21

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 round 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 foundation 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 Honourable 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 con-firmed 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 are 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 Commonwealth 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 the 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 honour 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 which 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 to security 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 lacklustre 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 congratulation 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 moonspeech 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 in 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 was 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 per cent personal approval rating,’ she said as the results streamed in. The can frosted over as she pulled the tab. ‘Fifty-three per cent are still worried about the Primes – that’s down four from yesterday. Eighty-eight approve of you forming the navy. Stock market is up; analysts are predicting a 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 favourable. 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 favour of the Agency and its progression. Do you think there’s going to be a war?’

‘I was in favour 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 that 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 round.’

‘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, is 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 analyse 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 side, and through her the African Caucus. Physically, it’s non-essential. 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 on board as possible, 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 trans-galactic flight capa-bility.’

‘My God, you’re serious.’

‘Columbia’s Security Agency 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 Kersey’s Directorate up to full active status, incorporating a dozen more government science departments. We’re looking at a percentage point increase on tax. 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 Inter-solar 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 centre 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 on 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 which looked like it ran on for ever, 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-storey 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 which led down to underground garages.

When he reached the first alleyway, he stopped and scanned round. High fences guarded both sides, with flowering shrubs and creepers tumbling over them in colourful 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 metres along the alley when he came to the back yard of 3573. A low double gate opened onto a short section of concrete which 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. The strands were wrapped so densely they looked like thick elongated bushes.

Hoshe went through the gate. One of the garage doors was open. Someone was moving round 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 grey. Above them he wore a purple T-shirt that was equally over-used. He had gold-framed 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. A simple search had been run against every registered partner in the Shansorel Partnership; and when none of them had proved to have 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, where he 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 favour 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 out down the alley and 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 were 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 per cent 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 physical reality. Ships were already being put together over at High Angel, and planetary security teams started assembling worm-hole 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 which turning the Agency into the navy entailed. In fact, precisely the kind of large-scale managerial role which had taken up ninety per cent of his adult life.

Navy Base One was primarily a cluster of freeflying starship assembly platforms holding station thirty to forty kilometres 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 centre of the parkland campus was a thirty-storey tower that had five concave-curving sides surrounded by a DNA helix of skyway rails – dubbed Pentagon II by Alessandra Baron, a name which 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 flowcurving furniture of white tragwood from Niska, monochrome illumination floors and walls. It was like working in an operating theatre. 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 in to the conference meeting which 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 cancelled 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 when President Doi formed the navy, taking over responsibility for the planetary defence operation, making him Wilson’s second in command. He’d sited his division’s office on Kerensk, and was rapidly assimilating the various Commonwealth directorates and agencies which 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 centres, 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 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 government. 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’s 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 couple of 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 anti-depressants and let him get on with it.’

‘Did he say what he wanted to do afterwards?’

‘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 StAsaph 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 she’ll be able to detect it. But given the nature of the flightpath, the 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?’ Patrica 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 scout ship 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 have 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 behaviour-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 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 the navy should respond 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 non-hostile, non-threatening 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 manoeuvring 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, Academician. 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 metres 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 hand-held 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 rumour said that several members of 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 defence 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 net-work. She was rather pleased to find that her contacts out-weighed 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 round 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 in 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 round 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 favourite woollen 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 windcheater 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 windcheater 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 round 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 pick-up was parked next to Liz’s small Toyota 4x4 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 round to programming the bots to clear the stone away.

The kids were already in the back seat, 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 round 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 miles 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. Twenty miles 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 northwards. Often they’d have a sheer fall of several hundred metres 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 colour as it approached its week-long spore season.

Thirty miles out of town, they passed by one of the abandoned JCB monster roadbuilders which 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 some time for a better look.

Five miles beyond the roadbuilder, on the high shoulder of Mount Zuelea, 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’re some vehicles coming out about seven o’clock, they’re going to take the night shift.’

‘Right then.’ Mark eased the pick-up forward, driving down the narrow zigzag gap between the vehicles that were parked at right angles across the lanes, most of them pick-up trucks or 4x4s, the kind 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 carriageway. Colleen’s big truck was easily visible, the sides were painted in the bright pink and emerald logo of her precipitator leaf business which were fluorescing strongly in the sunlight. Since they’d arrived, Mark had had several arguments with her about the semi-organic 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, snowploughs, 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 semi-organic fabric which swirled round 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 ageing which had produced long distinguished creases in his ebony face. He fitted his role as nature’s guru perfectly, charismatic and passively stubborn, traits which provided universal reassurance to anyone engaged with his ideals.

A flock of people trailed along in his wake. An entourage like the staff of any major politician, except these were more like acolytes. Some were intent and focused, while others moved through their own 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 for ever. 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 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 round 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 yards. Several hundred Randtown residents were milling around on the empty enzyme-bonded concrete. Adults cluttered 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 round in various games. Buzzbots zipped through the air above them, the latest craze. Little flying-saucer-shaped aircraft with contra-rotating fans at the centre, 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 towards 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 which 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 straight away, 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 Mount Zuelea 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 which brought groups in to the hotels weren’t even waiting behind the stalled navy convoy any more, and the tour operators were raising hell, and talking about suing. Flasks of warm drink were passed round. 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 pick-up to fetch the box containing their lunch. There was a flash of orange between the vehicles over on the other carriageway 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 pick-up, 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 extreme-ing 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 for ever. 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-sleeve 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 but 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 miles 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 anti-human stance.’

