Fallen Dragon

Hardly anyone spoke when they left that evening. Lawrence heard that there had been near fights in other teams during the last three tests. At least his own group had managed to keep reasonably civil. That must count in their favor.

Joona was in the square. The potato stall was back, along with a larger number of protesters. She caught sight of him, and intercepted him. Lawrence tried to smile off the startled looks of the other candidates, though he knew exactly what they must be thinking.

"Yours," Joona said curtly, pressing an EZ twenty into his hand. "I don't need your charity."

"It wasn't charity. I was concerned about you, that's all."

"Did I ask you to be?"

"How could you? You didn't know what planet you were on."

She turned quickly and started walking back to her friends. "I've survived in this city long before you got here, space boy."

"Sorry I cared," Lawrence shouted after her.

He had dinner in the Holiday Inn that evening.

Day four was interviews and evaluation. First time up, Lawrence was quizzed by two college officers about his background and motivation and likes and dislikes. He knew he had to be courteous and slightly self-deprecating and honest and relaxed and show he had a sense of humor as well as being overwhelmingly interesting. Tall order cramming those traits into ninety minutes while you're telling them your life history and slanting it so that your inquisitors believe they cannot possibly afford to let you slip out of the college.

The second interview was with an assistant to the deputy principal, a cheery old woman who dressed in clothes a century out of date, presumably to give her an authoritative schoolmarmish air. They sat on opposite sides of a steel-blue desk in her office, a fourth-story room with a good view out over the canal.

Data was scrolling down her desktop pane, which was just at the wrong angle for him to read it.

"You did very well on the simulations," she said. "Good reflexes. Good spatial instinct—whatever that is. High proficiency on logical analysis. Integrated well with the group command dynamics. Fast thinker. Care to comment on any of that, Mr. Newton?"

"We were a mess in the last three simulations yesterday. Too much competition."

"That's right. That's why we include them. Think of it as a measure of how unselfish you can be."

"And was I?"

"You certainly showed awareness of the situation. It was a mature reaction. You have the potential to be an officer."

"Excellent." Lawrence couldn't help his hungry grin.

"Which gives me something of a problem. You see, it's more than proficiency we're looking for this week. Your stake also has to be taken into account. And, frankly, there are candidates with an aptitude equal to yours who have a much larger stake in Z-B than you."

Lawrence managed to hold on to his expression of polite respect "I suspect they all had inherited stakes. It's not actually possible for someone of my rank in strategic security to earn a higher stake than the one I have. A lot of the fleet platoon members opt for a much lower percentage. That should tell you all you need to know about my level of commitment to Z-B."

"It does, Lawrence, and it's very impressive, as was your commanding officer's report. But the figures speak for themselves. And we have to stick to our chosen method of selection. You understand that, don't you?"

He nodded sharply. This is a hatchet job, he realized. She's turning me down. I've failed. Failed! His fingers closed tightly around the end of the chair's armrests.

"Good," she said. "What I'd suggest is that you reapply in another couple of years. With the scores you've accumulated over the last three days we'd welcome you back again for another assessment. And by then your stake should have risen to a suitable percentage."

"Thank you." That was what it boiled down to. Thank you. His life's dream denied. Thank you. Five years devoted to the company, putting his life on the line. Thank you. He'd left his world behind, his life, his family, his one love. Thankyou. Thankyou. Thankfucking YOU.

It was sunny and cold when he marched down the stone steps to the square, a cloudless deep azure sky overhead. He blinked at the sharp light, which was what must be making his eyes watery. It was normally dark when he came out of the headquarters building. People got in his way as he walked. He pushed past them, heedless of their protests. Trams, too, they could fucking wait. Bastard cyclists always in the way.

Fortunately the bar was almost empty. But then it was only three o'clock in the afternoon. When the evening crowd arrived, Lawrence planned on moving back to the hotel where he could call up room service for the rest of the night. He opened the front of his coat and claimed a barstool. "Margarita, one glass, one jug." He slapped a couple of EZ twenties on the bar. "And that's a proper glass, with salt."

"Yes, sir." The barman wasn't going to argue, not yet.

Lawrence dropped his head into his hands and let out a painful sigh, surprising himself by not shrieking in anguish. "Shit! Shit, shit, fuck it!"

Someone pulled out the stool next to his and sat down. Like they didn't have the whole fucking place to choose from. He jerked round angrily to tell them to— "Oh."

"I thought I'd better check on you," Joona said in mild embarrassment "You nearly got run over by a couple of trams."

He turned away. "Enjoy your moment of triumph."

"Suffering in others is not a cause for rejoicing."

"In that case, give the hippie philosophy a break. It pisses me off."

"They turned you down."

"Yeah. All right? They turned me down. Bastards."

"Did they say why?"

"I'm not rich enough. That's what it was in the end. My stake in the company isn't enough. For fuck's sake, I've got a thirty percent investment in Z-B shares. A third of everything I earn goes straight back into the company. What the fuck else do they expect from me?"

"I don't know. What did you expect from them?"

"A fair chance. No, not really. I should have known. Me of all people. I know how companies really work, what really counts."

The barman put his margarita jug down in front of him, pushing a coaster forward for the glass. It was a proper margarita glass, with a thin rime of salt around the rim.

"What does count?" Joona asked.

"Internal politics. You want one of these, or have you got to run back to shout at my fellow corporate cyborgs?"

"We're not exactly on timesheets and shift work." Lawrence nodded to the barman. "Another glass, please."

Waking up was accompanied by its timeless twin: where am I? Lawrence opened his eyes to see a long room with a desk and a couple of worn comfy chairs at one end. The floor was bare wooden boards, with a couple of rugs thrown down, one of which he was lying on. Opposite him was a broad arched window, with thick old curtains drawn. Scraps of streetlight shone around the edges, casting a dreary sodium-yellow illumination against the walls. Several large prints had been hung above the small fireplace, posters for various exhibitions and poetry recitals decades out of date. Definitely student digs. Brighter slivers of light silhouetted the door. When he lifted his head he could see a bed at the other end of the room. Joona was sitting on it, her back against the tarnished brass railings. She had a quilt wrapped around her shoulders. A reefer dangled from one hand, its end glowing morosely in the gloom.

"Oh, hell," he muttered. At least he was still wearing his uniform. "How did I...?"

"I brought you here," she said. There was a current of humor in her voice. "My turn to rescue you from the bar."

"Thanks." He sat up gingerly. "Do I owe you a twenty?"

"No, a friend helped get you into the tram. There's a stop close to the end of this street."

"Uh, right." He didn't remember much after the third jug of margaritas. Just bitching on about Z-B and how he would have loved to be the first person to land on a new world. He ran his dry rubber tongue around the inside of his dry mouth. The taste was awful. Apart from that he wasn't too bad, just stiff from the floor. "How come I don't have a hangover?"

"I made you take aspirin and vitamin C, and a couple of liters of water."

"Right. Thanks again." The mention of water made him want to pee. Badly. Joona told him where to find the toilet, just outside and down the corridor.

"Try to be quiet," she said as he hurried out "Everyone else is asleep."

His watch said it was quarter past two.

When he got back she was still sitting at the end of the bed, the reefer down to its last half-centimeter. "Want some?" she asked.

"No, thanks. Us cyborgs don't, remember?"

"Of course."

"Look, thanks again for taking care of me. I'd, er, better be going."

"Really?" She took a deep drag. "What's waiting for you?"

"Nothing much, I guess. I've still got three weeks' leave due. I just don't want to impose on you any more tonight."

"If I'd thought you were imposing I wouldn't have brought you here."

A sharp tingle moved down Lawrence's spine. He walked over to the bed and knelt down. She didn't say anything, just kept gazing at him with wide eyes. He took the last of the joint from her fingers and inhaled the way he'd seen it done on the i's. The smoke was bitter enough to make him cough.

Joona started to laugh. "I win."

"Win what?"

"I got to you."

"Yeah." He grinned and took another drag before handing it back. "You got to me. But then you were never going to run off and join the officer college with me, were you?"

She shook her head as if she'd been admonished and pouted. "No."

"Can I stay here the rest of the night?"

Joona nodded.

"With you?" he asked softly.

She opened the quilt. She was naked underneath.

When Lawrence woke up in the morning his earlier confusion was replaced by something close to embarrassment Classic case of now what?

He was lying along the edge of the bed, the quilt covering him, with his back pressed up against the wall. The mattress really wasn't wide enough for two. Joona was curled up beside him, looking a whole lot more fragile than she had last night. She was thin, skinny enough for her shoulder blades and collarbones to be prominent, and a lot shorter than he recalled. She must have been wearing heels before. Funny he'd never noticed that.

When he tried to pull the quilt up gently around her shoulders she stirred and woke. Pale blue eyes, he saw, a contrast to her darkish skin.

"Well," she said.

"Morning."

"Yes, it is."

She snuggled up closer, closing her eyes.

Again: now what?

"So, er, what time do you have to get up?"

Joona's eyes stayed shut "You're always in a rush to go nowhere, aren't you?"

"That's me."

"I was going to take a break from college. It's getting heavy there for me right now. I hadn't got a plan for getting up."

"You're at college?"

She sighed and sat up. "Yes, the Prodi. It's a complete shit-hole. They don't even have enough funds to stop the building from falling apart, and the lecturers are all fifth-raters who couldn't get an appointment cleaning the toilets at a decent university." She got up out of bed with a sudden energetic motion and padded over to the window, pulling the curtains back with a quick tug.

Lawrence didn't point out she was nude; he would have sounded like his mother. But the window was smeared with dribbles of condensation, only a few vague gray shapes of buildings were visible. Joona shivered and rubbed her arms. The air in the room was cold enough to make her breath show as thin vapor.

"Are you leaving me?" she asked.

"Like you, I don't have any plans."

"Actually, I was thinking I'd go to Scotland."

He couldn't figure out if that was an invitation. She certainly wasn't his usual type, not with all this twitchy energy and commitment to her stupid cause. He couldn't imagine her ever walking down the Strip at Cairns, hunting a good time as the sun went down. Come to that, he couldn't even imagine her laughing heartily. He'd never seen her do more than smile wryly every now and then. But then again, she definitely knew her own mind. Just like Roselyn. Unlike Roselyn, she wasn't happy with life. There was a lot of anger bottled up inside that small frame—a stupid form of anger, though he would never tell her that to her face. She was far too wrapped up in her issues to welcome contrary observations. He guessed that might make her kind of lonely.

The room had a singular imprint that was all her own. It wasn't just the air that was cold. Most people, he thought, would instinctively keep their distance.

So why didn't I?

Two lonely people. Maybe that was why they'd kept dancing around each other in the bar. They weren't opposites attracting after all.

"I've never been to Scotland," he said.

Joona was bending over the heatstore block that sat in the ancient fireplace, turning up its output. The black surface began to glow a deep orange, as if there were still embers in the grate. She gave him a fast, nervous smile. "You want to come with me?" There was surprise and hope in her voice.

"Sure. If you want me to come with you."

"I don't mind. It would be nice."

For a moment he thought she was going to jump back into bed with him. Instead she grabbed a big red-and-green-check nightshirt from the back of a chair and struggled into it.

"I'll put some coffee in the microwave," she said. "Then I have to do my yoga: it helps me center myself. We can go after that."

"Okay," he said, trying to keep pace with events. "I can pick up my stuff from the hotel on the way to the station."

"Will you book the train tickets? I hate using the datapool. I can pay you."

"Sure." He hunted around for his clothes, wondering what he'd gone and said yes to.

Lawrence and Joona took an express train straight out of Amsterdam direct to Edinburgh, traveling in a big U, down south to Paris, across to London, then up north again to the end of the 1-pulse line at Waverley. To start with, Lawrence was impressed by Holland. The old canals were still draining the land. Windmills stood guard along the straight-edged waterways, although little wind now reached their sails, thanks to the extensive forests that had grown up in the last two centuries across the old farmland. There was a huge variety of trees, but with the canals slicing through them they formed such a regular grid it made them look like nothing more than fields. In a sense they were, not that they were cultivated, but the land management teams maintained them carefully. Even now, the drainage system couldn't be allowed to fall into disrepair, and the roots were a big potential hazard. It gave him an impression of an artificial environment barely one step ahead of Amethi. He thought that in a way Holland must be the first example of large-scale terraforming; human engineering and ingenuity wresting a livable nation out of an alien environment.

Lawrence soon tired of the fenlands, especially as their speed blurred details. "So why Scotland?" he asked.

Joona put her feet up on the table, ignoring the disapproving looks of the other passengers in the carriage. "My grandmother is Scottish. We're going to stay with her."

"Where, exactly?"

"Fort William."

He put his interface glasses on and accessed the datapool to find where that was.

"You spend a lot of time trawling, don't you?" Joona said.

"My education had a lot of holes. You must do a fair bit of accessing yourself."

"As little as possible. I prefer books."

"There's a time and a place for hard copy. My dad had a thing for books, too. I guess that's why I never use them." He grinned at the face she pulled. "What's your subject at Prodi?"

"I'm taking ecological management."

"Right." It wasn't what he expected. "Doesn't that mean you'll wind up working for a company?"

"There are companies, and there are companies. And then mere are government agencies, at least by name. In practice they're another branch of corporate reclamation and revitalization divisions. But I won't take a job with any of them. There are still some private landowners who use the land in the traditional fashion. They farm, or log timber or run stables. That's what I want to help keep alive."

"Farming?" he said skeptically. "I thought that's what damaged the land in the first place?"

"Industrial farming did, yes. Pesticides and nitrates were poured over the soil in the quest for higher yields and to hell with the consequences. Agricultural machinery actually got so big and so heavy that it compacted the subsoil. By the end, in the developed nations, topsoil was little more than a matrix that suspended chemicals and water so the crop roots could absorb them. Then the companies developed protein cell technology and killed farming altogether."

"And stopped us raising and slaughtering animals for food. I mean, can you imagine how barbaric that was? Eating living things. It's disgusting."

"It's perfectly natural. Not that people think that way today. And I didn't say protein cells are a bad thing. After all, it means no one on Earth starves. But, as always, they went to extremes and eliminated every valid alternative. All I'm asking for is to keep a few pockets of independence alive."

"You mean like working museums?"

"No! These are havens for people who reject your corporate uniculture existence. There are more of them than governments and corporations like to admit. More of us."

"Ah, right, communes of back-to-the-earthers. So will you also be refusing the kind of medical technology that comes out of our wicked corporations?"

She gave him an exasperated stare. "That's so typical, denigrate something you know nothing about. I never said I was rejecting technology. It's the current global society that I refuse to obey. Technology doesn't have to come only from corporate labs, to be exploited for profit and policy implementation. It could come from universities where it would be made freely available to benefit everyone. Even small independent communities could support researchers. If we all had free access to data we could build a culture of distributed specialization."

"The old global village idea. Nice, but you still need factories and urban centers. You should know that culture always flourishes at the heart of society."

"The datapool is the heart of our society. You're still thinking in physical terms when you talk about cohesion. You can live in a cottage in the middle of a forest with every need taken care of, and still be totally in tune with the rest of the world."

"But why live there, when you can also live in a city, and interact with people, and go down to a bar in the evening and have a laugh and a drink? We don't all want to be hermits."

"I know. But your companies don't want anyone to be a hermit or anything else. According to them, we all have to fit into this uniculture they're trying to establish like neat little blocks on a circuit board. I don't want to be a part of that I want my freedom."

"I think you're exaggerating."

She pointed to a badge on her coat lapel. It had a single eye at the center. "Open your eyes."

He managed to steer the conversation off politics and got her talking about music, which was always a relatively safe topic. You could disagree about bands, performers and composers without storming out or throwing things. She enjoyed orchestral symphonies from several classical and modern composers; from postelectronic music she listened to what he thought of as ballads and street poetry. Although she had thousands of hours of tracks loaded into her multimedia player card, she became animated about live concerts, telling him about all the venues she'd visited, the bands and orchestras she'd heard. As far as entertainment went, she was scornful of the i's, although she admitted to watching several current soaps. The i's, she claimed, were something she grew out of. And she really hated AS-generated dramas, preferring to visit theaters. Amsterdam had a host of small nonmainstream theaters where her student status got her reduced rates, she said, and the city had hundreds of performance groups eager to put on their works.

Lawrence almost pointed out that having so many groups evolve in a city proved his argument about culture. But he still wasn't sure how she'd respond to that kind of teasing.

Even after lunch in the buffet car, when she drank over half a bottle of wine, she was still tense.

That afternoon she asked what he enjoyed, and he was foolish enough to admit accessing Flight: Horizon. It was the first time he'd ever seen her truly laugh.

"I can't believe we export that kind of crap to other worlds," she chortled. "No wonder you have such a screwed-up vision of starflight. My God, and that ending."

"Ending?"

"The last episode. Unbelievable! Pretty hot, though."

"You saw that?"

"Yeah. Told you I was into i's when I was a kid. Why?" Her eyes narrowed, giving him a curious gaze. "Didn't you see it?"

"No," he said lamely, unwilling to admit the associations the show had for him. Even though he knew he was totally and completely over Roselyn, he'd somehow never quite got round to accessing those last few episodes. "We only ever got a couple of series on Amethi."

"Oh wow. You've got to access it now you're here. You missed a treat."

"That part of my life is over. I can do without revisiting it, thank you."

Her eyebrows rose at the finality in his voice. "Okay."

Fortunately she didn't pursue it, or even try to tease him. Their conversation rambled on. The one thing that they never mentioned was sex. He found that strange. It was as if last night simply hadn't happened. At least for her. They talked around just about everything else. As he was taking his cues from her, he didn't try to bring it up.

He wanted to. Joona was good company. Not necessarily pleasant company. If their opinions clashed she would argue until he gave up. That made her interesting, as much as her diametrically opposed worldview. When he thought about some of his barracks conversations he couldn't believe how dumb they were in comparison. It was that quality he'd first noticed in her, the fierce intelligence, that's what attracted him. So he wanted to know where they stood, which basically meant was she coming to bed with him tonight, and every other night of this jaunt? At one point he decided she was saying nothing in order to tantalize him, an intellectual's idea of foreplay. Though there were always doubts about that theory. She was too highly strung to avoid talking about anything important in her life. Which made her silence on the subject slightly puzzling.

He'd booked a double sleeper cabin for them that night. When she'd paid him for the ticket there had been no mistake or misunderstanding, she saw exactly what he'd got for them. The thought stayed with him all that afternoon. They'd slung their luggage in there as soon as they got onboard, his shoulder bag, her rucksack. The cabin was tiny, its fittings as compact as modern design allowed.

