2 Adam Elvin walked out of the CST planetary station in Tokat, the capital of Velaines. He took his time as he passed the sensors which were built into the fluted marble pillars lining the concourse. If he was going to be arrested, he would rather it be now before the rest of the mission was exposed. The average Commonwealth citizen had no idea such surveillance systems existed. Adam had dealt with them for most of his adult life. Understandably paranoid about sabotage, CST used them to monitor everyone using their facilities. The sensor’s large processor arrays were loaded with visual characteristics recognition smartware that checked every passenger against a long long list of known and suspected recidivists. Adam had used cellular reprofiling to change his appearance (including height) more times than he could remember; at least once a year, more often twice or three times. The treatment could never cure the ageing process which was starting to frost his joints and organs; but it did remove scar tissue, of which he’d acquired more than his fair share over the decades. It also gave him a wide choice of features. He always felt that trying to disguise his seventy-five years was a pointless vanity. Any elderly person wearing an adolescent’s face was truly pitiful to see. The rest of the body always gave them away; too bulky, too slow. They were immediately picked out as losers, too poor to afford rejuvenation, retreating into the cheap fantasy of a skin-deep youth. He reached the departure rank outside the station’s passenger terminal, and used his e-butler to hail a taxi. There had been no alarm. Or at least nothing detectable, he told himself. You never could tell when you were up against her. She was smart, and getting closer to him as the years wore on. If she had prepared a trap for him on Velaines, it wasn’t to be sprung today – the time he would prefer. For the moment he was free to go about his mission. Today he was a new person, previously unknown to the Commonwealth. According to his citizenship file he was Huw North, a native of Pelcan, a first-life sixty-seven; an employee of the Bournewell engineering company. To look at he was overweight; considerably so, given how seriously Commonwealth citizens took their health these days, weighing in at around two hundred and thirty pounds. Accompanying that was a round saggy face that sweated a lot. Thinning grey hair was combed low across his forehead in an unfashionable style. He wore a baggy brown raincoat with wide lapels. It was open down the front to reveal a creased grey suit. A big man with a small life, someone nobody paid attention to. Cellular reprofiling was a cosmetic treatment for the poor and the vain, not a method of adding fat and giving skin a pasty pallor. As a misdirection it never failed. Which meant it was probably time to change it, Adam thought as he eased his oversized frame into the taxi, which drove him to the Westpool Hotel. He checked in and paid for two weeks in advance. His room was a double on the eighth floor, with sealed windows and air conditioning set too cold for him. He hated that, he was a light sleeper and the noise from the air conditioning would keep him awake for hours. It always did. He unpacked all the clothes in his suitcase, then took out the smaller shoulder bag containing his emergency pack – two sets of clothing, one of which was several sizes too small, a medical kit, cash, a CST return ticket from EdenBurg to Velaines with the outbound section already used, a couple of very sophisticated handheld arrays containing some well-guarded kaos software, and a legal ion stun pistol with buried augmentation which gave it a lethal short-range blast. An hour later, Adam left the hotel and walked five blocks in the warm afternoon sunlight, getting a feel of the capital city. Traffic up and down the wide roads was close-spaced, with taxis and commercial vans dominating the lanes. None of them used combustion engines, he noted, they were all powered by superconductor batteries. This section of town was still respectable, close to the central financial and commercial districts, although fifteen blocks away the quality of the buildings deteriorated appreciably. Around him now were stores and offices, along with some small side roads of terraced apartments, none of them over four or five stories high. Public buildings built in a late imperial Russian style fronted neat squares. In the distance, down the perfectly straight roads, were the towers that marked the heart of the city. Every few blocks he walked under the elevated rail tracks snaking through the city’s road grid, thick concrete arteries on high stanchions, carrying the major lines in and out of the planetary station. Velaines was in phase one space, barely fifty light-years from Earth itself. Opened for settlement in 2090, its economy and industry had matured along model lines ever since. It now had a population of over two billion with a proportionally high standard of living, the kind of world which phase two and three space planets aspired to become. Given the length of its history, it was inevitable that some strands of decay should creep into its society. In the fast-paced capital market economy model that Velaines followed, not everybody could make themselves rich enough to enjoy multiple rejuvenations. The areas they lived in reflected their financial status, road surfaces were cracked and uneven, while the efficient citywide network of metro trams serving them had fewer than average stops and ran old carriages. This was where the real rot set in, the despair and dead