Judas Unchained

CHAPTER THREE

The chalet that Mellanie had rented was one of fifty tucked away in a coastal forest over ninety minutes’ drive from Darklake City. Together they formed the Greentree Village Park vacation resort, the kind of place where parents on a modest budget could take their kids and let them exhaust themselves during the day on the resort’s playtime amenities or down at the beach. A large bar and restaurant building in the heart of the forest provided an evening refuge for the adults to unwind. Two nights a week there was a live cabaret act.

An hour after nightfall, the rental car dropped Mellanie off at the main entrance and rolled back to the parking lot. Vehicles weren’t allowed inside Greentree, leaving her to walk along the shingle paths amid the ancient bent rani trees with their white-moss leaf clumps and spongy green bark. Little mushroom-shaped light fittings along the paths provided a soft blue glow as they unraveled through the woods. Greentree had been laid out so that each cabin was completely isolated; all you could see from the windows were trees and the glowing turquoise path. Somewhere off in the forest she could hear the sound of the piano trio as they crooned their way through songs that were old even before Oaktier had been discovered.

A thin mist was creeping out of the soft loam as the temperature fell. It swirled in spooky luminescent currents around her feet, which she found slightly disconcerting. When she’d come here as a child with her parents, she’d adored the shaggy old forest with its thick buckled tree trunks. It had seemed magical in those days, a fantastical world to explore. All she could think about today was what might be lurking among all the shadows and secluded glades.

She’d paid in cash for the chalet she and Dudley were sharing. Most of the other chalets were empty right now, which reduced the chance of anyone seeing and recognizing her. She still left early in the morning as a precaution. And the SI assured her it was watching the local cybersphere nodes for any encrypted message activity that would indicate a surveillance operation. Even so, she’d be glad when they left. She still wasn’t sure what Baron would do about her.

Their three-room chalet was in a small clearing, with five huge rani trees towering over it. Dudley was pacing nervously up and down the lounge when she walked in.

“Where’ve you been?” he shouted.

“Fine, thank you, how are you?”

He stopped in the act of flinging himself at her, producing a massive petulant scowl instead. “I was worried.”

She ran her hand back through her tawny hair and gave him a mellow smile. “I’m sorry. It didn’t go as well as expected with Paula Myo. Turns out she doesn’t trust me, and I don’t trust her. Which kind of screws up the idea of us joining forces to take on the Starflyer. So I went on to California. My agent set up some job interviews. Good ones.”

“Oh.” He went up to her and gave her a cautious hug. When she didn’t squirm away, he asked, “Did you get one?”

“I got three offers, actually. Let me get out of these clothes and I’ll tell you.”

Dudley’s face immediately brightened.

“No, Dudley,” she said wearily. “Not for sex.”

“But…we will tonight, though, won’t we?” he asked in a whiny voice.

“Yes, Dudley, we’ll have sex later.” She glanced over at the kitchen alcove. Yesterday morning they’d paid cash for over a week’s worth of food and supplies from a supermarket twenty minutes away down the highway. The bags were still sitting on the bench, unpacked. “I’m going to have a shower, then I’d like something to eat. Think you can manage that for me?”

Once she’d freshened up she wrapped a towel around her hips and went back out into the lounge. It was almost a routine, checking the effect she had on him. Sure enough, Dudley could barely take his eyes off her naked torso. Ever since they had got here, she’d been using the gym a couple of hours a day to keep herself toned. The machines there faithfully recorded her physical condition, giving her top marks; but it was always reassuring to have her sexuality confirmed by a man. Even if it was only Dudley.

He’d made a mess of the dinner, which was impressive. The packaged food had a code strip for the microwave, automatically setting the timer and wattage when you put it in. He must have altered the settings manually. She took one look at the brown goo bubbling away under the cellophane wrapping and dropped them in the bin. The conditioning grille would take care of the smell eventually. “How did your day go?” she asked as she slid two fresh packets into the microwave.

“I went down to the beach. Some people arrived and started a barbecue. I came back here and accessed the unisphere.”

“Dudley, you need to learn how to socialize with people again.” She kissed him as the microwave counted down, breaking away with a promissory smile when it pinged. They settled down on the broad couch and Mellanie told her e-butler to turn the fire on. Bright holographic flames leaped up in the fire-place, while the invisible heater let out an accompanying blast of hot air—it even added a scent of burning wood.

“I don’t know who works for the Starflyer. It could be anyone. And the navy’s probably hunting us as well.”

“I doubt that.”

“You don’t know. Not really.”

Mellanie narrowed her eyes to look at him. Already he was sitting upright, fully defensive. She didn’t help his condition with her own mild paranoia about the Starflyer and Baron. “No, Dudley, I don’t; but they’ll have a very hard job finding us. I’ve made sure of that.” She curled her legs up and started poking chopsticks into the steaming dish of savory rice and chicken. Maybe it was a good idea they were leaving in the morning.

“What were your job offers?” Dudley asked.

“One was a TSI drama, Late Rendezvous. The producers were very keen to sign me up; it’s about a girl who arranges to meet her boyfriend on Sligo, then the Primes attack and she doesn’t know if he’s alive or dead. It’s all about her finding romance under the pressure of the attack.” She grinned to herself at the memory of the “co-stars” the producers had introduced her to. One of them, Ezra, had been utterly gorgeous. The thought of days spent rehearsing love scenes with him had almost made her sign up on the spot. Before the Prime attack and discovering Baron’s connection to the Starflyer there would have been no hesitation.

“A TSI?” Dudley said, alarm leaking into his features. “No! Please, Mellanie. Don’t. Not one of those again. That’s just sex. That’s what they want you for. Don’t. I don’t care how much money they offered. I couldn’t stand it.”

There were times when she really hated how pitiful Dudley was. She was fairly certain that there was no more useful information to extract from that abysmal jumble of thoughts in his brain. After California she’d toyed with the notion of simply not coming back to Greentree, just tell the navy where he was and leave their psychologists to straighten him out. But given who she wanted to meet next, having the Dudley Bose in tow, and under control, would make success a lot more likely.

And she did like him in a way. She supposed. Occasionally. When he was calm he could be very lucid, providing her a glimpse of the intellect that had qualified him for his earlier academic life. A sort of sneak preview of what he could be like. Then there was Elan, and everything they’d gone through together there when the Primes attacked. That wasn’t a bond easily discarded, not even for her. If he could just get the idea of love out of his head…

“I turned it down,” she said. “I can’t afford that kind of time commitment right now.”

“Thank you.” He bowed his head to examine the rectangular meal packet he was holding, almost as if he hadn’t seen one before. “What were the others?”

She pincered a big chunk of chicken with the chopsticks and popped it in her mouth. “Reuters said they’d take me on as a junior associate. Bravoweb offered me a reporter’s slot on the Michelangelo show; he’s always been a big rival for Baron. They’ve been fighting over audience points for over a century.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I’d take the Michelangelo slot. I think he got quite a bang out of poaching one of her top people. They offered me a trial three-month roving brief; and they agreed to my first story proposal.”

“Right. So what was it?”

“An inside account about people who live on a world that’s probably going to be invaded by the Primes in the next wave. I said I’d travel out to examine communities that are too poor to leave, the ones that have to stay even though they suspect they’re in for hard times. It’s pretty horrendous for them, really.”

“Oh.” Dudley picked up a tall tumbler of water and stared morosely at the ice bobbing around on top. “How does that help us track down the Starflyer?”

“I know for certain that’s where we can meet some really strong allies in the fight against the Starflyer, and Bravoweb will pick up the tab. Which is handy, because it’s not cheap traveling there.” She fashioned a smug smile.

“See?”

“Right. What planet?”

“Far Away.”

***

Coming into the office every morning was getting to be a real drag. In the old days when it was the Directorate, Renne had often come in early, especially when they were on a major case. Now she had to force herself up out of bed when the alarm woke her. And cases didn’t get any bigger than this one.

Somehow, Alic Hogan was always there ahead of her. Like Paula used to be, except Hogan didn’t conjure up enthusiasm in the rest of the team. Having him watching you arrive was like an automatic reprimand. She knew she was going to have to make an effort to cycle down on the irritation she felt toward him. But that was the problem. It was an effort.

John King appeared in the middle of the morning and walked over to her desk. “That smuggled technical equipment you had shipped back from Boongate. My analysis staff have got a slight problem with it.”

“Goddamn typical,” she spat.

John gave her a hurt look.

“All right, I’m sorry. It’s just that nobody ever comes and tells me any good news these days.”

“This isn’t bad news, exactly, it’s just strange.”

“Go on then, what’s strange with it?”

“Same as the stuff from Venice Coast, we can’t understand what it’s used for.”

“John, come on! You must have some idea. I saw the manifest Edmund Li finally produced. There was nearly a metric ton of hardware.”

“A lot of it very similar,” he said defensively. “But given we don’t know what they’re building, it’s difficult.”

“I’ll settle for best guess. I trust you.”

He smiled sheepishly. “All right, based on these systems, and factoring in the surviving components from Venice Coast, assuming they were intended for the same thing—”

“John!”

“Force fields. Very high-density force fields. But the thing is, they’d use up a terrific amount of power.”

“So?”

He gave her an elaborate shrug. “On Far Away? Where are they going to get it from? I checked with the Commonwealth Civil Council. There’s five medium-size civic power stations supplying Armstrong City; they’re gas turbines running off a local oil field. The revitalization project imported some fission micropiles to power their equipment in the early days. And the Institute has three micropiles to power their facilities. That’s it. The rest of the planet gets by on solar panels, wind turbines, and a few oil wells. They don’t have anything like the power output one of these weirdo devices would consume.”

She stared at him blankly, waiting for a suggestion. None came. “Then what does produce that much power?”

“I haven’t got a clue. It’s not like you could have smuggled a fusion or fission generator through unnoticed even before we were inspecting every piece of cargo. And Far Away can’t be physically plugged into the Commonwealth power grid. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Right then.” She instinctively reached for her mug of coffee, only to find it was empty. “So what we have is an unknown force field device, or devices, which consumes a lot of power, on a planet that doesn’t have any.”

“Nicely summarized.”

“I look forward to seeing how the Commander treats that one when you submit it.”

They both glanced over at the door to Hogan’s office.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” John said. “This is just a technical appendix to your report.”

Renne’s e-butler informed her that a file from King’s forensic staff had just been deposited in her working case HOLD folder.

John cocked his fingers pistol style and aimed at her. “What you do with it is up to you.”

“Bastard.”

He gave her a cheery wave, and retreated back to his own desk.

Vic Russell returned from Cagayn half an hour later. The second lieutenant barely had time to kiss his wife, Gwyneth, before Renne hauled him off into a conference room for a debrief.

“The Cagayn police were very familiar with Robin Beard,” Vic told her. “He works in the motor trade. Good repair and service man, apparently. Which fits in with what Cufflin told us; they met on an electronics course a few years back.”

“Did you see him?” Renne asked. She thought Vic looked tired; he was a big man, well over two meters tall, and about as wide. His weekends were spent playing bone-cruncher games of rugby for a nonprofessional club outside Leicester. Renne had turned up with Gwyneth to support his team one Saturday, and had been intimidated by the amount of good spirits violence in the game. Cagayn must have been an exhausting trip for someone as fit as Vic to appear run-down.

“No, ‘fraid not. I was too late. Our Mr. Beard is a somewhat migratory character. According to his tax records he never stays at the same garage for more than a couple of years.”

“He pays taxes?”

“Not very often. But that’s not why the police have such a big file on him. If you’re looking for a getaway vehicle, word is that Beard’s the one you need to give it a good overhaul beforehand. Same if you have a warehouse full of hot cars that need rebranding; he knows how to replace and revise all the manufacturers’ security tagging.”

“Sounds like the kind of person who would have good reason to know our elusive agent.”

“Quite so. I took a scout around his home. Rented, of course. We must have missed him by about twenty-four hours. His vehicle recovery van was gone, which is his own mobile maintenance shop; he keeps all his tools and equipment in there. It’s the one permanent thing in his life, apparently. I spoke to some of the guys he worked with at the garage; there’s a lot of customized machinery in the back, stuff he’s built over the years.”

For an instant, Renne saw the image of some titanic truck rolling along a highway with force field bubbles for wheels, draining energy from the Commonwealth grid as it went. “Ah, so if we find the van—”

“—we find the man. Yeah. Ordinarily the police wouldn’t have too much trouble spotting a bright orange three-ton tow van. Of course, given his chosen field of expertise it’s not quite as simple as it would be with the average criminal on the run. Beard is familiar with every traffic monitor program in the Commonwealth. He’ll have aggressor software to deal with all of it. Cagayn police have issued an all-officer dispatch for vans of that description to be pulled over and checked.”

“The boss would have loved that one: proper police work.”

Vic grinned, revealing teeth that had been rearranged in crooked ranks by too many hard impacts on the rugby pitch. “She would, yeah. But it gives us a bit of a nightmare.”

“You’ve alerted the Cagayn CST station?”

“First thing I did. They checked back through their schedules for me; no van of that kind left Cagayn in the time frame we’re considering. So if anybody does take a van like that on board a freight train, they’ll let this office know about it immediately.”

“Good. Thanks, Vic.”

Noon saw the daily senior officers’ case review meeting in conference room three. Renne joined Tarlo and John at the big table, put her coffee mug down, then hurriedly mopped up the ring it left on the surface.

“You two want to try Amies for lunch?” John asked.

“Sure,” Tarlo said.

“You’re not still after that waitress, are you?” Renne asked disapprovingly. The redhead Tarlo had spent a month flirting with was a first-life art student, still in her early twenties. He was in his third life. It wasn’t done. But that damn uniform…

“There are waitresses there?”

The men laughed. She sighed.

Hogan marched in and sat at the head of the table. His whole stance was charged with energy, which produced an aggressive smile.

“John, I believe you have something critical for us?”

“Yes, sir.”

Renne gave him a curious glance; he hadn’t mentioned anything earlier.

