects in amber.

The ground exploded. Huge gouts of soil and rock streaked up into the sky, obliterating all sight of the convoy. Fireballs from ruptured fuel tanks bloomed within the undulant dirt, to be snuffed out almost immediately. Bradley felt the blast wave strike the armored car, rocking it slightly. Dozens of Charlemagnes bolted, oblivious to the riders clinging to their backs, several toppled over. The cloud of pulverized rock fragments and gritty soil began to dissipate.

A section of Highway One three hundred meters long was completely missing. The ground around it had been reduced to a concave circle of raw smoking soil. Right at the center of the blast maar, the MANN truck sat completely intact; cloying dust motes slithered down its force field as the sunlight returned to glint off its shiny aluminum capsule. Seventeen Cruisers had also survived the zone killers, their force fields glowing like radioactive bubbles around them. Scraps of wreckage from the other vehicles were scattered across the pulverized earth, flames chomping eagerly at their plastic elements. There was no sign of any bodies.

“Dreaming heavens, doesn’t anything touch it?” Stig demanded.

“Go!” Bradley told him.

The armored car lurched forward to race down the remaining strip of road, gathering speed.

Morton had been surprised when the debris plume swirled away. He really hadn’t expected to see the MANN truck intact. His hyper-rifle had fired shot after shot at the stubbornly resistant force field cloaking the silvery capsule before and during the zone killer strike. He’d fired two HVvixen missiles into the melee. Beside him, Alic’s twin particle lances had boomed away, splitting the air with incandescent energy.

“Holy fuck,” Rob spat in amazement. “We never even scratched it.”

“That’s why they call them juggernauts,” the Cat told them with her usual peppy humor.

“The Starflyer gave the Commonwealth force field technology by all accounts,” Alic said. “Looks like it kept the best bits for itself.”

Bradley’s shouted command filled the general communications band. The armored cars began to drive hell-for-leather down the gradual slope. Morton took off beside them, body angled forward, moving with a simple fast loping movement, allowing Far Away’s low gravity to carry him in short arcs above the road between each footfall. His hyper-rifle folded back into its forearm recess while he was on the move. Accelerants began to fizz into his bloodstream, sharpening up his thoughts, binding the interface with his suit even tighter. Nerve strands lost their slackness, contracting to taut conduits that provided instantaneous responses, so tight he could hear them humming. The tactical display in his virtual vision graded up to an even faster refresh rate. Suit sensors showed him the clan warriors reeling their blast-spooked warhorses back under control, and turning back toward the remnants of the convoy. Cruisers opened up with kinetic rapid-fire guns. Long lines of soil in front of the charging horses were ripped up as they ranged in, then the lethal wall of projectiles was chewing through flesh and bone. The front rank of horses died as their legs were triturated beneath them, dropping their bulk into the horizontal fire plane. Their mortal screams seared straight into Morton’s electrified nervous system as they vanished beneath swirling plumes of blood and gore. Inside the scarlet fog, force field skeletons flared amber as riders tumbled to the ground. The second rank rode onward over the steaming gobbets of meat. Morton’s sensors pulled in a swift sequence of images, flicking along the remaining riders to capture faces contorted with rage, hanging on to reins with one hand while they fired off wild shots with ion carbines and lasers. Then they began to fall as the Cruisers continued their fusillade.

“Call them back,” Morton screamed into the general channel. “Get them out of there!” He deployed two plasma carbines and started bombarding one of the Cruisers with pulses. They broke apart into energy flares that whipped impotently across the translucent boundary.

Mortars fired by the McSobels began to land amid the Cruisers, disrupting their fire as force fields hardened temporarily against the electron squalls. Loiter missiles sailed overhead, waiting for the moment when the kinetic fire resumed to slam down hard.

The Barsoomians opened fire. Streaks of violet light hammered into the Cruisers, almost invisible against the sapphire sky. Morton’s tactical software couldn’t classify the weapons at all. The force fields began to glow a perilous rose-gold.

Short-range defense X-ray lasers on the armored cars opened up. Stig and the other drivers coordinated their attack, concentrating on one Cruiser. Morton’s aim shifted with accelerant lubricated precision to join the barrage.

They were halfway down the slope now, ranged at four hundred seventeen meters from the MANN truck. Thick clouds of diesel gushed up out of its vertical exhaust pipes behind the cab, and it started to rumble forward.

“Don’t go,” the Cat yelled at it. “That’ll make me cross.”

The Cruiser they’d been concentrating their firepower on exploded. Morton watched in dismay as the Guardians continued to ride into the kinetic guns. “They’re being slaughtered,” he shouted accusingly.

“We are where we’re meant to be,” Scott replied levelly.

“Fuck that.” He had two HVvixen missiles left. Both of them burst out of his shoulder tubes. Two seconds later they stabbed down on a Cruiser, taking it out in a clean pillar of white flame.

“Bad move,” Rob said. “I think we’ll need them later.”

Morton ignored him. The surviving Cruisers were still shooting. “Cat, Rob: synchronize.” He stopped running, and crouched down as his hyper-rifle slid smoothly up from his forearm. The MANN truck started to draw away. Beside him the Cat and Rob had come to a halt. Charlemagnes charged past in pursuit of the armored cars. Masers from Institute vehicles had locked on to them. The shield webbing protecting the warhorses blazed with energy that was discharged through their elaborately woven saddle tassels; the big beasts raced onward trailing whirlwinds of sparks. Morton pulled targeting data out of the tactical display at accelerant speed, bundled some of it in a neat file that he shunted to the Paris team. “That one.”

Three hyper-rifles fired at once, joined a moment later by the boom of the particle lances. The Cruiser’s force field burned dark crimson. They fired again. The Barsoomians joined them. This time they punctured the force field. “Switching,” Morton told them. He picked a second target while the fireball was still expanding.

The Cruisers were on the move, bucking and juddering over the rough ground as they closed protectively around the MANN truck. Accelerants allowed Morton a seemingly leisured review of the fickle data coming in from the Guardian scouts up ahead. The vehicles carrying the soldier motiles were only three kilometers away now. Already a running firefight had broken out between the aliens and the lead riders of the mounted platoons sent to intercept them. It looked like the soldier motiles were equipped with a very powerful version of a plasma rifle. They were also shooting mini-missiles with enhanced-energy warheads. Once again, the horses were taking the brunt of the attack.

Morton’s wired scrutiny snapped his attention back to one of his own sensor feeds. One of the Cruisers around the MANN truck was firing missiles. A squadron of intense purple sparks went slicing through the air to detonate against the front of Bradley’s armored car with a ferocity that slammed the heavy vehicle back several meters. The blast wave nearly knocked Morton to the ground. He swayed back as the inside of his helmet reverberated with the roar of the explosion.

“This is a strategic balls-up of the first order,” Rob declared. “They haven’t got a fucking clue what to do.”

“Is there anything we’ve got that can split that bastard’s force field?” Morton asked.

“I don’t think so,” Matthew said. “If the zone killers couldn’t do it, nothing we’re carrying can.”

“Bradley,” Alic called, “what’s your plan now?”

“We’re going to ram the truck. That’s the only way left to stop it reaching the Marie Celeste. We must pray the planet is having its revenge.”

“Crazy,” Rob wailed. “This isn’t a battle, it’s a joke.”

Morton swiped his attention across various images. The MANN truck had almost made it to where the road began again. Two kilometers ahead of it, the motile soldiers were brushing off the wild attacks by the mounted Guardians. They’d link up soon enough.

Another flight of missiles from a Cruiser pounded into the armored cars.

“If it’s running for its ship it has to get out of the truck to transfer,” Morton said. “That’s when it’s vulnerable. We just have to keep up.”

“Morty, clever boy,” the Cat said approvingly.

“Are you with me?”

“Wouldn’t miss it, darling.”

“Let’s show these morons how to fight a real war,” Rob said.

“Okay,” Alic said. “We’ll take it to them.”

Morton’s smile was feral as he started running.

Amid the gray desolation of solidified lava that comprised the summit of Mount Herculaneum the hyperglider had become difficult to see. Dust churned up by the crash had settled on its white fuselage, sticking to the streaks of ice to tone down the shiny plyplastic like adaptive camouflage. Its sharp aerodynamic planform had disappeared the instant it struck the rock spur, crumpling and warping until it resembled the worn vacuum-boiled ripples of lava on which it had come to rest. In the dark cavity underneath what was the badly smashed-up cockpit a couple of small red LEDs glowed in the shadows, slowly dimming as the ruined power cells decayed.

The thin regolith around the wreckage had been disturbed when Wilson hauled himself out of the inverted pilot’s seat. A trail of meandering sulci led away to the rim of Aphrodite’s Seat, illustrating how he’d pulled his inert legs along behind him as he crawled the remaining two hundred thirty meters. Every now and then the trail widened with broad scuff marks where he’d squirmed around. The exposed lava was covered by flaking splotches of dried blood and little droplets of epoxy foam used to patch the splits in his pressure suit that had torn open again.

Wilson never looked back now. He’d found a smooth cleft right on the precipice that accepted his body like a comfy old sofa. His feet didn’t quite dangle over the eight-kilometer drop, but they were only a few centimeters from it. The pressure suit’s silver-blue fabric was dull beneath a grimy coat of regolith dust it’d picked up as he dragged himself along. Thick pleats of epoxy foam crisscrossed his shattered legs. Two of the blobby lines were still oozing blood; little droplets inflating out from the edges to bubble away in the vacuum. He no longer worried about such things. Painkillers insured his remaining time would be comfortable. The last of the Wild Foxes had successfully completed the mission.

To his right, the arrays and their supplementary electronic modules were arranged neatly on the rock with the broad sensor strips sitting on squat tripods, their matte-black multi-absorbent faces pointing east. The view was perfect, showing him the entire Dessault range all the way across to the tiny spire of Mount StOmer in the east. Far, far below him, the glacier ring was a bright diamante strip braided by thin wisps of cirrus. Farther down, the thick storm clouds continued to sluice around the tremendous volcano. After hours watching keenly, he was sure the power of the winds from the ocean were weakening now. It didn’t matter; the storm had provided the Guardians with more than enough raw material to manufacture their planet’s revenge.

While he lay there in the quiet peace of the vacuum he’d observed the clouds spreading east. From this altitude it was like seeing a white-water torrent pouring down a dry riverbed. The green valleys were slowly occluded by the cumulus, leaving just the rugged gray and white pinnacles sticking above the surface.