All the time they spent talking in the main coach he knew that she knew they'd be going back there after dinner. They'd strip off in the confined space, then climb into the low bunk together. The prospect was highly arousing. It would be almost like their first time. Last night, from what he could recall, had involved little passion and hadn't lasted long anyway, some perfunctory fumbling brought to a swift climax. First-time sex was always hot. And here on the train it was inevitable, which added that extra twinge of excitement as he spent the afternoon looking at her.

They went to the restaurant as the train slid out of Paris. Joona ordered a bottle of red wine. Lawrence had two glasses; she finished the rest and ordered another. Her conversation, which had arrived at the global uniculture's contamination of Africa, allowed less and less opportunity for him to say anything. Eventually it became a bitter rant. Lawrence didn't have any of the second bottle. Joona ordered a brandy for herself, which she finished before they left for their sleeper cabin.

When they got to it, they found the conditioning was faulty, leaving the little room chilly. Joona swayed about, looking at him with a lack of certainty in complete contrast to her usual attitude. She gave him a brief who-cares grin and started to pull her clothes off. It was Lawrence's turn to hesitate.

"Look," he said reluctantly. "You've had a lot to drink."

"I can handle it. This is nothing." She got the sweatshirt off over her head, then put an arm out to steady herself as she undid her jeans.

"I'm sure. I'm just saying, we don't have to do anything tonight."

"Yes, we do." Her grin widened into something close to defiance as she slipped her briefs down her legs. "Don't you get it? We have to. We must." She began kissing him. The smell and residual taste of the wine was off-putting. He put his arms around her in a mechanical fashion, trying to respond with the same intensity.

"We're building a bridge," she mumbled. "The two of us, two worlds joining. That means we're human after all."

He wanted to ask what she thought she meant. But he was busy freeing his own shirt, and she'd sat down heavily on the edge of the bunk. The cold air didn't help his mood, it actually raised goose bumps on his skin. He climbed into the bunk beside her, quickly pulling the thin quilt over the pair of them.

She started kissing him again, ranging over his face and neck. A hand closed round his cock. One elbow rested uncomfortably on his sternum. What she must have intended as a suggestive caress felt more like an irritable tickle down the side of his ribs. The whole event was completely unerotic. He couldn't believe it; not after he'd spent most of the day anticipating this moment.

Finally he managed to roll the pair of them around so she lay underneath him. He could barely keep his erection going; to help he had to keep thinking about a couple of the girls from the Strip last week, how lively they were. Joona smiled up drunkenly at him and groaned as he slid farther inside her.

Fortunately, the whole miserable entanglement was concluded quickly. "God, I love you," she said. "This is what I want."

"What is?" He managed to find a space on the bunk that didn't squash the two of them together, even though he was in danger of falling off. When he looked back at her she was already asleep. She started snoring.

He found a thick T-shirt and put it on, then spent ages lying beside her, staring up at the cabin's invisible ceiling, unable to sleep. Nobody's fault, he kept telling himself, the circumstances were wrong, that's all. The cabin, the air-conditioning, the wine: an unfortunate combination. Tomorrow will be better.

The express terminus at Edinburgh Waverley had been dug underneath the original station, leaving the surface structure untouched. They hauled their luggage up the escalators to the big old sprawl of platforms underneath their arching glass-and-iron roofs, and found the local train over to Glasgow. Old-style induction tracks still threaded through the center of the city, passing below the ancient castle perched on top of its rocky pinnacle. Lawrence watched it slide past, fascinated by the massive stone blocks and wondering how the hell the builders had moved them into position without robots.

Once it was outside the suburbs, the train accelerated smoothly up to two hundred kilometers an hour. That was the fastest it could manage: the track in this part of Scotland was still using the same route that it had for centuries, laid down in the first decades of steam engines. It followed the contours of the rugged Highlands, curving too sharply to allow the train to reach its usual top speed. Even though there were no more farms, the district parliament had never obtained enough funds to straighten the route through the wild glens and restored woodlands. The cost of drilling new tunnels through hard Scottish rock and constructing viaducts over broad valleys was simply uneconomical given the volume of traffic. So anyone traveling the Highlands had almost the same journey as the Victorians who'd originally pioneered the route. There was even an old iron rail laid alongside the induction track, where enthusiasts kept a couple of old steam engines chugging up and down the coast, pulling early-twentieth-century first-class passenger coaches along behind them. A huge tourist attraction in the summer.

As they had arrived at Edinburgh station in the early morning, Lawrence was able to see the countryside in clear daylight. Queensland and some sections of Europe he'd seen were just as rugged, but nothing on any planet he'd been on was as green. With spring coming to the Northern Hemisphere, the trees were fresh with new leaves. Heavy rains had soaked the ground, giving the grass a healthy, vigorous start to the season. He took the window seat and pressed himself against it, smiling contentedly.

This section of the journey was the one that he enjoyed the most.

They reached Glasgow in the middle of the morning and changed trains for Fort William. If anything this journey was even slower. But the scenery made up for it. He couldn't believe the long, rugged glens, and the lochs with their dark mirror water that went on forever. Their splendor made him aware of how much humans belonged in this environment.

Joona sat beside him with her arm through his, pointing out various landmarks. Ever since she woke up she'd acted differently. Attentive and eager, as if their night together had allowed them to reach some new level of understanding and commitment. He didn't know what to make of it at all, though the affection was enjoyable. It made it seem as if they were more of a couple. Certainly anyone walking through the coach would assume so.

Fort William was the end of the line, its station just above the shore of Loch Linnhe. They stepped out onto the platform and Lawrence tipped his head back to look up at the mountain looming over the small town. The entire slope was covered with pine trees, their dark shapes packed tightly together.

"Is that Ben Nevis?"

"No," Joona said brightly. "That's Cow Hill; the Ben's away behind it. You'll be able to see it from Grandma's over in Benavie, if the weather stays fine." She glanced out at the choppy gray water of the loch. Dark clouds were streaming in from the southwest. "Rain's on its way."

Her grandmother was waiting in the station parking lot. Joona let go of his arm and waved frantically as she ran forward. Preconceived notions Lawrence had built up about Granny Beaumont being some quiet little old lady with her gray hair wrapped in a bun and wearing a long tartan skirt vanished there and then. The woman was only as tall as Joona, but she was a picture of health, with dark red hair only slightly tidier than her granddaughter's. She was wearing tough cord trousers and a long olive-green coat splashed in mud. He didn't see how she could be a grandmother to anyone in their twenties; she couldn't possibly be past fifty.

"So you'll be Lawrence, then." Her accent was thick, but easy enough for him to understand. They shook hands.

"Yes, ma'am."

"And we'll have none of that nonsense. I'm Jackie. Now come along with the pair of you, into the van. I've to pick up a few things first; then we'll go straight home." She ushered them forward. The van was a three-wheel pickup, with an egg-shaped driver's cab ahead of an open cart section. It must have been twenty years old, composite bodywork fraying along the edges with fiber strands bristling out of the cracks and odd-colored patches epoxied over the larger splits. The cab's curving windshield had yellowed with age and ultraviolet, reducing the visibility considerably. There was no steering wheel, just a broad handlebar.

"Still works, then?" Joona said.

"Of course. Sugarhol is the easiest fuel you can brew, and no duty on it, either. That's why they stopped making cells that could burn it."

Lawrence kept a perfectly straight face as he climbed into the rear of the pickup. The chassis rocked about as he tried to find a reasonably clean piece of floor to sit on. Joona passed their luggage over the tailboard to him, then climbed up. She pulled a thick woolen hat out of her coat pocket, then produced some gloves. "Don't worry, it's not far."

"Great." He zipped the front of his coat right up to his chin, then jammed his hands into the pockets.

Jackie climbed into the cab and fired up the converter cell. A cloying smell of burned sugar burped out of the exhaust, swirling around the vehicle. Lawrence wrinkled his nose up; his eyes started to water.

"There's a still up at the cottage," Joona said. "She ferments her own fuel. See what I mean about people hanging on to their independence?"

"Absolutely."

She laughed and gave him a hug before the pickup lurched off. Jackie Beaumont drove them north along the A82, which ran through the middle of Fort William. This section of town had large civic buildings on both sides of the road. He saw the hospital first, a modern two-story complex with an arched silver roof, its geothermal power turbine housed in a small igloo at the side. Two search and rescue helicopters were parked on their pads behind the accident and emergency annex. The information and heritage center was opposite. Next to that were several sports pitches, each covered by big translucent domes, similar enough to Amethi's nullthene to give Lawrence an unexpected twinge of nostalgia. The town administration office resembled a Georgian mansion with its vivid ginger brick and broad white stone windows. Only arches leading to the underground vehicle bays gave away its true century of origin. A line of buses had drawn up outside the secondary school. Kids in smart gray-and-turquoise uniforms were running around them, chasing balls and snatching each other's bags.

Just past the theater, Jackie turned into a parking lot serving a single-story wooden building that resembled a long barn. It had wide windows under the overhanging eaves, with displays of just about every kind of camping and walking gear ever manufactured. A carved sign over the door said Grimmers. Jackie hopped out of the cab and headed inside. Lawrence and Joona climbed down and followed her in. A cleaning robot was rolling through the nearly deserted parking lot, sweeping up leaves and mud.

"Looks like a good little community," Lawrence said as they went through the door.

She nestled up beside him. "A rich one, you mean. They can afford the facilities. A lot of companies combined to build the reclamation plants. There's a lot of tourism as well. The other end of town is virtually all hotels. Between them, they bring a lot of money into the area."

"That's good, surely?"

"Only if you've got a stake in it."

Jackie was picking up several boxes from a counter while the assistant chatted to her. Lawrence hurried over and took a couple of the boxes from her. She smiled her thanks and gave him a further two. They were heavier than he expected. The labels said they contained some kind of dyes.

"For the wool," Jackie said as they went back out to the van.

"Wool?"

"I'm part owner of a flock."

"Of sheep," Joona said, grinning.

"Right" It was a bizarre notion.

The rain had arrived, a thick, heavy downpour driven by strong winds. Turbulent clouds boiled overhead. Lawrence could see the last of the day's sunlight shining over the mountains on the other side of the loch. There was no sign of a rainbow. He put the boxes next to his own bag and clambered back into the van.

It was another ten minutes' drive back to Jackie's cottage, which was a few kilometers out of town. She drove them along the side of the Caledonian Canal before finally turning off onto a dirt lane that led through woodland of silver birch, oak and sycamore. Her cottage sat in a rambling garden, a long building with sturdy stone walls and lead-rimmed windows. A diamond brick chimney stack at one end was crowned by tall clay pots, with smoke curling away into the darkening sky. He expected to see a thatch roof, but the blue slate was just as acceptable.

Jackie drove the van into a wooden lean-to outbuilding on the gable end, which served as a workshop and garage. Water was overflowing from the guttering, sending a thick curtain pouring down across the doorway. The final deluge finished the soaking that the rain had been persevering with. Lawrence squelched down onto the concrete floor.

"Inside with the pair of you," Jackie said as she swung the big doors shut. "Go on now."

Joona led him through a side door into the cottage's kitchen. It was a wide room, taking up at least a third of the ground floor. The brick hearth was filled by a four-door Aga: its racing-green vitreous enamel had darkened down the decades, and there were plenty of little chips in it. But it was still functioning, throwing off a welcome heat Joona shrugged out of her coat and went to lean against it, gripping the tarnished chrome bar along the front.

"Good to be home," she said, and beckoned him urgently.

He stood in front of the ancient iron monstrosity, not quite sure what it was. Jackie took his hands and pulled him closer to it. Heat crept back into his dripping fingers.

"That's better," he said. "That wind chill was killing me."

"I spent many an hour drying out in front of the Aga. We've even used it to save some lambs."

"Huh?"

"If their mother dies, the plate-warming oven is just right for keeping them warm. Poor wee things need all the help they can get for the first few days."

"This is a stove?"

"It is that," Jackie said. She stood in the doorway, taking her boots off. "Installed over three centuries ago, I'll have you know, and still going strong. The burner ring was modified to use methane, but other man that, as sound as the day it left the factory."

Lawrence gave the stolid behemoth a suspicious look. If she was telling the truth, it predated the human settlement of Amethi. Amazing.

"You two had better have a hot shower and change your clothes," Jackie said. "You've turned blue. There's plenty of hot water. I'll have some tea for you when you come down."

Joona nodded. "This way." She took Lawrence's hand again and started to lead him playfully out of the kitchen.

"He's a big healthy lad you've got yourself, there," Jackie called after them. "You'll be needing the double bed tonight."

"Gran!" Joona yelled back. But she was smiling up at Lawrence, hunting his approval. He managed to smile back.

A kettle was whistling away on top of the Aga when he came back downstairs. He'd managed to find a clean T-shirt in his bag, and Joona had given him a thick apricot-colored sweater to wear on top. The arms were only a few centimeters too short.

He sat at the big oak refectory table in the center of the kitchen, watching Jackie make the tea. She used a china pot, spooning in dark flakes before pouring the water in. He'd never seen tea textured that way before.

"It takes longer, but it tastes better than your microwaved cubes," she said when she caught him staring. "Life's not so fast up here, we've time to let tea brew as it should."

"Fine by me, I could do with some slow living." Jackie sat in a chair in front of a new-model desktop pearl. Its pane was showing a sweater with an elaborate pattern of bright colors. She told it to switch off, and the pane folded itself back into the casing. "I expect our Joona has been filling your head with stories of glorious revolution."

"Not really. She just has a real bug about the companies."

"Aye, well, she blames the companies for splitting up her parents. Her mother used to work for Govett; they handle a lot of the transport for the reclamation plants in town. Trouble was, Govett has an enlightened social policy; they move their personnel around every five years so they don't get stale or deadended. Her father, my Ken, there was no way he was going to leave the Highlands. How that woman didn't realize his commitment to the area I'll never understand." She sighed. "Then he went and got himself killed over in Glen Coe, a skiing accident. Joona was twelve at the time."

"And after that you brought her up here by yourself?"

"Aye. She refused to have anything to do with her mother. Stubborn, she is. Her mother helped us out with money and got her into the Prodi, but that's the only contact they've ever really had."

"I can see why she's so attached to this place."

Jackie poured some milk into a big mug, then used a strainer to add the tea. "Not just to Fort William, it's our whole way of life she's devoted to."

He waved a hand round the kitchen with its age-darkened wooden furniture and scrubbed flagstone floor. Plates, cups and glasses stood along the shelves of a big Welsh dresser, probably all antiques. Copper pots and pans hung above the Aga, along with bundles of dried rosemary that gave off a mild scent. Despite the room's old-fashioned appearance, he could see a modern dishwasher and fridge built into the fitted cupboards. There had been a small cleaning robot in the lean-to outside. The only thing the kitchen really lacked was a texturalizer unit to make up basic food from raw protein cells. He suspected Jackie simply bought precomposed packets from town. A lot of people couldn't be bothered with home preparation these days. "You seem to be doing all right I was worried I was going to be spending my holiday in a mud hut."

"I've a few interests, but the flock brings in enough to get by."

"How does that work?"

"There's a lot of land up here that they can't plant their damn forests on, you know. So we still have mountain sheep, and shepherds, and even sheep dogs. That part of our lives is the same as it has been for centuries."

He frowned. "You don't like the forests?"

"Oh, I don't mind them. But there's a difference between restoration and uberretrogression. These days if the ecological agency finds a clear piece of land bigger than a patio they want to plant a tree on it. It's a direct continuation of the Greenwave policy that came in after protein cells were developed. The old radical Greens saw that as their chance to finally repair the damage that farming had done. It's all a load of bull. Farmers were good for the countryside; they took care of their land. They had to, they depended on it. And I swear there was never so much woodland in Europe before, no matter how far back you go into prehistory to try to justify today's acreage. What we've got now is no more natural than the intensive arable farming that went on in the second half of the twentieth century and first half of the twenty-first."

"What I've seen of it looks magnificent."

"It certainly does, aye. Though you've no idea how many walkers get lost around here every year. And that includes the ones that have full navigation and communications functions in their bracelet pearls. Idiots, every last one of them. Our rescue teams are busy practically the whole year round. And we reckon to lose at least fifty sheep in the trees each season. There's supposed to be fencing, but even the robots can't keep it all maintained."

"Don't forget the wolves," Joona said. She came into the kitchen wearing a baggy blue robe, a big green towel wrapped around her hair. She sat next to Lawrence and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. "They take dozens of sheep each year."

"Aye," Jackie said ruefully as she poured tea for her granddaughter. "Another species reintroduced courtesy of the environmental agency. As if we didn't have enough to contend with up here. But we get by. There's a fair weight of fleeces collected each year, and they keep the likes of me busy."

"You turn the fleeces into wool here?"

"Not directly. There's a couple of small local mills, cooperatives that we keep going; they wash the wool and weave it into yarn. Then it gets sent out to me and all the other crofters that are left up here. I knit it into sweaters like that one you're wearing. There's some that do blankets, and ponchos, and hats, and gloves. All sorts, really."

Lawrence looked down at his sweater, feeling it. "You knit these?"

Jackie laughed. "We're not Luddites, you know. I design the patterns. I've an old barn down at the end of the garden where I've got three cybernetic knitting machines. They do the hard work. I know how to maintain them, mind. I'm quite handy with an Allen key and diagnostic program, I'll have you know."

"All the tourists buy them," Joona said. "Natural wool sweaters sell for a premium. Those damn factory texturalizers can't get the artificial fibers quite right, they just feel wrong. And Gran's designs are best of all."

"So where's the problem?" Lawrence asked. "You're doing what you want, and the rest of society appreciates that."

"The corporations and district parliament tolerate us because there are so few crofters," Joona said. Her earlier good humor had faded. "They wouldn't welcome too many of their kind taking up our lifestyle."

"Now don't go getting her started, young Lawrence," Jackie said. "And you, my lady, can forget about politics for an evening. I get quite enough of that at the association meetings. Boring old farts, they are. So, Lawrence, were you really born on another planet?"

The evening that followed was one of the most pleasant he'd had for a long time. There was no pressure on him at all, no worry. He didn't have to go out hunting girls or drink. It was, he thought, what a real family evening should be like. Nothing like the ones he'd endured in his own home back on Amethi, not forced and littered with expectation. More like the ones he would have wanted his own family to enjoy, the ones they would have enjoyed if things had worked out between himself and Roselyn.

He gave Joona a quick, guilty look. But she just smiled at him. She was helping Jackie make the pasta for supper.

"Traditional Scottish spaghetti," Jackie had announced. They both laughed when he nodded eagerly and said: "Great."