“Foster Cortese finally pulled a match out of the visual recognition program,” John said. The big high-rez portal at the end of the conference room lit up to show the assassin’s face. “CST on Boongate has been slow to locate their records for us, but we can all see there’s no mistake. He came through the Half Way gateway six months before the Venice Coast incident.”

“Name?” Tarlo asked.

“Officially: Francis Rowden, son of a landowner, which is how he can afford to travel to the Commonwealth. He was going to enroll at a university on Kolhapur, a two-year agricultural course. We checked; they have no record of him.”

“He’s a Guardian,” Alic said happily.

“Why do you think that?” Renne asked.

Alic’s good humor flickered slightly, but nothing could tone down his enthusiasm. He held up his hand and started ticking off points. “Okay, one, he’s a Far Away native, so what other faction could he belong to? Two, he’s sent on tough assignments to benefit them, I mean really tough. Our boy is wetwired to the back of his ears with weapons. He’s their new enforcer.”

“How did the Venice Coast hit benefit them?” Renne asked quickly.

“Valtare Rigin was fucking them over. He had to be. He was a black market arms dealer. These guys don’t exactly have corporate mission statements. He saw a chance to switch cargoes or make a low-grade substitution or he was holding out for more money. Whatever. They caught him red-handed. What are they going to do? Sue him? Shake hands and say sorry? No, they close the deal their way. They’re terrorists, remember. The most lethal bunch of psychotics we’ve ever had running around the Commonwealth. This is what they do: kill people.

“Thompson Burnelli, well, that’s obvious. He’d just pushed through an inspectorate division which is going to screw every clandestine weapons shipment back to Far Away. Blam, out he goes. Revenge, a warning to others that no one is safe, none of you are beyond our reach. Murdering a senator shook the whole political establishment to its core. Then there was McFoster. He betrayed the Guardians; they killed him for it.”

“How did he betray them?” Tarlo asked.

“Justine Burnelli,” Renne said in a flat voice. She could see how Alic Hogan’s mind was working, and didn’t like it.

“Exactly,” Alic said, on a roll. “They find out McFoster visited Senator Burnelli, that the two of them are lovers. The next thing they know, he’s got a navy squad tailing him. They thought he was about to lead us to them.”

“How did they find that out?” Renne asked.

Alic treated her to an expression of mild scorn. “The trip to the observatory. His colleagues were watching him the whole time, a backup team. And we had that local office idiot…” He snapped his fingers.

“Phil Mandia,” Renne supplied reluctantly.

“Right: Mandia. He was following McFoster in a convoy of four-by-fours through the mountains. The Guardians saw us. They put it together. It wouldn’t matter to them if McFoster had actually clued Senator Burnelli in on what was happening or not. Whatever he said to her, it betrayed them. And there he is again, this Frances Rowden, waiting at LA Galactic. There on the right concourse exactly when the loop train pulled in, knowing he’s got our squads to dodge as well.” Alic beamed contentedly.

The trouble was, Renne admitted to herself, the facts fitted. Not only that, she couldn’t see a flaw in the Commander’s line of reasoning. Granted, a lot of it was speculation, but logical speculation; the kind of argument a jury would convict on.

It was also politically expedient, which fueled her unease. That same nagging little uncertainty she’d experienced when she walked into the Halgarth girls’ loft apartment on Daroca. No reason for it. Just her own awkward intuition. A detective knowing instinctively when something is out of kilter.

Everything Alic claimed was possible. Yes.

Believable? No.

“I’m going to enjoy this,” Alic said. “Certain people in Senate Security are going to be extremely upset when they access this case file now we’ve solved it for them. It doesn’t leave any room for her stupid conspiracy theories.”

Renne tried to catch Tarlo’s attention. She couldn’t, which she suspected was deliberate.

“Thank Foster Cortese for me,” Alic said. “He’s done a good job. Credit where it’s due.”

“Will do,” John King said.

He ran a program, Renne thought in disgust. She could see what Alic was doing, pulling the staff into his orbit. Team building with the completely wrong motivation behind it. They’d wind up producing politically required answers for him, not the right ones.

And why am I so cynical about this? That bullshit theory about Francis Rowden. Am I just jealous I didn’t put it together? It is simple enough. Why do I think it’s not right?

“I’m going to need another warrant,” Tarlo said.

“What for?” Alic asked.

“The Pacific Pine Bank records have been quite useful,” Tarlo said. Now he allowed eye contact with Renne, giving her an I-told-you-so smile. “The Shaw-Hemmings finance company on Tolaka transferred a lot of money into Kazimir’s account. I’d like to see where it came from.”

“How much money?” Renne asked.

“A hundred thousand Earth dollars.”

She pursed her lips, impressed.

“You’ve got it,” Alic said. “Renne, how is it coming with the Lambeth Interplanetary Society?”

There wasn’t any undue emphasis on the question; nevertheless she got the feeling that expectations were set a little too high following the news about Francis Rowden. Her report was going to let the side down. Ridiculous, I’m getting paranoid. “Nothing solid yet, I’m afraid. It was Vic’s case, but I’ve had him chasing down Robin Beard. Matthew has been datamining the Society, but there are very few files to work with. The employment agencies that serve that part of London don’t have any records of the Society at all. It’s not a promising avenue.”

“We could launch a unisphere appeal,” Tarlo suggested. “See if the news shows would give us some time. Ask for any ex-employees to come forward and contact us.”

“No,” Renne said. “That would show our hand to the Guardians.”

“I’m going to agree with Renne on this one,” Alic said. “We’ll keep public appeals as a last resort; it smacks of desperation. Let me know when the datamining stalls completely, and we’ll reconsider then.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So what about Beard?”

“He’s gone to ground on Cagayn, but the police there are on alert for him. Judging by his background, he’s someone who could provide us with a positive lead to the agent the Guardians use.”

“Do the police understand how important this is?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good, but ride them hard. We can’t let this one slip.”

***

Senate Security’s European division was nothing like as grand as the ever-expanding navy intelligence facilities over in Paris. It was based in London, taking over the entire top floor of a monolithic stone-fronted building in Whitehall, half a kilometer from Westminster Palace. The European division shared it with two other Intersolar Commonwealth departments, the UFN regional auditor and the environmental commission, all of whom provided excellent cover. There was no plaque outside announcing Senate Security’s presence, and if accessed the building management array had no knowledge of their existence. Entry was gained through a discreet underground ramp entrance opposite the old British Foreign Office building.

Every morning, Paula’s designated car would pick her up outside her apartment and drive onto the European trans-capital shuttle train, a sleek new maglev vehicle, which took thirty-five minutes to get from Paris to London using the old Channel tunnel route. Once they arrived at Waterloo Station the car drove her straight to Whitehall and down into the secure parking chamber underneath the ancient building. Travel time was well under an hour.

When Hoshe arrived on his first day, Paula was checking through the official case files on Francis Rowden as Senate Security pulled them out of navy intelligence’s array. “Idiot,” she muttered as Hoshe knocked on her open office door.

“Am I not welcome?” he inquired.

Paula grinned at him. “No, not you. Please, come in.” Her office was a great deal larger than the one in Paris, with a high ceiling and elaborate cornices. Wooden paneling extended halfway up the walls, originally a dark gold oak, but now nearly black with age. Two big windows looked out over the trees lining Victoria Embankment to the Thames beyond. Just to the north, Hungerford bridge was visible, carrying rail lines over the river to Charing Cross station.

One wall was completely covered by a holographic projection, a map of a large CST station, with a big terminal building at one end and hundreds of track lines winding across a broad open space outside it. Various trains were frozen in place, and a large number of green dots were sprinkled across the ground, each with its own neon-blue code tag floating above it.

“You landed on your feet, then,” Hoshe said; he gave the projected map an interested look as he passed. His shoes sank into the thick burgundy carpet as he walked over to the vast antique rosewood desk where she was sitting.

“I know. You’d think this was where the British ran their empire from back when they had one.”

“It’s not?”

“No. This was all remodeled a hundred and fifty years ago. The designers went for what they considered Grand Imperial era. It’s actually younger than I am.”

Hoshe eased himself into a chair with only a small wince.

“How are you doing?” Paula asked. She thought he certainly looked a lot better than when she’d seen him on Oaktier, with his face properly shaved, cologne dabbed on, and lightly oiled hair held back with his usual silver clip. The suit was new, too, a pale fawn-brown, expensive shiny fabric with narrow lapels, emphasizing a figure that was a lot slimmer than the first time she’d met him. She would have welcomed that loss of weight if it hadn’t been for the sunken cheeks that accompanied it.

“Easier, I guess. And Inima was a lot better this morning. I think she’s looking forward to being discharged.”

“I’m glad. What did she say about this job?”

“She rather liked the idea of living in London. It’s a security thing, you know? If you’re safe anywhere, it’ll be on this planet. There’s enough real wealth and power concentrated here to make sure it’s properly defended. After Sligo that can’t be a bad thing. And of course the clinics here are the best in the Commonwealth.”

“You got an apartment sorted out?”

“Personnel have short-listed five for me to take a look at. I’ll view them tonight. Until then, I’m all yours.”

“Okay then. The first thing I need is for you to take a look at something called the Cox Educational charity; it was responsible for funding some of Dudley Bose’s original observation of the Dyson Pair. My old Directorate team investigated it six months before the flight of the Second Chance and reported everything was legitimate and aboveboard. I want you to repeat the exercise, bearing in mind there’s been an allegation that the Cox records have been doctored. Then pull those old Directorate files, and compare them to your findings.”

“Right. Who made the allegation?”

Paula smiled. “Mellanie Rescorai.”

“Really?” Hoshe seemed to find that amusing, too. “I did warn you about her. What goes around…”

“Exactly. I’ve been doing some checking on Ms. Rescorai. There are some very interesting reports of her activities on Elan during the Prime attack. Apparently, she took a leading role in the evacuation of Randtown.”

“Mellanie?”

“Yes. I know! And her new boyfriend is Dudley Bose.”

“Well, I suppose there have been more unlikely couples.”

“Name one. They’re keeping out of sight somewhere on Oaktier.”

“You need them tracked down?”

“No. Her unisphere address is current and open. She’s just switched her correspondent role from Alessandra Baron to Michelangelo. Which is interesting: her other allegation was that Baron is working for the Starflyer.”

“Sounds like you should have recruited her, not me.”

“I’m keeping an open mind about her. Something there doesn’t quite make sense. This is not the bimbo in a bikini from Morton’s penthouse. She’s changed. Or part of her has; she’s still blindly impulsive, but there’s something else there as well now—she’s got a lot of confidence.”

“Everybody grows up sometime.”

“Maybe. For now we just do the background work and see what we can shake loose.”

“Okay. So what’s this, then?” He pointed at the projected map.

“LA Galactic. I was taking a look at the McFoster shooting incident. The Paris office has managed to find a name for our assassin: Francis Rowden. I wanted to see how he eluded both the navy and CST security after he killed McFoster. The office RI has worked up a simulation for me; admittedly the records aren’t perfect but most of the timings and positionings have been cross-referenced with each other.”

“Yeah, and?”

“Simple enough, he just jumped onto a train. There’s no other solution.” She gave the luminescent map a confused glance. “Though he only had a very small window of opportunity. I’m surprised none of the people on the ground saw him.”

“Your double agent?”

“Possibly.” Paula was surprised how troubled she was by the notion. She stared at the map with its green dots, one of the tags seemed to glow brighter than the others: Tarlo.

***

Mellanie had taken the window seat when they got on the train at Darklake City. Now, fifty minutes later, she watched them drawing in toward Boongate’s single terminal building. Thick gray clouds rumbled through the air above the city, blocking out the sun and unleashing a constant heavy downpour that was unseasonable for late spring. It added an extra layer of drabness to the empty wasteland of the station yard.

Glancing ahead, she could see people crammed onto every square centimeter of the platform that the Oaktier train was heading for. A line of CST security officers in dark blue flexarmor suits stood along the very edge of the platform, their arms linked, keeping the crowd back from the approaching train. A barrage of shouting began as soon as the PH58 engine nosed its way under the terminal’s arching roof. Hundreds of arms waved above the security squad’s bulbous helmets. It was a peculiar greeting for an ordinary train, as if there was some huge media celebrity on board.

Dudley peered nervously over her shoulder. “What are they here for?”

“A train out,” she told him. She wanted to sound slightly more blasé about it, someone observing the foolish antics of people she’d never have to meet or mingle with, the kind of people who lived a life she’d escaped, thanks to Morton and the SI. Except she knew that in a week or so she’d be back at this station, eager for a train out, just like them. Her ticket was already booked, an open-ended first-class return. Now she was beginning to wonder if that would mean much when it actually came down to standing on the platform and wrestling her way to an open carriage door; it didn’t much look as though the security squad would take time out to help first-class passengers.

When they disembarked there was only a narrow strip of concrete left between the train and the security squad for them to walk down. The hard-pressed line of flexarmored figures jostled constantly against them. Mellanie kept stumbling as she was shoved repeatedly against the side of the train. The angry glances she threw back every time it happened weren’t even noticed.

It was only when they reached the concourse they finally had some empty space. Reactive barriers had been set up to channel the dense throng of people from the station entrance to their platforms; not that the barriers could dull the angry buzz of the crowd. Going the other way, arrivals had their narrow exit routes almost to themselves. Barely twenty people had got off the train from Oaktier. Their two pieces of luggage popped out of the gap between the last security officer and the train as if the bags were being kicked clear.

Dudley stopped. “I want to go back,” he said meekly. “I want you to come with me, darling. Please, don’t do this. Don’t go to Far Away. We’ll never get back to the Commonwealth. They’ll land there, too. They will, I know it. They’ll land and they’ll capture me again, and…”

“Dudley.” She shushed him with a finger pressed on his lips, then kissed him. “It’s all right. Nothing like that will happen.”

“You can’t know that. Don’t treat me like I’m a child. I hate that.”

She almost said: Then stop acting like a child. Instead she lowered her voice.

“The SI will give me plenty of warning.” Which it wouldn’t—she didn’t think. Who knew?

Dudley gave her a petulant look.

“Come on,” she said brightly, and hooked her arm through his. “You’re going to see a neutron star firsthand. How many astronomers can say that, even today?”