In the background Samantha and the others chittered away, their voices like some kind of insect trapped in his helmet. He didn’t say very much to them now, just the occasional comment to confirm some aspect of the observation. At first there was little to see. The storm for all its size and speed was perfectly natural. He lay there watching its progress as the sun warmed his chest and the lava slowly sucked heat out of his spine. Eventually he noticed how the winds were gradually speeding up; the strange way clouds were confined to the mountains. Ordinarily most of the storm would flow away out across the vast expanse of the Aldrin Plains, while on the other side of the Dessault range it spewed around Mount Idle to disperse over the southern pampas lands. Today it was blocked and channeled. As the morning went on he started to recognize the Guardians’ choreography. Between the mountain peaks, manipulator stations churned up gigantic whorls in the fast-flowing cloud, sucking stationary highs into the Dessault range, denying the storm any release. As a consequence, the cloud swarm rose in height as it thronged along valleys, layer after layer building into a solid thunderhead, kilometers deep. With every exit denied it had nowhere to go but east. A smile ghosted Wilson’s face as he watched the front roar along Trevathan Gulf, fed by fresh gales that the manipulator stations injected through every major valley.

Thumb jabbing down hard on the red button at the top of the joystick. Missile launch: its contrail streaking off into the sky. Bring the fighter around back to the safety of the Wild Fox pack. Watch the radar as the missile hurtles toward its target. Distant unfelt kill.

When the winds reached the end of Trevathan Gulf and hit the High Desert they were traveling in excess of five hundred kilometers an hour. There were no manipulator stations out here. They had become irrelevant. The storm was so powerful it was now self-sustaining. Uncontrollable.

The vast deluge of white cloud spread out to obliterate the High Desert. Wilson saw it change color, the cumulus darkening, not with the slate-gray of suspended rain but the ocher of particles siphoned up from the desert floor by an army of twisters that had grown to the size of the very mountains that they had rampaged through. He watched it race toward the final line of pinnacles that guarded the desert’s eastern boundary. The enraged mass grew higher and higher until its thrashing crests finally rose above the snowcapped peaks, eclipsing the lands over which they were about to fall.

The soldier motile came at Morton with a nimble arachnid gait, veering from side to side in precise controlled motions. It was different from the ones back at Randtown: each of the four legs forked, giving it eight hoofs. Two of the arms also divided halfway along. The damn thing was insectoid. Triggering deep phobias. Even with accelerant freeze framing its body actions for examination he could never tell which of its hooves it was going to pirouette around next. Targeting was nearly impossible. One pair of the creature’s arms held hefty long-barreled weapons, which Morton was urgently trying to avoid. He did so with a fast low zigzag run, always keeping his feet in contact with the ground, enabling him to switch direction when he needed. Using the ground-eating leap here would give the alien a clear shot as he glided along.

A plasma flare from the soldier motile’s weapon hit the earth beside his feet. The suit’s force field held, but his legs were yanked from under him. In Far Away’s gravity it was an annoyingly slow fall to hit the earth and regain stability. Annoying verging on lethal. The moment stretched in accelerant time. Another blast struck him on the chest. The suit force field flared purple, and he was spinning in the air. Legs flung wide, trying to jab a foot on the ground, anything to kill momentum. Virtual hand moved leisurely through the battle cluster icons, selecting his weapon. Another energy blast stabbed past his helmet. Upper arm plasma grenade canisters thumped out their munitions. Air around the soldier motile glared with fizzing electron static.

Morton hit the ground, flattening himself. The world swept back to operate in real-time. He crouched and sprang. Electromuscle enhancement propelled him forward like a kamikaze aerobot.

The electrons drained away, leaving the soldier motile braced on all eight hooved legs. It was wearing what looked like a loose robe of scaly gray-green fabric, which was also acting as a force field conductor. Its sensor stalks ended in a clump of golden electronic lenses. Some of its arms ended in a tripartite mechanical claw; while the torso was strung with flat metallic boxes webbed with flexible cables. Arm two swung a big gun around on Morton, its sub-branch gripping some kind of grenade. Arm three fired an ion pistol. Arm one was holding a long buzzing blade. Arm four shot the other large gun at a target off toward the road, micromissiles shrieking away from their rotary launcher in its sub-branch.

The ion pulse jangled Morton’s suit sensors as he careered into the alien. For a second he was blinded. Tactile feedback gave him the sense of the alien’s weight against him, its second arm bending to grip around his hips. The blade skating over his neck, hunting a weak spot. Virtual vision shrieked a warning that his force field was being overloaded by some drain mechanism. These soldier motiles were faster than the ones on Elan. Sensor vision returned. Incomprehensible montage of alien suit fabric, purple light, trampled grass. His own senses told him they were falling together. He triggered the electrification circuit, pumping forty thousand volts through his suit. The alien turned lambent crimson. It sought to roll on top of him, legs three and one bucking, trying to latch what felt like hundreds of hoof claws around his ankle and knees. Morton went with the roll, then amplified it with a savage body twist. Wound up on top. His gauntlet clamped around arm one and twisted with full electromuscle strength. Something beneath the alien’s flesh buckled, and the arm bent around at a sharp angle. The claw of arm three closed around his neck. His force field alarm went up a grade.

“For fuck’s sake,” Morton grunted. Five-centimeter talons slid out of every finger on his right hand. He punched down hard. Red lightning spat out of the impact. He kept pressure going as the dump-function on the talon tips pulled energy out of the soldier motile’s force field. A stressed whine cut through his insulation. Then the alien’s force field weakened around the talons. Morton’s hand ripped through fabric and flesh. He thrust it deep into the body turning as he went, ripping organs and blood vessels, then pulled back. It came free reluctantly, sucking up a honey-yellow gore. The soldier motile went limp.

“Morty, we don’t have time to make it personal, darling,” the Cat chided.

A micromissile detonated beside him. A cloud of hyperfilament shrapnel boiled out of the explosion, shredding through soil and surface rock. His force field glared scarlet on the point of overload as he was punched sideways by the writhing impact.

“Told you not to waste the HVvixens,” Rob said.

Morton scrambled to his feet. The Cat was right. They were getting swamped by soldier motiles, of which there was a seemingly endless number. Hundreds of them had jumped out of their vehicles as soon as they reached the MANN truck. Now they were blocking the way forward. Leaving the road to try to outflank them had been a big mistake. A hundred fifty meters to his left, the armored cars were driving down Highway One, their X-ray lasers slashing from side to side like a demented swordsman keeping his opponents at bay. They could pierce the force fields used by soldier motiles if they got within fifty meters, which gave them a small clear area. A flight of micromissiles hammered into the road just ahead of the armored car Bradley was riding in. Hyperfilament shrapnel shredded the concrete to fine gravel. The armored cars started to fishtail as soon as they drove into it, wheels throwing up grit as they spun.

Alic’s particle lances boomed, sending pulses streaming toward the cluster of soldier motiles that had fired the missiles. They toppled to the ground, then started to pull themselves upright again.

Morton scanned his sensors around, building a tactical profile. It wasn’t good. So far they’d traveled about three kilometers on from the original blockade. At least a hundred fifty soldier motiles had them effectively surrounded. The Guardians on their Charlemagnes were a kilometer behind, and holding off—not that they could help. His suit power cells were down to under fifty percent. There had been too many close calls in combat. None of them had any HVvixens left.

His radar scanned ahead, picking out the MANN truck with its escort eight kilometers away. It was traveling fast along the clear road. Bradley wasn’t going to catch it, let alone ram it.

“We’ll ride shotgun,” he said. “Stig, switch off your X-ray lasers. We’re hitching a ride.”

“Morton, we have to catch up,” Bradley said.

Morton could hear panic edging into his voice. “We can cut through if we combine our firepower.” He’d already started running; the other suits were beside him firing energy weapons into the elusive line of soldier motiles. Up ahead, the armored cars took more hits from micromissiles. The road surface was completely trashed, reduced to a mire of loose fragments that bogged them down.

“Shit,” Rob screamed.

Morton’s sensors caught two soldier motiles pouncing. They’d been lurking in a shallow depression, their suits powered down to avoid detection. Limbs lashed out at Rob’s suit as the three of them crashed to the ground in a tangled bucking heap. Force fields flickered between lavender and cerise as weapons fired at point-blank range.

“Keep going,” The Cat insisted.

It was hard. Morton wanted to halt and pound the wrestling figures with shots from his hyper-rifle. Imagery shot into his brain at accelerated speed, and he saw just how many soldier motiles were charging after them. Front rank almost on top of Rob. “Rob!”

“Do it,” Rob grunted. “I’m gonna show them a little Doc Roberts trick any second. These motherfuckers don’t ever learn.”

Morton’s virtual hand flashed into his grid and hauled out Rob’s telemetry. He could see the safety overrides clicking off one by one. Powdery gravel crunched underfoot. The armored car was ten meters ahead. Morton leaped, powerdiving over the curving wedge-shaped vehicle. He’d almost landed on the other side when Rob shorted out every power cell he was carrying. The explosion turned the empty sapphire sky solar white.

“Way to go, Robby boy,” the Cat cried.

Morton’s outstretched hands touched the ruined road. He curled himself into a ball and rolled forward to kill momentum. The fearsome glare drained away. Behind him the armored car was skidding sideways. Stig fought for traction, slewing it back on course. Morton hopped on the front, clinging to one of the X-ray laser mounts.

The Cat appeared beside him as if she’d teleported in. A lone sensor image showed him the smoldering blast crater where Rob had been. Alic thudded onto the roof, gauntlets gripping narrow ridges tight enough to gouge the metal. Morton’s hyper-rifle deployed out of his forearm; targeting graphics slid out of his grid. The three of them began to shoot any soldier motile in a broad swathe ahead of the armored car. “Use everything,” Alic shouted. “Punch them out of the way.”

Morton’s grenade canisters thrummed as they fired. His plasma carbine switched to continuous pulse, hosing out energy. The hyper-rifle swung around as he picked out target after target. Power cell charge wound down at an alarming rate. More ion rifle shots came from behind them where Jim and Matthew were clinging to the armored car Ayub was driving. Micromissiles burst all around, hyperfilament lashing against the suits, streamers of ion fire clawed at the grizzly bodywork of the armored cars. They were driving through a demonic inferno that blotted out every sensor return in a digitized blizzard. His suit surface screeched as the demented energy slashed against it.

Then they were past the bedlam, racing down the gray-white concrete strip of Highway One, shedding static tendrils like chaff. Stig had cranked their speed up over a hundred sixty kilometers an hour; smoke was shooting out from somewhere underneath. Morton hunted around, finding the bulk of the soldier motiles streaming together behind them. Their weapons fire contracted, centering on the last armored car. Jim and Matthew were doing their best to return fire, but they were swamped by the colossal barrage. Hyperfilament shrapnel mauled the road right in front. The armored car exploded.

“No!” Alic cried. “Godfuck all of you. Oh, sweet Jesus, why can we never catch this monster?”

Morton wanted to answer, but all he saw was Rob’s demise, and Doc Roberts, Randtown’s glass crater.

“How much power have you got left?” the Cat asked.

“Twenty percent. Maybe.” Morton checked his schematics. “Bit under.” He started scanning along the side of the armored car. Somewhere inside metal was grinding against metal with a terrible clattering violence. The smoke rushing out from underneath had thickened.