They turned down his offer of help, for which he was quietly thankful. He was left to stroke a huge black cat called Samson, while they busied themselves up at the long counter. A bewildering variety of ingredients were produced from big earthenware pots that were fitted with wide cork lids. The bolognese was mixed, cooked, tasted, remixed.

He did make himself useful lighting the log-burning stove in the parlor. It was soon roaring away, throwing out such a heat he had to take his borrowed sweater off. Jackie produced a malt for supper, which he had to water down to drink.

The spare bedroom—with the double bed—had an uneven floor. When he walked across it cautiously he realized the oak boards were so old they'd hardened into something approaching steel. They creaked occasionally, but they were totally solid. There was no quilt on the bed, only sheets and blankets, which he was dubious about. But the blankets were obviously produced by Jackie and her fellow crofters, brightly colored with a thick weave, so he expected they'd be warm enough. A single light fitting hung from the low ceiling, its cone a lambent yellow, casting mellow shadows. Wind soughed stealthily round the cottage's gable end; he could hear the trees rustling around the garden.

He grinned expectantly at Joona after she shut the door, and hurriedly started pulling his clothes off. Her own movements as she undid the buttons of her blouse were hesitant, which he took as modesty. Which was arousing. By the time she'd finished undressing he was already waiting for her on the bed, determined that, finally, tonight should be good fun.

"Are we having the lights on or off?" he asked.

A troubled expression fluttered briefly over her face. "Off." There was an unspoken of course. She flicked the switch by the door. The faintest moonlight seeping through the curtains allowed him to see her as a dark, flowing shape as she moved toward him. The bedsprings bent and shifted as she climbed on.

Lawrence reached for her immediately, sliding his hands over her body. He cupped her small breasts and began teasing the nipples with his fingers. He licked at her neck, her shoulders, her face. Her breathing quickened and they kissed, his mouth smothering hers.

It wasn't that she didn't respond, exactly. She just wasn't as active as the girls he was used to romping with. He took that as his cue to start whispering suggestions and compliments, telling her of the acts and positions he wanted from her, promising how marvelous she would be performing them. Silently, Joona followed his directions.

Lawrence woke to the sound of some deranged bird being throttled very noisily just outside the bedroom window. Even the old peacocks back home never made so much racket.

At least the night's wind and rain had stopped. Daylight fluoresced the curtains a radiant jade.

Joona was sitting up with her back resting on a mound of pillows. A microsol tube was dangling loosely from her fingers, just like a reefer. She wasn't looking at anything within the room.

He wondered if he should say something about it. Sure, he liked a drink himself. But only when he was out for a good time. Her habit seemed to be on the wrong side of casual.

He settled for stretching elaborately and giving her a broad smile. Truly, there was nothing better than waking up in bed with a naked girl after a night of hot sex. He could feel his erection stirring already at the sight of her little breasts. "Morning," he said, and there was a lot of happy lechery in his voice.

Her focus came back inside the bedroom walls. "Now do that to yourself." Her voice was as calm and dense as the loch outside. "That's what you said."

"I, er..."

"The only time I've ever heard someone say that before was in a porno."

"Ah. Well, it just seemed right. Then." His face was hot as he tried to remember exactly what he had asked her.

"Some of those things you had me do; I don't even know the names for them."

Lawrence wanted to wake up. Now, please. This was not the way it was supposed to be the morning after. A few bashful grins exchanged when you're off-guard and reminiscing, silent acknowledgment how you both got carried away in the heat of it all, but as we're civilized folk we won't actually mention it. Certainly we don't talk details out loud.

"It's never been that way for me before," she continued. "You were so demanding."

"You ... Why didn't you say if you didn't like it?"

"I didn't dislike it. You're my man. We have to meet on that level as well. I wasn't ready for so much at once."

You're my man. What kind of thing was that to say? Hell, this was excruciating. He hadn't a clue what to say. Any normal girl would tell him outright if he'd gone too far. A simple no would have sufficed. He wasn't an animal, he respected other people. "Sorry," he mumbled. And that just came out like he was sulking.

"I felt left out," she said. "That's what hurt me the most. You were having this fantastic time with me, with my body. And I played no part in it."

It was an effort not to put his hands over his ears. He just wanted her to shut up, which was the absolute last thing he could ask right now. Guilt verged toward being a physical pain. He'd been so proud of himself during their lovemaking. And he thought he'd roused her as well. "You should have said. You didn't say anything." Even to his own ears that sounded desperate and defensive.

She put a hand on his arm. "Of course not."

What? He didn't get it, he really didn't. He eyed the microsol again, suspicions bubbling through the turmoil of thoughts. "We won't do anything like that again. Okay?"

"That will be denial. Which is wrong and stupid, and would mess us up. The whole time, I'd just be thinking of what you really want to do to me." Her voice was the kind of sharp monotone used by prosecution lawyers.

Actually, what he really wanted to do right then was get out. Out of bed, put his clothes on, and walk back to Fort William where there'd be a train back to the real world. But he didn't want to leave her. Not just from the extra guilt he'd suffer from running away after last night. There had been good times in the last few days, times when they'd connected, times when they'd cared about each other. That was something that hadn't happened to him since Roselyn.

And didn't all couples have problems? Admittedly not quite as raw as this ... "It won't be denial," he said slowly. "It'll be inclusion. Sex should be for both of us." Hey, fast thinker, Lawrence. It was a good block. She'd obviously accessed way too many self-help pop psychology manuals.

"Yes," she said seriously. "Yes, it would, wouldn't it? We must discuss what we are going to do first. That way we'll know each other better."

He managed not to shudder at the prospect. Sex should be spontaneous and fun, not analyzed clinically before. But if it meant ending this conversation ... "That's that, then." He leaned forward and gave her a quick, awkward kiss.

"Do you want to start now? We could do one of last night's positions again, if you tell me which one."

"No. I think, er, breakfast is good for me right now." It's not cowardice, he told himself, it's just polite and practical.

Lawrence had a distinct sensation of deja vu when they walked into the kitchen. Joona had become clingy again, laughing and smiling, giving him a quick kiss every minute. Touching him for reassurance that he was still there.

He suddenly wondered if the family were Catholics. Roselyn had always said nobody could beat orthodox Catholics when it came to guilt from the enjoyment of sex.

Forget about Roselyn, he told himself firmly. He kissed Joona back and received a bright adoring smile.

"Oh, you two," Jackie chided with a smile. "Cover your eyes," she told Samson.

It was a sunny morning, and when Lawrence accessed the forecast he was assured of clear skies for the rest of the day. They cycled into town, though as soon as they emerged from the woodland around the cottage Lawrence jammed the brakes on so hard he nearly skidded his wheels out from under. Ben Nevis was directly ahead, presiding over a quarter of the skyline. Its peak was still covered in snow, which broke up into jagged ribbons over the massive north-facing ridges of gray-brown rock. Long ribbons of glistening water slicked the near-vertical face. At the base of the rock, scree had spread outward like an invasive tide across the grassy slope.

"Now that is impressive," Lawrence said, and meant it. The sun was shining off the snow, making him squint against the glare. He was intimidated and challenged by the scale of the damn thing, wanting to know what it would be like to stand up there and look down. "You must be able to see half of Scotland from up there."

"We'll take a walk up it if you'd like."

"You're kidding. I'd never get up there without a muscle skeleton. Those cliffs look lethal even for technical climbers, and that scree is damn steep as well."

"You don't go up from this side, silly. There's a walkers' path that leads up from the glen. It only takes a few hours."

"Yeah, right." He gave the mountain a hard look before getting back on his bike.

Jackie had given them a list of things she needed from the town. He suspected it was makework, allowing them to wander around together. He didn't mind.

"Nice town," he said as they walked along the pedestrianized main street. The buildings with their little shops on the ground floor either dated back four centuries, or were good replicas.

"It is now," she said. "The council has cleaned up and refurbished a lot of our old important buildings. There's enough money for that kind of urban regeneration now."

"Hey, does that mean you finally agree that the big companies are good for the economy? They're the ones who generate that money in the first place."

"I knew you'd approve. Fort William's very ordered now it's surrendered to the uniculture. Just how you like things to be."

"All this is a bad thing? I've seen towns in a much worse state than this and I've only been on Earth for five years."

They reached the southern end of the main street, where the main road had been diverted along the side of the loch. The rest of the town was composed almost entirely of houses, spreading back up the shallow slope from the water for over a quarter of a mile. Each one sat in its own lush garden, large enough for several trees. From where they were standing the intense verdant green of new silver birch leaves vied with the cotton candy swarms of cherry blossom to produce the most luminous array. Daffodils and tulips had colonized most of the lawns, speckling the grass with masses of yellow and red flowers.

"Oh, no," Joona said quietly. "This is a lovely place to live, even in winter. All these fine houses are well built and well insulated, and if you're ever invited inside one, tastefully furnished, too. Something like ninety-five percent of the town's housing was built in the last two centuries. They leveled the old housing estates that were put up before the building industry started using robotics; those kind of highdensity houses were never made to last—not like Gran's cottage. So now we've got one house where there used to be two or three."

"Money, again."

"Yes. But that's not the only factor. The town's population is down almost twenty-five percent since the twentieth century."

"I thought the rural population has been declining ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution."

"It has. But I don't mean that. The total population is down, and still falling. That's why you can have bigger houses and gardens these days without putting pressure on the environment."

"Not having farmland helps, too, I'd imagine."

"Yes. It all fits together neatly, don't you think?"

The way she said it betrayed how scornful she was. He didn't reply.

Joona led him into a quiet cafe on the main street. The young waitress behind the counter greeted her warmly, and the two of them had a few quiet words. Lawrence found a free table near the window. Their hot chocolate arrived a minute later, along with some fresh-baked muffins. A small paper bag was passed to Joona, who vanished it into her coat pocket She put three EZ tens on the table. There was no change.

Lawrence blew across the top of his mug. "Does Jackie know how much of that stuff you use?"

"You mean, does she care? Half of this is for her, Lawrence. Our kind of lifestyle has always included narcs of one kind or another."

"I still think you should ease off a bit."

Her blank face clicked on, as if she'd already inhaled a microsol tube. "Thank you for the interest. It's not necessary."

That night they did talk about what they would do in bed. It wasn't as bad as he was anticipating. Actually, it was quite arousing, almost as if he was her tutor, a reasonable enough male fantasy. At least it put their relationship back on what he considered a more even footing.

The next few days were spent in and around Fort William. They visited the theater: twice to watch live plays, once to see a cinema screening of Cameron's Titanic. Lawrence helped Jackie out around the garden, which had suffered the usual winter's worth of neglect and damage. A few broken branches needed sawing off. Fenceposts had snapped. He spent an entire morning stripping down and cleaning her ancient gardening robot, trying to get the rusty mechanical components to run smoothly again. The blades on the mower attachment's cylinder had to be taken to one of the shops in town for sharpening. Another morning was spent helping out with the knitting machines. They were housed in a barn at the end of the garden, a stone building as old as the cottage, with an open truss roof that was elegant in its simplicity, sturdy beams of thick untreated oak holding up the thin lathing that the slates were nailed to. But it was dry inside, if not terribly warm. The three machines clattered away enthusiastically, slinging out their finished sweaters every few minutes. They changed over the bales and refilled the dye chambers, then packed the finished sweaters into boxes ready for collection.

At the start of his second week, they climbed the Ben as Joona had promised. It was a short bike ride from the cottage to the visitor center perched on the banks of the River Nevis, which meant they were among the first to arrive that morning. They locked the bikes into the rack, then pulled on their walking boots.

The trek was a lot easier than he was expecting, just as she said it would be. Once they crossed the small bridge by the visitor's center, they picked up a simple track running along the side of the hill, heading steadily upward. It was paved with rough stone, with neat steps cut in on the steepest parts, which seemed slightly incongruous for a supposed wilderness walk. Joona told him that the Scottish Environment Agency had to maintain it at this standard to prevent erosion. It had to cope with thousands of walkers during the course of the year.

As they climbed he could see more and more of the glen with its astonishingly green vegetation stretching away below him. The path had already started to lead through the huge swath of bright, fresh bracken that had sprung up along this section of the hill. Small wooden bridges took them over narrow fissures.

It wasn't long before the path curved around into a deep, grassy cleft with a stream at its head, white water coursing noisily through the rocky gully it'd cut into the slope. They walked toward the water, then suddenly switched back to climb the steepening slope at a reasonable angle. Another turn brought them out to a marshy saddle with its own lochan of dead, peaty water. Lawrence took a look at the vast scree-smothered slopes looming above them and sighed in mild dismay. He still couldn't see the actual top of the mountain yet. They stopped for a while above the lochan to drink some tea from their flasks and put on another layer of clothing. It was getting colder with every meter they ascended. The air below the cleft had been perfectly clear, giving them grand views across the beautiful Highland peaks. Here the mountain was accosted by thin strands of mist pushed along by the constant wind, reducing visibility.

For the next stage the path zigzagged up a steepening scree-covered slope. The tufts of grass and heather became less and less frequent until it was just stone and raw soil under their feet. Each sharp turn in the path was marked out by a cairn. Slush began to build up on Lawrence's boots as he trudged onward. Patches of snow appeared more frequently on either side of the path. The mist was thickening. He couldn't see the bottom of the glen anymore.

"It's so clean up here," he said as they stopped for another rest. "I love it."

Joona eased herself onto a boulder and pulled the flask out of her backpack. "I thought your whole planet was clean."

"It is. But that's a different sort of clean. I was expecting Scotland to be different. You had so much heavy industry around here, I thought there'd be more... I don't know, remnants. Streams that are half rust from all the old machines dumped in the lochs, mounds of slurry out of abandoned coal mines, that sort of thing."

"Scotland's heavy industry was mostly down south. Besides, you saw the reclamation plants outside town; they're busy little bees."

"Yeah." He'd noticed them on the first morning when they cycled into town, gently disturbing the landscape on the other side of the River Lochy from Benavie: underground factories strangely reminiscent of the chemical plant on Floyd, long flat-topped mounds covered in lush grass. This time there were no heat exchange pillars on top, only rows of black vents that could have easily been overlooked. The real giveaway to how much industry was hidden below the earth were the pipes running down the rugged side of Creag Chail above them: twenty wide concrete tubes that emerged from the mountainside a couple of hundred meters up only to vanish into the ground behind the mounds. They carried enough water down from the Highlands to power the whole reclamation site.

Joona told him the site had grown up from a single aluminum plant that had been built there in the twentieth century to take advantage of the hydro power. As the Brussels parliament of that time slowly started to introduce stricter legislation governing recycling, the plant had expanded, with subsidiaries springing up to reclaim other types of materials.

Now almost all of Earth's consumer products were designed so that at the end of their lives they could be broken down into their constituent elements, which were then fed back into the start of the manufacturing cycle.

Fort William handled just about every breakdown procedure, from the original aluminum cans to electronic components, glass to concrete, and the whole spectrum of polymers. One of the most modern facilities of its kind in the world, it employed everything from smelters, catalytic crackers and v-written enzyme digestion right up to ionic fission for toxics. Junk from all over Europe arrived by train, ship and canal barge to be sorted and extracted.

"I guess there's not much pollution these days," he said.

"Not in the industrialized nations, no, not after the Green-wave. Even the nonindustrial regions like Africa and Southern Eurasia are relatively clean as well. It's not in the corporate interest to foul up their future territory."

"Joona, you've got to stop looking at everything so cynically. Just because people have different goals from yours doesn't automatically make them evil."

"Really?' She gestured down the glen. "One day if they have their way the whole world will be just like this. Everyone living in their big cozy house in their tidy suburban estate."

"Yeah, terrible. Imagine that, everybody having to put up with low crime and good medical benefits."

"But no freedom. No difference. Just the corporations and their uniculture."

"That's bull," he said. "People have been complaining about multinational companies and creeping globalism since the middle of the twentieth century. The world still looks pretty varied to me."

"Superficially it is. But the underlying trend is unification. National economies are becoming identical, and it's all due to the corporations."

"Fine by me. I have no objection to them investing money in poor countries and spreading their manufacturing base. It gives everyone a chance to buy a stake."

"There is no chance. If you want to get any kind of decent job, then you have to join up. And once you're in, so's your family."

"Your family benefits from the stake, yes. You get a say in what school your kids go to, everybody receives medical benefits, there's a good pension at the end. Stakeholding is a great social development. It involves, motivates and rewards."

"It destroys individuality."

"Taking a stake is the choice of the individual."

"A forced choice."

"Life choices usually are. Look at me, I took my stake in Z-B because it's the only one with a decent policy on interstellar flight. Other companies have different priorities, the choice is endless."

Joona shook her head wearily. "I will never sell myself out for a fancy house and full medical coverage."

She was rejecting everything her mother was a part of, he realized. "Then I'm happy for you. Your principles make you what you are. And that I like."

She gave him a brief grin, and sat up. "Come on, not much farther now."

After the last zigzag in the path, they were walking over a vast field of loose stone. The route ahead was easy enough to see through the thickening mist; a thousand footsteps had worn the thick covering of snow down to a compacted slushy brown trail. As they moved forward, the mist became patchy, with the wind propelling it along. Nothing else seemed to change. The path was the same ahead as it was behind. Occasionally, large boulders poked up through the snow. Other people on the path would appear as dark shadows in the brightly lit vapor before resolving into focus.

Abruptly, the ground fell away. They were standing at the top of a cliff. The base was invisible in the mist below.

"Almost there," Joona said cheerfully.

A few hundred meters brought them to the top of the Ben. Lawrence held back on his disappointment It was just a flat uninspiring patch of snow-covered ground close to another section of the cliff. The mist meant they couldn't see more than fifty meters. Over the centuries there had been several structures built around the concrete survey marker that was the absolute pinnacle. Broken walls of stone protruded from the snow, outlining these ambitions of the past Not one of them had a roof. The only intact building was a rescue center, a modern composite igloo that had a red cross on the side, and a small aerial protruding from the top. It was almost buried by snow. Lawrence spotted several small flat stones that had been laid carefully against it. When he bent to examine one he saw an inscription had been scratched on the surface. A couple of lines of poetry that he didn't recognize, then a name, and two dates, ninety-seven years apart.

"Not a bad place to be remembered in," he muttered.

They made their way over to the survey marker and climbed up it, just so they could say they had actually reached the top. The mist was starting to thin out when they made their way over to one of the collapsed walls where other walkers were huddled. Once they hunched down out of the wind they opened their lunchboxes. Jackie had packed them some thick beef sandwiches. Lawrence wasn't particularly hungry, the cold had taken his appetite away, but he munched away at one of them anyway.