‘If this is being anti-human, 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 extremeing, 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 cosy. 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 a 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 round. ‘China,’ he called to the barman. ‘Can you access Alessandra Baron’s show for us, please?’ He normally fought shy of 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 three feet 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 centre 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 Mount Zuelea, 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 millimetres. ‘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 defence equipment on an uninhabited mountain,’ Mellanie said. ‘But wait for this next bit.’

‘Oh God,’ Mark said. He wanted the programme 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 anti-human stance?’ in a fully reasonable tone.

Mark’s giant face smiled goofishly. ‘If this is being anti-human, 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 wine glass 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 were 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 round 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 phoney. 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 colours across the forest floor. Palm trees and giant ferns began to inter-mingle 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 round 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 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, with 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 miles 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 which 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 grey trees that might result if pines were crossed with eucalyptus. The whole patch couldn’t have been more than a mile across.

Ozzie was working out what to say when an electronic bleep emerged from deep inside his backpack. The sound, so integral with 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, as his inserts regained 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 round 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 hand-held 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 hand-held array. Its screen unfurled to its full extent, measuring half a metre 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 which Tochee used were displayed in the deepest purple which the screen’s resolution could manage.

Tochee became very still. Hello, his forward eye segment projected.

‘Our electronic systems are working again,’ Ozzie said out loud. The hand held array translated into a series of patterns which 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 which 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 hand-held 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 round with its manipulator flesh, and removed one of the heavy bags it was carrying. Ozzie mean-while 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 analysers, 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 to 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 round 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 hand-held 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 round 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 artefacts 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 which carried people between the terminals. He slid smoothly along the elevated rail as it took him out over the vast marshalling yard that had spread out over the land to the east of Seattle. Kilometre-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 which 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 between them. Thousands of trains a day trundled across the station, providing the huge web of commercial links which helped maintain Seattle’s high-tech research and industry base.

Stig sat at one end of the tubular monorail car, quickly scanning his fellow travellers, 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 which would take him all the way round 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 on to 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 on to the local train. ‘Have your people got him?’ he asked Paula, who was standing beside him.

‘Yes, thank you. Team B are 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 US Government, in an agreement which 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 rivalled 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 multi-segment modernistic building of white concrete bled even whiter in California’s unforgiving sunlight. Despite the sheer size of the structure, it thrummed and vibrated from the passage of trains which 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 have a 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 tonnes of industrial and consumer products were routed between its gateways every day: food imports came to over a million tonnes, 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 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 super-capitalism 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 to 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 which 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 which 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 though 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-storey glass and carbon and concrete building on the San Diego side of LA Galactic, standing in the forest of similar office towers which 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 one-time 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 which served the loop train Stig was using. They began analysing 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 walkby.’

‘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 which connected platforms to the central concourse where the flood of people had reached the density of a baseball stadium crowd rushing for their seats. High overhead, the concrete dome ceiling was supported by giant spider-leg pillars, their sharp bends making it seem as if they might just be able to lower the whole mass at any time. It was his theory that was why people were always in such a rush here, subconsciously they were trying to get out before the collapse happened.

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 rank. 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 up. He was wearing a smart grey jacket over a yellow shirt.

Training made sure Stig didn’t turn his head as the two of them passed. But it was hard. Grey 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 any-one. 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 mid-level 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 upwards, locking the image in an insert file.

As the escalator slipped smoothly downwards 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. He 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 hand-held 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 metres 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 which contained the emergency kit.

Without looking back or running any more checks he went straight to the taxi rank. 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 which 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 which 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 which 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 Johans-son’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 Confederation 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, a hundred square miles 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 24/7 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 the 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. Flat-bed loaders and fork-lifts 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 which formed the company’s legitimate business, pack-aging 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?’

‘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 metres to one of the sewer pipes which 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 which 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 centre.’

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 soft-ware from an insider at the Shansorel Partnership, the same insider who had supplied regulator software for a set of microphase modulators which Valtare Rigin had acquired. It would have had the partnership’s signature embedded in the sub-routines. 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 practised 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 eight miles 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 further. Nor was it a direct route. The Service & Inspection bot had to pass through several junctions, opening and closing flow valves like air locks 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 hand-held 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 back-up 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 towards 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 harbourmaster.’

‘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 per cent, 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?’

‘Have 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 coastguard 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 on to the water. A quarter of a mile away, bright old-fashioned street lamps 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 yards 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 round 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 round 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 anti-pollution 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 round 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 fall-back 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 Renne 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?’ Renne 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 does he benefit from all this? Why allow the Guardians to smuggle arms to Far Away, then attack a merchant they contract? It doesn’t make sense.

‘Are you sure he was a Guardian today?’ Tarlo asked.

Renne 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. Renne, 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,’ Renne 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 over-active imaginations. Get me a list of possible uses, however far-fetched.’

‘Yes, chief.’

The navy lieutenant in charge of the forensic team came over to Paula and saluted. Tarlo and Renne 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 which had burst from the man’s neck when it was wrenched backwards, 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 which 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 were 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 which 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 towards the senator.

‘What’s your name, son?’

His hand came round 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 one-time 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.