“It’s the one percent that’ll kill it,” the Cat said.

“Stig?” Morton asked. “Are we going to make it?” The sound coming from the armored car sounded terminal.

“We’ll make it. This thing has redundancy everywhere. Sixteen kilometers, that’s all.”

Their speed still hadn’t slackened. Up ahead, the road was angling into the foothills. The Institute valley was visible as a wide saddle that led back to the first mountains of the Dessault range. They weren’t high enough to have snowcaps, but the ones in the misty distance behind them did. He scanned the jagged skyline, looking for any hint of an approaching storm. Far Away’s vaulting sapphire atmosphere was as placid as he’d ever seen it. Damnit, I thought we could rely on the Admiral at least.

The armored car juddered sharply and recovered. He swept his radar along the road, getting a clear empty image until it curved into the valley ten kilometers ahead. The MANN truck was already inside.

“Bradley,” Morton said regretfully. “We’re not going to catch it. Do you have any notion how we can disable the starship?”

“Not disable, no. We just have to delay launch until the storm arrives.”

“How?”

“There is one possible option, if you’re willing to help me.”

That didn’t sound good in any way. Morton wanted to look at the Cat’s face, to see what she felt. Despite her thick shell, he knew her well enough now to read her thoughts.

She could obviously read him a lot better. “We’ve come this far,” she said.

The amethyst plasma inside the Dark Fortress churned in violent torment as it was bombarded by radiation from salvos of fifty-megaton fusion bombs. Thousand-kilometer peaks soared up through the gaps in the outer lattice sphere like solar prominences, their extremities evanescing away into tattered streamers. The Charybdis dived down between them and struck the plasma at fourteen gees.

Ozzie had been bracing himself for a spine-snapping impact, even though he knew the plasma had a density that barely disqualified it from being a vacuum. There was a slight tremor, which he had to strain to notice amid the brutal acceleration. He disengaged the drive, and was plunged into freefall so abruptly his maltreated body interpreted it as being flung forward.

“What the fuck?” Mark mumbled.

Ozzie shut down their active sensors. “Flying dark, see?” The passive sensors showed fusion drives drilling through the plasma all around as the Prime missiles hurtled past. “They’re overshooting.”

“Can we navigate like this?”

“Sure. Look at the returns. The plasma is illuminating the lattice spheres in twenty different spectra. We can fly through this, but slowly.” Their velocity was already taking them toward the second lattice sphere at twenty kilometers per second. Behind them, three hundred twenty Prime ships slid through the outer lattice sphere and plunged into the plasma. They launched another massive missile salvo.

“Uh …”

“It’s fine, I can steer us through the second lattice no problem. It’s the negative mass one, there’s like no way we can hit it, we just get shoved away if we get too close, like magnets.”

“Ozzie … Christ! They can see our wake.”

“Huh?”

Behind the Charybdis, a five-hundred-kilometer-long contrail of plasma spiraled like a gargantuan tornado. The armada of missiles was all converging toward the apex at seventeen gees. They started to detonate. The frigate’s hull field blazed rose-gold as it warded off their directed radiation pulses, flinging vast webbed lightning zephyrs off into the plasma. “Shit.” Ozzie pushed power back into the secondary drive, accelerating the Charybdis away from the vector it had been coasting along. G-force shunted him down into the cushioning again. “Are we losing them?”

“No!”

“Mark, you control the weapons, do something!”

“What? I can fire a quantumbuster, a nova bomb, or a neutron laser.”

Behind them, another wave of missiles detonated. Radiation turned the plasma to an opalescent violet.

“Use a quantumbuster.”

“We need to be a million kilometers away at least when one of those goes off—anything closer than that and this frigate is dead.”

“Son of a bitch, we’re not going to make it.”

“You have an incoming call,” the SIsubroutine said. “An encrypted maser link originating outside the first lattice sphere.”

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Ozzie groaned.

“Do you want to establish a connection? The identity certificate is confirmed: Nigel Sheldon.”

Ozzie was crying as he laughed. “Tell him we’ll accept the charges.”

“Yo, Ozzie, how’s it hanging?” Nigel said. “You guys need any help down there?”

Both armored cars charged around the final curve in the road, and the Institute valley was directly ahead. The town had the look of a small elite university campus, with villas and apartment blocks colonizing the shallower southern slope in prim rows where their silvered windows looked out over the long white laboratories and engineering sheds that sprawled across the floor of the valley. All of it was dwarfed by the huge cylindrical starship sheltering inside a force field. The scaffolding that had surrounded its eight-hundred-meter length for over two decades had gone, revealing a light gray fuselage that the morning sun gave a satin sheen. Eight dark fusion rocket nozzles dominated its aft superstructure, their external casings inset with concentric thermal duct strips that were glowing a mild maroon as they kept the superconductor coils chilled. Several long blunt fins protruded from the fuselage, fluorescing a deep fuchsia purple as they maintained thermal stability within the internal tanks and generators. Up at the prow, the original tumorous cluster of force field generators had been supplemented by an elongated scarlet cone, fifty meters across at the base. Frost clung to long segments of the fuselage, revealing the outer walls of the deuterium tanks.

A single gantry pillar had been left standing just behind the prow. The MANN truck was parked at its base.

“The son of a bitch made it,” Alic said bitterly.

“We’d have been royally screwed anyway,” the Cat said. “I somehow don’t think these boys would let us pass.”

Soldier motiles had formed a broad line across Highway One and the surrounding ground half a kilometer from the rear of the Marie Celeste.

“Oh, shit,” Morton muttered; there must have been a thousand aliens waiting.

“Ready,” Stig said.

“Hit it.” Morton launched his three electronic warfare drones; the Cat launched her remaining pair. Stig and Olwen had changed the focus on the X-ray lasers; now they fired them in broad fans at the waiting aliens.

For a couple of seconds the soldier motiles were bombarded by false signals and insidiously corrosive software; X rays seared into their electromagnetic sensors. They adapted and filtered and flushed the digital viruses, but there was still a moment while they were purblind.

It didn’t matter. When their sensors regained full functionality and scanned the land in front of them nothing had changed; the armored cars were still racing along Highway One, three armor suits riding on the outside of one that was puffing out hot black smoke. The two vehicles suddenly braked hard, tires squealing as the gearboxes were slammed into reverse. Then they were turning, skidding around as if the concrete had iced over. They started to flee back down the road.

As one, the soldier motiles started running after them. The armored car that was leaking smoke suddenly juddered. It began to slow, sparks flying out from underneath along with thickening belches of smoke. Something inside it was clanging like a broken bell. The soldier motiles opened fire.

“FUUUUUUCK,” Morton yelled, and powerdived off the armored car. The sky around him erupted in a relentless blaze of malignant ion bolts. He hit the edge of the concrete and rolled perfectly, timing it so he recovered his footing in a half turn. Suit electromuscles propelled him into an immediate sprint, his body leaning forward at forty-five degrees. The force field reshaped itself, mushrooming out around his head and shoulders to act as a spoiler, providing downpressure from the air that rushed over him. He swung his hands in a near-Neanderthal gait, knuckles not quite touching the ground, but close.

Sensors caught Stig bursting out through the armored car’s front emergency hatch as its force field’s glow escalated to a scarlet climax. The Guardian sped away, moving with fluid ease in the low gravity. Behind him the soldier motiles concentrated their fire. The crippled armored car exploded.

Up ahead, Olwen’s armored car braked.

“Keep going,” Morton yelled frantically. “Get the fuck out of here.” Micromissiles streaked overhead, pummeling the slow-moving vehicle. “We can outrun them.”

“But—”

“Go!”

The armored car accelerated hard again, building distance.

“Outrun them.” the Cat laughed raucously. “You going to run away from the launch, too, Morty darling?”

He gritted his teeth inside his helmet. Ever since he’d seen the ship he’d been trying to work out how much it massed. A lot of it was fuel; he remembered that from the quick review he’d given the files. Despite that, a quarter of a million tons was a conservative estimate. Even with force field wings generating some degree of lift, igniting the kind of fusion engines that could produce that much thrust would be worse than letting off a strategic nuke.

He saw the dark tide of soldier motiles flow over the burning wreckage of the armored car. They were fast, but they didn’t have electromuscle support. They’d never be able to keep that speed going. Would they?

The Cat was keeping up with him, leaning over at an even greater angle. Alic was off to one side.

“There won’t be a launch,” he grunted.

“Oh, Morty, you’re priceless. These Guardian fuckups have blown every chance they had. This won’t be any different.”

“It has to be. Bradley has to win. The Starflyer can’t go free.”

“Then we should have brought some tactical nukes or a Moscow-class warship. Don’t you get it? This thing is smarter than us.”

“You. Not me.”

“Morton’s right,” Alic said. “It hasn’t launched yet. Bradley just has to keep it on the ground.”

“Men! Why accomplish when you can dream?”

“Fuck you.”

It took them three minutes to cover a kilometer. They didn’t use the road, it was too open. The ground alongside was rugged, with the grass and eucalyptus shrub offering a small degree of cover. They kept going for another fifteen minutes, until Morton’s laser ranger finally showed him they were widening the gap on the soldier motiles behind. “We need to get away from the road,” he said. “The other motiles are still up ahead. I don’t want to be caught between them.”

“Good idea,” Alic said.

Morton changed direction slightly, angling away from Highway One.

“How far do you figure they’ll chase us for?”

“More to the point, how much power have you got left?”

“My suit is down to eleven percent. The force field is a real drain.”

“Look, boys, we don’t have to—”

The sun went out.

Even with accelerant driving his thoughts, it took a second for Morton to register the monstrous anomaly. The light was draining out of the veldt, rushing away from him like an extinction event. “Huh?” He twisted to face the west and tilted his head up, aligning the main visual sensors on the Dessault Mountains. His knees nearly faltered with shock. “Not possible,” he gasped.

The Charybdis began to creak in protest as Ozzie shunted the acceleration up to fifteen gees. They were chasing a shallow parabola back up from the second lattice sphere. Behind them, nuclear explosions had pumped the plasma into a solid incandescent white sky. Sensors showed them the outer lattice sphere as back prison bars across the hazy stars.

An armada of Prime ships was curving around to follow them through the turbulent plasma, firing volley after volley of missiles. More explosions bloomed, and an indigo stain began to seep through the plasma as the energy levels built toward saturation. Masers and X-ray lasers left visible cerise lines through the diaphanous ions as they stabbed at the frigate.

Ozzie was feeding small random variations into the acceleration, evading the missiles’ target tracking function. A red mist was encroaching the edges of his virtual vision. He tried to keep his attention on various colored lines that represented important criteria like velocity and closing distance. External cameras showed him a very large dark strut of the outer lattice looming in front of the frigate’s blunt nose. It was a hundred eighty kilometers wide, and stretched out to a junction with five other struts four hundred kilometers ahead.

“Nigel?”