Then the mist cleared completely and he stood up to look at the view. "Oh wow." You really could see half of Scotland. Mountains and glens and forests stretched away into a hazy horizon. Long tracts of water sparkled dazzlingly in the brilliant sunshine. He stared at it in a mixture of wonder and hopelessness. How could Amethi ever hope to achieve vistas such as this? All that effort...

Joona cozied up beside him. "When it's really clear you can see Ireland."

"Yeah? Have you? Or is that just a local myth for gullible tourists?"

She slapped at him playfully. "I have seen it. Once. A few years back. I don't come up every day, you know."

The sun was bright enough to make him squint. And the wind was bringing tears to his eyes.

"Stay here."

She said it so quietly he thought he was mistaken at first. Then he saw her expression. "Joona... you know I can't."

"Yes, you can. We're that new society you're looking for, Lawrence. This is where you can have your fresh start. Down there in the glens are free people building their own lives and doing what they want with them."

"No." He said it as gently as he could. "This is not for me. I've loved being here, especially with you, but I have to go back eventually. I'm too different."

"You're not," she insisted. "Your precious officer college rejected you, and you found us, me. It's inevitable. You must see that."

It was that earnestness of hers again. Sometimes it made her the strongest character he'd ever known. But there were occasions when it betrayed a worrying degree of vulnerability. She really didn't understand what went on around her, insisting on her own interpretations of events.

"Don't do this," he said. "We've had a great time together, and there's still another week to go."

"You have to stay, Lawrence. I love you."

"Stop it. We've only been together a few days."

"But don't you see how well you've fitted in here?"

"I'm a guest," he said in exasperation. "What the hell could I do here? Carve statues of Nessie for tourists?"

"You're a part of our lives. You lived with us. You made love to me. You even ate real food. All of this you welcomed."

"Joona, I stayed a few days. We're having a holiday romance, that's—" His subconscious sent out a disconcerted warning, almost like a physical jolt. "What do you mean I ate real food?"

"Real food." Her entreating smile never wavered. "Vegetables grown from the soil."

"Oh shit!" His hand came up to cup his mouth, and he stared aghast at the half-eaten sandwich. "Is this—is this?" He couldn't even bring himself to ask it. Not that. In his schooldays he'd always been revolted by the notion his ancestors had been forced to farm so they could eat—all the history class had.

"Aberdeen Angus beef," she said. "The best there is."

"Is it real?" he yelled.

"Well, yes," she said, oblivious to his horror. "Old Billy Stirling keeps a herd of them down past Onich. He slaughters a couple every month. There's quite a demand for it from the crofters. Gran always gets her meat from him."

Lawrence's legs gave way, pitching him forward. He vomited onto the snow, his whole stomach heaving violently. The spasms lasted for ages. Even when there was nothing left to bring up, his muscles were trying to squeeze out the last drops of acidic juices.

Finally, when he was through, he was on all fours with his limbs shaking unsteadily. He scooped up some snow and wiped it across his forehead, then tried to chew it to take the taste from his mouth.

"What's the matter?" Joona asked.

"What?" He looked up to see her frowning in concern. Several other walkers had come over to see if they needed help. "Did you say what's the matter?"

"Yes." She looked confused.

"You gave me a piece of a fucking animal to eat, and you ask me what the fucking matter is. An animal! A living creature. You're fucking crazy, that's my problem. You fucking... oh hell. How long have I been eating this shit?'

Her expression became pained. "You've lived our life with us, Lawrence. What did you think we ate?"

"Fuck it." He thought he was going to vomit again. The muscle reflex was certainly there, the inside of his mouth sopping wet, but by now there really was nothing left to bring up. He smeared some more snow against his head and slowly rose to his feet.

"Lawrence." Her voice was urgent, becoming shrill. She held out a hand to steady him.

He twisted from her reach. "Stay away from me. You hear? Stay away, for fuck's sake." He stumbled away from her, then managed to get his legs under control and picked up speed. Joona took a few paces toward him. "Lawrence!" she cried. "Lawrence, I love you. You can't go."

He started jogging down the track of compacted snow. "Don't call. Don't come after me. It's over." He stopped and turned to face her. "Over! Do you understand that? It's over. And I am leaving." He glared at their small bemused audience. "Thank you, and good-bye."

By now he'd regained almost full coordination. He ran. Ran down to the zigzag section of the path. Slowed slightly as he pounded over the slippery loose rocks and scree. Kept on jogging until he was long past the stream running down the cleft. Even then, when he was exhausted and dizzy from effort and shock, he kept moving fast along the final descent.

He took his bicycle from the rack at the visitor center, and pedaled to the train station in town. From there he caught the late-afternoon train to Glasgow. Changed for Edinburgh Waverley, where he could get an express to Paris. He had to wait two days in the French capital until there was a seat on a Z-B flight back to Cairns. He spent most of it drunk, moving from cafe to cafe in the old artists' quarter, trying to blot out the memory of the madwoman and everything he'd eaten at the cottage.

He never tried to contact Joona again. There was never any message from her, either.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Ebrey Zhang had finally imposed a ban on Z-B personnel leaving their barracks after eight o'clock in the evening. It had been yet another fight in a marina nightclub, resulting in another squaddie with serious stab wounds, that had eventually forced his hand. He knew it was going to be unpopular and bad for morale. But he didn't have any choice. No matter how well supervised the platoons were (and his first diktat had been that they had to be accompanied by their NCOs when they went out), there was always a disturbance of some kind, invariably resulting in injuries, and property damage, and worsening public relations—not, he was the first to admit, that they could get much worse.

So he'd called a staff meeting and announced his decision. Predictably enough, the officers had voiced their concerns. He'd said he understood, and that as compensation they could increase the amount of drink available in the bars of the hotels they'd taken over as barracks. Platoons on night patrol, though, were now under orders to arrest any Z-B personnel they found outside.

That one order had completely wrecked Hal Grabowski's life. Memu Bay was bad enough when he was allowed to get out and blow off steam every few days. But this was like the end of the world. Bringing more beer into the hotel bar was no use at all. Hal had never been one for getting wildly drunk every night, and certainly it was no substitute for getting out He hated being in the same building the whole time, with the same people, bitching about the same things, eating the same menu day after fucking day. The barracks hotel was worse than prison.

But he might just have managed to tolerate that if it hadn't been for the one thing completely absent from his life. What he wanted most, as he told everyone who would listen, was pussy. And lots of it. Their current existence was like being fucking tortured. Every day when he was out on patrol, the streets would be full of girls wearing next to nothing in the bright hot sunlight. Laughing, smiling, having a good time right in front of him. He wasn't supposed to say anything to them: the Skin meant he couldn't even smile on the off chance he earned a smile back. And now his single opportunity to get to meet a girl had been snatched away. The sarge had been sympathetic, but he said he couldn't bend the rules for anyone. Sorry. Hal thought his head was going to explode; right after his dick. He didn't even care about the order, that was nothing. The fact that it had to be broken was obvious. His only problem was how.

He had to wait until eleven o'clock when the hotel's main kitchen had finished for the night and the staff had all gone home. A squaddie from Wagner's platoon, a guy his own age and with a similar problem, had told him about the route out. The kitchen had a door that opened into a small backyard. There was only one security sensor covering the area, a motion tracker wired straight into the AS. Armed with the codes, which the squaddie had also provided, Hal spent half an hour that afternoon infiltrating the sensor's management program. He hadn't shut the little unit down; that would have put everyone's life on the line. Instead, he'd altered the diagnostic routine, making it repeat two hundred times instead of its usual once; the check that normally took three seconds now took over three minutes, with the sensor itself inactive while its support circuitry was analyzed. The diagnostic automatically ran at twelve minutes past the hour, every hour. His alteration would operate for that night only, then wipe itself after 3:00 a.m., allowing the program to revert to its default setting.

There was nobody left in the kitchen. He made his way past the stainless-steel benches and waited by the back door until the clock function on his bracelet pearl read twelve past eleven. He opened the door and stepped outside. There was no alarm. The yard measured three meters by fifteen: it was used as a store, with empty boxes and beer barrels stacked up against the walls ready for collection. Hal hurried down to the far end and scrambled up the boxes, to peer over the top of the wall. Nothing moved in the dark alley on the other side. He swung over and dropped down.

His luck was in. A taxi was parked on the side of the road twenty meters from the alley. The driver was reading something on his media card; but the yellow vacant light was on. Hal opened the back door and sat down.

The driver looked up, examining Hal in the mirror. "Where to, sir?"

"Marina district." Hal pulled his collar up, hoping it hid the valves on his neck.

"Sure thing." The driver spoke to the car's AS and they pulled away from the curb. His hands rested lightly on the wheel, allowing the AS to steer.

"Hey, er, you know this town pretty well?" Hal asked.

"Sure. I was born here. Took a trip to Durrell once. Didn't like it."

"I've not been out much recently, not since I got here. That is, not by myself, you know. I haven't gotten to meet too many people. You see where I'm coming from here, man?"

"Guess so. You want to meet people. Marina's the best place for that."

"Right. But I want to meet a girl. I want to be certain I meet a girl. You know anywhere a guy like me with some money in his pocket could be real certain about that?"

The driver grinned into the mirror. "Hey, relax, buddy. We're all human here. I know a decent cathouse that'll take care of you." He disengaged the AS and began steering manually.

The house was in one of Memu Bay's better residential streets, a big three-story building set back from the pavement by a narrow front garden. Hal opened the gate in the cast-iron fence and gave the taxi driver a glance. The driver gave him a thumbs-up and drove off. There was no one else on the street. "Fuck it," Hal grunted. He went up the three steps to the glossy black front door and rang the brass bell.

It was opened by a middle-aged woman in a glittery red cocktail dress. She had just too much makeup on for her to be a respectable house owner. At least the driver hadn't been jerking him around. Hal grinned. "Evening, ma'am."

She pursed her lips, looking him slowly up and down. Her gaze lingered on the valves now jutting over the top of his collar. "Can I help you?"

"I hope so. I'm looking for some company tonight"

She took a half pace forward and looked both ways along the street "Are you recording, Officer?"

"I'm off duty, and getting my ass busted is the last thing I need right now."

"Very well." She gestured him in. "We have to be careful, you understand."

"Yes, ma'am. Same in my hometown." The hall had a marble tile floor and a high ceiling. A big crystal chandelier hung from a long brass chain, shedding a bright light It could have been an ordinary house, except that someone had draped gauzy white fabric from just about every surface, giving it an odd chintzy appearance. A broad staircase led up from the rear of the hall, curving into a landing that ran around the second floor. Two girls wearing simple white cotton dresses with lace-up fronts leaned on the rail, peering down at him. One of them winked. It was all he could do not to wolf whistle at them. This was the right place all right Classy.

"Humm." The tip of the madam's tongue licked at her lavender-colored lips. "We've never had an alien here before."

There was a nasty moment when he thought she was going to be the one. Not that he would have minded too much, but he was kind of looking for someone younger. Hal grinned roguishly. "I might be an alien, but I'm still compatible, ma'am."

"Before we go any further, I'm afraid there is the question of money. Which also has to be compatible." She told him a figure that made him hesitate. Goddamn locals, they knew he was desperate—but then everyone who came here was. Under her level gaze he pulled out a thick wad of bills and handed over most of them.

"Are there to be any unusual requests placed upon the lady in question?" the madam asked. "Understand, we can provide almost anything you ask for. But I have to be informed in advance. It will avoid any alarm and subsequent unpleasantness."

"No, I just like it kinda straight, you know. Nothing too weird."

"I see. And you are a young man. A virile man."

"Hey. You know. I keep in shape."

She arched an eyebrow suggestively. "I can see that. There are several of my ladies who probably have the stamina to keep up with you. Though certainly not all."

Hal knew he was grinning like a baboon. Didn't care. He was getting hard already.

"Micha, perhaps," the madam pondered. "Although she is very experienced. Perhaps that is off-putting to you?"

"Anyone who knows what they're doing in the sack is okay by me."

"Perhaps." The madam tapped a manicured finger to her lips, as if Hal were an exceptionally vexing problem. "Yes. I think Avril for you. She is very young, which is exciting, no?"

"Oh yeah." It took a lot of control not to yell.

"Very well. This way." The madam beckoned and started up the stairs. Hal followed hot on her heels. Both of the girls at the top of the stairs pouted at him as he went past.

The madam opened one of the doors around the landing. When he saw what was waiting for him, Hal almost shoved her out of the way. He couldn't believe the girl standing by the big bed inside. Back home she probably wouldn't even have been legal. Avril was lean and tanned, with fine shoulder-length chestnut hair framing a coy smile. She was wearing sports gear, very short running shorts and a Lycra halter top that was tight enough to hold up her pert little breasts and outline their nipples.

"Jesus H. Christ," Hal growled between his teeth.

The madam bowed slightly. "Until later." She closed the door.

Hal spent a long moment staring at Avril as his breath grew hotter, then moved purposefully across the room.

* * *

To start with, it was a standard missing-person report. Gemma Tivon waited for three hours past the time her husband usually arrived home from the night shift before trying to open a link to his bracelet pearl to ask where he'd gotten to. There was no reply; the datapool communications management AS reported there wasn't even a standby link to his bracelet. It was switched off. He never did that Gemma called the spaceport and asked if Dudley was working some unexpected overtime. The department supervisor told her no, then got the security people to check the parking lot and the gate log. Dudley Tivon's car wasn't in the lot. The gate log showed he'd signed out at seven minutes to six that morning, slightly earlier than usual.

Because they were conscientious employees, the spaceport immediately called the police and sent someone around to Gemma Tivon. The police accessed the local traffic regulation AS and used its log to track Dudley's car after it left the spaceport. As usual, he'd driven along the main highway back to the city; then his routine changed. He'd turned onto Durrell's outer beltway and continued on eastbound for another three junctions. After that he'd taken a minor road, then turned off that for an unmonitored track leading through a forest. There was no record of the car coming out of the forest on any of the approach roads.

As the spaceport was pressing hard, the police sent a couple of patrol cars into the forest and dispatched a spotter helicopter. It took them two hours, but they eventually found Dudley's car under a big pine tree. The interior had been soaked with some inflammable liquid and set alight. A forensic team was immediately sent to the scene, along with three more cars.

The Zantiu-Braun AS that monitored all capital zone police activity tagged the case for attention anyway because of the strange circumstances. The Third Fleet intelligence agency AS also tagged it, but for a slightly different reason: Dudley Tivon was connected with spaceflight, and Gemma was collateral.

Five minutes after the patrol car officer informed her dispatcher they'd found the car and it had been deliberately set alight, the relevant case datapackage was delivered to Simon Roderick's DNI from his personal AS.

"A cold trail, unfortunately," he said as Quan and Raines arrived in his office. "Over four hours now since the car was abandoned and torched."

"We can divert some of our helicopters to the forest to help with the search," Quan suggested.

"No," Simon told him firmly. "We don't initiate anything. I don't want us to draw attention to our interest If the police want our assistance they can apply for it through the appropriate channels. In any case, simply finding poor old Tivon's body will prove little."

"Forensics might give us something."

"I doubt it. In fact I doubt we'll ever find the body. If our opponents have any sense, and as far as I'm concerned, they have plenty, the body won't even be in that forest. Besides, I'm not interested in how he died, only why."

"He'd delivered something to them and wasn't necessary anymore," Raines said. "Or he'd delivered something to the spaceport for them—a bomb, perhaps—and thought he was collecting his payoff."

"That's very crude for these people," Simon said. "In any case, you're overlooking his wife, Gemma. He isn't going to get involved in any venture that could jeopardize her. No, I think he was in the wrong place at the wrong time." He glanced at the two intelligence operatives. "Run up a week's timeline profile for me. Access every sensor log in the data-pool, starting with last night and working backward from there. When you come back to me, I want to be able to watch his whole day, every single minute of it. And once you've done that, set up a secure link to the Koribu and correlate as much as you can from last night with skyscan."

It took them another five hours, but they were smiling when they returned to Simon's office. "We found it," Quan announced. He had the confident tone of every underling bringing good news to his boss. "Dudley was murdered, and that's only the start of it." His DNI routed the first set of files to the big wall-mounted pane opposite Simon's desk. A time-synchronized split image appeared. On the left was the recording from a camera overlooking the spaceplane parking apron. On the right was a skyscan picture of the same location.

Simon sat back in his seat watching as a man emerged from the bottom of the Xianti 5OO5's airstairs at the same time Dudley Tivon walked out of the maintenance hangar. On the left Dudley continued across the apron into another hangar. On the right, the two men confronted each other, and a second later Dudley was dead.

"I don't know how they did it," Braddock Raines said in admiration. "But there isn't a trace of software subversion anywhere in the spaceport's network. I even had one of our people go out there and physically pull the memory circuits for the cameras around the parking apron so we could go over them here. Nothing. So we know they can play that network like a maestro. Whatever they've got, it's damn impressive."

"Is that camera memory e-alpha protected?" Simon asked sharply.

"No, although it is protected by some excellent encryption. However, the backup memory in the AS is inside an e-alpha fortress," Raines said. "But we think that the subversion occurred at the camera itself, or at least its connection to the network. They had to have their own AS online to generate the false image in real-time. In itself, that's interesting. They subverted four cameras that we know of, and that takes up a lot of bandwidth. Our AS should have picked up that quantity of subversive dataflow within the spaceport network. The fact that it didn't is highly suggestive."

"You mean e-alpha is compromised?"

Raines screwed his face up, unwilling to make a commitment. "It is possible to do what they did without breaking through e-alpha forts. But it's difficult. Of course, so is subverting e-alpha. If they can't actually do that, their capability is close enough to make very little difference to us. The fact that their man got into the spaceplane is proof of that." He ran an earlier skyscan file, showing the intruder walking across the apron and straight into the airstair. "No record of any entry during the night," Raines commented as the figure approached the big delta-shaped spaceplane. "And there, see, when he arrives at the airstair he doesn't need to physically tamper with the security lock. The software's already been configured to admit him."

"You drew up a timeline for the intruder, of course," Simon said.

The two intelligence operatives swapped a mildly worried glance. "We tried. We couldn't even establish when he entered the maintenance hangar, let alone when he arrived at the spaceport. The only sensor data we can trust is from sky-scan, and that's too limited to build up any kind of detailed profile."

Simon cursed quietly. There had been many times down the years that he'd suggested a greater satellite surveillance capacity during asset-realization campaigns. It had never moved past the proposal stage. If he was honest with himself, even he couldn't justify the expense of such coverage. He was just used to having that resource available. But Earth with its swarms of low-orbit satellites was unique. Out here, the best Z-B could offer its strategic security forces was enough satellites to provide constant coverage of the most strategic sites. Inevitably that meant the spaceport and the headquarters in the capital. The ground footprint did allow some overlap around each zone as the satellites orbited overhead, but not much. Looking at the fuzzy image of the intrader's head, he was thankful that the small skyscan flotilla had gone unnoticed by the resistance group. So far, it was turning into Simon's sole advantage.

