3

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 further and further away from Earth. It was the Commonwealth ExoProtectorate Council which 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, since the probability that such an encounter would ever occur was extremely low, 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 in this section of the galaxy.

Now though, the Dyson Alpha event had changed everything. Nigel Sheldon couldn’t ever recall attending a Council meeting before, although he supposed he must have when both 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 directly through Augusta to the New York CST station in Newark; from there it was a quick journey over to Grand Central.

He always enjoyed Manhattan in the spring when the snow had gone and the trees were starting to put out fresh leaves, a vibrant green which 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 and fifty years old, and at two hundred and seventy-eight storeys 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 and his entourage into the main conference room on the two hundred and 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 when the meeting started. 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 neighbouring 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. Although he could just see the brilliant ma-hon tree glimmering dominantly at the centre 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 which 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 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 towards 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, at least they meant the whole place was different, unlike most of the flat urban sprawls out on the settled worlds.

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

‘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 considered that a more mature appearance was essential for his position. His apparent age gave him broad shoulders and a barrel torso which needed a lot of exercise to keep in shape. Thick silver hair was cut short and stylish, accentuating the slightly sour expression which was fixed on his flat face. Bushy eyebrows and bright grey-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, turning them into a major Intersolar Dynasty, which gave them almost as much influence as Nigel’s family inside the Commonwealth.

‘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 that are 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 two twenty-two.’

‘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 doubtfully. ‘But it’s going to be a long while before we start thinking about phase four.’

The 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 amongst 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 and had devoted a hundred and 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 favour of a 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 eternal self-serving narcissistic behaviour. 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 grey silk suit, so obviously a former Ivy League college athlete. His air of confidence was never something that could be acquired through memory implants and bioneural tweaking; it was only available 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 at 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 towards 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 adviser; 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 gave the one empty chair a pointed glance, and sat 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 Isaacs chose to make his entrance. Nigel quashed 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 which made wormhole generators possible, he’d been a genuine eccentric; moments of pure genius partied with surfer-boy dumbness to claim the dominant personality trait throughout his undergrad years. A time which 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 which he’d considered unsolvable. They’d made a great team, good enough to compress space so Nigel could 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 pile 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 a legend; the wildman of the Commonwealth, the ultimate alternative lifestyle guru. The girls, the old vices, and the brave new narcotic stimulants, chemical and bioneural, which 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 which cost billions before it was hijacked by the Barsoomians; he owned a secret network of wormholes linking the Commonwealth planets which 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 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 actually 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 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 Isaacs?’ 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 which 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 adviser 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 bub-bled into life with tangerine and turquoise lines scudding backwards into a central vanishing point, looking like some antique screen-saver pattern. ‘Good afternoon ladies and gentle-men,’ 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 adviser 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 like 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 build-up 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 also 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 godawful weapon they were protecting themselves against. The alternative is just as bad, that some other alien species feared them so badly 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 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 just ask them what’s going down here?’

‘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 Isaacs, I am aware of that. We do have a great many Silfen cultural experts, all of whom are still 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 relying on our own resources. Hence the need for this Council meeting.’

Ozzie threw her a furious look, 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 towards 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 millennium. 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 worm-hole 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 other 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 co-exist 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 Isaacs 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 co-exist 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 round 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 onwards and upwards. 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 Hal-garths had direct allies around the table in addition to Rafael, and their family were the main beneficiaries from 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. Whadoyaknow, 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 round 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. Always 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 per cent 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 back down 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 that does.’

*

Oaktier was an early phase one planet, settled in 2089. Its longevity had produced a first-class economy which ran smoothly in conjunction with a rich and impressive cultural heritage. The crystal skyscrapers and marble condo-pyramids that comprised the centre 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 and forty years after settlement, the population was just over one and a quarter billion, spread out over eight continents. The vast majority working diligently and living well.

With the Seattle legacy perhaps weighting the decision, Darklake City had been sited in a hilly area of the sub-tropics. With its slopes of rich soil, constant heat, and abundant water from rivers and lakes, the area was ideal for coffee growing. The lake shore which made up the south-eastern edge of the city now sprawled for thirty-five kilometres, incorporating marinas, civic parks, expensive apartment blocks, boatyards, leisure resorts, and commercial docks. At night, it was a gaudy neon rainbow of colour 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 semi-legal 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 centre 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. The only thing out there was a few sparkling cruise ships which 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 leant 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 well insulated from the low buzz of electric vehicles on the streets below, and the bustling shoreline three kilometres 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 grey-blue crescent of Oaktier’s low moon was just strong enough to reveal the mountains behind them which formed a low wall across the night sky. In the daytime, long terrace lines of coffee bushes were visible banding the slopes. White plantation mansions nestled in lush groves of trees, set back from the thin roads which 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 fibre 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 with large brown marble slabs on the floor and walls; 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. 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 semi-doze.

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 they’d 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 towards a public flotation which 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 travelled round 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 which 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 afterwards . . . 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 back-ups 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 round 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 which 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 memorycell 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 last 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 lounge. 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.