“Contact lost,” the SIsubroutine reported.

“Well, I suppose that’s a good thing,” Mark said. “Proves the material is still electro-repulsive. This thing isn’t dead yet.”

“Right.” Ozzie changed direction again, heading straight up toward the strut. It was fifty kilometers away when he curved around to fly parallel to it; he didn’t dare try to get any farther in. Vast rivers of luminescence flickered on and off deep inside the dark material. “Come on, Nigel.” He reduced acceleration to a steady two gees.

“Do you think they’re—”

Outside the Dark Fortress, the Scylla fired a quantumbuster and immediately dropped back into hyperspace. The missile intercepted a Prime ship, converting a modest percentage of its mass directly to energy. For a brief instant, the radiative output of a medium-sized star contaminated space around the Dark Fortress. It sliced through the forty-eight wormholes MorningLightMountain had opened from its gas-giant settlements, obliterating the generators on the other side and anything else caught inside the beams. Around the Dark Fortress, every Prime ship flared like a comet as it vaporized, trailing dying molecules through the brilliant white void.

Ultra-hard radiation poured through the outer lattice sphere, decimating the ships and missiles inside. Safe in the umbra of the electro-repulsive matter, the Charybdis flew onward unharmed as the radiation sleeted down on either side of the massive lattice strut.

“Now that’s what I call hellfire,” Ozzie mumbled.

Below the Charybdis the plasma had turned a lethal pellucid violet. Visual sensors could see each of the remaining three lattice spheres. The core remained an impenetrable haze.

“Do you think the inner lattice spheres can withstand another blast like that?” Mark asked.

“Who knows, but Nigel was right. We were going to do that anyway when we knock out the flare bomb. Nothing to lose by doing it twice.”

“Nigel Sheldon’s pretty smart, isn’t he?” Mark said admiringly.

“Yeah.” Ozzie’s smile tightened. “Pretty smart.” He fed power into the frigate’s secondary drive, and dived straight down toward the second lattice sphere at eight gees.

The fourth lattice shell was made from a material that appeared to be completely neutral, devoid of any detectable properties, it didn’t even have any mass as far as human sensors could discover. All that existed was its physical boundary. Like the upper three lattice spheres, it remained completely unaffected by the energy deluge from the quantumbuster. Ozzie piloted the Charybdis through it without any trouble. He decelerated to a velocity vector that kept them stationary relative to the core, and extended every sensor.

The rings were in turmoil. They oscillated and stretched, rising and falling in and out of alignment through the ecliptic. The black cables that held together the outermost ring, the daisy chain, were flexing like lengths of elastic as they strove to contain the wild fluctuations of the lenticular disks. Inside that, the green ring that had been so uniform when the Second Chance recorded it was now undergoing curious distensions; bulges would suddenly appear, sending out slow ripples across the surface. The silver braids were nearly breaking apart; while the one of scarlet light was contaminated by dark fissures.

It was the ring nicknamed Sparks that was the worst affected. The river of emerald and amber lights with their cometary tails were being flung out of their simple orbit by a single dark contortion, like ions waltzing around a magnetic anomaly. It took them almost an entire orbit to drop back into the plane, only to be slung out again.

“There’s our bad boy,” Ozzie murmured. The quantum scan showed him the pattern of elongated distortion fields radiating out from a single point as they spun slowly along through the coruscating ring. “A genuine spanner in the works.”

“Target loaded,” Mark said. “Effect field pattern selected. It’ll stand off five thousand kilometers and spike the heart of that bastard.”

“You’re the man,” Ozzie told him.

“Launching.”

The Charybdis gave the faintest shiver as the quantumbuster shot out of its launch tube. Ozzie turned the frigate around, and accelerated hard up through the lattice spheres.

Bradley landed in the shallow drainage ditch at the side of Highway One. The soil was damp and squishy, absorbing his impact. He folded himself into a cleft and froze. His suit’s external chromometic layer painted him with low-tone grays and greens to match the grass tufts and mud he’d settled in. Every other system powered down. Thermal batteries absorbed his body’s heat, allowing the suit skin to adopt the same temperature profile as the ditch. A tiny beam of light washed in through a slit in his visor, illuminating his eyes. Outside the armored cars were skidding around. One sounded in a bad way. Their engine noise dopplered away. His breathing was loud in his ears, challenged only by his heartbeat.

The light flickered. Soldier motiles were running past him, several splashing their way along the bottom of the ditch. They were centimeters away.

And fate—mine, the Starflyer, humanity, the Primes—is decided by that tiny distance. But then my fate has taken stranger turns than this in the past. Perhaps the dreaming heavens will smile upon me today.

The movement outside his suit ended. Bradley switched on a lone sensor, and scanned around. There was no immediate sign of the soldier motiles. He stood up, and watched the alien army charge away. Some distance farther along Highway One an armored car exploded.

Keeping the suit fully stealthed, Bradley hurried toward the giant alien starship. He opened passive sensors, knowing the signal he would receive.

Not a sound or an image, at first, more a mélange of feeling—to those who knew how to interpret it. The complex electronic song saturated the air waves, broadcast from every direction to engulf the valley. Together the harmonics that surrounded Bradley had a unity that was remarkable in its complexity. The tunes rose and fell, meshing into a cohesive mind. Bodies, alien and human, sharing every part of themselves: memories, thoughts, sensations. He moved among them, receiving their extended cognizance, drinking it in. Watching the three humans in armor suits running along the road as we chase after them—concern that the human warriors should not be able to interfere with the launch. Observing the many technological facets of the refurbished starship, adjusting the systems as they interact with each other—eager for the long exile to finally end. Maintaining the force field around the ship—determined that no weapon would penetrate. Reviewing the sensors covering the valley—alert for transgressions.

The location and purpose of each body were individual, yet their thoughts were homogenized, replicating their originator. Direction, purpose, came from only one source: the Starflyer.

It moved from the gantry lift into the starship, awakening the giant machine in its entirety. Soon it would leave to vanish amid the stars. Safe. Free.

Bradley told the force field around the starship to admit him. Compliance was a logical thing to expect, given the Starflyer’s ultimate origin. The immotile rules all, nothing deviates from that. However, as the Starflyer was more sophisticated than a standard Prime immotile, it didn’t have the same reticence in allowing electronics to have governing functions over machinery. Electronics were subsidiary to it in the same way as motiles; it programmed them, it set their parameters. They obeyed it.

That was its flaw, Bradley knew, the same as every Prime. It did not understand independence nor rebellion. Its motiles, whether grown in congregation pools from its own advanced genetically modified nucleiplasms, or humans whose brains had been surgically and electronically subsumed to host its own thought routines, were a part of it. Their thoughts were its thoughts, copied and installed from its own brain. None of them deviated. It couldn’t conceive deviation or betrayal, so neither could they.

Security was a one-dimensional concept for the Starflyer. It took precautions to guard itself physically and politically from native humans as it insinuated its human motiles within their Commonwealth society. That was the level of safety it determined it required to insure its survival, a strategy that had been successful.

No human could hack into the electronic network of the Institute valley; as the processors were an extension of the Starflyer’s own mind, they only acknowledged orders that had an internal heritage. What the network and its processors did not have was the ability to discriminate between an order from a genuine motile and a human who remembered the neural “language” of the Starflyer.

In front of Bradley the force field protecting the Marie Celeste realigned its structure to allow him through. He jogged along the bottom of the deep grassy scar that the vast alien ship had scored as it slid along the ground before finally coming to an ignominious halt. Several soldier motiles were patrolling the base of the starship. Their minds told him where they were, the direction they were looking in, where they would look next. Their sensors and eyes never saw his suit’s stealth coating as he hurried into the shadows cast by the big fusion rocket nozzles. Proximity alarms watched passively as he told their processors his presence was legitimate.

The ship had been lifted gradually out of the scar by motiles and civil engineering machinery. A wide pad of enzyme-bonded concrete had been laid underneath to support the weight. Cradles gripped the lower fuselage, holding it off the ground. Bradley walked up the metal stairs on one of the cradles. An access hatch to the fusion engineering bay opened for him, and he ducked inside.

The initial findings on the Marie Celeste published by the Institute were accurate enough. It was comprised of fusion rockets, their fuel tanks, environmentally maintained water tanks containing an alien amoeba-equivalent cell, and the force field generators. From that, public perception remained locked on the knowledge that there was nothing else inside; certainly it possessed no life-support section, no “crew quarters.” A more detailed examination showed (unpressurized) access passages and crawlways remarkably similar to those humans would design into any ship. No maintenance robots were ever found. The first conclusion was that the passages were used only for construction.

Right at the center of the tanks there was a chamber with a life-support system. The Starflyer lived in that, fed with base cells and purified water from the tanks. It didn’t need additional space to move about in; there were no leisure and recreational facilities that any human would have needed during a centuries-long flight. All it did was receive information and supervise the ship’s systems. When necessary it would ovulate nucleiplasms into a freefall vat to grow space adept motiles that would be dispatched on repair assignments. After they had completed their task they would be recycled into nutrients for the base cells in the tanks. Every century a new immotile would be created to house the Starflyer’s mind as the old body aged. All this in a chamber of thirty cubic meters. Easy for a preliminary examination to miss in a volume of twenty-five million cubic meters, especially as it had been badly damaged during the landing.

There were no lights inside the engineering bay, another aspect contributing to the myth of the ship being “solid machinery.” Bradley turned his infrared sensors up to full resolution, and made his way along the cramped passage. It branched several times, some openings like vertical chimneys leading up to the center of the ship. Climbing would take too long for him; he found a corridor leading toward the prow and moved as fast as he could. The corridor walls were open girders. Beyond them, the ship’s major segments were held together inside a simple gridwork. The individual beams of metal were shaking as the fusion drives worked down their ignition sequence. In two minutes the ship would lift from this world to the clean emptiness of space.

Bradley clambered out of the corridor and began to worm his way up through the narrow gap between a deuterium tank and some car-sized turbo pumps. The mindsong of the Starflyer remained perfectly clear to his receptors, even wedged into the lightless metal cavity.

“Remember me?” he asked.

Every motile in the Institute valley froze.

“You do, don’t you? I made sure you wouldn’t forget me.”

The mindsong altered, reaching out into the brains of each human motile contained within the Starflyer’s mental empire. Questioning. Processors ran checks on themselves to see where the aberrant harmonics were coming from.

“Oh, I’m in here with you.”

Outside the ship, the song faltered, withdrawing.

“You didn’t think I was going to miss this moment, did you? I want to be with you when we launch. I want to be certain. I want us to be together when we die.”

Suspicion strengthened until the mindsong became loud enough to exert a painful phantom pressure on Bradley’s ears.

“Bombs, kaos software, biological agents. I forget which. They’re hidden somewhere on board. I don’t remember where, or how long I’ve been here. Perhaps I never went away.”