"You must have tracked Tivon's car leaving the spaceport."

"Yes," Raines said, happy to appear positive again. He directed the requisite files onto the pane. Skyscan showed a small cargo robot trundle along the deserted parking lot at five o'clock. The intruder was walking toward Tivon's car from a completely different direction. They arrived at it simultaneously. The intruder opened the trunk and the robot deposited a sealed crate into it before rolling off along its route. Elapsed time was five seconds. The robot had barely halted.

Simon watched the intruder close the trunk and get into the car.

"He sat in there for forty minutes before he left," Raines said with respect. "Driving out at five might have drawn attention to the car. So he waited and left a few minutes ahead of Tivon's usual time. How's that for keeping your head?"

Simon kept staring at the pane. "Car profile?"

"It left the skyscan footprint twelve kilometers beyond the spaceport. He just kept driving along the main highway without stopping."

"Do you have an image of his face?"

"Not really. He tended not to look up; I'd guess he's quite surveillance-smart." A picture appeared on the pane, looking down on the intruder in the parking lot. He had tipped his head back slightly to study something a little higher than he was. It expanded into a collage of blurred pixels the size of golf balls. "And that's with AS enhancement. It drew us several possibles from that." Five high-resolution faces appeared on the pane, each time a man under thirty, and all with the same general bland features.

"They won't be any use." There were disappointingly few distinguishing features in the extrapolations, Simon thought, even the characters in AS-generated i-soaps were more real than this. "And he's not even wearing a hat," Simon said thoughtfully. He gave Adul Quan a pointed look. "Remember the last time we had an incident like this?"

"The bar in Kuranda," Quan said. "Just before we left Earth. Do you think they're related?"

"Difficult to see how. Anyone who wants to keep below our horizon must invariably use the same tradecraft." He grimaced at the row of five impassive faces, impressed at the audacity and resourcefulness of the intruder. In all the campaigns he'd been on, Simon had never encountered a threat quite like this one. He couldn't help wondering why Thallspring of all places should produce this style of quietly lethal resistance movement. "No, I'm not quite ready to believe in interstellar conspiracies. We need to focus on the immediate threat. How long was he in the Xianti for?"

"Seventeen minutes," Quan said.

"Long enough for anything. Has it flown today?"

"Yes, sir. It took a cargo up to the Norvelle this morning. Landed at thirteen-thirty-five. No problems filed with flight control. It's undergoing standard preflight checks and refueling ready for another cargo run, scheduled for eighteen-twenty." Quan looked directly at Simon. "Do you want us to stop it?"

"No. Which starship is it scheduled to dock with this time?"

"The Chion, sir."

"Change it to the Norvelle again. If it has taken anything hostile up there, I want any possible contamination to be as restricted as possible."

"Yes, sir."

"After it's unloaded its cargo I want a mechanical fault declared, something that entails its docking in the Norvelle's maintenance bay. Braddock, I want you to get up to the Norvelle on the following flight. You are to carry instructions from me directly to the captain. Once you're up there, I want you heading a small army of the best technicians we've got. You're to rip that damn spaceplane apart, take it down to its individual molecular strings if you have to. But I want to know exactly what our friend was doing in there, and what he's left behind. Understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"Very well. And from now on we're to operate under the assumption that e-alpha has been compromised—that includes our communications. The one thing we cannot afford now is to tip our hand to them."

* * *

The police on Thallspring, as with police forces on all the human worlds, had very precise regulations on how to deal with every situation and crime their individual officers encountered. This body of knowledge had been painstakingly assembled over decades and was in a constant state of revision thanks to several factors such as legislation, failed court cases, successful court cases, devious lawyers, advances in forensics, pressure groups, previously botched procedures, human rights and human failings. Each officer had been trained to follow these procedures to the letter, especially for serious crimes. Cutting corners invariably jeopardized court proceedings.

So when the young girl came staggering into Memu Bay's marina police station at twenty-five minutes past two in the morning, weeping and screeching hysterically that she'd been raped, the desk sergeant knew exactly what had to be done. Detectives with specialist training were summoned, along with a female doctor. The victim was gently led to an interview suite by a female constable, and the whole event recorded.

Procedure insisted that a preliminary statement be taken as soon as possible. Ordinarily this was to ensure that if the alleged perpetrator(s) could be identified a patrol car could be dispatched immediately to the crime scene. A forensic team would also be dispatched to gather evidence.

This time, something unexpected occurred. The girl kept shouting: "He was an alien. I saw the things on his neck."

The detectives who had arrived to take the statement immediately called the precinct commissioner, who promptly called the mayor's office. That was where the second aberration slipped into the smooth running of the system, creating a great deal of anger and shock among the people dealing with it.

A lot of very senior staff from both Zantiu-Braun and the civil administration were woken up and advised what was happening down at the marina precinct station. From there another set of calls went out. The two lawyers regarded as Memu Bay's best were quickly retained by the victim's family (although they offered to waive their fee) and hurried to the precinct station. Inevitably, given the number of people involved at this stage, the media were alerted. All of the news companies respectfully withheld even the slightest rumor concerning the victim's identity from the datapool, though they did give her age as fifteen. What they made extremely clear was that an alien was the chief, and only, suspect.

Once the principal officials and the girl's distraught father had arrived, she was taken to a small examination room. In the presence of a lawyer, the detective in charge of the case and the Z-B legal representative, the doctor took samples of what the media referred to as "genetic evidence" of intercourse. Cameras also recorded her superficial bruising, grazes, torn clothing and swollen cheek. With that ordeal over, the nurse was finally allowed to treat her physical injuries.

The girl was sent home and assigned a social worker trained in victim counseling. The precinct detectives would interview her in more detail once she'd had some time to recover.

Meanwhile the genetic samples were sent to Memu Bay's Medical Forensic Laboratory for immediate analysis, accompanied by the senior detective, the victim's lawyer, the police magistrate, the Z-B legal officer and a Z-B medical technician. The head of department herself had been called in to handle the analysis to make absolutely sure it went correctly. Even she was nervous as she placed a sample of the genetic evidence onto the scan array. It took the AS eight minutes to acquire the full DNA signature.

The detective first ran it through Memu Bay's central criminal register. No matches were found. The police magistrate then authorized a suspension of privacy warrant, which allowed the opening of the town's medical records for a comprehensive search. Again, no matches were found. The detective then formally requested the Z-B legal officer to run a check against their personnel files. Having no grounds to refuse, and bound by Thallspring's laws, he agreed.

Although Z-B's AS could have run the search in seconds and relayed the results back to the group while they were still in the MFL, the detective and his partner, accompanied by the Z-B legal officer, took a car over to the block of hotels that Z-B was using as its barracks. The detective received a full procedural briefing from the magistrate through his bracelet pearl on the drive over. The police commissioner was absolutely determined that justice should not be blocked by some technicality thrown at them by a Z-B legal smartass.

It was 5:32 a.m. by the time all the relevant parties assembled in front of the barracks duty officer. He listened to the detective's request and came out with a formulaic "full cooperation" statement. The file of the suspect's DNA was handed over to an assistant and loaded into the barracks AS.

Seventeen seconds later, a perfect match was confirmed.

Ebrey Zhang had been sitting in his office since half-past-three, drinking bitter coffee and munching nervously on stale croissants. He'd been given briefings from a legal officer and the civil administration AS on where they stood on jurisdiction. He'd had an unpleasant interview with General Kolbe, bringing him up to speed. The only bright spot of the morning was that he hadn't yet received a call from Simon Roderick personally.

But then, as he kept telling himself, nothing was proven yet.

Two cameras covered the scene in the barracks for him. His optronic membrane scrolled the search results as they happened. When the positive result emerged his whole body tensed up as if he'd been struck. He threw his desktop pearl across me wide study as hard as he could. The casing broke when it hit the far wall. "FUCK!"

His aide tried to remain impassive. It wasn't easy. News was pouring into the datapool about the incident. Three reporters were already outside the barracks. Fortunately, it was still early, but it wouldn't be long before a crowd gathered. This was shaping up to be one long, evil day.

On the big sheet screen facing Zhang's desk, the detective was requesting custody of the suspect from the barracks duty officer.

"Sir?" the aide queried.

"Okay," Ebrey said in defeat. "Hand him over."

The aide instructed his personal AS, which relayed the message to the duty officer.

"Get me five platoons in Skin and on duty immediately," Ebrey Zhang said. "I want the police station where they're going to take him to be completely secure. Make that very clear to our dear commissioner, too; I don't care how many of his precious constables he has to take off other duties. There's to be no lynching."

"Yes, sir." He snapped out a quick list of instructions to his AS.

Ebrey watched the scene in the barracks. Everyone was remaining so unnaturally civil it was almost comical. But not with this crime, he told himself. Dear God, this oaf couldn't have hurt us harder if he was in collusion with KillBoy himself. Only then did he think about the girl, and shudder. Ebrey Zhang had a daughter of his own.

"Send someone round to her house," he told the aide. "Get that fucking collateral necklace off her."

"Yes, sir."

Hal stirred in discomfort when the ceiling light came on. There were a lot of excitable voices nearby. A hand shook his shoulder.

"Piss off," he mumbled. He was still half dreaming about Avril.

"On your feet, Private!"

He lifted his head. Sergeant Wagner was standing above the bed, his face hard and contemptuous. Captain Bryant stood just behind him, looking furious and possibly just a little bit scared. There were other people crowding into the hotel room, two of them in local police uniforms.

"Whaa— Sir." Hal pushed the quilt off and clambered to his feet. He didn't salute. He only had his shorts on; it would have looked ridiculous. His heart started hammering. Oh, shit, they found out that I broke curfew.

"Detective," Bryant said with a sharp nod at one of the policemen.

The detective came forward. "You are Halford Grabowski?"

"Er, yes, sir." He glanced at Wagner, hoping for some kind of support. The sergeant's stare was fierce.

"I am arresting you on suspicion of rape."

"Ung." Hal's jaw dropped in astonishment.

"In accordance with the Perlman declaration I am advising you to say nothing at this time. I am entitled to take you from this place to an officially sanctioned holding area, where you are to be questioned with your legal representative present. Please put some clothes on."

"You've got to be fucking joking. Sir?" He turned to the captain.

"Get dressed," Bryant ordered.

"I didn't do nothing. Not that!"

The detective produced a pair of handcuffs. "Come on, son, don't make it any worse."

"You can't do this!"

"Oh, yes, I can."

Hal turned to the captain, pleading. "Tell him."

"While you're here, you are operating under local civil law, Grabowski. We made that quite clear during your briefing. Now put some damn clothes on, or you'll be taken to the station as you are."

Sergeant Wagner held up a pair of trousers. Hal managed a dazed laugh and took them from him.

"I want this room sealed," the detective was telling Captain Bryant. "Our forensic team will need to examine it later."

"I understand. Nobody will come in here."

It wasn't real, Hal was telling himself, none of this was real.

Lawrence Newton came into the room, dressed in a short gray toweling robe. He raked at his disheveled hair as he yawned widely.

"Sarge," Hal yelled. "For Christ's sake, help me."

Bryant held up a warning finger. "You are not active in this case, Newton. When an arrest is being made, nobody from the suspect's platoon is to be involved. Standard procedure. Now get out."

Lawrence gave the captain a reasonable nod, as if the facts were obvious. He turned to the detective. "I'm the kid's NCO. What's the charge?"

"Newton!" Bryant stormed.

"We're taking him for questioning concerning an alleged rape."

"Really. When was it supposed to have taken place?" Lawrence asked.

"Early this morning."

"Okay." Lawrence looked directly at the frantic kid. "Did you do it?"

"Be quiet," Bryant demanded. "Grabowski, I'm ordering you not to reply."

"I didn't, Sarge. Not that. For fuck's sake, you gotta believe me."

Lawrence studied his face for a moment. "I do."

"Oh, thank you, Jesus."

"Hal, finish dressing," Lawrence told him. "Then you'll have to go with the police."

"Sarge!"

"Do it. We'll get a lawyer sorted out for you at this end. Clear this crap up quickly. Meantime, you do as you're told. Understand?"

"Yes, Sarge."

Hal finished dressing and reluctantly let the detective cuff his hands. As he was led away down the corridor all his platoonmates were waiting outside their doors. They shouted encouragement, slapped him reassuringly on the shoulder, told him they'd be on his case right away, no worries. He even managed a few sheepish grins. The last thing he heard as the elevator doors shut on him and his escort was Captain Bryant hissing furiously: "My office, Newton. Five minutes."

There was an angry crowd outside the police station. Hal could hear them from his cell. The chanting. The shouting.

Everyone had been polite to him since they arrived. It was an act, though, he could tell that much. A Z-B lieutenant had ridden with him in the police car, introducing himself as Lannon Bralow.

"I've been assigned as your legal representative," he told Hal.

"You mean you're my lawyer?"

"Yes."

Hal relaxed slightly.

After they got to the station, Hal was shown into a medical examination room and told to take his clothes off. They were put in a polyethylene bag and taken away. Then a doctor arrived and wanted to take samples. Lannon Bralow told him it was okay, and to cooperate. So Hal lay down on the couch and let the doc prod and poke. He only kicked up when the guy started to examine his dick. His dick, for Christ's sake! But Bralow was there and kept saying how it was okay, and everyone needed it done. Hal let it happen, but made the lawyer promise he wouldn't tell anyone else from 435NK9. Jesus, he'd never live that down.

Once it was over, the police gave him a one-piece overall to wear and took him down to the cells. What seemed like hours later, Lieutenant Bralow came in to see him.

"So, like, where are we?" Hal asked. He was a little pissed the sarge hadn't come.

"They're about ready to interview you."

"For what? I didn't do anything."

Bralow forced a smile. "Hal, the girl that's making the allegations ... They found traces of you inside her. I was there when they took the samples. Our own AS identified your DNA."

"It's wrong. I never raped no one. I ain't no fucking animal."

"Hal, we've been running our own inquiry at the barracks.

We know you broke the curfew last night Morkson told us all about the backyard and the motion sensor."

"Shit!" Hal groaned. Goddamned Morkson. What an asshole.

"Hal, now listen, you have to be level with me on this one. Half of Memu Bay is outside howling for your blood. The asset factories are on strike. There's a barricade outside the airport gate so our cargo trucks can't get through. The platoons are being attacked in the streets; we've had to use darts nine times already today, and it's not even noon yet. What the hell happened last night?"

"I went to a goddamn whorehouse. Okay? I mean, Jesus, it's been months since I got me some pussy. I was, like, on fire. And this curfew..."

"Right." Bralow sounded relieved. He opened up his desktop pearl. "Start at the beginning."

The room they interviewed him in was a large office with a big wooden desk and leather swivel chairs. Hal knew for sure this wasn't the usual place for interrogating prisoners. But then there were more people than he was expecting sitting in chairs waiting for him.

The detective, Gordon Galliani, was sitting beside a lawyer he introduced as Heather Fernandes, who he said was representing the victim's family. Two other men were sitting at the back of the room, one in a smart police uniform. Hal had been around long enough to recognize a senior officer when he saw one. The other wore an expensive, conservative suit. His eyes were puffy and red, as if he'd been crying. He was looking everywhere around the room except at Hal.

Lieutenant Bralow sat beside Hal. Captain Bryant was there as well. Which Hal could have done without. He wanted the sarge, or even some of the guys from the platoon. At least Bryant seemed to have calmed down since the morning. He even said a brief hello.

Hal sat down opposite the detective. There were a couple of desktop panes in front of him, each with a holographic pane unfolded and running a test pattern.

"Mr. Grabowski, we're here to try to establish exactly what happened last night," Galliani said with a friendly smile. "This interview is being recorded and can be submitted as evidence in any possible trial. Now, as you know, a very serious allegation has been made against you."

Hal leaned forward on the desk, his hands opening to the detective. "I never raped anyone, okay? I'm telling you the truth, here. And I can prove it."

"Really?" Galliani was momentarily thrown. "How do you intend to do that? We have gathered a lot of evidence that incriminates you."

"Look, I jumped the barracks curfew, okay? I admit that. But, shit, I didn't rape no girl. I went to a whorehouse to get laid. I paid for it, fair and square. Cost me a goddamn packet, too."

"You're saying you visited a brothel?"

"Yeah."

"What brothel? Where is it?"

Hal flinched. "I'm not sure. This taxi took me there. The driver knew it. It's only a few minutes' drive from the barracks."

Galliani waited in silence for a moment. "That's it?" he asked eventually. "That's your proof?"

"Yeah."

"I'm sure if you were to pursue this alibi you would soon establish its validity," Bralow said smoothly. "My client is trying to cooperate."

Galliani sat back and smiled at Hal. "Son, you've had three hours and full access to a smartass lawyer. This bullshit is the best you can come up with?"

"It's not bullshit," Hal said hotly. "I went to a brothel. It was a big smart house, they all were down that street; there was a little garden along the front with iron railings. I don't know the number, but I'll know it again when I see it."

"What time did you leave your barracks?" Galliani asked.

"Twelve minutes past eleven."

"And when did you return?"

"Twelve past two. That's when the sensor was inactive, see? Twelve minutes past every hour."

"If you don't know where this brothel is, how did you get back to your barracks?"

"The madam called a taxi for me. I got back to the barracks about quarter to two. I had to hang around and wait before I could actually get in."

"Did anyone see you?"

"No, man, I wasn't supposed to be there. I hung around in the alley; I guess there weren't even many people on the street that time of morning. But the taxi driver can vouch for me."

"Was it the same driver who took you to the brothel?"

"Yeah."

"I don't suppose you know his name, or even which taxi company this was?"

Hal shrugged awkwardly. "No. But I think he was using AS control when we left. You'll be able to trace him through the traffic regulator logs."

"We'll certainly check."

"And so will we," Bralow murmured. He met the detective's gaze levelly.

"So," Galliani said. "We've established you were out on the streets at the same time this alleged rape took place, and that no one can actually confirm exactly where you were."

"The taxi driver can, the madam can, Avril sure as shit can—" Hal was checking them off on his fingers.

"Avril?"

"The whore I spent half the night screwing. There were a couple of other whores I saw there, as well. Don't know their names, though."

"But you'll recognize them when you see them?"

"Yeah, no problem."

"So all we have to do is find this taxi, and the brothel, and you're in the clear?"