It was a poor bribe, but he did give a reluctant shrug and allow her to lead him off toward the single door leading off the concourse. There were plenty of signs for the connection service to Far Away. They followed them through a deserted cloister and finally reached an external doorway that came out on a corner of the terminal building. The noise of miserable frustrated people reverberated around them.

Outside the station, the crowd must have been ten thousand strong. They were squashed together in a great swathe from the passenger terminal all the way back to the highway exit a kilometer away. Cars and taxis that had been abandoned on the approach roads were now isolated impediments surrounded by dense clusters of bodies. They’d all been broken open and were now being used for everything from shelters to kids’ play frames to toilets. Thousands of umbrellas bobbed about, blobs of murky color deflecting the waves of rain sluicing down out of the insipid sky. Kids dressed in waterproofs moaned and wailed as they were dragged along and buffeted on all sides. Men and women shouted futile insults and complaints, growing louder as they neared the terminal entrance.

Police and CST security had them all penned in between two lines of officers and patrolbots. Helicopters drifted overhead, producing cyclonic down-swirls of rain to complete the wretchedness of everyone on the ground.

Mellanie’s virtual hands brushed several icons and she began scanning the scene with her eyes, retinal inserts on maximum resolution, sending the image back directly to the Michelangelo studio in Hollywood. She murmured a few accompanying, patronizing comments about desperation and the flotsam of war. Disdain came easy now; proximity to Alessandra had seen to that.

A text message popped up in her virtual vision. GOOD STUFF. ALREADY! KNEW I WAS RIGHT ABOUT YOU. REMEMBER, TAKE CARE WHEN YOU GET THERE. LOVE MA.

Michelangelo had been surprised when she pitched the Far Away trip to him during their private interview. He thought she was trying to prove something. Normally, interns would just have to go to bed with him to earn their probation contract; in that respect he had an even greater appetite than Alessandra. Mellanie had suggested the assignment after they’d finished fucking and she’d already got the job. It’d thrown him slightly, but he smiled and said he liked her style.

He had quite a lot of style of his own. Thanks to Dudley, who was a triumph of quantity over quality, she’d almost forgotten what truly hot sex could be like. He could also be funny. She’d laughed out loud a couple of times at the stories he told. When she did that she realized laughter was something that never happened when she was with Dudley—nor ever would, she thought. Most of the subsequent train journey back to Oaktier had been spent fantasizing what else she’d have to do in that large bed of his to earn a permanent contract.

“Is that the office?” Dudley asked.

“Huh.” Mellanie shook off the reverie that the text message had kindled. Dudley was pointing to a small clump of boxlike prefab buildings adjoining the terminal, each of which had tour company signs above their doors.

“Yeah. We want Grand Triad Adventures. They said someone would be waiting for us.” Her semiorganic coat had birthed a hood that she pulled over her hair to protect it from the rain. The boots she wore were practical rather than stylish, probably the kind of thing a Randtown local would possess. To match that, she’d chosen a pair of olive-green jeans from her own collection, and a black sweatshirt of semiorganic fur fiber that was wonderfully soft against her skin. Dudley had just put on his usual nonlabel pants and a cheap shirt and jacket. She’d given up trying to dress him properly.

They splashed their way through the puddles to the rank of tour operators. Grand Triad Adventures was easy enough to find. It was the only office with a light on.

The deputy assistant manager of tour bookings, Niall Swalt, was sitting behind the reception desk, absorbed by some bizarre game show on the portal. Rock music thundered out across the deserted office as female figures dived in and out of vats filled with oily fluid. When the door opened, he lunged to his feet, the bright figures and the music shrinking away.

“Ms. Rescorai, a pleasure.” Niall came around the desk, eager to greet her. “I’m a real big fan of yours. I still access Murderous Seduction once a month at least.” He was wearing one of Mellanie’s old promotional sweatshirts, with a hologram of her face in the middle of his chest. It had been washed so many times the image flickered badly through its smile cycle, drizzling green and red interference specks.

“Always delighted to meet a fan.” She made herself smile neutrally as he grabbed hold of her hand. He had cheap OCtattoos on his fingers and arms that her own sophisticated inserts analyzed instantly on contact. The thin green lines were capable of delivering crude sensory impulses to his nervous system; to Mellanie he briefly appeared as a glowing arabesque wire sculpture, with the densest entanglement concentrated around his groin. “And you can still see,” she remarked dryly.

“Oh, yes, it’s a fantastic story. And it’s all real.” He was grinning profusely as he stared at her; the heat in his cheeks highlighted his pimples. “You are sensational in it. You feel gorgeous.”

“Thank you.” Mellanie didn’t risk glancing at Dudley, who was ominously quiet beside her. “That’s very sweet.”

“Do you mind if I ask you about the hunting lodge night? Did that happen for real?”

“Yes, yes it did, that was quite a night.”

Dudley’s face had frozen, with every muscle rigid. Only the color spreading across his cheeks revealed he was even alive.

“Wow!” Niall whistled admiringly. “And the time Morton took you to the Falkirk restaurant. Why didn’t you sue the security people?”

“Who would have benefited? And let’s face it, we shouldn’t have been in the ladies’ washroom together. It was a bit naughty of us; but the singer was very beautiful. Who could resist?”

“Right. Yeah. I’ve noticed some mistakes, too.”

“Really?”

“The party on Resal’s yacht: when you go on board you’re wearing black silk panties, but when you leave they’re gold satin.”

“Gosh, I never knew. I’ll have to have a word with the continuity people about that.”

“The other thing was Paula Myo. I checked the actual court files from the trial; according to the Directorate case notes the Investigator did research Oaktier’s organized crime groups. But Murderous Seduction showed her completely dismissing the possibility that Shaheef was killed by a third party.”

“We were emphasizing the point. Myo didn’t do a thorough job.” Mellanie’s face had become as inflexible as Dudley’s; for the first time she actually had to consider that automatic response. What if Myo had investigated properly? What if Morty… She flexed her shoulders, annoyed with herself for doubting.

Emboldened by how easy it was to talk to his idol, Niall gave a shy grin and asked, “Are your breasts really that firm, or did they edit the tactile stream to make them feel like that?”

“Hey!” Dudley snarled.

Niall gave him a puzzled frown.

Mellanie put a hand on her devoted fan’s arm. “Niall, our train was late, we routed through StLincoln before we got to Wessex, so we’re worried we might have missed the connection.”

“Oh, no,” Niall said earnestly. “Everything’s ready for you.”

“Great. This is all our luggage.” She pointed to the two cases that had rolled in behind them. “Where do we go now?”

“The company has a car. Uh, I’m afraid you’ve got to be cleared by the Far Away freight inspectorate division before you go through the wormhole. It’s a new thing, they’ve only just started doing that. They make sure you haven’t got any weapons or illegal stuff.”

“Sounds like a good idea.”

The car was a Mercedes limousine; all it did was drive them eight kilometers across the station yard to a nearly empty warehouse. Several scanning systems had been set up inside the yawning building, one of them an archway large enough for an entire freight train to pass through it. A couple of very bored police officials were reviewing shadowy images of crates on a big portal. They ordered Mellanie’s luggage to roll through a small scanner hoop.

“There were a lot of people waiting to leave outside the station,” Mellanie said to Niall as their bags went through. “How difficult is it going to be for us to get on a train once we get back from Far Away?”

It was as if she’d issued the young man a personal challenge. He straightened himself up to compose his features into what he considered a reassuring expression. “Grand Triad Adventures guarantees the safe transport of all its customers on both sides of the gateway. We take responsibility for your holiday as soon as you arrive on Boongate, and that doesn’t finish until you leave. Mr. Spanton, the manager, he left me in charge when he took off for Verona with his family. I shall be here to make sure you get your allocated seats.”

“Thank you, Niall.”

“All part of the service.”

“Don’t you want to leave?”

“Sometimes I think maybe I do. But this is my home. Where would I go? The Commonwealth isn’t going to abandon us. There’s a lot of new defense equipment coming in. I know that for a fact. I work here at the station. I see things. Everyone in the crowd out there, they’re just frightened stupid rich people. I’m not like that. I’m staying.”

“Good for you.”

After the luggage check, the Mercedes took them over to the small tour-embarkation building, which had its own platform along one side. Mellanie saw an MLV22 electric engine hitched to a single carriage waiting under the short composite panel canopy. There were three other people in the suiting room: Trevelyan Halgarth and Ferelith Alwon, a pair of physicists on their way to the Marie CelesteResearch Institute, and Griffith Applegate, a bureaucrat in the Governor’s office. Griffith confided that he was one of eight staff that were coming back on rotation—he was the only one who’d shown up. Trevelyan and Ferelith were pleasant enough, but Mellanie worried they were both Starflyer agents, and went for a polite but aloof approach when they tried to talk to her.

The suit Mellanie had to wear to compensate for Half Way’s atmosphere was a baggy mauve overall with its own heating web and a metal ring collar. Its array interfaced with her e-butler, and as soon as she’d settled the ring on her shoulders a rubbery semiorganic membrane slithered out from inside the rim to form a seal around her neck. A transparent bubble helmet clipped neatly onto the ring and locked tight. Her e-butler ran a quick check on the rebreather module and threw up a row of green icons in her virtual vision. She took the helmet off again, and carried it under her arm.

Niall led them down a corridor to the train, where a steward was waiting outside the open carriage door. “I’ll see you in about a week,” Mellanie told him. She let Dudley carry on through into the carriage, then gave Niall a quick impish kiss on the cheek. “They’re real,” she whispered and hurried off. Her last image of him was an astonished, happy smile on his gaunt face.

The inside of the carriage looked similar to all the rest of the standard-class furnishings in CST’s fleet. It was only the airlock doorways at both ends that made it different. As soon as the five passengers were sitting down the outer door closed, sealed, and the train began to roll forward.

Rain splattered down across the window as soon as they left the platform behind. Nothing else was moving across the station yard. Even the big cargo depots were quiet and unused.

Red light began to seep in through the carriage windows as they approached the Half Way gateway. Then Mellanie felt the tingle of the pressure curtain. It might have been her imagination, but she thought it was stronger than usual.

As soon as they were through, the rainwater that had smeared itself across every window in the carriage immediately turned to ice and fluoresced a strong crimson. She pressed her face against the triple glazed glass, peering through the frost pattern. The landscape outside was a desert of naked rock, stained a dark carmine by the M-class star. A coral-pink sky rose from a distant jagged horizon, phasing to a deep scarlet directly overhead. There were no clouds, not even the gentlest of hazes to mar the uniformity of the heavens above Half Way; the atmosphere was incredibly clear. Powerful blue-white flashes were going off constantly, an almost monotonous rhythm cutting through the red sunlight. No matter where Mellanie looked, she couldn’t see any lightning bolts; nor was there any thunder.

The journey from the gateway was short. On one side of the track, the rock began to dip down to reveal Half Way’s last remaining sea, a flat calm surface of slate-gray water. They were traveling toward a deep V-shaped inlet, whose sharp cliff walls extended back over a kilometer from the main shoreline. On any other world the inlet would have been an erosion estuary with a fast river emptying into its apex. Here, it looked as if a wedge-shaped slice of the land had been hewed out and removed. Instead of a river, a broad tongue of rock formed a smooth ramp leading down into the sea.

Shackleton was perched a hundred meters from the tranquil water, an odd collection of pressurized huts raised on stumpy pillars, interspaced with gigantic hangars. As well as the train staff and air crews, the little village also housed a team from Boongate’s National Marine Science Agency who were methodically categorizing the remaining oceanic life-forms. Not that anybody was visible outside; the whole place seemed deserted. It boasted a single crude station at the inland end, consisting of a ramp for cargo, and a pair of metal steps for the airlock doors.

As they drew up to it, Mellanie pressed harder against the glass, keen to see the planes they’d be flying on. Four of Half Way’s nine HA-1 Carbon Goose flying boats were resting on the rock just above the sea. She stared in awe at the massive silver-white fuselages gleaming under the red sun as their true size sank in.

When the Commonwealth Council was assembling the financial package necessary for CST to establish a wormhole link to Far Away, its members had been actively concerned about the possibility of anything hostile finding its way back to the Commonwealth. Given the nature of the flare that had been detected on Damaran, they had the reasonable enough worry that the aliens who triggered it might be antagonistic. The safeguard they insisted on was simple enough. The two respective wormhole gateway stations on Half Way must be separated by a considerable distance so that the route to Boongate could be severed in the event anything wicked did force its way off Far Away. After a full survey of Half Way, they went on to build the stations, Shackleton and Port Evergreen, on islands over ten thousand kilometers apart.

It was the Halgarths, the political instigators of the whole Far Away project, who provided the link between the islands. Some quirk of dynastic pride made Heather Antonia Halgarth decide on the largest aircraft ever built. The components were all constructed on EdenBurg and shipped in through Boongate to be assembled in Shackleton’s hangars. Made out of a carbotanium composite structure, each Carbon Goose measured a hundred twenty-two meters long, with a corresponding wingspan of a hundred ten meters. They had six engines, air-cooled fission micropile ducted turbines producing thirty-two thousand kilograms of thrust each, enough to give the plane a cruising speed of point nine mach. Range was effectively unlimited; the micropiles needed replacing only every twenty-five years.

The steward led them down from the train, and started shepherding them toward the Carbon Goose they were going to use. Behind them, a couple of CST staff emerged from a hut and began supervising the cargo removal. Loaderbots lifted up crates and transferred them to a small fleet of flatbed wagons that would drive them over to the plane.

Mellanie felt her suit stiffen and inflate as the airlock’s outer door opened. Valves soon equalized the pressure. Half Way’s atmosphere wasn’t hugely toxic—the majority of the gas was the kind of nitrogen oxygen mix found on H-congruous worlds—but it also contained unacceptably high levels of carbon dioxide and argon, which made filters or a rebreather essential. Equatorial temperature in the daytime fluctuated between minus ten and minus fifteen Celsius. Again, not immediately lethal, but heated suits were indispensable.

She walked a few paces away from the bottom of the steps and tilted her head back. Another bright flash erupted in the sky. It came from a tiny radiant point close to the gibbous bulk of the M-class star.