Over the strident turmoil of the mindsong, Bradley could hear motiles scrabbling along passages. Thousands of them were set loose, swarming like rats, seeking any clue to his whereabouts.

Bradley waited in the pitch-dark as the Starflyer’s thoughts thrashed into doubt and wrath. Waited as the minutes ticked away. The fusion rockets held their ignition sequence.

“Will you launch? I wonder. Flee to the safety of space knowing I can’t survive long. Hope the redundant systems will suffice after the sabotage. Or will you stay? The damage can be repaired here on the ground. Of course, the Commonwealth elite know you exist now. They will be coming in their super-ships. You would not survive their vengeance.”

The mindsong rose to a howl of fury.

Bradley looked down. Below his feet, a motile was standing in the corridor, sensor stalks curving up to gaze on him. It exploded into motion, clawing its way up the girders.

“Too late, I’m afraid.”

Outside the starship, darkness fell.

Bradley smiled, the gesture’s warmth pouring like a balm into the discordant mindsong. “You can never know us. Only a human can truly know another human. The rest of the galaxy is doomed to underestimate us. Just as you have done.”

The hull sensors saw the solid wall of the megastorm sweep out of the High Desert. It towered briefly above the mountains before enveloping them and blasting down into the Institute valley. For a few seconds, the force field over the Marie Celeste resisted the savage assault, radiating a vivid ruby light until the titanic battering overloaded its generator. A sixteen-kilometer-high wave of sand and stone traveling at five hundred kilometers an hour crashed down on the naked starship.

“Farewell, my enemy,” Bradley Johansson said contentedly.

The two frigates hung side by side in space, completely invisible. One and a half million kilometers away, the Dark Fortress glimmered like a wan Halloween lantern. It suddenly flared blue-white, rivaling the nearby Dyson Alpha star in magnitude. The light faded as swiftly as it had risen.

“So there was some kind of matter at the core of the flare bomb to convert,” Mark said.

“Looks that way,” Ozzie agreed.

“Can’t see the barrier.”

“Mark, give it a minute, okay. In fact, give it a month. We’ve all been beating up on the Dark Fortress rather badly.”

“The lattice spheres are still there,” Nigel said with quiet admiration. “The damn thing survived two quantumbusters. The Anomines knew how to build to last.”

“No sign of the flare bomb’s quantum signature,” Otis reported. “Looks like you killed it, Ozzie.”

For five hours they waited as the plasma inside the lattice spheres cooled and dimmed. Then it vanished without warning.

“Hey, some kind of shell just appeared around the outer lattice sphere,” Otis said.

“Aren’t you going to say I told you so?” Nigel asked.

“Nah,” Ozzie said. “I figure I owe you one.”

“Something very weird is happening to space out there,” Mark said. “I don’t understand any of these readings.”

“Me neither,” Ozzie said. “How about you, Nige?”

“Not a clue.”

The light from Dyson Alpha faded away to nothing; with it went the radio cacophony of MorningLightMountain’s signals.

“Mission accomplished,” Nigel said. “Let’s go home.”

“Come on, dude, this isn’t the end of it. Nothing like. MorningLightMountain is still out there; it’ll be starting over fresh in a hundred star systems.”

“Ozzie, please, you’re spoiling the moment.”

“But—”

“Home. With one slight detour.”

Morton’s virtual vision gave him the illusion of light and space. Without that he knew he would have fallen for the Siren call of insanity echoing enticingly at the center of his mind. As it was, spending hours immobile in the armor suit with no external sensor input at all was pushing him closer and closer to all-out claustrophobia. Actually, there had been one thing from outside that still managed to get through to him: the noise of the storm had been reduced to a hefty vibration by the meters of soil on top of him, one he could feel through the suit’s adaptive foam padding. The timer in his grid told him it lasted for three and a half hours before finally fading away.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said to Alic.

“Damn right,” the navy commander agreed.

The two of them had lain there in the darkness with hands clasped together like a pair of scared children. That touch allowed them to communicate. Morton wasn’t sure he could have held out without the contact of another human being. He didn’t even remember much of their conversation; giving each other potted histories, women, places they’d been. Anything to hold the isolation at bay and with it the knowledge that they were buried alive.

There had been no choice.

When the storm appeared from behind the mountains and swallowed the last pinnacles, they’d had four or five seconds at best before it hit them. Alic had fired his particle lances straight into the ground, blasting out a simple crater of smoldering earth. “Get in!” he yelled.

Morton had dived straight into the hole, cramming his suit up against Alic’s. The Cat hadn’t moved.

“Cat!” he implored.

“That’s not how I die, Morty,” she’d said simply.

He didn’t even manage an answer. Alic fired the particle lances again, collapsing the soil around them. The Cat had sounded sorry for him; out of all the weeks they’d spent together, that was the strongest memory he had of her now.

Once they started digging their way out, he began to appreciate her reasoning. His suit power cells were down to five percent, and the soil was packed solid. He vaguely remembered that if you were caught in a snow avalanche you were supposed to curl up, to create a space. There had been time for nothing other than the most basic survival instinct. The hole in the ground offered a chance at survival. The impossible wall hurtling down on him didn’t.

It took a couple of minutes to wiggle his gauntlet about and compact the earth around it. Electromuscles strained on the limit of their strength just to achieve that. After the hand came the forearm, and finally he could move the whole arm in a little cavity. He began scrabbling. It took hours.

“There was never this much soil on top of us,” he kept saying.

“Inertial navigation is fully functional,” Alic would reply each time. “We’re heading straight up.”

The power cells were draining away at an alarming rate as they wriggled and grubbed their way along. Heat was a big problem; the suits kept pumping excess heat onto their external surfaces, but the soil wasn’t a good conductor. It began to build up around them. One more problem Morton could do absolutely nothing about.

Seven hours after the storm arrived, Morton’s gauntlet pushed through into open air. He sobbed with relief and shoved like a maniac, battering the suit forward, no longer caring if it was good technique. Claustrophobia was creeping up behind him, refusing to let go. Soil crumbled away around him and he finally flung himself out of the hole and into early evening sunlight crying out with incoherent relief. He slapped at the emergency locks, shedding sections of the suit as if it were on fire.

Alic came stumbling out on all fours. Morton helped him off with the legs and shoulders. They hugged for a long moment, slapping at each other’s backs like brothers who had been torn apart for a century.

“We fucking did it,” Morton said. “We’re invincible.”

Alic drew back, and finally took a long look around. His expression became troubled. “Where the hell are we?”

Morton finally paid attention to their surroundings. His first thought was that they’d tunneled away for kilometers to emerge in a different place altogether, possibly a different world. They were standing in a desert; it didn’t have sand and sun-blasted stones, but the expanse of raw soil and dark stone fragments that lay all around didn’t have a single blade of grass or tree growing anywhere. Nor was there any evidence that life had ever visited this place.

He looked up at the mountains that barricaded the western horizon, and called up a map file, integrating it with his insert’s inertial navigation function. The peaks corresponded to the eastern edge of the Dessault Mountains just outside the Institute valley. They were in the right places, but they weren’t the right shape at all. Every crag and cleft had been abraded away, reducing them to tall conical mounds of stone. They weren’t as high as they used to be, either. The snow had vanished completely.

“That really was one hell of a storm,” Morton muttered. “I never took Bradley seriously before.” He looked to the east, convinced there should be some sign of it. The horizon was a perfectly flat line between the newborn reddish brown desert and Far Away’s glorious sapphire sky. “Probably gonna go all the way around the world and bite us again.”

Alic was looking at the gentle saddle that used to hold the Institute. “No sign of the Marie Celeste. I guess the planet had its revenge.”

“Yeah.” Morton started scratching the back of his arms. Just about every part of him was itching now. The sweatshirt and thin cotton pants he wore didn’t exactly smell too good, either. “What now?”

“We survived. There’s got to be someone else around here.”

Wilson watched the tail end of the storm flow away into the east. The mountains around the High Desert were hard to see now; they’d become the same color as the land. It was a beautiful view, the air the storm had left in its wake was perfectly clear, there were no clouds anywhere. A doldrum calm had enveloped the whole Dessault range. If he had a regret it was the way the storm had stripped the snow off the eastern mountains. Real mountains deserved snowcaps to complete their majesty.

“It’s over, Admiral,” Samantha said.

“Are you sure? That seems a very bold statement.”

“You didn’t see the starship launch, did you?”

“No, I didn’t.” He smiled at her conviction. “And you’re quite right. I would have seen the fusion drives if they had fired. Your planet had its revenge.”

“Thank you, Admiral, you made it possible.”

“I just hope that storm dies out soon.”

“We think it will break up in the Oak Sea; there’ll be ordinary hurricanes split off from it, but the main body will power down before long.”

“Nice theory. Did the Martian data help you come up with the figures?”

“Yes.”

“That’s very comforting for an old NASA man like me to hear. Thank you, Samantha. My congratulations to you and your colleagues.”

“Admiral, our original observation team should be with you in ten to fifteen hours. They’ll escort you down. If you could make your way to the southern end of Aphrodite’s Seat they’ll rendezvous with you there.”

“That’s very kind of you, Samantha, but I’m just going to stay here. I imagine it will be quite a spectacular sunset.”

“Admiral, uh, I don’t want to … Are you all right?”

He looked down at his legs. The blood had finally stopped seeping around the epoxy foam. They didn’t trouble him anymore; he could barely feel them now. Every now and then a big shiver would run along his torso. The lava he was resting on had become quite cold. “I’m fine. Tell your team to turn back. They’d just be wasting their time. I’m afraid I’m not quite the pilot I used to be.”

“Admiral?”

“You have a lovely and strange world here, Samantha. Now the Starflyer’s gone, make the most of it.”

“Admiral!”

Wilson closed the link. She meant well, but she’d want to keep talking. He didn’t need companionship now. It was quite a revelation after so long, but he didn’t fear death anymore, not with Oscar and Anna showing him the way.

They’d find his body, and extract his memorycell, and re-life him. He was sure of that. But it wouldn’t be him who lived on in the future. He’d never accepted that form of continuation in the way the Commonwealth-born generations did. That old twenty-first-century way of thinking was one very tough habit to quit.

But this isn’t a bad place for it all to end, not after three hundred and eighty years. I flew up the highest mountain in the galaxy and helped defeat the monster. Shame I didn’t get the girl. I suppose she’ll be re-lifed with edited memories. Maybe her clone and my clone will have a beautiful future together. Be nice.

The cold closed in slowly. Wilson kept staring down on the planet. Watching the shadows lengthen and the atmosphere far below haze to gold.

Big black shape sliding through the heavens, blotting out the stars.

This must be the end, then.

Pain, just when he thought it had all ended. Jolting from side to side. Space suits. Low gravity. A long black ellipsoid parked on the gray-brown regolith. Airlock open, stairs extended.

I crashed. On Mars. Is this the rescue party from the Ulysses?