"Yeah." Hal smiled happily. "Yeah, you got it, man."

"So how do you explain your semen being found inside the victim's vagina?"

Hal's smile dried up. "I don't know. It's a sting. A frame-up. It can't be anything else."

"And the girl's story? That you attacked her in Sheridan Park? That you threatened to set off her collateral necklace if she didn't do what you wanted?"

"Hey, that's your bullshit, man. None of that crap happened. None of it. I wasn't in Sheridan Park. She's lying. She's a part of all this."

"All this? So it's a conspiracy, then?"

Hal glanced at Bralow.

"Zantiu-Braun personnel would be the obvious victims of any rogue criminal elements in Memu Bay," the lieutenant said. "And we both know there are some."

"You've been having a tough time from our hooligan element," Galliani said. "But there's no organized resistance group, is there?"

Captain Bryant cleared his throat. "No. There is no organized resistance group in Memu Bay."

Hal twisted around in his seat to stare at the captain. "You've gotta be jerking me off. You were at the fucking soccer match, for Christ's sake. You saw Graham Chapell get blown to shit by KillBoy's bastards. You saw that!"

"We're still investigating the soccer game incident," Bryant said to Galliani. "We're not yet sure what happened."

"Jesus fucking wept."

"So there may or may not be someone, or some group of people, capable of setting you up for rape," Galliani said.

"Damn betcha there is," Hal told him. "It's that bastard KillBoy you should be looking for. Not me."

"Which means the rape victim must be part of the conspiracy?"

"You bet. You call her in here and give her the third degree. She'll crack."

"Strange how this comes back to the oldest conflict the human race has."

"What do you mean?"

"One of you is lying."

"It's her, man, I swear it. She's jerking you around. She's saying everything KillBoy told her to."

Galliani paused, as if considering something. Then he called up a file from one of the desktop pearls. Its pane displayed a girl's face. Hal was very aware that the detective was watching him closely.

"For the record, Mr. Grabowski, have you ever seen her before?"

Hal frowned, not quite understanding what was going on. "That's Avril. How did you get her picture?"

"Avril?"

"Yeah. The whore at the brothel. You do know where it is. Why did you say you didn't?"

"Let us be quite clear about this. You're saying that girl is Avril, whom you met in a brothel last night?"

"Yeah. Have you known this all along?"

"Mr. Grabowski, did you at any time last night have sex with the person you call Avril?"

"What, that's not her real name?"

"Did you have sex with that girl?" Galliani's finger tapped impatiently on the pane.

"Sure. I got my money's worth. I keep telling you. She's the one. I was there in the whorehouse with her last night."

There was another moment of silence. The detective appeared almost embarrassed.

"Mr. Grabowski, did you notice anything out of the ordinary about Avril?"

"Like what?" Hal wasn't committing himself. There was something badly wrong about this, he knew it. Damn but he wanted the sarge to be here.

"Did she, for instance, have a collateral necklace fitted?"

The question surprised him. "No. No way."

"You're sure about that?"

"Hey, I got to see a damn sight more than her neck, man. She wasn't wearing no necklace. What is this crap?"

"I think I've heard all I need to at this point, thank you," Galliani said. "We'll take a break. And I really think you need to have a long talk with your lawyer, Mr. Grabowski."

"Just what the hell is going on?" Hal demanded. "Okay, so I fucked some whore. That's not a crime. She wasn't even much good. I should have had a refund, man."

Someone in the office roared wildly. Hal searched around for the noise, just in time to see the man in the expensive suit charging at him. His face was red and contorted in feral rage, arms held out straight in front of him, hands ready to tear and throttle. He jumped at Hal, who didn't have time to move aside. The two of them crashed to the floor, thrashing about. Then Galliani and the senior policeman were pulling him off. Bralow hung on to Hal, who was game for getting back up and decking the old maniac.

"What the fuck..." he shouted.

The man was quickly hustled out of the door. He was sobbing now, a wretched gulping sound that was clearly audible even after the door was shut.

"This place is a fucking loony bin," Hal announced. "What the hell is going on here?"

Bralow sat down, sighed, then pulled the desktop pearl toward him. The girl's face was still on its pane. "She's the... the alleged victim," he said.

"Avril? No way, man. No goddamn way. I paid for her!"

"That's not her name."

Hal looked at the closed door, suddenly curious. "Who was that? The guy that went for me?"

"Her father. The mayor of Memu Bay. And she does have a collateral necklace. Ebrey Zhang put it on her himself."

"Oh, Jesus fuck," Hal whispered. He sat down heavily beside Bralow as real fright took hold. None of this was making any sense, goddamnit. "Lieutenant, you've got to get me out of this."

"That might be difficult now."

* * *

The Norvelle was in a thousand-kilometer orbit around Thallspring, its inclination of five degrees providing it with line of sight on Durrell each time it passed through the planet's prime meridian. At ten-fifteen in the morning it rose above the capital city's horizon. As the sensors acquired the sprawl of buildings, a low-power laser was fired from one of the huge vehicle's five communications bays, seeking out the East Wing of the Eagle Manor. It was detected by a small electronic receiver unit on the roof, which immediately sent an answering laser pulse back to the starship. With the beams locked on their respective sensors, their width reduced until it was less than two centimeters at the target point, providing a link that could not be intercepted. The rooftop receiver unit was connected to a module in Simon Roderick's office by an armored fiber optic cable. Again, splicing into the cable was impossible. The system provided him with the most secure link possible to the starship. Only five people knew of its existence. Simon had been waiting for the call since he arrived at the office that morning. His usual routine of administrative work had been delegated to his assistants and personal AS. Instead, his time had been spent reviewing information filed under the generic name "The Opposition." As he ran through it all he conjured up probable attack scenarios, which grew steadily more exuberant as the morning progressed. It didn't matter how fanciful he made them, he still couldn't determine what they were actually planning. Nothing quite fit into what was clearly an impressive capability. The more he went over it, the more he was convinced they were holding back, waiting to deliver the hammer blow.

The secure communication module chimed melodically, and a sheet screen on the wall lit up, showing one of the Norvelle's cabins. A man was sitting in front of a freefall work bench, with straps holding him down in the light gravity field. He looked into the camera and gave it a thin smile. "Good morning. It looks very sunny and warm down there today."

Simon settled back behind his desk and looked at the face on the screen. It was his own, but fifteen years older. That particular batch of clones, the SF9s, were notorious for their phlegmatic temperament. Each generation tended to have its own quirk, which they put down to the individuality of the crиche nursing staff and the inevitable influence they exerted during the clones' formative years. The SK2 batch, to which the Simon in the study belonged, were often regarded as the more peppery of the breed. Although they were positively mild compared to the short-tempered SC5s (whose proclivity had sparked a wholesale review of crиche staff screening procedures). But whatever their behavioral nuances, they were all totally dedicated to the company that they controlled.

"Morning," the SK2 Simon replied. "So what's the result?"

"Well, the good news is it wasn't a bomb."

"I never expected it would be. Far too coarse for our friends."

"Young Braddock Raines was most thorough. The space-plane cabin was scanned and analyzed down to a molecular level. He also had the accessible systems removed and reviewed in the starship's lab. There was no detectable foreign genetic residue. However, somebody had opened an access panel. There were metal traces in the Allen screws. The alloy doesn't correspond with the tools issued to our maintenance people."

"Thank heavens for that I was beginning to think they were almost infallible."

"Quite. The panel gives access to several electronic components, including a major network junction. None of the components had any trace of tampering, except the junction. And that took some finding. The nuclear macroscan revealed some very peculiar stress patterns in the casing's molecular structure. Our so-called solid state physics experts are apparently baffled. They don't know what could have caused it"

"Interesting."

"The word is alarming. I don't like the idea of Thallspring having technologies that we don't understand. Especially when they're being used against us."

"Their development has been very well hidden. We've run all the usual financial audits through the Treasury network. They couldn't spot any kind of government funds being diverted for clandestine technology projects in the last ten years."

"Hardly surprising when you consider we're talking about people who can walk into our spaceplanes whenever they feel like it. Whatever they've got it's real enough."

"Assuming whatever the intruder did to the junction gave him access to the spaceplane's network, what do our experts think he achieved?"

"The theory they're throwing around up here is total subversion. The IT boys have dumped the spaceplane's entire AS program into a storage core for analysis. So far they can't find a single extraneous code line. The best conjecture they can come up with is a hidden command compressed into the original code."

"In other words we don't know for certain what the hell the intruder did."

"Absolutely."

"Damn." The SK2 didn't waste time considering the puzzle. That was the advantage of having multiples working on the same problem: whatever solution his clone sibling came up with, it would be the same as the one he would eventually arrive at. And the SF9 had been thinking about this for over an hour already. "Recommendations?"

"This intrusion has to have been some kind of reconnaissance mission. The interest our friends have in the space-plane demonstrates they want to get up here in one form or another, and as it's a Xianti they must be targeting the star-ships as a final destination. If they could fly up already, it would have been done. Therefore, they're still in the preparation stage. For myself, I believe he copied the AS to study our procedures."

"I see. So what else do they need?"

"For a hijacked flight to pass unnoticed, the only other consideration will be communications. We must hope they haven't already been there."

"I'll make the necessary preparations. I take it you consider e-alpha to be compromised?"

"Completely."

"That will have to be taken into account."

"Of course. I'll leave the details to you."

"Thank you. Send Raines down today, please. I'll need him for implementation."

"He'll be on the next flight." The SF9 Simon glanced at a pane, reading the text. "So what policy have you decided to apply to Memu Bay?"

The SK2 used his DNI to consult his personal AS. The daily summaries poured into his brain, neatly tabulated in bright indigo. "Damn," he muttered as the Grabowski rape case scrolled down. He should have run the usual morning review. Problems like this should never arise in the first place. "What the hell is Zhang doing over there?"

The SF9 smiled, content with his little victory. The Simons always enjoyed scoring points off each other. It was healthy competition.

"I'll give it a full investigation," the SK2 said.

"No need. They've already got an appalling asset-acquisition record. Things have to be calmed down. Sacrifice Grabowski to the mob. Then get Zhang to crack down hard."

"Fine," he said dismissively. He was irritated at being caught short on an incident like this.

The SF9 cut the link, chucking contentedly.

* * *

When his car arrived outside the marina police station Ebrey Zhang seriously wondered if he should have put his Skin suit on. The protesters were eight or nine deep on the road and hyped up badly. He shivered as he read some of the slogans they'd sprayed on nearby buildings, saying what they wanted to do to Grabowski. Ten people in collateral necklaces were standing directly in front of the station entrance. They'd chained themselves together. Crude signs hung round their necks saying:

Death before Rape

So Please kill me now

Stones, cans, bottles and what Ebrey hoped was only mud began to rain down on the car, making curiously dull thudding sounds as they dented the bodywork. Ten Skins and a batch of police in full riot armor pushed angry people aside, creating a route for the car.

"Holy shit," Ebrey grunted. A huge brown lump hit the windshield and spread wide. Definitely a turd. The driver had to use the wipers and a whole load of cleaning fluid to smear it away.

"This isn't getting any better," Lieutenant Bralow said. "There's at least as many here today as there were yesterday."

"Same with the asset factories," Ebrey admitted reluctantly. "They're still on strike."

"What does the general say?'

"Get it over with, and quickly."

"Easy for him."

"He's got a point. There's more than just Grabowski to consider." Ebrey indicated the mob outside. "This whole thing has got to be defused. We can't even implement the TB vaccination program right now. How crazy is that?"

"They should be able to move to trial in a couple of weeks."

"Weeks? That's no damn good. Haven't they finished their investigation yet?"

"Almost. Enough to thoroughly trash Grabowski's alibi. We've run our own checks in parallel, of course. Our AS can't find any taxi that could possibly have taken him anywhere, never mind the brothel."

"It exists?"

"No. We think the street he claims he went to was Minster Avenue. They're all private homes for the reasonably wealthy. There's no brothel."

"In other words it's all bullshit."

"Sir, he raped Francine Hazeldine. The best help I can be to him is by making a leniency plea."

"Ah. That was the other thing that the general told me."

"What?"

"We don't leave anyone behind, no matter what the circumstances."

Lieutenant Bralow gave his commander an agitated look, then nodded. "Yes, sir."

The car made it through the station's perimeter and swooped down into the underground garage. Detective Galliani was waiting for them. He said hello politely enough and told them that Margret Reece was waiting upstairs for them.

Ebrey Zhang kept his face composed even though he was seething. He was governor of Memu Bay; he was the one who summoned officials to him.

Not a chance, he told himself bitterly.

The only time Myles Hazeldine had slept at all in the last forty-eight hours was when the family doctor gave him enough sedatives to knock him out. Even those few hours had been twisted with nightmares and helpless fury. The same as his waking hours.

He knew he must keep calm for his beloved Francine's sake. But it was so terribly terribly hard. To make matters worse, she was the one who kept apologizing to him, saying she was sorry she'd stayed out late at the club with her friends. Sorry she hadn't called him, or a taxi when she left.

It was almost as though she was the one comforting him. Which was wrong. Another example of how bad a father he was.

And so the hours dragged by. Pathetic helplessness alternating with utter primitive fury. He never wanted to let Francine out of his sight ever again, wanted to keep her next to him where she could be protected. He also wanted to rip that piece-of-shit alien bastard's heart out of his rib cage and hold it up to the sun, crying out in victory as scarlet blood showered down.

Don and Jennifer had taken over the day-to-day running of the mayor's office. Actually, they'd insisted. The same as dear old Margret Reece had insisted he was never to be allowed near the suspect again. He'd managed to pull rank that first time, playing on sympathy to get into the interview. Damn, but that had been a moment of sweetness, actually getting his hands round the laughing, sneering kid's neck. However briefly.

But no way could they keep him out of this meeting. The first time Memu Bay would be able to stand up to the invader scum and insist on things being played by the book. They wouldn't like that, their own bogus legitimacy being used against them.

He was waiting in the marina station commissioner's office, not far from the one where they'd had the interview, as it happened. The commissioner was there, along with his boss, Margret Reece, and the police magistrate handling the case. Everybody seemed reluctant to look at him, much less talk. That didn't bother Myles. He had nothing to say. And their earnest sympathy only served to remind him what darling Francine had undergone. If he thought about that he would probably break down again.

The door opened and Galliani showed Ebrey Zhang into the room, along with the Z-B legal officer, Bralow.

Zhang nodded politely. "Mr. Mayor." He put his hand out.

Myles just wanted to smash his fist into the bastard's nose. Margret Reece had warned him, but he hadn't forgotten who'd put that necklace around Francine's neck. The chief of police was watching closely, as was the precinct commissioner.

Zhang stepped back, slightly subdued.

"Thank you for coming, Governor Zhang," Margret Reece said. "I asked you here in your role as Halford Grabowski's senior officer."

"I understand."

"My officers have amassed enough evidence to formally charge him with the rape of a minor. The magistrate here has assigned a preliminary trial date. As his commanding officer, I'm asking you to sign him over into full civilian custody for the duration of the trial. I believe that is the requirement that Zantiu-Braun strategic security forces operate under."

"That is correct," Zhang said.

"Good." Margret Reece signaled the magistrate, who walked forward and offered a desktop pearl to the governor. Its pane scrolled a long legal script.

"Thank you," Zhang said. He glanced at the script. "This trial date is in three weeks' time."

"Yes," the magistrate said.

"What is the possible maximum penalty if Grabowski is found guilty?"

"I'm sure you already know," Margret Reece said. "But it happens to be lifetime imprisonment."

"Of course. There is an alternative."

"No, there isn't!" Myles snapped. "I knew it, I fucking knew they'd try and slime their way out of this."

"Myles, please," Margret said. "What alternative?"

"We court-martial him ourselves," Zhang said. "It will be quick, and the proceedings will be fair."

"Are you suggesting ours aren't?"

"Not at all. But neither you nor I want his lawyer to appeal on the grounds that he was given a biased jury. Which given the current state of affairs in this town will be a valid point."

"In other words, you want him judged by your officers?"

"Yes."

"No fucking way!" Myles shouted. "You authorize that custody order. Do it."

"Your police lawyer will be able to join our prosecution team," Zhang said. "That way, you can be assured the case will be made correctly."

"I don't understand," Margret Reece said. "Why a different court? It will look like you're trying to load the judgment in his favor. Or..." She paused thoughtfully. "Are you considering a prison sentence that will be served on Earth? Is that it? If you find him guilty you take him home with you rather than hand him over to our prison service?"

"That isn't actually what will happen."

Myles sat up at that. Despite his turmoil, he was still politician enough to see a deal being offered. "What's the penalty under your court-martial laws if he's found guilty?"

Zhang looked right at him. "Capital."

Myles had never thought of that. The death penalty was expressly excluded from all court action by Thallspring's constitution. How strange that he, the custodian of the founding fathers' liberalism, should now be given the opportunity to go against their original creed. He should of course refuse: it violated everything his culture stood for. "In that case," Myles said, "we agree."

* * *

Nearly a third of the children were missing from school that morning, which saddened Denise. It was another beautiful day, with a hot sun already high in a clear, deep blue sky. A breeze from the sea was just enough to cool Memu Bay's baking streets for people to walk down without being too uncomfortable. So it wasn't the weather keeping them away.

Today was the day Halford Grabowski's court-martial began. The population of Memu Bay was holding its collective breath. After all the unrest and the huge emotional outpouring of anger that accompanied it, people had actually taken a step back. Perhaps they were shocked by the prospect of capital punishment—not that any protested against it. Whatever the reason, the trams were running normally, and most of the shops seemed to be open. There was no sign of any Skin patrol walking the streets. Quite a few people were down on the beach, enjoying the sand and the water. And Denise knew that the hurriedly formed workers committees at the major asset factories were meeting today to discuss going back to work.

Even so, some parents were obviously reluctant to let their little loved ones out of their sight again so soon after days when the whole town seemed ready to explode. Ironically enough, Melanie Hazeldine had been one of those who appeared. Francine had brought her, the two of them riding in the back of a big limousine with darkened windows.

Denise watched from the kitchen as the two sisters kissed good-bye, and Melanie raced on into the school to greet her friends with excited shrieks. She hadn't been in school for a week.

"How are you?" Denise asked quietly when the two of them were alone together.

"Okay." Francine managed a small, brave smile. "I'm really worried what this has done to Daddy. I didn't know he'd take it so hard."

"You can tell him afterward, if you'd like, after the bastards have left."

"Do you think I should?"

"I'm not sure," Denise said honestly. "You'll be shocking him again, that his sweet daughter got involved with a resistance group, and did what she did to help the cause."