“Is that it?” she asked Dudley.

He was gawping up at the sky, for once looking quite serene. “Yes. That’s the companion. I was hoping you could see the plasma tide, but it doesn’t seem to be substantial enough for naked eye observation.”

“You mean the sun’s atmosphere?”

“Not the corona itself, no, though that does undergo constant tidal distortion. The neutron star is orbiting close enough to the sun to attract most of its solar wind. The plasma gets tugged out into gigantic streamers across the gulf and then spirals down to the neutron star. All the flashes you see are impact waves.”

As he was talking the neutron star flared again. Mellanie had to blink and look away, the light was so intense. It left a dense purple afterimage in her vision.

“Is that radioactive?”

“It emits radiation, Mellanie, it’s not radioactive. The two are quite separate.”

“All right,” she said in faint annoyance. “Is it dangerous?”

“There’s quite a heavy gamma and X-ray burst each time, yes. But Half Way’s atmosphere will protect us from the worst. You perhaps wouldn’t want to stay out here for a week, though.”

“I’ll try to remember.” She marched off toward the waiting flying boat, irritated by the way he’d switched into his lecturer persona.

The Carbon Goose was standing on its triple undercarriage, with aluminum air stairs extended from a forward airlock hatch. A long cargo hold was open amidships, with loaderbots transferring crates on board. As Mellanie drew closer she got a clear view of the sea behind the vast aircraft as it rippled against the inlet’s natural ramp of rock. It wasn’t perfectly still after all; the surface undulated slowly as it was stirred by the gentle currents of air that passed for wind on this world. A fringe of mushy ice lapped slothfully against the rock all around the shoreline, never quite managing to agglutinate into a solid sheet. The terminal glaciers that had emerged five million years ago to cap the northern and southern zones of the planet had slowly drained vast quantities of pure water out of the oceans, leaving a residue of water that became ever more salty with each passing century, correspondingly lowering its freezing point. Neither of the massive planetary encrustations had grown any larger for millennia now. With the star in its current state, Half Way’s environment had reached an equilibrium that would probably last for geological ages.

The airlock in the flying boat was large enough to hold all five passengers simultaneously as the atmosphere cycled. Mellanie took her helmet off as she walked into the forward cabin on the first deck. Her first impression was rows and rows of huge chairs stretching away down the brightly lit interior, like a small theater auditorium. There was a staff of eight waiting for them, and three times that many bots. She’d never seen anything like it before.

They were helped off with their suits and told to sit wherever they liked. Mellanie chose a window seat near the front, and was given a glass of bucks fizz by one of the stewardesses. “Now this is the way to travel,” she declared as the seat slid back and its footrest extended. Dudley looked around uncertainly, then gingerly allowed himself to sink back into the thick leather cushioning.

There were all the usual dull thuds associated with an aircraft preparing to take off, crates being loaded and secured, cargo hold doors closing, turbines starting up. The ends of the wings slowly bent down to the vertical, lowering the long bulbous tip floats ready for the water takeoff. Then they were rolling down the rock slope into the sea. More thuds as the undercarriage retracted, leaving them floating. They taxied sedately out of the inlet. The pilot used the PA to announce their ten-hour flight time and wished them a pleasant journey, and the nuclear turbines wound up to full thrust.

It was a surprisingly short takeoff run. Mellanie grinned excitedly as huge fans of spray curved out from behind the wingtip floats. Then they were surging up into the pink sky, applauded by the silent dazzling flashes of collapsing ions as they crashed into the neutron star forty million kilometers above them.

There was only one break in the monotony of the flight. Three hours in, the pilot spotted a pod of white whurwals far below, and lost altitude so the bored passengers could see them. They were little more than vermilion dots sliding through the darkling sea, almost twice the size of Earth’s blue whales. Unlike those terrestrial whales these were fantastically aggressive, pack creatures hunting down the gradually dwindling stocks of fish they shared their last arctic ocean with. They even fought with other pods as they swam around and around the equator between the constricting walls of Half Way’s terminal glaciers.

Twice Mellanie and Dudley left the forward cabin to consummate their membership in the mile-high club. They didn’t even have to use the cramped toilets for privacy. The middle and rear cabins on all three decks were empty and dark, giving them plenty of scope for misbehavior amid the long rows of vacant seats.

Port Evergreen was situated on an island covering forty thousand square kilometers, all of it naked rock. No plant life had ever been discovered on Half Way; there were no traces of soil, even sand was virtually nonexistent thanks to the lack of a moon and any tides; and nobody had ever chipped out any fossils from island strata. Planetary scientists argued that evolution had never pushed out of the aquatic stage, not that the Commonwealth was interested. Half Way was the ultimate nowhere planet.

As if to prove it, Port Evergreen was even less impressive than Shackleton. It was dusk when they arrived, with barely enough maroon light left in the sky to illuminate the desolate rock. Port Evergreen nestled at the lee of a kilometer-wide dip in the blank cliff face that the island presented to the sea. It had one hangar, six silvery pressurized huts, and a long two-story building that looked like some kind of cheap hotel. The wormhole generator was housed in an armadillo-shaped edifice of raw carbon panels, with one fat tapering end sheltering the gateway arch. There was no rail track leading into it, which surprised Mellanie.

Their Carbon Goose splashed down in a reasonably smooth fashion, parallel to the shore, although once they hit the water deceleration was a lot sharper than any normal aircraft runway landing. For once Mellanie was grateful for the plyplastic grips holding her into the seat. She suited up carefully as they taxied in to the land. There were four more of the huge flying boats standing outside the hangar; by strict rotation another had flown back to Shackleton as they came the other way.

Two suited figures were standing at the bottom of the air stairs when the passengers disembarked. The first introduced himself as Eemeli Aro, the CST technical officer responsible for the wormhole generator.

“Good timing on your part,” he told the passengers. “The wormhole cycle starts in another eighteen minutes. There’s no need to rest up in the lodge.” A hand waved in the direction of the gateway. “You all just walk over there, and as soon as it opens I’ll give you the all clear. Just walk through.”

Mellanie had been expecting a slightly more elaborate arrangement, but she and Dudley exchanged a quick glance through their helmets, and started traipsing over the rock. The red sun was already close to the horizon, and falling fast. Its neutron companion continued to send out dazzling flashes, as if it was the emergency strobe on some sinking ship.

Polyphoto lights were shining on all of Port Evergreen’s buildings, producing weak yellow splashes on the rock as the sunlight vanished. The stars came out quickly, leaving Mellanie feeling very small and exposed. For the first time in her life she truly understood the concept of darkness closing in.

The five passengers huddled close together in front of the gateway. A wan ultramarine light filled the arch, only visible now the red sun had set. It wasn’t cold, but Mellanie folded her arms, hugging herself and shifting her weight from one foot to another. She mentally urged the wormhole to power up, but there was nothing she could do to hurry the stormrider.

Half Way’s strange binary star was the final factor in selecting the icy planet as a site for the wormhole stations. Even though its diameter was considerably smaller than a standard commercial CST wormhole, the Far Away wormhole still had a massive energy consumption requirement. The basis of the stormrider was an idea that went back to almost the beginning of the twentieth century’s “space age”: a contra-rotating windmill, powering a simple electrical generator, that worked off the solar wind.

Like the original concept, the stormrider had rectangular blades, sixteen of them radiating out from the hub, each one a flat lattice of struts twenty-five kilometers long, made from the toughest steelsilicon fibers the Commonwealth knew how to manufacture. Twenty-three kilometers of them were covered by an ultra-thin silvered foil, giving a total surface area of over one thousand eight hundred square kilometers for the solar wind to impact on. Even in an ordinary solar system environment that would have produced a considerable torque. In the Half Way system the stormrider was positioned at the Lagrange point between the red star and its neutron companion, right in the middle of the plasma current, where the ion density was orders of magnitude thicker than any normal solar wind. The power the stormrider produced when it was in the thick of the flow was enough to operate the wormhole generator. But it couldn’t simply sit at the Lagrange point producing electricity continuously; that would have been too much like perpetual motion. As the waves of plasma pushed against it, they exerted an unremitting pressure on the blades that blew the stormrider away from the Lagrange point out toward the neutron star. So for five hours the two sets of blades would turn in opposite directions, generating electricity for the Port Evergreen wormhole that was delivered via a zero-width wormhole. The stormrider also stored some of the power, so that at the end of the five hours when it was out of alignment, it had enough of a reserve to fire its onboard thrusters, moving itself even farther out of the main plasma stream where the pressure was reduced. From there it chased a simple fifteen-hour loop back around through open space to the Lagrange point, where the cycle would begin again.

Forty million kilometers from Half Way, the stormrider glided back into the heart of the Lagrange point, where the tempest of ions splashed against its gigantic silver blades. Their rotation speed began to increase.

The archway’s wraithish radiance abruptly changed to a bright monochrome haze. Vague shadows were moving about on the other side of the foggy pressure curtain.

“Okay, people, through you go,” Eemeli Aro said.

The two physicists stepped through almost immediately, blurring into shadow.

“It’s quite all right,” Griffith Applegate reassured them. “I’ve done this a hundred times.” He promptly strode through the archway.

“The connection is stable,” the SI told Mellanie. “I am connected to the net in Armstrong City, such as it is. It is safe to go through.”

Mellanie put her hand out, and felt Dudley take hold of it.

“Suppose we’d better go then,” she said. The pair of them walked directly into the torrent of bright warm light.

Mellanie was keen to see what the new world looked like, the city, its people. Instead of having a good look around, she was immediately distracted by the way her body wanted to soar away off the ground. It was as if an ordinary step had somehow turned into a leap. As soon as she came through the pressure curtain she was moving forward far too fast. She hurriedly let go of Dudley and brought her arms out to try to balance herself, which sent her little shoulder bag zipping off ahead of her as if it were a balloon caught in a breeze. She managed to come to a halt, and stood completely still, fearful of what any further movements would do to her. The bag fell down to her side.

“Damn, I forgot the gravity.” She took a breath, and glanced around for Dudley. He was standing just behind her, completely unperturbed by what had happened.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Remember what I told you about inertia here. This is a low-gravity planet. You have to think out any movement before you make it.”

“Yes, yes.” Her elegant virtual hand tapped the helmet release icon, and the collar disengaged. She lifted the transparent bubble off her head, and shook out her hair, which floated about slowly.

The noise of the city swirled around her, machinery thrumming away, combustion engines, car horns, the cry of animals, human conversation and shouts. Its smell was stronger than any urban area she’d ever visited in the Commonwealth: raw gasoline fumes, and seawater, and animals, spicy cooking, organic decay, heat, dust, it all mingled into a brawny mélange that was overpowering in a first breath.

When she recovered from that, she looked around. They seemed to have emerged into some kind of open arena measuring an easy five hundred meters across. There was a low metal fence in front of her, isolating a peaceful semicircle in front of the gateway to serve as a reception area for arrivals. Beyond the fence, and dominating the center of the arena floor, were three wide brick-lined pools with big fountains squirting out of various statues. Some traffic drove around the pools, a mix of gasoline vehicles, bicycles, rickshaws, and horse-drawn carts, though none of it appeared to be following any road markings. High yellow-stone walls curved away on both sides of her, topped by dozens of ragtag solarcloth awnings draped over poles of wood and fiber-glass that were lashed together with no thought of symmetry. There must have been some kind of walkway up there; she could see a lot of people moving around close to the low parapet. At ground level, the walls were punctured by archways of varying sizes. The smaller ones had stalls just inside, away from the sharp midmorning sunlight, selling anything from modern consumer technology to fresh food, clothes, plants, toys, ancient and much-repaired bots, hand tools, power tools, animal feed, artwork, semiorganics, books, and medicines. Several of the archways opened into bars, offering drinks that ranged from guaranteed-hangover-cure coffee to hundred-proof local rum, with dozens of beers and fruit juices, even native wines. The largest archways led into dark cave-like buildings serving as warehouses. Small trucks and horse-drawn carts went in and out.

A swarm of people was moving slowly over the rough-laid stone slabs that formed the arena’s floor, making the traffic give way to them. Their clothing styles were bewilderingly wide: they’d enthusiastically adopted everything from loincloths to T-shirt and shorts, kilts, saris, conservative business suits, priestlike robes, simple dresses, mechanics’ overalls; there were even a few men in tropical-khaki police uniforms with peaked white caps trying to sort out traffic disputes.

Standing with her back to the dark shimmer of the gateway, helmet under her arm, Mellanie felt like some kind of astronaut who’d just stepped out of her rocketship. She stared out at the bustling scene for a long moment before stirring herself to cope with more immediate and mundane matters. A couple of CST personnel were helping the Institute physicists out of their suits. Mellanie began to shrug out of hers. A CST supervisor asked her to move aside. She barely cleared the gateway before robot vans and flatbed trucks started trundling through, bringing the crates from the Carbon Goose. They drove straight out into the arena and headed for the archways that fronted warehouses, collision horns blaring at sluggish pedestrians.

By the time she and Dudley got their suits off, their luggage had been unloaded. Both bags rolled over to them. A hotel courtesy car marked LANGFORD TOWERS was parked outside the fence, its driver smiling and waving to attract their attention. The two Institute physicists were climbing into a big six-wheeled Land Rover Cruiser with black-glass windows. Three trucks were parked beside them, receiving a batch of crates that had just come through the gateway.

Griffith Applegate picked up his shoulder bag, and gave Mellanie a friendly smile. “Don’t worry, I know it looks daunting, but take it from me, this is a tame part of town. You’ll be perfectly safe here.”

“Thanks,” she said dubiously.

He pulled a wide-brimmed hat out of his bag and settled it on his head, then put his sunglasses on. “One piece of advice. Only use the taxis with a license from the Governor’s House.” He touched the rim of his hat and set off into the throng.

“I’ll remember that,” she told his back. “Come on, Dudley, let’s go get to the hotel.” She checked to see that her luggage was following, and set off for the courtesy car.