“Admiral, stay with us. Come on. The Searcher’s in orbit, we’ll get you up to their medical facility in no time. Stay with us now. This is Nigel. Remember me? Hang on! Understand?”

What about the flag? There was no flag in the ground. I thought we did that. It’s always the first thing you should do when you land on a planet. Says so right there in the manual.

Mellanie didn’t want to open her eyes. She was frightened of what she might see. There wasn’t any pain left, but her body remembered it only too well. It ghosted around her, taunting, threatening to return. So much so she thought its absence might only be an illusion. She could still see the horror on Giselle’s face. The blood that surrounded her like a fine mist as she spun helplessly. Kinetic weapons pulping her flesh.

“Am I dead?”

Nobody told her she was.

There was light now. Dark red of closed eyelids. Sheets touching her skin. Hard patches on her arms. Most of her torso was numb. She could hear her heart beating.

That has to be good.

She drew in a breath, and risked a quick glance. The room was strangely familiar. It took a while for the memory to come back: Bermuda room, the mansion on Illanum. There was a big cabinet of medical equipment beside the bed, tubes and wires led under the sheets.

Oh, well, there are worse jails.

Someone was curled up on the couch in the big bay window, snoring softly. Sunlight filtering through the white gauze drapes shone on his ginger hair.

The sight of him made Mellanie smile fondly. Crazy boy. Why he was here puzzled her, unless he’d been confined to this room by Nigel.

Her virtual vision grid was in peripheral mode. She told her e-butler to refresh it and brought it up to full operative status. A great many squares were dark; mostly her inserts. “What happened to them?” she asked her e-butler.

“You have received extensive clone grafting,” it replied. “Damaged systems and OCtattoos have not yet been replaced. Some functional systems were removed.”

The SI ones, she realized. Then she read the date. “Three weeks? I’ve been out for three weeks?”

“That is correct.”

“Why?”

“Time required for medical treatment.”

“Oh.” Now Mellanie really didn’t want to look under the sheets.

Orion stirred, saw she was awake, and sat bolt upright. “Are you okay?”

“I think so. I haven’t tried to move yet.”

“The nurses said it’d be another few days before you can get up.” He came over to stand beside the bed, gazing down at her in awe. “Are you really all right? I was really worried. They spent so long treating you. The chief doctor said they had to grow new bits. I didn’t know they could do that.”

“They can. Uh, Orion, why are you here?”

“They said I could be when you woke up.” He suddenly became terribly anxious. “Why? Don’t you want me here?”

“No … I’m glad you are, actually.” There weren’t many people she wanted to face right now. The boy was easy, though.

His smile was euphoric. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

His hand crept down to where hers lay outside the sheets, then darted back.

“So are we under arrest?” she asked.

“Huh? Oh, no. The security people weren’t very nice when the ambulance brought you back here. They said Nigel Sheldon was really cross with you. But it’s all been okay since he and Ozzie got back.”

“Back from where?”

“They flew to Dyson Alpha and restarted the barrier generator. It’s been on all the news shows.”

“Oh.” And I missed it all.

“There are Dynasty warships going off on Firewall flights right now. And there’s been alien agents arrested in the Commonwealth, and there was some big storm on Far Away that killed the Starflyer, and lots of other stuff. Tochee and I can hardly keep up with it.”

“Nigel’s back?”

“Yeah. He said to tell you the offer’s suspended. What does that mean?”

“He promised me an interview; that’s all.”

“Okay. And a bloke called Morton stopped by. He said you’d know where to find him if you wanted to.”

“Right.” He couldn’t be bothered to wait?

“Mellanie, where do you want to go when you’re better?”

“It’s a little early to … What did you call me?”

Orion hung his head sheepishly. He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. It was heavily creased, as though it had been read a lot.

Mellanie recognized her own handwriting. She’d actually written it in this room.

Darling Orion,

I’m sorry I have to leave you like this. I don’t want to, but I’m not even who you think I am. My real name is Mellanie. One day I’ll explain, if you ever want me to.

“I’ve managed to find out most of it,” he said. “Who you are and everything, that the SI sent you. Ozzie explained.”

Her throat was tightening horribly. “Then why are you here?”

“I told you, they said I could be.”

“But, if you know …?”

He reached out, boldly this time, and brushed some of her hair from the side of her face. “None of that stuff changes the way I feel about you.”

Mellanie started crying. It just wasn’t fair that he was the only one in the universe who truly cared for her. Why couldn’t I have met him before any of the others? “I can’t do this. I’m wrong for you.”

“No you’re not, don’t say that.”

“I’m not a nice girl, Orion, really I’m not.”

Orion gave her a quick devilish grin. “Yeah. I remember. I was sort of hoping you’d go on being like that with me.”

She put her hand around his head and pulled him down for a kiss.

The building manager was standing outside the main entrance of the ancient five-story building, supervising the maintenancebot as it removed the sign. Paula watched the electromuscle tentacles drop it into a trolleybot’s wire cage. It lifted out the old sign and placed it on the stone wall, then began to screw it into place. She smiled at the familiar lettering.

“Madame!” the building manager’s face lit up. He bowed deeply. “You are back! Welcome, welcome. The world has regained its sanity.”

“Thank you, Maurice,” she said sincerely. “Slight exaggeration, but it does feel good.”

He kissed her on both cheeks. “Everybody is waiting for you inside. May I carry that?” He indicated the small plastic bag she was gripping in her left hand.

“No thank you, I can manage.” Paula took a breath, and walked up the steps. As the doors opened, the maintenancebot began polishing the letters on the sign. She paused and watched the ancient brass lettering start to gleam again in the Paris sunlight.

INTERSOLAR COMMONWEALTH
SERIOUS CRIMES DIRECTORATE

The first person she met when she walked into the office on the fifth floor was Gwyneth Russell.

“Boss!” Gwyneth exclaimed. “Welcome back. And congratulations. Deputy Director. It’s about time.”

“Yes, well, you can’t spend your whole life in a rut.”

Gwyneth gave her a very startled look. “Absolutely not. I’m footloose and fancy free myself for the next fifteen years till Vic steps out of the Boongate wormhole. Fancy a drink tonight? I know some good clubs with lots of sweet first-life boys.”

“Not tonight, but sometime, yes.”

“Sure.”

Behind Gwyneth the rest of the investigators were standing at their desks, applauding enthusiastically. Paula actually felt her cheeks redden. She looked around at the familiar faces, and nodded her appreciation. “Thank you; it’s nice to see you all back out of uniform again,” she said. They fell quiet immediately, smiling. “It’s customary for the new chief to tell you that there’s going to be some changes around here, but I think we’ve all seen enough of that. From now on it’s strictly business as it used to be. So—I’ll want a meeting of all senior investigators in an hour to establish current case priorities. I shall also be reviewing personnel files today and tomorrow to see how you performed recently, and we need to rebuild teams after the losses we took during the navy days. To which end, I’d like to welcome Hoshe Finn to the office; I’m sure he’ll fit in just fine.”

Hoshe gave her a grin, and raised his cup of herbal tea in salute.

Alic Hogan was in the director’s office, putting his personal effects in a box. He gave Paula a half-guilty look when she walked in.

“Sorry, Chief, I wasn’t expecting you for another hour. How did it go with the Director?”

“Easy. Departmental meetings are a waste of time at best; it’s all politics and budgets. Nothing useful or relevant.”

“You’ll be all right, now you’ve got the Burnelli family backing you. Five years, you’ll be the Director.”

“Humm.” Paula cocked her head and looked out of the big window. “Adopted again.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing. I never realized: you can’t see the Eiffel Tower from here. You could from my old office.”

Alic swept the last pile of papers into his box. “Uh, you know that’s the one building management assigned me to.”

“Very symbolic.” Paula sat behind the desk and pulled her rabbakas plant out of the bag. The flower had faded, but another pink shoot was worming its way up out of the black corm. The hologram of the Redhound family was placed next to it. Then she took out a fist-sized perspex cube with a memorycell embedded in the middle. “I’m really pleased you’re staying, Alic,” she said.

“I don’t see a huge future for me with Admiral Columbia. Uh, I was surprised when you agreed to accept me in the Paris office.”

“From what I heard you stood up to him for what you knew was right. That means you’re in the right place.”

“Thanks.”

“In any case, you could have taken your pick of government jobs after Far Away.”

“I quite enjoyed the work here, despite all the politics.”

“Yes, well, that should be considerably reduced from now on; Columbia has his hands full at the moment. He’s pressing the Senate for navy involvement with the CST exploratory division.”

Alic let out a low whistle. “What did Sheldon say about that?”

“Let’s just say he wasn’t very enthusiastic. The two of them are also struggling over who gets the credit for the Firewall. I expect we’ll see Columbia’s bid for the presidency before too long. Now, I’ve got a meeting scheduled with our office’s lawyers and the prosecuting attorney from the Justice Directorate at eleven o’clock, which I’d like you to sit in on.”

“No problem. What is it for?”

Paula held up the perspex cube. “Interesting case. Gene Yaohui, aka Captain Oscar Monroe. Do we re-life him and then hand him over to the Justice Directorate for trial and suspension, or should he sit out his thousand years here?”

Alic gave the cube a startled look. “That’s him?”

“Yes. I recovered him and Anna Kime from Stakeout Canyon. Anna’s being re-lifed, with a suitable memory edit to remove the Starflyer contamination under the conditions of the Doi amnesty. My contacts tell me we’re going to be facing a request from Wilson Kime’s lawyers to hand Oscar’s memorycell over to him for custody on York5. If that happens Kime will undoubtedly re-life him. There will be a lot of political pressure on the Justice Directorate to drop the Abadan station charges; heavyweight character references, emotionally loaded claims of rehabilitation claiming he’s paid his dues to society, the precedent for sentence cancellation set by the navy interdiction troops on the Lost23, that kind of thing. Should be quite an interesting court battle.” She smiled, giving the memorycell a curious gaze. “I might even lose.”

“You? I doubt it.”

“The sea’s right outside,” Barry squealed as he ran back through the house. He flung himself at Mark. “Right there, Dad!”

Mark ruffled his son’s hair. “I told you it would be.”

“Can I go in now? Please! Please!”

“No.” Mark gestured at the pile of boxes and crates that the trolleybots had taken off the big removal truck. He could see them through the wide open doors, bringing more boxes. How did we acquire so much stuff so quickly; we lost everything in the Ulon Valley. “You can’t, I’ve no idea where your swim trunks are. And besides, I don’t know what the currents are like.” Which was a white lie; the development company brochure file guaranteed that the beaches of the Mulako Estate had benign weather and tides.

“Where’s the sea?” Sandy demanded as she came in through the front door, holding her backpack.