"Has it helped? I don't know. I just wanted to hurt them for what they did to William. He was my brother, you know. I never really knew him—I was young the last time round."

Denise put her hands on the younger girl's shoulders, squeezing softly, wanting the contact to emphasize the gratitude she felt. "Oh yes, you helped. Take a look around at what you've accomplished. They can't walk the streets anymore. Do you know what that means to people, not having to bow down and get out of the way because a bunch of arrogant bullies are swaggering down the pavement? Their precious pillaging has taken a financial knock it'll never recover from. They won't make money out of us. You made all that possible."

"Yes." Francine straightened her back and smiled properly. "I did. Poor Daddy."

"Tell him if you think it will help. Let him blame me; he might find that easier. We shouldn't come out of this as the victims, because we're not. They are, now."

"Thank you, Denise." Francine leaned in close and kissed her. "You're so strong. We need you to defeat them. I don't want my children to fear the stars like I've always done since William."

Denise hugged her friend. "They never will. I promise."

After all of the children had arrived, Denise called them together and dished out the media pads. That was always a popular activity. She played them some sing-along tunes as they created a host of wondrous shapes in a rainbow of colors. Each one was held up for her inspection as she walked along. She offered a few suggestions and spoke thousands of words of praise and encouragement.

The children took a break for juice and cookies. Denise sat with them, drinking her own tea.

"Finish the story, miss," one of them asked. There was a chorus of "Please!"

With a small show of reluctance, Denise put down her tea. "Not everyone's here, I'll have to tell it again later." That earned her a round of cheers.

"Okay then," she said with a pantomime sigh. "I suppose I will." After all, she considered, I don't know how much longer I'll be here. The thought dampened her eagerness; even with a future of astounding possibilities opening to her, she would miss these smiling, mischievous faces. Trust and admiration were given so easily at their age. She felt like a fraud for receiving it, which troubled her.

"Mozark took seventeen years to complete his voyage around the Ring Empire. Weeks before he arrived, the kingdom had heard he was returning. There were celebrations on every planet, and when Endoliyn was told the news she burst into tears, she was so thankful that her prince was coming home. No word of the ship and its quest had been heard for over ten years. Which is a long time for even the stoutest mind to hang on to trust "But now the day had come, and millions of the kingdom's subjects gathered around the giant landing field. They waited for hours, staring up into the sky where the galactic core stretched from horizon to horizon, blazing with silver light. Finally they were rewarded with the sight of a tiny black speck high in the air. It grew and grew until its shape became clear, and the mightiest roar of greeting arose from the crowd. The starship settled on the very pad it had left from, which had stood empty these seventeen years waiting for its return.

"Mozark emerged first to be greeted by his father, the king, who wept openly at the return of his son. The rest of the crew were then welcomed with great honor, for although they were not as renowned as their prince, they had played no less a part in the voyage.

"And then, when all the public celebrations were done, Mozark traveled to the palace where Endoliyn lived, and asked for her forgiveness."

"Why?" Jedzella asked in wonder. "What had he done wrong?"

"Which was almost Endoliyn's reply," Denise said, grinning at the youngster. "She also wanted to know what he had done. To which Mozark said he had spent seventeen years away from her, which was unpardonable. They had been in love when he left, and such a separation was not something that should ever be inflicted on a loved one. She laughed, and told him he was silly, and that she loved him even more for embarking on his quest. What other person would sacrifice so much for the ideal he believed in? Then she asked the question that had been on her lips for seventeen years: what did you find?

"Mozark was so shamed by his beloved's question that he bowed his head. Nothing, he confessed, I have found nothing out there that we cannot build or think of for ourselves. In that I have failed you completely. All of this supposedly noble journey was for nothing. I almost wasted those seventeen years.

"Endoliyn was heartened by this small glimmer of hope. And asked him what he meant by 'almost.' He replied that there was indeed one thing that he found. A small, trivial, selfish thing, he said, which is mine and mine alone. And what is that, my love? she asked. He gazed upon her and said, I have come to realize that life is the most precious thing. It matters not where you are, or who you are. All that matters is how that life is lived; and lived it should be, to the full. And I know that my life can only be lived in such a fashion when I am with you. That is the only knowledge that I have returned with. I care not whether my kingdom rises into glory or falls into the abyss, all that I ask is that I share that prospect with you.

"Endoliyn laughed for joy, and said that of course she would live her life with him. And Mozark was overwhelmed with gladness. In due course they were married and Mozark became king, with Endoliyn at his side as his queen. They ruled the kingdom for many a long year. Few could remember a monarch so wise and kind. So, of course, the kingdom did not fall into the abyss, but prospered and continued to provide comfort and protection for all its peoples with serenity and grace."

The children waited for a moment, until it was obvious that Denise had finished. Not a few sullen glances flew among them. No outright resentment, but she knew they felt cheated.

"Is that it?" Melanie asked.

"I'm afraid so," Denise said kindly. "So what have you learned from Mozark's voyage?'

"Nothing!" one of the boys yelled. The others giggled.

"That's not quite true," Denise said. "I've learned a lot, and I think you have as well. The moral of the story is a simple one: This technology we have, and I'm the first to admit that it is a fabulous technology, should not be allowed to blind us to ourselves. Science is not an answer to our problems. By itself it cannot provide happiness, it can only ever help to light the way. We must find that happiness in our own way in the short time we've been given to walk this universe. When you grow up, you should concentrate on what's important to you as a person. In Mozark's case it was his love for Endoliyn, and it took him a voyage around the galaxy before he realized that. Only when he searched for a solution amid the science and minds of his peers did he see how empty such a quest was. The universe is centered on you, for that's the only perception of it you'll ever have. You are the most important thing in it, every one of you."

Mollified, but only just, they sprang to their feet and raced off to the games in the garden.

"Very good, my dear."

Denise turned to see Mrs. Potchansky in the doorway to the school's small kitchen. "Thank you."

"I've been interested to hear how it was all going to end," the old lady said.

"You approve, then?"

"Oh, yes. I still don't think it can quite be rated up there with the classics, I'm afraid. It would need some polishing and sharpening for that. But I'm glad you told it to them."

Denise looked out at the children as they caused their usual mayhem in the garden. "Perhaps I should have given them an ending with a little more oomph."

"If that's the true ending, then that's the way it must be told. Never sell yourself short, my dear."

Denise smiled and stood up briskly. "I never have."

"I know."

There was an edge to the old lady's voice that made Denise pause uncertainly.

"I'm proud of you, Denise," Mrs. Potchansky said. "You've done a wonderful job these last few weeks. Circumstances have not been easy. It gives me some hope for the future."

"We'll prevail, don't you worry."

"Of course you will. Thallspring will." Mrs. Potchansky went back into the kitchen.

Denise listened to mugs and plates being loaded into the dishwasher and wondered exactly what they'd just been talking about.

* * *

Michelle Rake had done well in getting the lab assigned to Josep and Raymond. It was in the botanical sciences block, one of the older university buildings away on the edge of the institution's parklike campus. An avenue of ehretia trees connected it to the central cluster of faculty buildings, their long dark green leaves casting a dense shade over the path underneath. The other students all said that when the panicles of white flowers bloomed they put out a delectable scent, but that wouldn't be for a few months yet. The tall trees and still air gave this section of the campus a secluded air, as if the important work had moved onward and outward, leaving just a few aging academics to tend their plants among the gently decaying facilities.

It was a perfect location for Josep and Raymond to run i-simulations—isolated, yet in the heart of Durrell. The botanical sciences block itself had a network several generations out of date, yet perfectly adequate for their needs. And even now, when life in the capital had settled down to more or less normal, over 30 percent of students were still taking an extended leave of absence. That left few people questioning their presence in the building; botany was never an oversubscribed discipline to begin with.

Cold climate chambers ran along one wall of the lab, shedding a pale violet light through misted-up glass. Their refrigeration cabinet rattled and buzzed in the corner. The two wooden benches that ran down the center of the lab were supporting a fair amount of glassware, resembling a sophisticated high-school chemistry set. Tables under the long windows were covered in clay pots filled with dozens of ugly, bearded cacti growing in bone-dry soil. The ubiquitous black cube of a datapool node was hidden under one of the tables, with three tiny orange LEDs on its front glowing amid the shadows. A Prime program had fortressed it from the rest of the network without alerting the management AS. Inside the cube, its array of neural pearls were generating an image of the Koribu as seen from an approaching Xianti. Josep and Raymond perceived the simulation through their d-written cell clusters, eliminating the need for stim-suits. Sensations slipped directly into their brains as they sat side by side in a pair of old leather armchairs, even managing to give them a modest impression of freefall. With their eyes closed they weren't aware of the botany lab. To anyone observing them, it would have looked as if they were in a deep REM sleep.

Inside the shared environment, Josep was in the Xianti's pilot seat while Raymond and a simulated Denise had begun suiting up behind him. The Koribu was visible through the windshield, a broad conglomeration of machinery, three hundred meters ahead of the spaceplane's nose. Two more Xiantis were also approaching the giant starship, their cargo bay doors folded open. Small one-man engineering shuttles were gliding out to meet them, ready to retrieve their valuable cargo.

"No physical contact with the big mother," Josep said wistfully. "So at three hundred meters' distance we produce the malfunction alert."

Amber graphics appeared on the console panes as well as the windshield, reporting a hydraulic failure in the Xianti's payload bay door actuators. The Koribu's flight controller queried them. Josep kept his conversation within the guidelines they'd gleaned from the spaceport mission data logs.

After the starship's AS had received and confirmed the spaceplane systems data, they were cleared to dock in the starship's maintenance bay. For most minor equipment malfunctions, the spaceplane would be sent back down to the ground for inspection and repair. Maintenance in freefall was a difficult and expensive business: there were few situations that justified it Having an inaccessible cargo was one of them. It was a relatively simple procedure to provide auxiliary hydraulic power to the spaceplane, allowing the payload bay doors to open and the cargo to be removed. After that the doors could be closed and locked against atmospheric entry. The spaceplane would be dispatched back to Durrell for a thorough maintenance overhaul. This scenario also had the added advantage that no one on the starship would actually see what was in the Xianti's cargo bay.

While Josep flew them around the Koribu's cargo section, Raymond finished putting on his suit. It had been specifically tailored for him out of a silver-gray fabric no thicker than paper. In its inert condition the fabric was slightly elastic, allowing him to push his limbs into the sleeves with relative ease. The suit's hood was thicker, almost like a protective sports mask. He slipped it on, and small tubules melded with his nostrils, supplying him with air. His lips were engulfed by what felt like soft dry sponge, absorbing every exhalation. The suit sealed up along the front, then contracted. For a moment his skin felt as if it was being pinched everywhere. Then the shapemorph finished, and he couldn't even feel it anymore. Its surface changed color as its thermal conductivity altered, shedding excess heat from his skin, keeping his body at the temperature he was most comfortable with. His d-written neural cluster received sensory information from sensors on the outside of the hood, complementing his vision.

Finally, he picked up a black, sleeveless jacket and fastened it over his chest It was primarily a harness for several weapons, their power packs and ammunition, although it also had several small gas jet nozzles around his shoulders and waist, giving him a degree of freefall maneuverability.

Denise had also finished suiting up. She was holding a handgrip near the airlock.

"Ready," Raymond told Josep. He and Denise airswam into the airlock. The inner door swung shut. Denise activated the cycle.

"Stand by," Josep told them over the secure band. "We're fifty meters away."

The outer hatch opened. Raymond could see the starship's engine section sliding past, its cryogenic insulation fiercely luminous in the bright sunlight. He gripped the hatch rim and pulled himself out.

The Xianti was heading for the starship's drum-shaped cargo section. A hundred empty silos opened into blackness. The sunlight was at the wrong angle to shine directly into them, though he could just make out a few that were filled with cargo pods. Up ahead, past the silos, the huge doors of the maintenance bay were hinging apart to reveal a rectangular metal crater. Mechanical cradles were extending their mandibles, preparing to grip the spaceplane.

"Go," Josep ordered.

Raymond tensed his leg muscles and pushed off. The jacket nozzles fired immediately, adding to his velocity. He flew fast and true into the end of an open silo. The nozzles fired again, killing his velocity. He closed his hand on the metal grid structure and hauled himself along to the top of the silo. Denise was in a silo twenty meters away. She raised an arm and pointed. He gave her a thumbs-up and began to move again.

Hand over hand they crawled along the cargo section until they reached the rim. Fifteen meters in front of them, the first life support wheel was turning silently, a wall of crinkled foam sliding along quickly enough to be mistaken for flowing water. Then they followed it around and the curves became apparent, shattering that illusion.

They both started to crawl up the side of the cargo section toward the axis. After twenty meters, they were level with the top of the wheel. Raymond's suit had to increase its visual sensitivity, the gap between the cargo section and the wheel was so gloomy. Hardly any light was reflected off the wheel's coating of foam.

Once he had a reasonable field of vision, Raymond fed his location into the suit's function control pearl and then entered the wheel's relative velocity. He let go of the cargo section's metal framework and drifted over to the edge of the life support wheel. When he was barely a meter above it, the jacket nozzles fired again, accelerating him in the same direction as the wheel's rotation. From his point of view, it seemed as if the wheel was slowing as he moved in toward it. There were innumerable protrusions amid the foam: conduits, pipes, even ladders. He grabbed at one, a thick metal loop, and the bogus gravity took hold, pulling him abruptly down onto the top of the wheel. A sixth of his weight had returned, holding him securely.

He saw Denise had landed a quarter of the way around the wheel behind him. She gave him a thumbs-up. Raymond stood, taking care not to make any fast movements. He had a very clear impression that beyond the edge of the wheel was now down. If he slipped, centrifugal force would fling him clear of the starship and into its sensor field. He took a few careful steps in toward the middle of the wheel and examined the structure below his feet with deep senses. Particle resonance located a clear patch, and he took a loop of energy focus ribbon from his jacket. When it was laid out on top of the foam, the ribbon formed a circle about two meters in diameter.

A hundred meters around the wheel, Denise was doing the same thing. Raymond stood away from the ribbon and activated it with a pulsed code. The foam underneath the ribbon flash-vaporized along with the carbon titanium alloy below. A two-meter circle of the wheel fuselage slammed upward, punched by a seething column of air. Bright white light shone up out of the hole. Paper, clothing, electronic modules and wildly oscillating sprays of liquid filled the column of air, hurtling into the darkness of the axis far above.

Raymond waited until the blast died down, then hurried forward and dropped down into the wheel. He was in some kind of lounge, with the detritus from the decompression swirling senselessly around him. Bright red strobes were flashing. The emergency airlock panel had sealed the hatchway. His suit pearl found the wheel's internal network frequency, and Prime poured into the nodes.

He walked over to the emergency airlock panel and used the Prime to override its safety locks. It slid open and he stepped into the chamber beyond. The panel slid shut behind him, and the hatch opened in front. Starship crew were running round in chaos. Prime shut down all other internal communications, then extinguished the lights. It didn't make any difference to Raymond: he could see equally well in infrared and laser radar. He brought up an EC pistol and started killing.

After the i-simulation Josep and Raymond opened their eyes, grimacing against the bright afternoon sun pouring through the botany lab's windows. Josep got up first and stretched elaborately.

"Not bad," he said. "I think we should start running more adversarial versions, though."

"Yeah. I guess so. It is a little easy at the moment"

"We can begin with you being spotted when you leave the spaceplane."

"Oh great."

Josep grinned and checked his watch. "We've got a couple of hours until Michelle gets back."

"How's that going?"

"Fine. Being an activist has sharpened her outlook. She likes courier duty: it makes her feel she's achieving something. How about Yamila?"

"I could never get her involved, not even at basement level," Raymond said. "She's too timid. Even suggesting it would frighten her off and I'd be left looking for new cover."

"Not at this stage, we can't afford it."

"I know. As it is, she thinks I might be seeing someone else. All those nocturnal absences."

"Speaking of which..."

"Yes." Raymond filled two cups with water and dropped a tea cube in each before sliding them into the microwave alcove. "We need the communication keys." It had come as a surprise to them when they analyzed the data from the Xianti. They'd known that the spaceplane communication traffic was encrypted, although they'd never bothered to examine it before. Had they done so they would have found that not even Prime could decrypt it. Theoretically, given enough processing power and time, any code could be broken, but Z-B used a particularly strong four-dimensional encryption technique for its spaceplanes and changed it every time. Even with the resources Raymond and Josep had available, they could never crack it inside the timeframe they needed for a successful operation.

"Shame the keys are physical. Z-B seems to take its space-flight security very seriously."

"Prime keeps trawling up obscure references to Santa Chico," Raymond said. "I don't know what happened there exactly. But it's possible they may have lost a starship to some kind of weapon."

"No wonder they're protective. Onetime dimensional encryption indeed." Josep shook his head in admiration. "I'll collect them from the spaceport in a few days."

"Has the fuss over Dudley Tivon blown over?"

"Just about. The police have downgraded the case to a level-five resource funding. Prime picked up some activity in Z-B's security AS; it was flagged for senior staff attention. I presume they were interested because Tivon worked at the spaceport. But there was never any follow-up."

"We're in the clear, then?"

"Looks that way."

"Good. From what Denise has been saying, things are just about ready at her end."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The first time Lawrence Newton visited Thallspring he already considered himself a campaign veteran. By then his attitude was relaxed enough to allow him to enjoy the planets that Zantiu-Braun sent him to. In this case, it helped that the population put up no serious resistance. He didn't even mind being assigned to Memu Bay rather than the capital. The coastal town was small enough to be easily controlled and large enough to boast extensive leisure facilities. Z-B's platoons had made full use of the clubs and bars along the marina since the first week after they landed. Even the locals had reluctantly started to welcome their spending power in the absence of the regular tourists.

The campaign had all gone reasonably well up until the fifth week when some lunatic rebel had firebombed two of the local food production refineries. Now the Z-B governor had been forced to impose rationing on everyone and activate three collateral necklaces in retaliation. The mood in town had soured, although the biochemical factories that were being asset-realized hadn't been affected.

So Lawrence hadn't grumbled too much that evening when Sergeant Ntoko announced 435NK9 had been assigned a hinterland patrol. They assembled early the next morning outside the hotel that was serving as their barracks. A convoy of eight jeeps to carry the three platoons, accompanied by five ten-ton trucks that would bring back any assets they found. They rolled out through the center of town and onto the eastbound start of the Great Loop Highway.