Stig McSobel rested his elbows on the stone parapet that lined the top of Market Wall to give himself a better view across 3F, as the locals called First Foot Fall Plaza. Two hundred meters away, the gateway had opened on time, and five people emerged through the dark pressure curtain.

“They’re here, Halgarth and Alwon,” he said to Olwen McOnna, who was standing at his side. She wasn’t watching 3F; like every good bodyguard she was scanning the nearby shoppers who moved from stall to stall in search of bargains. The merchants were pressed up together in a giant ring of commerce that made up the roof of the city’s massive central edifice. Here the flow of life and trade was unchanged, money and goods were exchanged in the same ritual of fast barter that had been in existence for close to a couple of centuries, heedless of the threat that lurked out among the stars. Deeper in the city, though, the uncertainty was more pronounced; rumor and fear were affecting the way people thought and behaved. The absence of tourists was noted everywhere. The Governor had ordered more police out of their comfortable stations and onto the streets where their visibility would instill confidence. A futile measure, Stig believed. Soon unease would turn to worry, then panic.

“It’ll take them an hour to get outside the city,” Olwen said. “I’ll alert the raiders.”

“Okay.” Stig’s virtual vision ghosted icons and text over the gateway. He opened a channel back to the unisphere, and several messages flooded into his e-butler’s hold file. His own messages went racing out to various onetime addresses. Then he peered forward in surprise at the people now standing in front of the gateway. The virtual vision intensity reduced, and he used his retinal inserts to zoom in. One he knew of, Griffith Applegate, who worked in the Governor’s House, trying to maintain Armstrong City’s shaky civil infrastructure. The other two…“I know her. I accessed her on the unisphere back in the Commonwealth. She’s some sort of celebrity. A reporter. Yeah: Mellanie Rescorai. What’s she doing here?”

Olwen hadn’t stopped searching the crowd of shoppers. “If she’s a reporter, she’s looking for news. Obviously.”

“Not a proper reporter, just a rich brat doing silly ‘personality’ stories. Probably covering this season’s city fashion.” His virtual vision strengthened slightly, and he activated several icons. Inserts began to run an ident program on Rescorai’s companion—there was something familiar about him.

Stig watched the two of them clamber into a hotel courtesy car. It pulled away with a fusillade of horn blasts just as the first departures bus pulled up outside the gateway enclave. Passengers disembarked; Far Away natives who’d recently spent a lot of time in the gym and injecting steroids and genoproteins to give themselves additional muscle. Stig remembered that time of his life all too easily. A second bus drew up. Two more were driving slowly across 3F. CST personnel were already handing out the slack mauve suits that would safeguard the passengers as they walked to the Carbon Goose waiting for them on the other side of the gateway. The cost of the trip, even a one-way ticket, was beyond the means of most of Far Away’s population. Crime in the city was increasing as desperate people acquired the cash any way they could.

A transparent purple rectangle flipped up into Stig’s virtual vision. “Well, wadda ya know,” he muttered.

“What?” Olwen asked.

“That bloke with Rescorai, he’s Dudley Bose.”

The Langford Towers gave Mellanie and Dudley the Royal Suite on the top floor. There was complimentary champagne, even if it was only from a vineyard out on the northern slopes of the Samafika Mountains. They also had complimentary chocolate, fruit, cheese, biscuits, and mineral water. Every table had a big vase with magnificently arranged fresh flowers. The bathroom medicine cabinet could hardly shut, there were so many toiletries inside.

They were the only residents.

“This certainly beats the hell out of the old Pine Heart Gardens,” Mellanie declared as she pushed open the patio doors and went out onto the broad veranda. With its four floors, the Langford Towers was one of the tallest nongovernmental buildings in Armstrong City; it helped that the ceilings were very high, a design feature that helped prevent patrons from standard-gravity worlds from banging their heads after an inadvertently strong step. The hotel’s size and position gave her an excellent view out over the red pan tile rooftops to the shore of the North Sea a couple of kilometers westward. A broad circular harbor provided berths for boats of all types, from trawlers to ferries, cargo sloops to houseboats, sports fishers and simple pleasure yachts. The blue sea beyond sparkled invitingly even with the sun low in Far Away’s astonishing sapphire sky; several dozen boats were making their way into the harbor for the night.

Mellanie scanned across the skyline. Armstrong City lacked the neat urban grids she was used to; its streets and avenues zigzagged and curved in contorted patterns. They actually swerved around the larger buildings in the center like the First Foot Fall Plaza and the Governor’s House, and the revitalization project offices, which made her wonder which had come first. Only the acres of warehouses behind the harbor seemed to have any sort of regular order in their layout. Outlying districts swarmed over the undulating land, revealing parks and retail streets, neat suburban estates and industrial zones. Thickets of tall metal chimneys squirted out thick gray plumes, a pollution so blatant it startled her.

Away to the south she could see a couple of dark oval shapes stationary in the sky, just outside the city boundary. A hundred twenty years ago when the revitalization project was at its peak, it had employed a fleet of over two hundred fifty blimpbots. At first they’d been used to spray soil bacteria across the desolate post-flare landscape, loading up from the newly constructed clone vats at the aerodrome outside Armstrong City. Then once the soil was revived they’d scattered seeds and even insect eggs across the planet in an effort to return it to full H-congruous status. Several had succumbed to hostilities between the Guardians and the Institute, and a number were lost in the storms that raged around the Grand Triad, but it was age that claimed most of them. Those that remained, barely thirty now, were running on components cannibalized from warehouses filled with the shells of their retired cousins, their gas envelopes patched and fraying, undeserving of the flightworthy certificates that the Governor’s House ritually issued to them every year.

Blimpbots and pollution were only half of Mellanie’s sense of uncoupling. She realized what really bothered her: the lack of trains. There were no embankments and cuttings taking priority through the architecture. No elevated rails slicing above the clogged-up traffic. More than anything, trains symbolized Commonwealth society.

“What a weird place,” Mellanie said. “I can’t see why so many people emigrated here. It’s all so backward; as if the Victorians invented starflight and transported their culture here. Maybe that is where the Marie Celeste came from.”

“You’re too young to understand,” Dudley said.

She turned, mildly surprised at the confidence in his voice.

Dudley stood beside her, smiling admiringly at the ramshackle city spread out around them. “Try rejuvenating five times, having to go back to a nine-to-five job for century after century just so you can pay half of your salary into an R and R pension fund that allows you to do exactly the same thing all over again. You might have a different job, wife, children; but for all that you’re just stuck on the same loop with no prospect of change. Once you’ve been through all that, Mellanie, even you would consider coming here to live your last life without a safety net.”

“I didn’t know you felt that way, Dudley.”

“I don’t. Or didn’t. Not during my last life, anyway. But I remember accessing a lot of files on emigration here. A couple more rejuve treatments, having to spend another fifty years fighting the dean for funding, married to another bitch like Wendy, and, yes, I could see myself doing it. There’s something very appealing about walking off into the wilderness and seeing what’s out there. The prospect of telling modern life to fuck off, and just for once build something substantial for yourself with your own two hands, revert to the hunter-gatherer state. It’s not as far away as we like to think, you know.”

“And now?”

“Now? None of us have that luxury anymore.” His face flinched. “I made sure of that, didn’t I?”

“No. You were a very minor part of what’s happened. Sorry to dent your ego, my darling, but you’re not that responsible.”

He grunted, unconvinced.

She wasn’t sure how to respond. The times when the old Dudley appeared she felt small and stupid beside him. Strange, considering this was the state she was supposed to be helping him return to.

The SI’s icon flashed emerald in her virtual vision, allowing her to postpone thinking about Dudley and his new future. “Yes?” she asked it.

“We’re only three hours from the end of the wormhole cycle, Mellanie. This would be a good time to establish our subroutine in the city net. We can verify operational authenticity.”

“All right.” She walked back into the lounge. There was a pine desk beside the door into the bedroom with a small, ancient desktop array on top. She placed both hands on the array’s first-generation i-spot, and a webbing of faint silver lines appeared on her fingers. A whole new display of icons materialized in her virtual vision, and seeker programs began to analyze the local net from inside her inserts. “Doesn’t look like there are any decent monitor programs in the nodes,” she said.

“We concur, Mellanie. Please release our subroutine.”

Her gold snakeskin virtual hands tapped out the code sequence, and the subroutine decompressed out of her inserts, flowing into the city net through her contact with the desktop array. The SI had formatted it as a simple observer system, with enough independence to advise and assist Mellanie when the wormhole was closed. She’d brought it with her in her inserts because any program that large entering Far Away through the narrow bandwidth of the Half Way relay would easily be detected by monitors. That opened the SIsubroutine to the risk of corruption, especially if the Guardians or the Starflyer were running hostile smartware in the city’s nodes.

“I am installed,” the SIsubroutine reported. “The city net has enough capacity for me to run in distributed mode within its on-line arrays.”

“We confirm that,” the SI said.

“Great,” Mellanie said. She took her hands away from the desktop array.

“See if you can find any kind of activity that might be the Guardians. All I need’s a name, or an address. Some way I can make contact with them.”

“I will begin analysis,” the SIsubroutine said. “There are a great many systems that have restricted access. Given the age of the processors I am operating in, it will take some time to circumvent their fireshields.”

“Do what you can.”

Dudley had come back into the lounge. “Who are you calling?” he asked.

“The Michelangelo office.” She told her e-butler to close the connection to the SI. “Just checking in and getting an update.”

“Okay.” His gaze crept over to the bedroom’s door. “What are we going to do next?”

“Go down to the bar, and get some information. Bars are always the best place for that. Besides, I could do with a big drink, we’ve been traveling for ages.” She yawned, stretching her arms to try to loosen the knotted shoulder muscles. “Come on, let’s go see if Far Away’s heard of a Murderous Seduction cocktail.”

The bar and restaurant at the Langford Towers were the only parts of the hotel doing any decent business. They catered to an upmarket cliental, such as it was in Armstrong City, providing a décor with decidedly Indian influences. The chef favored spiced dishes, and the in-house music system played a lot of sitar classics.

Stig found himself a small empty table in the bar, and sipped a beer quietly while he tried to catalogue the other customers. He’d been there forty minutes when Mellanie and Dudley walked in. He’d intended to give them a brief look, then show no further interest, just as Adam had taught him. But Mellanie made that difficult. Her longish chin and flat nose denied her the kind of perfection a classic beauty would have, but her physical presence was striking. Powerful strides carried her quickly across the bar, yet she’d already developed a controlled rhythm to her movements that most offworlders took at least a week to learn. Every motion made her wavy gold hair flutter leisurely above her shoulders.

Dudley followed her with unsteady footsteps. When they arrived at the counter he grabbed it to steady himself. It was hard not to draw comparisons between the two of them, given the way Dudley stayed so close. The re-lifed astronomer came over as completely inadequate both physically and mentally.

Stig finally managed to look away. Most of the other patrons were watching the newcomers. Despite his earlier assessment, he couldn’t tell if any of them were Starflyer operatives from the Institute. Surely at least one of them must be?

The Institute was becoming a lot bolder in the city since the Prime attack. Its director had offered assistance to the Governor as crime and disturbances increased; already several routine police patrols in the center were accompanied by Institute troops in their dark armor. Stig thought it unlikely the only two offworlders on Far Away wouldn’t be kept under observation.

He heard Mellanie try to order some exotic cocktail that the barkeeper had never heard of. She settled for a pitcher of margaritas. As the barkeeper started mixing the ingredients she eased herself closer to him, and spoke in low tones. Stig casually glanced around, just in time to catch the barkeeper’s startled expression. The man quickly shook his head, and gave her the pitcher before hurrying off to the other end of the counter.

A disgruntled Mellanie hauled Dudley over to a vacant table.

Stig was almost laughing. The whole scene was like a badly acted TSI drama.

Fortunately there was no second act. Mellanie and Dudley drank their pitcher and went off back to their suite, both of them yawning. Stig remained in the bar, watching who left and when. Nobody else was acting remotely suspicious.

Closing time was midnight. He finished his beer and waited in the deserted lobby. Finally the barkeeper came through from the kitchen, pulling his coat on.

“A word,” Stig said presently.

The barkeeper glanced about nervously, but the hotel’s night staff was nowhere to be seen. He was in his mid-thirties, with the kind of spindly frame that most Far Away residents acquired, which made his burgeoning beer belly unusually prominent.

“Yes, sir?”

Stig produced an Earth fifty-dollar bill, and pressed it into the barkeeper’s hand. The man was professional enough to pocket it at once.

“Very attractive offworld girl in here earlier tonight.”

“The Royal Suite, sir, top floor.”

“Thank you, I already know that. What I would really appreciate knowing is what she asked you for.”

The barkeeper gave him an awkward look. Stig waited. He wouldn’t have to make any threats, not against the barkeeper. At the worst it would cost him another fifty dollars.

“She wanted to know where she could meet a member of the Guardians. I told her I didn’t know. Which I don’t. Obviously.”

“Obviously.”

“I never said anything else.”

“I see. Thank you.”

The barkeeper let out a short relieved breath, and hurried out. Stig waited a couple of minutes, then made his own way out into the night, the hotel’s automatic doors locking behind him.

Solar-charged polyphoto globes gave off an uninspiring yellow shimmer down the length of the wide street. The faint throb of dance music was just audible, drifting from the back door of a club. A cool air washed the salty ozone smell of the sea across Armstrong City. Somewhere in the distance a police siren wailed its lonely note along the empty roads. It couldn’t be for the Institute’s vehicles; they’d been destroyed hours ago, hit by mortars and masers not ten kilometers outside the city. Trevelyan Halgarth and Ferelith Alwon would never reach the Institute now, never help the Starflyer. With any luck their memorycells had been ruined by the fire that consumed the Land Rover Cruiser. They’d be just as dead as Kazimir.

Stig pulled a cigarette from his packet and thumbed an old-fashioned gasoline lighter. A bad habit, picked up back in the decadent Commonwealth. The mix of nicotine and grass felt good as he pulled it down. He needed a lifter from the stress of the day.

“That illumination makes you a perfect target,” Olwen said from the shadows.

“If you’re relying on a cigarette glow instead of a decent nightsight you’re in deep trouble,” he told her.