“Outside, come on!” Barry grabbed her hand, and the two of them raced off through the huge living room and out onto the veranda, Panda barking loudly as she raced after them. The lawn beyond had only just been turfed, gardenbots were still tending the new shrub boarders. It ended with a long dune that topped the private beach of white sand and azure water. A thicket of palms had been planted down one side of the lawn, shielding them from the rest of the estate. Mark had never seen so much civil construction work in one place before, not even on Cressat. That morning they’d driven out of Tanyata station, itself undergoing a massive expansion, and down the coastal road. Outside the burgeoning capital city, the land along the shore was one giant building site, with the developers offering exclusive homes in fifteen-acre private grounds. Mark had bought the plot at the farthest end of the estate, where the national park began. They didn’t need a mortgage, the Sheldon Dynasty had paid for it, although Nigel had wanted him to take something even grander on Cressat—in fact anything anywhere was the offer. Mark said no thanks, living in mansions just wasn’t him. He didn’t want to live off a trust fund, either; he’d seen the way Dynasty children turned out and he wasn’t going to let that happen to Barry and Sandy. So he’d accepted a directorship at the Tanyata offices of Alatonics, the Dynasty’s principal bot manufacturer, which paid him a colossal salary—and the way Tanyata was growing he was going to be earning it. Immigration was running at a quarter of a million a week, mainly refugees from the Lost23. Once all the arrangements had been made, Liz sat down with the architect for a week, designing the big airy house that to be honest was a small mansion. Now they were here, it didn’t seem quite real.

“Don’t go in the water,” he yelled after the kids. “I really mean it.” He looked around the big hall, trying to remember which doors led where. Then he caught sight of the marks that Barry’s sneakers had left on the living room’s polished hardwood floor, and winced. “Find out if there’s a maidbot,” he told his e-butler.

Liz walked in, carrying a box full of crockery. “Guess what?”

“Er …”

“The furniture store just called. They won’t be delivering until Thursday.”

“But that’s two days. What are we supposed to do until then? We haven’t got much furniture.” He still couldn’t believe the size of the rooms; it was like a house made up from aircraft hangars. The few items they had brought with them wouldn’t fill his study, let alone the reception rooms.

“Good question. The marshaling yard at the station is just a mess, the container is there somewhere. They think.” Liz gave the hall lighting a suspicious stare. “Those aren’t the fittings I ordered.”

“Aren’t they?” Mark thought the gold and pearl fittings were quite nice.

“No. Where the hell is that development company rep? She should have been here when we arrived.”

“Yes, dear.”

“What’s that?” Liz was looking back out at the front of the house, where a MoZ Express courier van had drawn up next to the removal truck. “Never mind, I’ll find out.”

“Do you want me to help unpack some of the boxes?”

“No. You watch the show, it’s starting. The portals were all installed—at least they’d goddamn better be.”

Mark hurriedly found a big floor cushion in one of the boxes, and carried it through into the living room. He put it on top of the scuff marks. Liz would kill Barry if she saw them.

He sat down and told the house management array to access the Michelangelo show. The portal projected the image across half of the empty floor. The resolution and color definition was superb, even with the sunlight streaming in through the open veranda doors.

Michelangelo was dressed in a flowing purple silk suit, standing by himself in the middle of the studio. “Hello, one and all. This is the show we’ve been trailing for a couple of weeks now, the one where we promise to give you the real story behind the war. And believe me, I am not kidding. To prove it, we have Nigel Sheldon here in the studio.” The image focus switched to a line of chairs, Nigel sat at one end, and smiled at the studio audience as the applause started. “Ozzie, himself,” Michelangelo announced as if he couldn’t quite believe the guest list. “Retired Admiral Wilson Kime, Senator Justine Burnelli, Chief Investigator Paula Myo, and our two very special visitors, Stig McSobel, spokesman for the Guardians of Selfhood, and a MorningLightMountain motile containing the memories of Dudley Bose.” Michelangelo applauded the line-up, then smiled winningly out at the audience to show how really happy he was with the next announcement. “And although it’s technically my show, the interviewer of course simply has to be our very own Mellanie Rescorai.”

Mark chuckled as the image zoomed in on Mellanie sitting behind Michelangelo’s big desk.

“You should have gone,” Liz told him.

He looked up and grinned. “Not a chance. Remember the last time she interviewed me?”

“Yes,” Liz drawled. “Anyway, the delivery was for you.”

“Oh, what is it?”

Liz gestured at the trollybot. There were ten children’s school lunch boxes resting in its basket. “There was a note.”

Mark frowned as he opened the little envelope. “Fresh from the kindergarten,” he read. “Enjoy your new house. Ozzie.” He grinned and opened the first lunch box. “Hey, champagne!”

“Millextow crab salad,” Liz exclaimed as she opened another. “Thornton’s chocolates. Damn, we need more rich friends.”

Someone knocked on the front door. When they went into the hall they saw three people standing on the shaded porch. Mark did his best not to stare at the tallest of them, a lean man wearing a kilt and white T-shirt. Every part of his exposed skin had an OCtattoo; golden galaxies glowed on his bald head. “Hello there, I’m Lionwalker Eyre, and these are my life partners, Scott and Chi. We’re your new neighbors. Thought we should come and introduce ourselves.”

“Please, come in,” Mark said. He was now having trouble not staring at Chi, who was enchantingly beautiful. “I didn’t know we had neighbors yet.”

“Aye, well, we’ve been here a while,” Lionwalker said in a broad Scottish accent. “Normally I’d have moved planets by now. Don’t like the crowds. No offense. But there are no uncrowded planets anymore. So, best make the most of it, eh?”

“We were just about to open a bottle.”

“In the middle of the afternoon? My kind of neighbors.”

“I know you,” Chi said. “You’re the Mark Vernon.”

“Ah.” Mark casually sucked his belly back in. “Guilty, I’m afraid.”

“Actually,” Liz said, as her arm closed around Mark’s shoulder. “He’s my Mark Vernon.”

Bradley Johansson did the one thing he didn’t expect to do: he opened his eyes. “I’m alive,” he exclaimed. His throat had trouble forming the words, they came out very wrong. These vocal cords were evolved for more sophisticated sound, and song.

“Did you ever doubt that?” Clouddancer asked. “We named you our friend.”

“Ah,” Bradley said. He tried to get up. When he moved his arms, the wing membranes came with it, rustling heavily. He looked down in astonishment at his Silfen body. “Is this real?”

Clouddancer laughed. “Hey, pal, if you ever find out what real is, you be sure and let us know, okay?”

It had been a long three weeks out in the new desert. Tom was tired and filthy after the endless days scanning the sandy soil and digging endless holes. He also wanted a break from Andy’s constant whining and Hagen’s wretched cooking—say about ten years. Brothers they might be, but that didn’t mean he could stand being cooped up with them for so long.

It had seemed like a good idea after their home had burned down in Armstrong City thanks to the psycho Guardians. The Commonwealth was keen to acquire sections of the smashed alien starship, the navy paid good money for pieces. All you had to do was head out into the new desert that the planet’s revenge had laid across the veldt between the Dessault Mountains and the Oak Sea, swing a metal detector about, and dig where it went ping. A lot of guys were doing it. They claimed to be very rich, not that you’d know it from the way they dressed or the vehicles they rode.

Tom and his brothers had never had any real finds. A few scraps, chunks of twisted metal that truthfully could have been anything. The dealers in Zeefield never offered much. Scavengers said if any true find came along the dealers would bid against each other, bumping the price up. Tom hated the dealers, but the only way to get the true price on the scraps was to drive all the way back to Armstrong City where the navy starship visited every couple of months to see what’d been found. Traveling cost them weeks. They weren’t making enough to do that.

Every time they went out, Tom was convinced that this would be the trip that hit pay dirt. The starship was huge, mostly solid machinery according to the dealers and other scavengers. That meant there should be segments the size of houses buried under the new desert. How difficult could it be?

This had been another washout trip. They had sensors rigged to cables that stretched out for twenty-five meters on either side of their old Mazda jeep. The ends were fixed to small quad bikes that Hagan and Andy rode, keeping the cable taut. That way they could cover big stretches of the new desert driving along together. The guy they’d bought them off swore the system could find metal twenty meters down. The price he charged them for the rig, they should have been able to locate anything a kilometer away.

All they’d got was a battered old pump made of some lightweight metallic composite, which was probably going to fetch a couple of hundred Far Away dollars, and three curving jags of metal that looked suspiciously like wheel arches to Tom. But they had wires and some electronic modules fixed to them. So you never knew … It had taken the better part of five days to excavate them. The trouble with the new desert was that it wasn’t a real desert, especially not now, a year after the planet’s revenge. To start with it had been a naked expanse of sandy soil. But the rains washed over it, and seeds from the buried plants germinated and began to grow. It was a faint green color now, and the soil was claggy, making digging difficult, especially after the rain. Streams and rivers were reappearing along contours. There were some lowlands that were now just bogs, impossible to traverse. Every time they went out, they’d spend hours digging the Mazda out of unexpected patches of mud.

Tom found Highway One just after midday, and turned onto it, heading north. Farther south, where the road ran parallel to the Dessault Mountains, it had completely vanished beneath the soil of the new desert. Here, it extended out in the open, sometimes for kilometers before high dunes covered it again. They slowly diminished the farther north you went, until half a day past Mount StOmer they ended altogether. It was easy to follow the road, though. Every vehicle left tracks along the line of the concrete underneath the dunes. You could even find the road in the dark.

When he was on the crest of one dune, he saw a dark figure by the side of the tracks a few hundred meters ahead. “What the hell is that?”

“What’s what?” Hagen shouted.

“Will you turn your fucking music off,” Tom told him. That was another thing: Hagen played his jazzy rock all day long at full volume.

“It’s a girl,” Andy said. “Yahoooo.”

Tom peered forward. No way you could tell. “Come on, guys, it’s someone with a busted truck, is all.” Not that he could see one. Not anywhere. But how else would anybody get out here?

“I’m telling you, it’s a girl.”

“Hagen, turn you music off right now, or I’m gonna throw that array out of the jeep.”

“Screw you, asshole.”

But he did turn it down. Tom gunned the Mazda down the slope. Not that he believed Andy, but …

“How much do we charge for recovery and taxi service?” Andy said with a laugh.

“Hell, I know what I’m gonna charge her,” Hagen said, and cupped his crotch.

It made Tom realize what they must look like. Filthy overalls and T-shirts, all in raggedy old sunhats, ancient shades. Unshaved for the whole three weeks. And the state of the Mazda was pretty poor. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he muttered as they approached the figure who still hadn’t moved. He slowed the jeep.

“Told you so,” Andy said.

Hagan started an excited heavy breathing laugh as if he were some kind of retard.

“Shut up, Hagen,” Tom shouted. It really was a girl. She had short dark hair under a white peaked cap, and wore a sleeveless orange T-shirt with tight dark pants cut off just above the knees. And she was sitting in a very weird position, with her legs crossed and feet bent back somehow. All he could think of was how supple she must be to do that. A smile was growing on his face. He halted the jeep beside her. “Good afternoon, there.”