Although most settlers on colony worlds lived in towns and cities that were built on gamma soak patches, some had chosen to establish themselves out among the native vegetation and animals. These smaller townships and homesteads were almost always founded to harvest a valuable native crop or mine some mineral. Out in the mountainous hinterland behind Memu Bay there were several dozen such settlements, all of them linked by the Great Loop Highway that ran in a rough oval around the Mitchell Mountains, a series of high volcanic peaks dormant for thousands of years.

Thirty-five kilometers from Memu Bay the Great Loop Highway was still a wide, level tarmac road that had just cleared the modest barrier of mountains that encircled the coastal town. The Mitchells were rising out of the thick jungle ahead. Lawrence sat in the front passenger seat of the jeep while Kibbo drove on into the foothills country. He could see the range stretching away into the vanishing distance. Vulcanism had pushed an enormous plateau ridge up out of this side of the continent, running parallel to the coast for over two hundred kilometers. The table of the plateau was reasonably level, a kilometer and a half above sea level. Because of its size, it had a microclimate all its own. Amid the continent's pervasive tropical heat its domination of wind patterns pulled in a cooler, moist air that irrigated the whole area. Some of the most vibrant vegetation on the planet ran rampant around the plateau's lower slopes. Two major rivers flowed down from its heart, along with hundreds of smaller watercourses. But it was the peaks themselves that dominated the skyline, varying from small rounded mounds to giant jagged rock cones over seven kilometers high. Snow gleamed on over half of them, astonishingly bright in the clear air.

"Anyone ever climbed those mothers?" Kibbo asked.

"I think so," Lawrence said. "I saw some tour offices in town that ran trekking holidays up on the plateau."

"I hope the poor schmucks wear some kind of power suit. It looks tough up there."

"Mount Horombo is the tallest, eight kilometers. You wouldn't need a power suit for that, just really good thermal underwear. And an oxygen gill as well, I'd imagine."

"You fancy trying it?"

Lawrence laughed. "Not a chance."

"I wouldn't mind a go," Kibbo said. "It must be a fantastic sight from up there."

"I bet it's covered in cloud most of the time."

"Jeez, Lawrence, you're such a pessimist."

Lawrence had a private smile at that. It had been long enough since that miserable, emotionally confusing time that had been born out of his assessment in Amsterdam. The memories no longer hurt when he brought them out to examine them. In fact, now he could look back in wonder at how he'd ever fallen for a girl as weird as Joona in the first place. Fate below, the signs he'd ignored!

There were even times when he thought about reapplying for starship officer college. Z-B might be run by a bunch of pricks, but it was still his only chance of realizing his old dream. Despite everything that had happened to him over the last few years, he'd never quite let go of the hope. And he'd notched up a damn good record with strategic security. Sergeant Ntoko said he was going to recommend him for a corporal's stripe once this Thallspring campaign was concluded. And he was damned certain his stake was large enough to satisfy the college's deputy principal now.

Life was good for him at the moment. Pessimism played no part in it.

The convoy started to wind its way up the plateau's slope. As the climb progressed, so the trees on either side of the road became progressively taller. Their branches were swamped with vines, enormous webs of them strung between boughs and trunks in a thick, shaggy lattice, sprouting cascades of gold-and-black flowers. Ripe gray fruit was dropping all around the vehicles, making the tarmac slippery with their pulp. Humidity closed in around the convoy, with layers of warm mist coiling between the tree trunks. Their Skin was almost white as it repelled the heat.

"Great Loop, my ass," Sergeant Ntoko grumbled from the lead jeep. The road was now down to a single band of tarmac, whose edges were being remorselessly chewed away by tufts of aquamarine grassmoss. He was often slowing for fallen branches, using the jeep's front grid bars to push them aside. Even the surface was cracking open, revealing dusty red earth underneath. Insects similar to terrestrial termites were busy building their soil castles up around the base of trees. The tiny creatures secreted a chemical cement, bonding the minute grains of dirt together so the odd-shaped tumuli glimmered with a metallic purple-and-blue sheen under the intense sunlight.

The air was noticeably cooler when they finally drove out onto the top of the plateau. Ahead of them, the trees were thinning out, although the individual specimens seemed to be even larger than those on the slopes, reaching thirty to forty meters high. In between them, the ground was carpeted in monster plumes of spiked crown reeds, their withered leathery seed pods swaying three or four meters into the air. The Great Loop Highway degenerated to a heavily compacted dirt track with deep wheel ruts that had been burned through the reeds. Sooty black clumps lined the sides where the highway maintenance robots had incinerated any living frond that crept back across the designated route. To prevent any possible misdirection, slender metal pillars were spaced every kilometer, wearing a high collar of solar cells to power their beacon lights and transponder.

Lawrence went back to mountain-gazing again. There were more Mitchells visible now, thrusting bluntly out of the lush subtropical plain, the awesome monuments of tectonic petulance. Long strips of dark cloud scudded round them, raining hard on the lower slopes.

The convoy reached Rhapsody Province first—an area marked out by dozens of slate-gray slag heaps thrown up across the plain where mining equipment bit deep into the plateau's stratums, hunting out bauxite deposits. The spoil was fresh and dark, slick with dank chemicals that prevented anything from growing on its treacherous, shifting sides.

Aluminum was not one of the metals that Auley supplied to the planet. And capturing another asteroid that had it in quantity wasn't cost-effective given the amount used by Thallspring's industrial concerns. Most cities had secured their own source, and Rhapsody Province even produced enough of a surplus for Memu Bay to export to other settlements.

Located almost dead center of Rhapsody was Dixon, a mining town, or at least an engineering center where the mining machinery was maintained and repaired. A full quarter of the town was given over to huge sheds of corrugated composite where cybernetic tools and humans worked alongside each other to service the mining and processing equipment. There was even a small fusion plant sited a kilometer away, a squat white concrete hexagon with a slightly convex roof. It was surrounded by pylons that carried bright red power cables out to the active mining sites.

The houses, shops and offices, that made up the rest of Dixon all had a prefab appearance. Their layout and size were highly individual, but every wall was made from the same insulated composite paneling, and each roof was a matte-black solar collector. Even the air-conditioning cabinets that stood outside were the same make, all with their fans whirring away behind rusting chrome dissipater fins. The plain's dusty volcanic soil hazed the air above the grid of streets, frosting every surface with a dark ocher patina.

As soon as the convoy arrived at the end of the main street they had to stop and reverse. One of the massive excavator processors was being delivered back to its site after a spell in the maintenance sheds. The unit was twice as long as a locomotive, and three times as wide. It was sitting on an even bigger low loader whose caterpillar tracks must have been as wide as Lawrence was tall. He whistled with respect inside his Skin helmet as the massive rig crawled past, shaking the nearby buildings.

Captain Lyaute, who was commanding the convoy, ordered the vehicles to draw up in the town's central square. By the time they'd parked in a circle and the squaddies jumped out they'd gathered quite a crowd. It was the first time Z-B had visited the plateau; people were curious. They were also suspicious and sullen, standing well back from the Skins.

Lawrence hoped they weren't going to have to demonstrate the weapons capability of their Skin. It had taken several unpleasant days to convince the citizens of Memu Bay that they were invincible and everyone should just knuckle under and cooperate. But this bunch were tough engineers working hard for a living. They also had a quantity of hardware and tools that could damage Skin if correctly and creatively misapplied.

Lyaute snapped out a few quick orders, and three Skins snatched a civilian each. Before anyone could react, they'd been fitted with collateral necklaces. The captain started to speak to the crowd; he quickly had to crank up the volume on his Skin's speaker as the crowd shouted abuse and insults back at him. They were furious at what they were being told, that the squaddies were going to go through their town and help themselves to anything remotely valuable. Any resistance would result in the collateral necklaces being activated.

After walking just a couple of streets, Lawrence decided the convoy was a waste of time. There really wasn't much in Dixon worth taking. Not that the town saw it that way. As soon as the Skins went into the cavernous maintenance sheds they found the articulated trucks that brought the aluminum down to Memu Bay. Except they hadn't been used since the day the starships flew into orbit overhead. Every one of the big trailers was filled to capacity. But that was only a fraction of the hoard. Lawrence and Amersy walked into the first of the big sheds, only to stop in amazement. Aluminum ingots were piled up as high as the roof. Nobody was going to send the town's one product to the coast where it could well be stolen by the invaders and taken away on their pirate star-ships. Amersy laughed at the metal mountain. "What kind of idiot thinks we can afford to transport a shitload of aluminum on a starship?" he asked.

Lawrence didn't share his mockery. Thallspring had never heard of asset realization before this first campaign had arrived. Out here in the hinterland they certainly didn't know what was regarded as valuable. They were playing safe, trying to protect what they'd worked for. He could appreciate that.

When Dixon's AS was scrutinized, the logs showed that the excavator processors were operating at minimum capacity, and had been for weeks. The only reason the operators hadn't stopped them altogether was that it was more trouble to start them up again than keep them ticking over like this.

Captain Lyaute explained the financial reality of asset realization to the mine managers, trying to tell them they were wasting their time by the go-slow. They just glared at him.

A jeep was sent over to the hospital. Some of the more advanced medicines and vaccines were loaded into it. A truck was driven out to the fusion plant, where it could stock up with expensive spare components. Lawrence and Amersy helped shift excavator cutting heads from their storage racks in one of the big sheds, heaving them into the back of a truck. The bulky cones were studded with long compression-bonded diamond blades that Z-B would strip off back in Memu Bay before boosting them up to the waiting starships.

"That's our livelihood you're killing," one incensed technician yelled at them. "How can we buy food if we can't work, you bastards?"

Lawrence ignored him.

"The guy's got a point," Kibbo said. "This does seem kind of petty. The blades, okay, they're high-tech and expensive. But medicines from the hospital?"

"It's the same deal for everyone on the planet," Lawrence said. "They'll produce replacements as soon as we leave. We're not taking the factories with us."

"Still not quite what I thought we were about"

"Being seen up here is what we're about," Ntoko told them. "We're flag-waving, that's all. The hinterlands have to know we're here, and we're real. It happens on every campaign. You send a convoy round all the backwoods settlements to prove they're not immune. If we didn't, places like this would be a haven for refugees and resistance movements. And the way to pay for these convoys is—"

"Is with valuable goods," Amersy finished. "Asset realization in miniature."

"You got it."

Lyaute decided that the convoy wouldn't be spending the night in Dixon. Anger was running on high voltage through the townspeople, and there were too many of those tempting heavy tools available.

When he got back into the jeep, Lawrence watched several Skins from the other platoons stuffing jewelry and household cards into their personal bags.

The convoy camped out on the plain that night, thirty kilometers past Dixon. They got to Stanlake Province the next day, where waterside villages were strung out all along the shores of the lake itself. They harvested strange aquatic weeds for their complex organic compounds, which were used down in Memu Bay's biomedical factories. Assets here were even scarcer than in Dixon. All the villages used solar panels and wind turbines to generate their electricity; there was no fusion plant. Only three of them had a doctor's office—serious patients were taken to Dixon, or air-ambulanced out to Memu Bay. Electronic systems were years out of date. In their raw form, the organic compounds were worthless. Lyaute did check that all of the harvest was being sent to Memu Bay. It was.

They drove on past the lake, deeper into the high plain. On the third day they reached Arnoon Province. Several of the Mitchell peaks were clustered together here, creating deep, meandering valleys between them. Dense forest had colonized the sheltered saddles between the high slopes. Slim curlicues of white cloud poured down from the craggy snow-covered peaks to writhe amid the treetops. The Great Loop Highway led straight through the thickest section of vegetation. Trees and vines blotted out the sun for long periods. Flat tree stumps lined the route where the highway robots had cut the path, with bulbous fans of bright coral-pink fungus growing out of the damp, rotting wood. But not even the robots could cope with the creepers that twined across the gap. Despite the jeep's all-terrain suspension, the journey began to get rough.

"What do this load of hillbillies do?" Kibbo asked as they rocked and shook their way through yet another tunnel of vegetation. Two hours in the cool forest, and they still hadn't seen any sign of human habitation.

"I think they grow tigercotton," Amersy said.

"That's Laeti Province," Lawrence said. "Arnoon collects willow webs. It's a vine that only grows in this forest, similar to wool apparently. They have a load of cybernetic looms that churn out clothes and rugs. The cities pay a premium for it" He grunted at the sudden echoes of memory. Isolated crofters living amid the mountains, selling their crafts to the rich city folk so they could buy the few items necessary to maintain their independence.

Either Great Loop Highway marker posts were being stolen, or the transport office had decided to space them farther apart in the forest. Up in the lead jeep, Ntoko was relying heavily on his inertial guidance and maps uploaded from the Memu Bay Town Hall, which were at least a decade out of date. They kept coming across junctions and forks in the muddy road that simply didn't exist in the old files.

Sometime around midafternoon, Lawrence caught sight of what he assumed to be a willow web. A small jade ball of what looked like tightly packed velvet gossamer was hanging from a high bough by a single sapphire-blue stem. The wood where the end of the stem was attached had swollen to three times the bough's ordinary width. In contrast to the rest of the forest vegetation, which was slick and damp, the furry surface of the ball was completely dry, as if it repelled the alternating deluges of rain and mist that inundated the trees.

They began to appear regularly after that. The first one had been a baby. Some he glimpsed deeper in the trees were as tall as himself, their surfaces mottled with dark lichen and plagued by ordinary creepers. Now that he knew what to look for, he could often see the shriveled stems protruding from distended branches, their ends cut cleanly.

Ntoko had actually driven into the village before he realized it. To start with he thought it was just a broad clearing. Then there were small children racing in front of the jeep, and he slammed the brakes on. Wheels slid on the carpet of wet mossgrass as the children squealed. They stopped, mercifully without hitting anyone. Smiling faces were suddenly surrounding the vehicle, hands waving as excitable young voices chattered.

Lawrence, who admittedly wasn't wearing his safety belt, had been thrown forward into the front seats. He straightened up and scanned his helmet sensors round the clearing. It was like a multiphase image that resolved only when you looked at it in the correct focus. Where before he'd seen trees with drooping branches tangled by vines, there were now wooden A-frame houses with roofs of elaborate reed mats that were obviously still alive. What he'd taken as a random scattering of shaggy bushes were actually compact gardens.

"Holy crap," Ntoko muttered as he climbed down. "This place is like the most perfect camouflage."

"You're thinking military, Sarge," Lawrence said. "This is just the way people like this live." ' "And you'd know all about people like this, space boy."

Adults were emerging from the foliage, or doors, to gather around the convoy's parked vehicles. They hung on to their lively children, waiting expectantly. Captain Lyaute launched into his standard speech about Z-B acquiring ownership of the planet's founding corporation and requiring a dividend. Instead of the anger and resentment rife in Rhapsody and Stanlake, the Arnoon villagers grinned at him, amused by the whole concept. Even putting collateral necklaces on two of them didn't curtail their open derision.

The squaddies started to search the arboreal A-frames. Lawrence began to revise his opinion of the villagers as simple crofters. The inside of the houses were far from primitive. They had electric lighting, and air-conditioning, and running water; kitchens that were fully equipped with every modern convenience, fridges, washing cabinets, microwaves. Lounges that had full AS desktop pearls with large panes and sheet screens to play the thousands of hours of multimedia recordings stored in extensive libraries.

Domestic convenience items aside, it was the decor that impressed him the most. The villagers had put a lot of effort into fashioning their homes according to individual taste. Many of the frames were carved, then painted or bound with willow wool in vibrant primary colors to emphasize curves and textures. Carvings invariably followed the Hindu or Buddhist school, with many-armed gods and goddesses serenely contemplating the village as they sat astride powerful serpentine dragons. Inside the houses mood decoration was favored, with children's playrooms formed inside nests of brash, exciting patterns; lounges came in elegant abstracts or classical ornate, making them cozy and welcoming, bedrooms in cool, subtly blended pastels. He began to wonder how many of the villagers were artisans. Somebody had to take care of the practical stuff.

Spaced among the houses were carpentry shops where the furniture was fabricated along with the trusses and internal structure for the A-frames. There was a pottery as well. Another craft shop made jewelry. Lawrence found that one easily enough. Skins clustered around it like bees swarming over their queen. Few of the pieces were made from gold or silver or platinum, and none had precious gemstones, but the bracelets and necklace pendants and earrings were all beautiful, handcrafted with care and precision. Most of them had cavities to hold neurotronic pearls. They were all being stuffed into Skin pouches.

Lyaute held court with the village council in what passed for the meeting place, a pavilion created from ten big snow-bark trees planted in a circle, their upper branches closely interlaced to form a broad dome of contiguous leaves that admitted slender ultramarine sunbeams while remaining closed against the rain. The captain was alarmed at the lack of anything valuable enough to qualify as a valid asset. The village did have a doctor, but a quick search of her surgery produced only five or six packets of medicines, all close to their expiration date. As in Stanlake, all serious accidents and illnesses were immediately shipped down to Dixon or on to Memu Bay. When Lyaute asked how many people lived in the village, the council said about six hundred. That was a lot more than the file from Memu Bay's Town Hall indicated. Even so, there weren't enough A-frames to house them all. Because many of us live out in the forest where we gather the webs, the council replied. Directions to such homesteads were not given by grid reference, they were in the form of walk half a kilometer along the northwest path, take a right-hand turn and walk for another kilometer, then ford the stream and head for the second peak to the south...

Lawrence was pretty sure the villagers were quietly making fun of the captain. But he had to admit this kind of community was unlikely to have anything Z-B could want. Like Dixon's aluminum ingots, sweaters, however colorful, were not a viable starship cargo.

The captain decided to send Platoon 435NK9 out to the wool center to check on the technology level employed. As it was a little way outside the village he called for guides. In spite of the now-blatant looting that was going on in the A-frame houses and craft workshops, the group of villagers accompanying them remained cheerful and polite. When their great-grandparents first settled this area, they told the Skins, they had brought bulldozers and concrete and dammed one of the larger streams fed by the snowfields on Mount Henkin high above. A hydro plant built into the base of the dam provided the village and the wool center with all the electricity they needed. Their own small tool shop could fabricate any replacements for the hydro system, making them almost self-sufficient.

The wool center was history with a vengeance for Lawrence: five airy wooden barns filled with old-fashioned machinery busily whirring away. Piles of big willow webs were being combed out and spun into yarn. Dyeing vats bubbled away. Bobbin winders clattered.

When it was compacted into strands and knitted together, willow wool made excellent water-resistant clothing. A fleet of small vans took the sweaters and ponchos and blankets down to Memu Bay, coming back with food and consumer goods. Unlike the aluminum trucks from Dixon, they'd continued making the run after the starships arrived. When he looked at a few of the sweaters coming off the knitting machines, Lawrence thought the patterns were conservative, nothing like as bold as the ones Jackie designed.