She came out of a doorway and joined him as he walked away from the hotel, down the slight slope that led toward the harbor.

“Where’s Finlay?”

“Got himself a good spot. He’ll call if they leave the hotel tonight.”

“Anybody else interested?”

“If they are, they’re better than us. We haven’t seen anyone.”

Stig stopped, and looked back at the high whitewashed façade of the Langford Towers. The Royal Suite balcony was a gray rectangle just under the roof. What in the dreaming heavens does a girl like that see in a piece of wreckage like Dudley Bose? They have to be here for a purpose.

“They went to bed about ten minutes after they went back to the room,” Olwen said.

“I thought that suite was too high to get a proper line of sight inside.”

“It is. I’ll rephrase. The light went off ten minutes after they got back upstairs. Hasn’t come on again since.” She sniggered. “Probably couldn’t wait to rip each other’s clothes off. Here by themselves. Hint of danger. Young. You could practically smell the hormones sweating off them.”

Stig didn’t say anything. His own mind had been filled by the image of a naked Mellanie on the bed with Dudley Bose. It bothered him slightly. That it was Dudley, not him. Which it really shouldn’t do.

“What do you want to do about them?” Olwen asked.

“Not sure. They want to find us, apparently. Let’s see what they do tomorrow.”

Stig was using Halkin Ironmongery, an old hardware store, for his headquarters in Armstrong City. It was fairly central, had a big useful garage at the back, and the neighbors believed the clan members were new owners taking their time to do the place up, an opportune impression that allowed for a lot of people and vehicles to come and go without attracting comment. As covers went, Adam Elvin would have been proud.

When Stig arrived in the morning Murdo McPeierls and young Felix McSobel had already started stripping down the engine from one of the Mazda Volta jeeps. They had nine of the sturdy old vehicles jammed into the garage and yard. Stig had brought them in as part of the reception for the Boongate blockade run that Adam was putting together. Adam hadn’t sent too many details yet, not even by encrypted message. But it would go ahead, Stig was certain of that; the new inspections on Boongate had essentially cut them off from their Commonwealth supplies. One of Stig’s other jobs was putting together the technical teams who would assemble the multitude of components into the specialized force field generators needed for the planet’s revenge. So he knew how desperate the clans were for fresh components. They were desperate for the Martian data as well. He’d talked to Samantha who was in charge of the control group assembling the large array that would run the network of manipulator stations. She’d explained how urgent it was. Now Kazimir was dead and the data lost. That should have been my run. Fate had been evil to them that day.

Stig spent the first half hour of the morning working out in the makeshift gym in the store’s basement, kickboxing the heavy leather bags, imagining each and every one of them to be Bruce McFoster. It was good exercise, something he could lose himself in, not having to think.

“You are troubled, Stig McSobel,” said a voice that had a permanent whispering echo.

Stig hadn’t heard anyone come in. He finished his kick and slid around smoothly, dropping into a crouch. The Barsoomian who called himself Dr. Friland was standing at the bottom of the wooden stairs, a tall figure clad in dark robes of semiorganic cloth. His face was partially hidden inside a deep monk’s hood, which was perpetually haunted by shadows. Stig had once used his retinal inserts to try to get a clear image, only to find the effect was actually some kind of distortion field. The Barsoomians always veiled their true appearance. Rumor had it they didn’t want anyone to know how far their modifications had taken them from their original human form. Dr. Friland was certainly taller than any normal human Stig had ever seen; though plenty of Commonwealth citizens had reprofiled themselves for media sports shows like wrestling, producing ridiculous freak-variants on the human body. This was different, not that he knew how exactly.

Stig straightened up, allowing the muscles in his shoulders and arms to loosen. “What makes you say that?”

“You always resort to physical activity when confronted with a vexing problem,” Dr. Friland said in his euphonious voice. “It allows your subconscious to review possibilities.”

“Right.” Stig retrieved his towel and started to dry himself. He’d managed to work up quite a sweat. “By the way, our people say to thank you again for the bioprocessors. They’ve been integrated into our large array. Apparently they were way ahead of anything the Commonwealth is producing. It should make our digital simulations a lot quicker.”

“Our pleasure.”

Stig walked over to the bench and pulled on a simple short-sleeved shirt. He was always grateful to the Barsoomians for the assistance they gave the clans, yet he never knew what to say on the rare occasions he encountered one. How could you make small talk to an unknowable entity? Dr. Friland had arrived in Armstrong City a week ago, delivering the requested processors for the command group. For reasons best known to himself he’d remained in the city, staying in the big private residence the Barsoomians maintained for themselves out in the Chinese quarter.

Without any visible leg movement, Dr. Friland rotated on the spot, keeping his shielded face pointing at Stig. “There is something new in the city’s net.”

“A new monitor program?” He was surprised the clan’s webheads hadn’t detected it; they were interfaced just about continuously.

“No. This is a…presence.”

The Barsoomian sounded uncertain, which sent a tingle down Stig’s spine. He placed a lot of weight on the supposed infallibility of the Barsoomians. Even his time in the Commonwealth with its everyday technology could never fully quash all the fabulous childhood stories of the others who shared this world. “You mean like a ghost or something?”

“A ghost in the machine? How appropriate. It is certainly a machine’s ghost.”

“Ah, right. So, what’s it doing?”

The darkness within Dr. Friland’s hood lessened to reveal a row of smiling teeth. “Whatever it wants.”

“I’ll get my people to watch for it.”

“It is elusive. Even I can only gather hints of its passage.” The darkness closed back over Dr. Friland’s smile.

“Wait…We’re not talking about the Starflyer, here, are we?”

“No. This is a binary construction; it is not a child of biological life. But it did not come through the gateway. We would have felt its passage within the datastream.”

“Then what the hell is it?”

“I suspect you were close to the truth with your first question. Something this pervasive can only be here to observe the city and its inhabitants. What you should be asking is, who would want to gather information on such a scale?”

“Mellanie,” Stig hissed. “She wants to know how to meet us. She’s a reporter, so I guess she must have access to sophisticated scrutineer programs. I just didn’t think…” He fell silent, rubbing at the back of his neck with some embarrassment. “Me of all people, I shouldn’t be fooled by appearances.”

“This is the girl who came through the gateway yesterday?”

“Yes. Though I haven’t a clue who she’s working for.” He leveled a sly glance at the Barsoomian. “Do you know?”

“Alas, my people are not omnipotent. I have no more idea than you, perhaps even less. It is a long time since I left the Commonwealth.”

“You weren’t born here?” Stig knew he probably shouldn’t ask, but it wasn’t often a Barsoomian talked about anything, let alone his own background.

“No. I was born back on Earth, before Sheldon and Isaacs opened their first wormhole.”

“Dreaming heavens. I never knew anyone was that old. Not even Johansson dates back that far.”

“There are some of us still left from that time. Not many. Not now.”

“Right.” Stig shook himself, and started to walk up the stairs. He watched closely as the Barsoomian followed him, gliding across the gym’s dusty floorboards. The hem of his robe lifted just before he reached the bottom stair, flowing upward ahead of whatever feet it concealed. “I’m going to check with the team I’ve got watching Mellanie and Bose,” he said. “Do you want to stay around?”

“No thank you. They haven’t left the hotel yet. I thought I would visit the national gallery today. It’s been a while, and I hear good things about the new sculptors.”

Stig did his best to avoid checking over his shoulder. There was just no predicting the Barsoomians.

Dr. Friland was right: Rescorai and Bose hadn’t left the hotel yet. The team he’d assigned to them reported that they’d ordered breakfast in bed.

Stig told the webheads to start searching for a new distributed-operation monitor program in the city’s net. He desperately wanted to increase the number of people watching the young reporter, but the clans didn’t have enough people in Armstrong City for that. There was no way he could switch priorities based on his own feelings—Adam had certainly hammered that lesson in. Unless and until she did something radical, Mellanie was an unknown he had to regard as nonhostile. He still had to cover the daily gateway opening, and continue training and preparation for the blockade run. On top of that he had to maintain a thorough watch on the Institute personnel’s activities in Armstrong City, which continued to grow.

With the few clan members he could spare, he was lucky Mellanie didn’t spot them when she did finally leave the hotel to wander over the city. They stayed well back, and delivered hourly bulletins for him. She behaved just like any rookie reporter; even though he was convinced that was an elaborate front. He still hadn’t figured out what Bose was doing with her, not at all.

Mellanie had a thoroughly worthless first day in Armstrong City. After a long sleep to recover from the journey she headed off to the Governor’s House, where she spent over an hour in the press office, familiarizing herself with local events. Her expectation that her Michelangelo show credentials would give her special privileges and encourage the Governor’s media staff to confide rumors and civic gossip was badly misplaced. Nobody had ever heard of Michelangelo. The official line was that the Guardians were a bunch of scabby mountain bandits, irrelevant to the city. The Governor’s media people were keen to push the concept of how life was continuing normally on Far Away, that nobody was panicking.

A follow-up visit to the local news company, the Armstrong Chronicle, which maintained a public bulletin service and ran news shows on the city net, was almost as unproductive. The Chronicle reporters did at least supply some details on the ambush just outside the city. She was shocked to learn Trevelyan Halgarth and Ferelith Alwon were dead, and that the medical crews had retrieved their memory cells for shipment back to the Commonwealth. When she asked if it was the Guardians who’d mounted the ambush nobody knew anything other than the police statement that local crime syndicates were suspected.

She popped into one of the gyms that was doing such a roaring trade, recording a puff piece for Michelangelo about rich natives building their bodies up for life on a standard-gravity world. It was so ineffectual she was embarrassed to send it when the wormhole cycle opened.

In the afternoon she did some bog-standard man-in-the-street interviews. They were a little more revealing; several people said they thought the Guardians were behind the recent attacks on the Institute’s vehicles and property. If they were, she reasoned, then they must have a group based in the city.

When they got back to the hotel she reviewed the meager information the SIsubroutine had collected for her. “I have no direct evidence of any Guardian membership,” it told her. “However, when the wormhole was open earlier this afternoon, a great many encrypted messages flowed into the city net. Most were directed to the Governor’s House, and the Institute.”

“And the rest?”

“They were all addressed to individuals. Given the small physical size of the net, it should now be possible for me to correlate the physical location of each recipient.”

“I haven’t got the time to knock on the door of everyone who got an encoded message.”

“Of course not. But once I have identified the building where an encoded message was received, I can review the electronic hardware it contains for evidence. Be advised; there is one place I will not be able to venture: the Barsoomian residence in the Chinese quarter. There are some strange processing units connected to the net at that node. My routines do not run correctly in them. I have withdrawn myself from that area.”

“The Barsoomians, they’re some kind of ultra-green radical group, aren’t they?”

“That was one of their founding concepts. They are humans who wish to explore the potential of unrestrained genetic modification within themselves and their environment, thereby leaving mainstream society behind. Far Away was the ideal planet for them to establish themselves. Without a global government it cannot enforce the kind of restrictions on genetic modification which most Commonwealth worlds have.”

“Are they connected to the Guardians?”

“I do not know. It seems improbable the two groups are unaware of each other. There are several archive reports at the Armstrong Chronicle of Guardians using unusually large horses. The Barsoomians would be an obvious source of breeding stock.”

“That is interesting. All right, let me know if you find anything at those buildings.”

Mellanie and Dudley had dinner in the hotel restaurant. The curry she chose was a lot hotter than most she’d eaten before, but she managed to get it down, aware of the waiter smiling in the background when she puffed out her cheeks and drank copious amounts of cold mineral water to wash it down. Dudley wasn’t so lucky. He was complaining of a bad stomach even before they reached their suite.

“I thought I remembered liking spicy food,” he mumbled the second time he returned from the bathroom.

“It’s probably an acclimatization thing,” Mellanie said. “Your new body isn’t ready for curry just yet.” She retrieved her small white cocktail dress from her bag—not one from her own range, a nice Nicallio that had been tailored to fit her just perfectly—and she knew she looked sensational wearing it.

If she didn’t have any success tracking down the Guardians tomorrow, then she’d just have to extract information the old-fashioned way. During her visit to the Armstrong Chronicle, several male staff members had managed to swing past and tell her how delighted they’d be to show her around the big city at night.

Looking at the dress with its nearly nonexistent skirt, Mellanie gave a mildly resentful sigh. She would fuck whoever it took to get a contact name, of course she would. But lately—actually, since the Prime invasion—she’d begun wondering about other ways to accomplish her job, because that’s how most other reporters got things done. When she tried to count up just how many people she’d slept with, she couldn’t. Life had just swept her away since that awful court case; she’d done what she could to stay in charge and in control, but the events powering her along had been so overwhelming. It had been an exciting ride, though, she couldn’t deny that. At times, that is. Frightening, too.

But there have been so many people.

As she’d told dear old Hoshe Finn all those eons ago, she wasn’t ashamed about her sexuality. Really, she wasn’t. It was finding out about Alessandra that caused the most pain. The betrayal. Alessandra had just whored her for the Starflyer; never caring, never interested.

I should have said yes to that money-junkie sleezeball Jaycee when he tried to whore me. At least he was honest about what I’d be doing for him in those kinds of TSIs.

“Are you all right?” Dudley asked.

“What? Yes.”

Dudley still had one hand pressed firmly across his belly. With the other he reached out to her face. “You’re crying.”

“No I’m not.” She moved back out of range, hurriedly swiping her hand across her eyes.

“I thought… Oooh.” Dudley hurried for the bathroom again.

Mellanie grunted at Dudley’s departing back, and flopped down on the bed. The town was almost silent outside; she should be able to get a good night’s sleep. Dudley certainly wouldn’t be pestering her tonight.

The loud and unpleasant sound of Dudley’s digestive suffering came clear through the bathroom door. Mellanie searched around in her bag for the earplugs she’d been given on the Carbon Goose, pushed them in, and hauled the duvet over herself.

The following morning Mellanie decided to get professional. It wasn’t as though she’d had to sit through lessons or courses on how to be a reporter when Alessandra took her on; but she’d picked up enough around the office to know the basics of starting an investigation in a strange town.