“Howdy!” Andy shouted. “Me and my brothers, we’re heading into town.”

Tom jabbed his elbow into Andy’s ribs.

“Yes, ma’am.” Hagan laughed. “We’re gonna have us a party tonight. Do you wanna party?”

To Tom’s complete surprise she stood up and grinned at them.

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” said the Cat.

As always, lack of sleep made Ozzie testy. He unzipped his tent, flapped his arms against the chill of the early morning forest air, and wandered over to the fire they’d built last night. The Bose motile was standing beside it, feeding small chips of wood to the embers. Flames were starting to flicker again.

“Morning, Ozzie,” the Bose motile said. “I’ll have this going again in a minute. Do you want your hot chocolate?” It was speaking through a small bioneural array attached to the tip of a sensor stalk, a custom-built system that could easily be swapped for a standard Prime interface module.

“Coffee,” Ozzie grumbled. “It’ll help keep me awake.” He glowered at the tent on the other side of the small clearing that Orion and Mellanie shared.

“I’m lucky, this body doesn’t need sleep like humans. A good rest is all it takes to refresh me.”

Ozzie sat down on an ancient rotting tree trunk and started tying his boot laces up. The horses were snorting behind him, impatient for their feed. “Some humans don’t need any sleep, apparently. I mean, did you hear them last night? Man, they were at it for hours.”

“They are young.”

“Huh. They could at least be young and quiet.”

“Ozzie, you’re turning into quite a grump. Did you never have a honeymoon?”

“Yeah, yeah. Throw some eggs on the pan, will you, I’m going to see to the horses.” He busied himself with the nosebags.

Tochee was next up, unzipping the hemispherical tent that it had designed for itself. “Good morning, friend Ozzie.”

“Morning.” The array on his wrist translated his grunt into an ultraviolet pulse for Tochee. It looked like a bracelet with a black stone set in the top, the whole thing was bioneural and custom made. The experts in the CST electronics division had relished the challenge of coming up with bioluminescent ultraviolet emitters; it’d taken them the best part of six months, but the little unit functioned perfectly along the Silfen paths.

The first cup of coffee mellowed Ozzie’s temper slightly. Then the sound of human sex started to echo around the clearing, rising in pitch and intensity. The tent was shaking.

“Why do they both refer to your deity while mating?” Tochee inquired as it munched on some rehydrated cabbage. “Is it a request for a blessing?”

Ozzie shot the Bose motile a look, but of course it didn’t have body language he could read. “Uncontrollable reflex, man, look it up in your encyclopedia files.”

“Thank you, I will do so.”

Ozzie started eating his eggs and rehydrated bread. Trying to concentrate on the food.

Orion and Mellanie appeared a little while later, both smiling broadly. They held hands as they walked over to the fire.

“I boiled some water for you,” the Bose motile said.

“Probably cold by now,” Ozzie muttered.

“Would you like some teacubes?”

“Yes, please,” Mellanie said. They sat on the trunk together. She leaned against him, her hands holding his, and they smiled at each other again. “Do you have to leave?” she asked.

Ozzie chased off his mood; that was really why he was being such a dick this morning. “Yeah, ’fraid so, man. There’s a split in the path just the other side of the clearing.”

“He’s right,” Orion said. “I can feel it.”

Mellanie gave the tall trees a wistful look. “I wish I could.”

“You’ll learn,” he said adoringly.

Ozzie caught all four of the Bose motile’s sensor stalks waving in unison. He put it down to motile laughter.

They all took a long time to pack up that morning, delaying the moment. In the end all the bags were loaded onto the horses, water canteens filled, lunches made ready in the day packs. Ozzie stood facing Tochee and Orion, feeling thoroughly miserable.

“Tochee.”

“Friend Ozzie, I have dreaded this time.”

“Me, too, man. But you’ll find your way home. We did.”

“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”

“Ha! Don’t believe everything humans tell you, okay?”

“Okay.” Tochee extended its manipulator flesh and shaped it into a human hand. Ozzie shook it formally. He wasn’t quite prepared for the way Mellanie threw her arms around him. There was still a small nagging issue of trust with that girl that he hadn’t resolved.

“You’re seriously going to do this?” he asked.

Mellanie gave him an innocent shocked look, which dissolved into a beautifully evil smile. “Oh, yes, I’m doing this. My inserts can record all the worlds we visit. Are you afraid I’ll beat your record of new planets to walk across?”

“No. But you’re at the top of the unisphere. That interview could have turned Michelangelo into your coffee boy. You knew that.”

She gave him a curious, distant smirk. “Black, one sugar.”

“Excuse me?”

“I thought you’d get it, you of all people. It’s far better to travel than to arrive, right? Yeah, I made it to the top. Now what? Stay there for five hundred years? On the way up I found out what it takes to get there, and what I’ll have to do to stay there. I thought I could do it, I really did. I thought I could be harder and nastier than all the rest. Actually, I can be, which is the really awful thing. But I found I don’t like the price. It’s not who I am—I don’t think. I need a break, Ozzie. I need to sort myself out.”

“Too much too soon, huh?”

“You changed the world with wormhole technology, but it was Sheldon who built the Commonwealth. Why, Ozzie?”

“More fun this way.”

“Yeah, well, I’m going to take a look at the galaxy. When I get back I’ll have the recordings to step straight back into the number one slot again if that’s what I want.”

“I hope you find out what you want to be by then,” he said sincerely.

“Thanks, Ozzie.”

“In the meantime, be nice to Orion. He’s a good kid.”

Mellanie batted her eyes. “Not anymore, he’s not.”

Ozzie grinned as she walked away, trying not to stare at her ass. Her jeans were incredibly tight.

“Guess this is it,” Orion said. There was something caught in his throat, making his voice hoarse.

“Are you going to be all right?” Ozzie asked. “Really, I mean?”

“Sure. You taught me how to take care of myself. Except for those pickup lines. They were really crap, Ozzie.”

Ozzie hugged the boy, suddenly afraid he was going to lose it and start crying, which would be seriously uncool. “They’re out there, dude, you know that.”

“I do. Sometimes I think I can see them. They’re a long way away.”

“Well, you be careful, remember you can keep coming back.”

“I know.”

“And have fun on Tochee’s world. I want a full report someday.”

“You’ll get it.”

“Look after Mellanie. She’s not as tough as she makes out.”

“Ozzie, we’ll be fine.” Orion gave him a last hug. “Good-bye, Ozzie.”

“Sure, dude, good-bye.”

Ozzie shouldered his backpack, watching as Orion, Mellanie, and Tochee left the little clearing, leading the three heavily laden horses after them. He had a strong impulse to rush off after them.

“Saying good-bye is always hard.”

“What’s that?” Ozzie looked up at the Bose motile.

“I believe Orion is perfectly capable of surviving out here. He is, after all, a friend of the Silfen.”

“Yeah, but come on, he and Mellanie don’t have a brain cell to rub together.”

“It’s not their brain cells that they’re interested in rubbing together.”

Ozzie laughed. “No, it isn’t. I guess it’s going to take Tochee longer than it expects to get home.” He sighed. “Come on, let’s get going.”

They set off in the same direction as the others, to begin with. Ozzie could see them through the trees for quite a while. Orion and Mellanie would wave from time to time. He raised a hand in reply. Eventually, the undergrowth was too dense.

“Is this really a path?” the Bose motile asked. They were forcing their way through bushes and tall grasses, with the trees clustering close together. The ground was damp underfoot.

“Yeah,” Ozzie replied, knowing, feeling the ancient way stirring out of its sleep. “It just hasn’t been used for a long time, is all.”

It took them three more days, pushing through the forest as it turned from doughty pines to lush tropical vegetation that was really thick. On the morning of the third day, the trees began to shrink. They looked malformed, suffering from some kind of disease. Leafless stumps began to appear amid the living trunks, becoming prevalent. The undergrowth gave way to ribbons of slime that covered the ground. It wasn’t long before the dying jungle gave way to a field of boulders. Stone began to rise up on either side, forming gully walls. Thunder echoed around them, growing louder. They were walking into darkness now, with occasional flashes of lightning accompanying the thunder.

“I hear it,” the Bose motile said suddenly.

Ozzie nodded. He walked to the end of the gully, and peered down into the valley below. Overhead, a force field held off the thick black clouds. Lightning scraped across the translucent energy field.

The home of MorningLightMountain was laid out before him. The giant building that had consumed the conical mountain in the center of the valley. Vast rectangular congregation lakes, with their writhing bodies emerging onto ramps where they were marshaled into new regiments by motiles. Industrial buildings mushrooming everywhere.

“I can’t see a single living thing apart from it,” Ozzie said. “Nothing.”

“You won’t,” the Bose motile said. “Not here. There are farms elsewhere. Most of the continental land is given over to agriculture. But there is no wildlife.”

“What’s it doing?”

“Brooding. It thinks it is going to die. Not for millions of years, until the sun expands and fills up the inside of the barrier. But that is all it sees now. It doesn’t believe that any of its interstellar settlements will rescue it, should they survive our nova bombs. It knows they will devolve into independence and thus become its enemy just like all the other immotiles used to be.”

“Morbid son of a bitch, isn’t it? Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Of course. It is only fitting. I was the last thing to escape from Dyson Alpha, it is only right that I bring back a chance, some hope. MorningLightMountain cannot change now. Evolution here has ended. It cannot think differently, not by itself. Somebody must introduce change, for it will never come from within.”

“And you can do that?”

“I can try. I can insinuate questions into its thoughts. Questions it cannot conceive for itself.”

“Isn’t that a bit like making it in our own image?”

“I don’t think you need worry that MorningLightMountain will ever become human in its outlook. For myself, I will consider it simply developing a more rational outlook as a success. It needs to learn tolerance.”

“Good luck. That’s something we don’t do very well ourselves. We nearly killed MorningLightMountain in a knee-jerk reaction.”

“But we didn’t, did we, thanks to you.”

“And a few others.”

“It will take time, centuries I expect, and there’s no guarantee of success.”

“I’ll come back in a few hundred years, check up on your progress.”

“Please do. It will be interesting to see what you have become by then.”

To Sophie Hazel Hamilton
I never knew how much I missed you until you arrived

WORKS BY PETER F. HAMILTON

THE NIGHT’S DAWN TRILOGY

The Reality Dysfunction

The Neutronium Alchemist

The Naked God

Fallen Dragon

THE GREG MANDEL TRILOGY

Mindstar Rising

A Quantum Murder

The Nano Flower

Misspent Youth

A Second Chance at Eden

The Confederation Handbook

Pandora’s Star

Judas Unchained

PETER F. HAMILTON is the author of numerous short stories and novels, including Pandora’s Star, Fallen Dragon, and the acclaimed epic Night’s Dawn trilogy (The Reality Dys-function, The Neutronium Alchemist, and The Naked God). Hamilton lives in England.