“I want a full analysis of city court cases going back two years,” she told the SIsubroutine. “Get me a listing of every case the police brought against the Guardians, even people who are only suspected of membership. We can cross-reference it with the locations of those encoded messages.”

“I can’t do that. Official court records are archived in an isolated memory core.”

“That’s ridiculous. All government records are supposed to be publicly available. It’s in the Commonwealth constitution, or something.”

“Article 54, yes. However, the Armstrong City grand court has used this archiving method for security purposes. Like most of the Governor’s House electronics, the court’s systems are old. There is no money available for upgrades, which leaves them vulnerable to anyone coming through the gateway with modern aggressor software. Records could easily be destroyed or tampered with.”

“Damn it.”

“You may visit the court in person and request copies.”

“Okay, all right. I’ll do that, then.”

“The Armstrong Chronicle has many cases on file which I can access. I can give you a list of possible court cases to research.”

“Thank you.”

Dudley wanted to come with her.

“I don’t think you’re up to that,” she said diplomatically. Despite the earplugs she’d heard him scamper off to the bathroom several times in the night. Sitting opposite her in the deserted dining room for breakfast, all he’d managed was a cup of weak milky tea and a slice of toast. He looked like he’d got the mother of all hangovers.

“I’m fine,” he said grumpily.

Mellanie couldn’t be bothered to argue. She dressed for her day in a simple dove-gray T-shirt and jeans, tying her hair back into a loose tail with a brown leather band. They took a cab, for Dudley’s sake, waving on the first three until she finally saw one with a Governor’s House license.

“I think someone is following them,” Olwen said.

Stig was in the middle of a briefing for the team members left at Halkin Ironmongery. Over half of his people were running around town trying to keep up with their assignments. He held up a hand to his audience, and asked, “Who?”

“Not sure,” Olwen replied. “The pair of them have been in the grand courthouse for two hours. I’m having trouble staying inconspicuous. But there’s someone else lurking here, having the same kind of problem. He’s not on any file we’ve got.”

“Have you found out what she’s doing there?”

“Going through court records. I don’t know which ones yet. Finley was going to talk to the court officials after she leaves.”

“Okay, I’ll get you some electronic coverage. Stand by.” He went up to the first-floor room where the team’s arrays were set up. Keely McSobel and Aidan McPeierls were both fully interfaced with the city net. He told them to review the area around the courthouse to see if there was anybody using encrypted messaging.

“You’re right,” Stig told Olwen five minutes later. “We’ve located at least three hostiles in the courthouse.”

“What do you want us to do?”

“Nothing. Keep Bose and Rescorai in sight. I’m coming straight over with some reinforcements.”

Mellanie was making good progress. The SIsubroutine had given her seven cases where the Chronicle mentioned a possible connection with the Guardians. All of them involved attacks on the Institute, either against their vehicles or personnel in Armstrong City. The police had caught few suspects. Those they did haul before a judge were just local punks, all of whom had a suspicious amount of wealth either in cash or in newly purchased goods. Obviously, they’d been paid to harass the Institute; not that they admitted to anything. Invariably, they had good lawyers.

Mellanie smiled when she read that for the second time. Three prominent city lawyers seemed to represent most of the accused, and they didn’t come cheap.

“There is an increasing amount of electronic activity in and around the courthouse,” the SIsubroutine told her. “I believe you are under observation.”

Mellanie rubbed her eyes and switched off the desktop array that was displaying the cases. It ejected the memory crystal that the clerk of the court had supplied her. “Police?” she asked.

“No. The systems they are using are more advanced than the police have on this world. Some of the signal traffic is strange. It appears there are two separate groups operating independently.”

“Two?” Mellanie rubbed at her bare arms where goose bumps had suddenly appeared. It wasn’t cold in the little office that the clerk had let her use. Midday sun was streaming in through the double-glazed window, stirring the air-conditioning unit into desultory life, while outside the season’s warm humid air hung over the city like a possessive spirit. If there were two groups interested in her, she knew one of them had to be from the Starflyer. Had Alessandra found out she’d traveled here? Or am I being too paranoid?

Dudley was curled up in a chair on the other side of the desk, his youth and pose giving him a strong resemblance to some sulky schoolboy. His eyes were closed, and moving like someone in REM sleep as he accessed a file from his inserts.

For an instant, she was tempted to creep out and leave him there. Except he’d panic when he realized she’d gone, and cause a big scene. And he was completely incapable of looking after himself if a Starflyer agent did want to abduct him.

Maybe bringing him along wasn’t so smart after all.

“Come on, Dudley.” She shook his shoulder. “We’re leaving.”

Mellanie put on her sunglasses as soon as they went outside. Dudley seemed to shrink away from the warm light. He was sweating and shivering as they walked away from the big old courthouse onto Cheyne Street.

Silver lines appeared just below Mellanie’s skin, like deep-sea creatures rising tentatively to the surface. They began to spread and multiply along her arms and up her neck to envelop her cheeks in a delicate filigree. Some of them she activated herself; the simple systems that she understood, sensors that amplified her perception of the surrounding area. The SIsubroutine was tapping into others.

Cheyne Street was busy. It was close to the center of town, a boundary line between the sector that housed the main government buildings and the start of the commercial district. Traffic was constant along the road, vehicle exhausts releasing dark fumes into Far Away’s crisp air. Cyclists wore filter masks as they weaved through the slow-moving cars and vans. Mellanie pushed her way along the crowded pavements, trying not to think what the fumes were doing to her lungs.

“We need to keep this simple,” she told the SIsubroutine. “Find me a car here that can take us back to the hotel.”

A long list of vehicles slid down Mellanie’s virtual vision, everything the SIsubroutine could find on Cheyne Street, either moving or parked. None of them were less than ten years old. As they’d all been imported from the Commonwealth, they all had drive arrays, not that they were used much in Armstrong City, which lacked even a basic traffic management system.

“Two Land Rover Cruisers registered with the Institute office have just turned onto Cheyne Street,” the SIsubroutine said. “They are heading toward you.”

Mellanie’s inserts and OCtattoos revealed a multitude of signals flashing through the city’s ether. She saw the Cruisers establish links to several people on the pavement. Two of them were very close, twenty meters behind, and walking quickly toward her. She turned her head to see a couple of men dressed in the dark tunics worn by the Institute troopers. Her virtual vision superimposed iridescent data pixels over the image. The two figures were separated from the rest of Cheyne Street’s pedestrians by haloes of tangerine and scarlet grids.

“I don’t feel too good,” Dudley said. His face was white, slicked with cold sweat.

Mellanie wanted to slap him. She couldn’t believe he was doing this to her, not now. Didn’t he understand how much trouble they were in? “We have to hurry, Dudley, they’re coming.”

“Who?” Any further questioning was postponed by a violent judder that started in the middle of his chest. He squashed a hand to his mouth. People were staring at him as his cheeks bulged out, moving away with their faces wrinkled up in disgust.

Mellanie’s boosted senses showed her the SIsubroutine establishing itself in the drive arrays of vehicles along Cheyne Street. Both of the Institute troopers had reached the front of the courthouse building. One of them drew his ion pistol. “Hey, you,” he called out.

Dudley started to throw up. People backed away fast as watery vomit splattered onto the paving slabs. Now there was no one between Mellanie and the Institute troopers.

“Stay right there,” the first trooper shouted. He raised the ion pistol, leveling it. Mellanie blinked against a powerful green dazzle as the weapon’s targeting laser found her face.

A car horn sounded loudly. People turned in curiosity, then yelled in panic. There was a sudden rush of movement as an old Ford Maury saloon veered across Cheyne Street, heading straight for the troopers. The green laser vanished, swinging around toward the Maury. Mellanie caught sight of the driver, a middle-aged woman who was tugging desperately at the steering wheel, her face frozen into an expression of disbelief and horror as the car refused to obey. A fusillade of horn blasts from the road around the wayward car drowned out all other sound. The troopers tried to race clear, but the car followed their movements. Its front wheels hit the pavement curb, and the whole chassis jumped half a meter in the air as it lurched forward. The trooper with the pistol got off one wild air shot before the Maury’s front grill hit him full-on just above his hips. Mellanie winced as his body folded around the car, arms and upper torso slamming down across the hood. Then the car crashed into the stone wall of the courthouse. Its collision absorber frame crumpled at the front, reducing the deceleration force on the passengers. Plyplastic sponge bags sprang out of the seats, wrapping protectively around the driver. Outside the car there was no protection. The impact burst the trooper apart as if an explosive charge had gone off inside him. For a second the shocked screams of everyone watching rose above the cacophony of horns.

A second car thudded into the curb with a loud crunch, smacking into the remaining trooper, who was staring numbly at his colleague’s atrocious death. He was bulldozed into the courthouse wall not five meters from the first smash.

It broke the spell. People started to stampede away from the horrific scene. Vehicles and cyclists swerved to avoid the rush.

“Move!” Mellanie yelled at Dudley. She pulled him along, nearly lifting him off the ground in the planet’s low gravity. Somewhere farther down Cheyne Street there was yet another violent vehicle crash. Reviewing the flood of data her insert-boosted senses were delivering, she saw the SIsubroutine had taken over a delivery van and rammed it into one of the Institute Cruisers. The resulting snarl-up had blocked that half of Cheyne Street completely.

A small Ables four-seater Cowper pulled up beside Mellanie. Its doors popped open and she shoved Dudley in. “Let’s go,” she cried.

The Ables pulled out into what was left of the traffic. Everything else on the road seemed to move neatly out of its way, allowing it to accelerate smoothly away from the bedlam. Mellanie turned around to gape at the scene behind her. People had stopped running now. Some hardy souls were gathered around the cars that had killed the troopers, trying to help free the people inside.

She sank back into the seat with a shaky gasp of air. Her virtual vision relayed the excited pulses of encrypted communications weaving through the city net.

“Can you track the people in the second watcher team?” she asked the SIsubroutine.

“Yes.”

The chain of data traffic flipped up into her virtual vision, turquoise globes linked by jumping sine waves of neon orange. Ten people were sharing the same channel. Three of them were heading toward Cheyne Street in a vehicle of some kind. The rest were on the ground close to the courthouse.

“Any idea who’s in charge?” she asked.

“One of the people in the vehicle is issuing more messages than the others, which would indicate they are in charge. However, I do not have the capacity to break their encryption, so I cannot offer any guarantee of this analysis.”

“Doesn’t matter. If the other guys were from the Institute, this lot have to be Guardians. Find an access code for the leader’s interface.”

A city net personal address flipped up into her virtual vision. The rest of the imagery was shutting down. When she held up her arm, the lacework of silvery OCtattoos was fading from her skin. “Are you all right?” she asked Dudley.

He was curled up in the passenger seat, shivering badly. “Do you think they had memorycells?” he asked in a faint voice.

“I imagine re-lifing is part of their contract with the Institute, yes.”

“I want to go home.”

“That’s not a bad idea, Dudley. We’ll do that.” The wormhole opened again in two hours. She suspected their hotel would be under observation. If they left right away they might just manage to stay ahead of the Institute. “See if you can get us on the passenger manifest for the next flight back to Boongate,” she told the SIsubroutine. “And cancel the route back to the hotel. Take us toward 3F Plaza, but not actually into it, not yet.”

Mellanie took another minute to compose herself. The car crashes had been deplorable. But then, if the SIsubroutine hadn’t intervened, she and Dudley would be in the back of a Cruiser heading for a very unpleasant, and short, future.

She told her e-butler to call the Guardian member’s code.

Stig stopped the car at the end of Kyrie Street, just before it opened out into 3F Plaza. Franico’s, the Italian restaurant, was twenty meters ahead of him.

“You want to do this?” Murdo McPeierls asked.

“It’s not as if we’ve got the element of surprise,” Stig said. He tried to stop it sounding grouchy, but Murdo had been in the car when he’d got Mellanie’s call.

“I’ll scout around,” Murdo said. “Shout if you need me.”

“Sure.” Stig gave the traffic a slightly apprehensive glance. Kyrie Street looked perfectly normal. But then Olwen said there’d been nothing out of place on Cheyne Street until the cars started going berserk.

Stig squared his shoulders and went into Franico’s. Mellanie hadn’t chosen it for its décor or its menu. Gray curving walls and archways of dead drycoral divided up the restaurant into low segments modeled on some insect hive floor plan. The food was pasta and pizzas, with the house speciality of fresh fish from the North Sea.

It took Stig a moment to find Mellanie. She and Dudley were sitting at a table close to the door, half-hidden by one of the crumbling archways, which gave her a good view of anyone coming in while remaining out of direct sight. He went over and sat down. Dudley scowled at him; the young re-life astronomer was nursing a glass of water. Mellanie had a beer and a plate of garlic bread.

“Thank you for coming,” Mellanie said.

“Your call surprised me. I was interested.”

“I need to talk to the Guardians.”

“I see.”

She grinned and bit into a slice of the bread. Melted butter dribbled down her chin. “Thank you for not denying it.”

Stig nearly protested, but that would have been churlish. “How did you find me? More importantly, how did you get my address code?”

“I have a good monitor program. A very good one.”

“Ah. It was you who released it into the city net.”

Mellanie stopped chewing to give him a surprised look. “You knew it was there?” She dabbed a paper napkin to her chin.

“We knew something was there. It’s very elusive.”

“Okay, well, don’t worry. It’s not hostile.”

“I doubt the Institute would agree with you.”

“Their troopers had drawn weapons. They were going to take me and Dudley for interrogation. We’d probably be turned into Starflyer agents.”

Stig was silent for a moment while he reviewed what she said. “Very likely. Do you mind telling me what you know about such things? Frankly, I’ve never met anyone other than a Guardian who believed in the Starflyer.”

“I discovered my old boss was one, Alessandra Baron. She sabotaged an investigation I…” Mellanie stiffened, turning abruptly. Stig saw a dense, intricate pattern of silver lines flicker into existence on her cheeks and around her eyes. “What the hell are you?” she blurted.

He looked over his shoulder to see Dr. Friland glide out from the back of the restaurant. A faint purple nimbus had replaced the usual shadow inside his hood. It died away. When Stig glanced back at Mellanie, her complicated OCtattoos had vanished from view.

“Shall we call that an honorable stalemate?” Dr. Friland asked in his mellow, echoing voice.

“Sure,” Mellanie said guardedly.

“I am glad. As to your original question—”

“You’re a Barsoomian.”

“Correct. My name is Dr. Justin Friland. I’m pleased to meet you, Mellanie Rescorai.”

Mellanie pointed a finger, and switched it between Stig and the tall robed figure. “You guys working together?”

“We do on occasion,” Dr. Friland said. “And this is one of them.”

“Right.” Mellanie took a sip of her beer, still not looking away from the Barsoomian.

“All right,” Stig said. “We’re not shooting at each other, and we agree the Starflyer is our enemy. So what did you want to talk to the Guardians about, Mellanie?”

She gave him a moderately flustered look. “I came to ask what I should do.”

“You want our advice?” Stig found it hard to believe anyone as ballsy as this girl would need to turn to anybody else for help. She was smart, determined, and resourceful; she could also clearly look after herself. He’d never seen wetwiring so sophisticated. So who’s she working with?

“Like you said, nobody in the Commonwealth believes in the Starflyer. I need to know what you’re doing to bring it down. I need to know if I can help. I’ve got some very strong allies.”

“Oh, fine, one moment while I go fetch copies of our plans, and hand over the names and addresses of everyone we have working in the Commonwealth.”

“Stop being a prat. We both know what’s got to happen here. You give me a onetime unisphere address, I’ll go back to the Commonwealth and make contact. That way we get to negotiate and find some middle ground where we both help each other.”

“That’s you,” Stig said. “What about your partner here?”

Dudley barely looked up from his water. He looked thoroughly miserable to the point of being disinterested.

“What about Dudley?” Mellanie asked.

“He kicked this whole thing off.”

“You stupid, ignorant, little man,” Dudley snapped waspishly. “Have you no sense of perspective? No one person began this; no one person will end it. Least of all me.”

Stig thought he did well to hold his temper in check. “Without you, the Second Chance would not have flown. Without you, millions of people would still be alive.”

“I died out there, you shit!” Dudley said. “They caught me, and they took me prisoner, and they…they…”

Mellanie’s arm went around him. “It’s all right,” she said soothingly. “It’s okay, Dudley. Sit back now.” Her hand was rubbing along his spine. “Dudley was used by the Starflyer,” she said to Stig. “If you don’t believe me, ask Bradley Johansson; he spoke to Dudley’s ex-wife. He knows all about the astronomy fraud.”

Stig didn’t know what to do. The simplest thing would be to give her a onetime code as she asked; hand the whole problem over to Johansson and Elvin. But right now, sitting across a table from an obviously unstable Dudley Bose, Stig felt as if he was being manipulated into that very position. His instinct had it that anyone as beguiling as Mellanie couldn’t possibly be duplicitous. Rationally, he suspected she was about ten times as lethal as any veteran clan warrior. Yet she seemed so earnest, so open.

“May I ask what you will do if the Guardians don’t provide you with any assistance?” Dr. Friland asked.

“Carry on as best I can,” Mellanie said. “Gather as much evidence as I can against Baron, use it to expose her to the authorities, and hopefully penetrate whatever agent network she’s a part of.”

“She will be one of only three people. That’s the classic model of spy cells, and with today’s encrypted communications she may not even know the other members.”

“I’ll find the others,” Mellanie said grimly. “No matter how secure she thinks her communications are, I can hack them.”

“Of course, you said you had allies. And we witnessed a small fraction of its ability today, did we not? Are you sure it is trustworthy, Mellanie?”

“I’d be dead if it wasn’t.”

“Yes. I suppose that does generate a respectable level of personal confidence. All I ask, Mellanie, is that you continue to question. You are a reporter, are you not? A good reporter, despite your circumstances and the unseen help you have received.”

“It doesn’t matter how much help you get,” she said. “There has to be talent there to start with.”

Dr. Friland laughed. “Not to mention self-belief. So, Mellanie, all I ask is that you don’t throw away that reporter’s instinct. Keep questioning. Don’t stop asking yourself about your great ally’s motivation. It is, after all, not human. It is not even flesh and blood. Ultimately, its evolutionary destiny cannot be the same as ours.”

“I…Yes. All right,” Mellanie said.

“Treachery is always closer than you expect. Ask Caesar.”

“Who?”

Stig frowned. She’s joking. Right?

“An old politician,” Dudley said wearily. “An emperor who was betrayed by those closest to him. For the greater good, of course.”

“It’s always for the greater good,” Dr. Friland said. His voice sounded like someone very young, a boy who felt sadness strong enough for it to be grief.

“I won’t make that mistake,” Mellanie said. She deliberately looked away from the Barsoomian, and took another drink of her beer.

Stig told his e-butler to prepare a file with one of his fallback unisphere contact addresses in it. “Here’s your address,” he told Mellanie as the file transferred into her holding folder. “I hope you’re on the level with me.”

“I know,” she said. “If I’m not, you’ll track me down, blah blah blah.”

“You. Your memorycell. Your secure store.”

“Nice try. If we don’t defeat the Starflyer, neither of us will be around to duke it out. If I had been a Starflyer agent, you and everybody at Halkin Ironmongery would already be dead.”

The casual way she dropped their secure base of operations into the conversation made Stig want to scowl at her. Instead he felt a touch of admiration. She really is quite something. So why Dudley?

She gave him a pert grin, knowing she’d won that round. “The wormhole opens in another seventy minutes. We’d better get going. Dudley and I are booked on the next Carbon Goose flight under different names. That should be enough.”

“We’ll be watching,” Stig told her. “In case the Institute causes any trouble.”

“I’m sure you will. Good-bye, and thanks.”

“Safe journey.”

***

As modern-day wedding ceremonies involving members of Intersolar Dynasties went, it was short and very old-fashioned. Wilson and Anna went for the classical love, honor, and obey pledges. Current fashion was for the bride and groom to write their own vows, or if they lacked the poetic streak themselves hire someone to compose some poignant lines on their behalf. The newest one-upmanship variant of this was for the vows to be set to music in order for the happy couple to sing them to each other in front of the altar. Society brides had been known to undergo a little cellular reprofiling of the vocal cords to ensure perfect harmony.

“You can stuff that,” Anna said when the hopeful wedding planner mentioned it as a possibility.

It was a good decision, given who was actually attending their service in the Babuyan Atoll multidenominational chapel. Chairwoman Gall was of course invited, on the groom’s side, and managed to sit in the pew in front of President Elaine Doi and the Senate delegation led by Crispin Goldreich. Senior navy personnel sat on the bride’s side, along with a small number of Anna’s family, who looked uncomfortable and out of place amid so many Grandees. Wilson had to make some tough choices about who to have from his own extensive family. His ex-wives were omitted despite him being on good terms with nearly all of them; on principle he asked one child from each previous marriage, a representative number of direct descendants; then of course there were a lot of Farndale people he had to invite—political obligation. Courtesy meant he had to invite Nigel Sheldon, who said yes for himself and four of his harem. Ozzie was sent an invitation, but didn’t bother to reply.

Given the ever-expanding number of guests, suggestions were made to the couple that they use a cathedral to accommodate all the additional people who really, really, would like to attend. Wilson said a flat no, and wished to God he’d never listened to Patricia Kantil and her idea about feelgood propaganda. A full third of the chapel pews were reserved for media correspondents. Medium-level reporters on permanent assignment covering the navy in High Angel suddenly found their “company” invitation appropriated by celebrity anchors and chief executives.

Wilson sat in the front pew slapping one hand into the other while the organist played some dreadful twenty-second-century hymn. His perfectly tailored dress uniform with its flawless midnight-black cloth was becoming oppressively warm while he waited. And waited.

“Probably won’t show,” Captain Oscar Monroe said cheerfully, and loud enough for several nearby pews to hear. “I wouldn’t. Too much pressure. Should have had a private ceremony like you originally wanted.”

“Thank you,” Wilson hissed at his best man.

“Just doing my job; preparing you for the worst.” He twisted around in his seat. “Yep.”

“She’s here?”

“Nope. The press are all starting to smile at the nonarrival. It’s like a display of saber-toothed dentistry back there.”

Wilson felt the appallingly strong urge to giggle. “Shut up, you dick.”

With a theatrical flourish, the organist began to play the wedding march. Wilson and Oscar stood up, not looking at each other in case they started laughing out loud. Anna began her walk up the aisle on Rafael Columbia’s arm. A hundred professional retinal inserts followed her every move. Thousands of studio-based couture experts lamented that she was wearing her uniform. A unisphere audience of nine and a half billion completely ignored them.

Navy personnel filled the chapel’s garden. Off duty or just taking a break, they all turned up to applaud the Admiral when he and Anna came out of the chapel doors arm in arm, smiling in true couplelike unison. Both of them grinned at the spontaneous display of support, and waved as they walked over to the marquee set up beside the chapel. The rest of the guests spilled out onto the grass, looking up at the waning crescent of Icalanise beyond the crystal dome. Strong slivers of light shone a few hundred kilometers away from the gigantic alien starship, the new assembly platforms forming their circular pattern in front of the stars. For the politicians it was surprisingly reassuring to see their committee work and deal making and budget trading actually translated into solid hardware. A lot of them looked at the simple pattern of lights, and compared them to the images of thousands of ships descending on the Lost23 worlds. In such circumstances, total reassurance was difficult to come by.

Nobody let it spoil the festivities. Even the celebrity reporters behaved themselves, as well as could be expected. Nearly all of them tried to get up close to Nigel Sheldon at some point in the reception. He wasn’t often seen out in public, and the off chance of an exclusive was too tempting. Vice President Bicklu pointedly ignored Oscar, who raised a glass every time he caught the VP glaring in his direction. Ten-year-old Emily Kime, who was Anna’s one bridesmaid, managed to down two glasses of white wine before her parents found out. Alessandra Baron and Michelangelo adopted some magical people variant of identical magnetic poles repelling each other in order to avoid coming within ten meters for the whole reception.

Wilson and Anna left early for a luxury hotel over in New Glasgow. Officially they had twenty-four hours’ leave in which to conduct their honeymoon. The media were all quietly briefed that in reality they would both be back at work the following morning. Everybody was taking the navy’s response to the Lost23 very seriously indeed. The newlyweds were also postponing having any family until after the Prime alien situation was resolved. In that they were no different from any other couple in the Commonwealth. Womb tank leasing companies and germline modification clinics were going out of business on every world as people stopped having children. It was a trend that the Treasury was monitoring with some urgency, along with hundreds of other economic downturns.

It was close to midnight when Oscar left the party and took a personal pod over to the concave-walled tower that was Pentagon II. Even this late most of the offices were fully staffed. The navy was operating nonstop to finalize the designs of its new ships, and see them into production. Oscar was due to take the Defender out for a month-long patrol flight in a few days’ time; and he was expecting the starship to be effectively obsolete by the time he got back. CST technicians had already delivered the prototype marque 6 hyperdrive, with a theoretical speed of four light-years per hour. The test flight was scheduled for a fortnight’s time. Such was the pace of progress, the marque 5 had been obsolete before it ever even got out of the design array.

The elevator delivered him to the twenty-ninth floor. Up here, at the executive level, there were fewer people around. Nobody passed him as he walked the short length of corridor to his office. He locked the door and sat behind his desk, with the lights barely on. For a long time he did nothing. It wasn’t the first time he’d come up here ready to do this. Each time he’d…not chickened out exactly; anger had driven him away. Anger about Adam coming back and making this demand. Anger that fueled a determination not to give in, not to be pushed around. Not like before, when he was first-life young, when the two of them had been idiotic hotheads following a cause someone else had infected them with.

Some of those times spent sitting here, Oscar had nearly called Rafael Columbia. Just get it all over with. It would mean a terribly long time in life suspension, but when—or if—he ever did emerge it probably would be into a better society. That always made him laugh bitterly. Typical Monroe cop-out; let someone else get on with it while you wait for better days.

He’d been through this soul searching so many times in the years immediately after Abadan Station. It had taken a decade for the pain and guilt to subside. After all, it had been a mistake. Not an accident; he didn’t ever give himself that easy option out. But it hadn’t been deliberate, not the deaths. They hadn’t set out to do that. So he’d rebuilt his life, not as himself; but he’d used the surprisingly well-made cover that the Party provided, and got himself a job, and friends, and made a real contribution. Working for CST’s exploration division he’d opened up dozens of new worlds, where people could make a fresh start and leave behind the dishonesty and greed and corrupt politicians and the Dynasties that were the majority of the Commonwealth. Some of those worlds he’d been back to, and found them quiet and pleasant, full of hope and expectation. He’d given people a chance. And that was what really mattered, which is how he’d come to live with himself once more. What those people did with that chance was up to them. One man could never give them anything more. Unless you were an arrogant little shit like Adam Elvin, who was surely the most self-deluding bastard who’d ever walked the Commonwealth planets.

But for every other fault and stupidity, Adam wasn’t dishonest. He really thought something odd had happened on the Second Chance.

And the hell of it is, I still don’t understand how we lost Bose and Verbeken at the Watchtower. Not really.

Oscar pulled a high-density memory crystal from his pocket, then another. In the end he had eight of them lined up on his polished desk. He slotted the first one into the desktop array.

“Access the Second Chance log recordings,” he told his e-butler. “Isolate the period between the barrier coming down and us going back into hyperspace. Give me a list of file classes.”

The data rose silently into his virtual vision. The ship had an engineering log, bridge log, visual and data, environmental systems log, external sensors, power systems, communications, ancillary vehicles, individual space suit logs, food consumption records, crew medical records, fuel levels, plasma rocket performances, hyperdrive logs, navigation logs, satellite flight logs, life-support wheel deck section general recordings; a list that went on and on down into ancillary systems and structural analysis. Oscar hadn’t realized just how much of their life on the voyage had been monitored and recorded, how little privacy they had in practice. He used his virtual hands to designate the categories he thought might be useful, right down to the waste management files, and told his e-butler to copy them. The download took a long time.