ends, where human lives were wasted, sacrificed to the god of economics. In this day and age it was an outrage that such a thing should happen. It was exactly the environment Adam had long ago committed himself to eradicating, and now the place he needed most for his other activities. He found himself an A+A hotel at the end of 53rd Street, and checked in, using his Quentin Kelleher identity. The A+A was a franchise of cheap fully-automated hotels where the manager was also the maintenance chief. The reception array accepted the Augusta dollar account transfer from his credit tattoo, and gave him a code for room 421. Its layout was a simple square three metres on a side, with a shower/toilet alcove and a dispenser outlet. There was one jellmattress bed, one chair, and one retractable shelf. However, the room was on the corner of the building, which meant he had two windows. He asked the dispenser’s small array for a sleeping pouch, three packaged meals, two litres of bottled water, and a toiletries bag, all charged to his account. The mechanism whirred smoothly a minute later, and the items popped out into the rack. After that he set one of his handheld arrays to sentry mode, and left it scanning the room. If anyone did break in, it would notify his e-butler immediately with an encrypted message from a one-time unisphere address. Such an act had a low probability. Velaines was proud of its relatively low crime-index, and anyone staying in an A+A wouldn’t have anything of value. Good enough odds for him. * That evening Adam took a metro tram across town to another slightly shabby district. In amongst the closed shops and open bars he found a door with a small sign above it: Intersolar Socialist Party Velaines, 7th chapter His e-butler gave the door his Huw North party membership code, and the lock buzzed. Inside was pretty much what he expected, a flight of bare wooden stairs leading up to a couple of rooms with high windows, long since boarded up. There was a bar in one, serving cheap beer from microbreweries, and lethal-looking liquors from ceramic bottles. A games portal took up most of the second room, with observer chairs packed round the walls. Several men were sitting on stools at the bar. They fell silent as Adam walked over. Nobody wearing a suit, even as cheap as his, belonged in that room. ‘Beer, please,’ Adam told the barman. He put a couple of Earth dollar bills on the counter; the currency was accepted without question on most worlds. The bottle was placed in front of him. Everybody watched as he took a sip. ‘Not bad.’ Adam even managed to keep a straight face. He could appreciate a Socialist club not buying from a big corporate brewery, but surely they could find a smaller one which actually produced drinkable beer. ‘New in town, comrade?’ the barman asked. ‘Got in today.’ ‘Staying long?’ ‘A little while, yeah. I’m looking for a comrade called Murphy, Nigel Murphy.’ The man at the far end of the bar stood up. ‘That’ll be me then.’ He was slim, taller than Adam, with a narrow face that carried suspicion easily. Adam guessed he was a first-life; his head was almost bald, with just a thin monk’s ring of greying hair. His clothes were those of an ordinary working man: jeans, and a check shirt, with a fleece jacket worn open, a woolly hat stuffed into one pocket. They were all streaked with dirt, as if he’d come straight from the factory or yard. But the way he looked at Adam, the assessment he carried out in a glance, marked him out as a leader. ‘Huw North,’ Adam said as they shook hands. ‘One of my colleagues was here last week.’ ‘Not sure if I remember,’ Nigel Murphy said. ‘He said you were the man to talk to.’ ‘Depends what you want to talk about . . . comrade.’ Adam held in a sigh. He’d been through this same ritual so many times over the years. By now he really ought to have worked out how to circumvent the bullshit and get right down to business. But as always, it had to be played out. The local man had to be proved top dog in front of his friends. ‘I have a few issues,’ Adam said. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ ‘You’re very free with your money there, comrade,’ said one of the others sitting behind Nigel Murphy. ‘Got a lot of it, have you? Thinking you can buy our friendship?’ Adam smiled thinly at the barfly. ‘I don’t want your friendship, and you certainly don’t want to be a friend of mine.’ The man grinned round his colleagues, his appearance was mid-thirties, with the kind of rashness which suggested that was his genuine age, a first-lifer. ‘Why’s that?’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘Sabbah. What’s it to you?’ ‘Well, Sabbah. If you were my friend, you’d be stalked across the Commonwealth, and when they catch you, you’ll die. Permanently.’ Nobody in the bar was smiling any more. Adam was glad of the small heavy bulge in his jacket produced by the ion pistol. ‘Any of you remember November 21st 2344?’ Adam looked round challengingly. ‘Abadan station,’ Nigel Murphy said quietly. ‘That was you?’ Sabbah asked. ‘Let’s just say I was in the region at the time.’ ‘Four hundred and eighty people killed,’ Murphy said. ‘A third of them total deaths. Children who were too young to have memorycell inserts.’ ‘The train was late,’ Adam said. His throat was dry as he remembered the events. They were still terribly clear. He’d never had a memory edit, never taken the easy way out. Live with the consequences of your actions. So every night he dreamed of the explosion and derailment just in front of the gateway, carriages plunging across junctions and parallel rails in the busiest section of the station. Fifteen trains hit, side-shunted, crashing, bursting apart, exploding, spewing out radioactive elements. And bodies. ‘It was on the wrong section of track at the wrong time. My chapter was after the Kilburn grain train.’ ‘You wanted to stop people from eating?’ Sabbah asked sneeringly. ‘Is this a drinking den or a Socialist chapter? Don’t you know anything about the party you support? The reason we exist? There are certain types of grain trains which are specially designed to go through zero-end gateways. CST don’t tell people about those trains, same way as they don’t mention zero-end. The company spent millions designing wagons which can function in freefall and a vacuum. Millions of dollars developing machinery whose only job is to dump their contents into space. They go through a zero-end gateway onto a line of track that’s just hanging there in the middle of interstellar space. Nobody knows where. It doesn’t matter, they exist so that we can safely dump anything harmful away from H-congruous planets. So they send the trains with their special wagons through and open the hatches to expel their contents. Except there’s nothing physically dangerous about the grain. It’s just tens of thousands of tons of perfectly good grain streaming out into the void. There’s another clever mechanism built into the wagons to make sure of that. Just opening the hatch isn’t good enough. In freefall the grain will simply sit there, it has to be physically pushed out. And do you know why they do it?’ ‘The market,’ Nigel Murphy said with a hint of weariness. ‘Damn right: the market. If there’s ever a glut of food, the prices go down. Commodity traders can’t have that, they can’t sell at enough profit to pay for the gamble they’ve made on the work of others, so the market demands less food to go around. The grain trains roll through the zero-end gateways, and people pay higher prices for basic food. Any society which allows that to happen is fundamentally wrong. And grain is just the tiniest part of the abuse people are subject to thanks to the capitalist market economy.’ Adam stared hard at Sabbah, knowing that once again he was going too far, making too much of an issue out of his own commitment. He didn’t care; this was what he’d devoted himself to, even now with all his other priorities, the greater human cause still fuelled him. ‘That’s why I joined this party, to end that kind of monstrous injustice. That’s why I’ve committed my life to this party. And that’s why I’ll die, a total death, a member of this party. Because I believe the human race deserves better than those bastard plutocrats running us like some private fiefdom. How about you, sonny? What do you believe in?’ ‘Thanks for clearing that up,’ Nigel Murphy said hurriedly. He stood between Adam and Sabbah. ‘All of us here are good members of the party, Huw. We might have joined for different reasons, but we have the same aims.’ With one hand he signalled Sabbah and the others to stay at the bar. His other arm pressed lightly on Adam’s shoulder, steering him towards a small door. ‘Let’s talk.’ The back room was used to store beer crates and all the other junk which a bar generates down the years. A single polyphoto strip was fixed to the ceiling, providing illumination. When the door was closed, Adam’s e-butler informed him its access to the cybersphere had been severed. ‘Sorry about that,’ Nigel Murphy said as they pulled out a couple of empty beer crates to sit on. ‘The comrades aren’t used to new faces round here.’ ‘You mean the party’s a lost cause on Velaines?’ Nigel Murphy nodded reluctantly. ‘It seems that way some days. We barely scrape two per cent in elections now, and a lot of those are simply protest votes against the major parties. Any direct action we take against the companies is so . . . I don’t know. Puerile? It’s like we’re hitting a planet with a rubber hammer, we’re not causing any damage. And there’s always the risk of another mistake like Abadan. Socialism isn’t about killing people, after all. It’s supposed to be about justice.’ ‘I know. It’s hard, believe me. And I’ve been working for the cause a lot longer than you. But you have to believe that some day all this will change. The Commonwealth today is based on pure imperialist expansion. That’s always the most favourable time for market economics because there are always new markets opening. But it will ultimately fail. The expansion into phase three space is nothing like as fast and aggressive as the first and second phases were. The whole process is slowing. Eventually this madness will stop and we can start to focus our resources towards genuine social growth instead of physical.’ ‘Let’s hope so.’ Nigel Murphy raised his beer bottle. ‘So what can I do for you?’ ‘I need to speak to some people. I’m looking to buy weapons hardware.’ ‘Still blowing up grain trains, huh?’ ‘Yeah.’ Adam forced a smile. ‘Still blowing up grain trains. Can you set that up for me?’ ‘I can try. I’ve bought a few small pieces myself over the years.’ ‘I’m not looking for small pieces.’ ‘The dealer I use, she should be able to help. I’ll ask.’ ‘Thank you.’ ‘What kind of hardware are we talking about, exactly?’ Adam handed over a hard copy of the list. ‘The deal is this, you can add on whatever this chapter needs up to ten per cent of the total price. Think of it as a finder’s fee.’ ‘This is some very serious hardware.’ ‘I represent a very serious chapter.’ ‘All right then.’ Nigel Murphy still couldn’t quite banish the troubled expression from his face as he read down the list. ‘Give me your e-butler access code. I’ll call when I’ve set up the meeting.’ ‘Good. One thing, have you had any new members join recently? The last couple of months or so?’ ‘No. Not for about nine months now, unfortunately. I told you, we’re not very fashionable at the moment. We’re going to mount another recruitment drive in the general workers unions. But that won’t be for weeks yet. Why?’ ‘Just checking.’ * Sabbah hated himself for what he was doing. The comrade was obviously well connected in the party, probably in the executive cadre. Which meant he truly believed in what he was doing, especially if he’d been truthful about the grain train. It wasn’t that Sabbah didn’t believe in their cause – no way. He absolutely hated the way everyone else in the world seemed to be doing better than him, that his background had condemned him to one life lived badly. The way society was structured prevented him from bettering himself. That was what attracted him to the Socialists in the first place, the way they were working to change things so that people like him would get a chance to live decently in an inclusive world. All of which only made this worse. The comrade was actively working to bring down the companies and the plutocratic state which supported them. Which was a lot more than Sabbah ever seemed to do. All the seventh chapter did was hold endless meetings where they argued amongst themselves for what seemed like hours. Then there was the canvassing, days spent being abused, insulted, and treated with utter contempt by the very people they were trying to help. And of course the protests outside company offices and factories, ambushing politicians. Sabbah had lost count of how many times he’d been on the wrong, and very painful, end of a police shockwhip. The real reason he kept going these days was because of the rest of the chapter. He didn’t have many friends outside, not any more. But he didn’t have any choice. Not in this. It was nine years ago when he met the woman. The job that night had been so easy it would have been criminal not to do it. He’d gone along with a couple of old mates he’d known back from his gang years, when they’d all pulled a truck from the reform academy to run the streets. A delivery truck that made a nightly run from the CST planetary station to various local wholesale warehouses about town. It was carrying crates of domestic goods from Augusta, all high quality. And the van was old, its alarm a joke. Thanks to some decent targeted kaos software bought from a contact, they’d managed to intercept the van and lift its load clean within ten minutes. Sabbah even took a couple of maidbots with him when he went home in addition to his cut. She was waiting for him when he walked through the door; a middle-aged woman with mild Asian features, her shoulder-length raven hair flecked with grey strands, wearing a smart business suit. Sitting in his lounge, looking like she belonged in that dingy two-room apartment more than he ever did. ‘You now have a choice,’ she said as his mouth was gaping open in surprise. ‘Either I’ll shoot you in self-defence, because you were assaulting a government official in the pursuit of her duties; or we make a deal and I’ll let you keep your dick.’ ‘Whoo . . .’ Sabbah frowned at his door, silently cursing its alarm circuit for not warning him she’d broken in. ‘Or do you believe the Velaines public medical insurance scheme will pay for a new dick, Sabbah? That’s where I’m aiming, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ In horror he saw she had some kind of small black metal tube in her hand, and it really was levelled at his groin. He shifted the boxes containing the maidbots, gradually lowering them until they covered his hips and the hugely valuable personal organ situated there. ‘If you’re police, you won’t—’ The violent crack which her weapon produced made him cower. Scraps of foam packaging drifted through the air while the remnants of the maidbot dropped to the floor. The little machine’s crab-like electromuscle limbs spasmed for a while before collapsing limply. Sabbah stared at it. ‘Oh Christ on a crutch,’ he whispered. He gripped the remaining box even tighter. ‘Do we now know where we both stand?’ the policewoman asked. ‘Yes ma’am.’ ‘All I want is for you to do something for me. A small thing. Will you do that?’ ‘What?’ ‘One day someone will turn up at your chapter, and I want to know about it. I can’t give you his name, he changes it every time. But he’ll be looking to buy things, weapons most likely, or kaos software, or samples of diseases, or components with the wrong specifications which will screw up whatever they’re installed in. That’s the kind of person he is. A very unpleasant individual. He’ll claim to be a party member, to be doing what he does for a noble cause. But he’s lying. He’s a terrorist. An anarchist. A murderer. So I want you to tell me when he visits you. Okay?’ Sabbah didn’t like to think of the alternative. She was still pointing the weapon right at him, aiming low. ‘Yeah, sure. I’ll do that.’ ‘Good.’ ‘When’s he coming?’ ‘I don’t know. It might be tomorrow. It might be in thirty years’ time. It might be never. Or I might have caught him before he ever reaches Velaines.’ ‘Uh, right, okay.’ ‘Now turn round.’ ‘What?’ ‘You heard.’ She got to her feet, the little weapon still pointing at him. Sabbah reluctantly turned to face the door. His hands were grabbed, forcing him to drop the maidbot box. A cold band of malmetal coiled round his wrists immobilizing them. ‘What the hell . . .’ ‘You’re under arrest for theft.’ ‘You’ve got to be fucking joking! I said I’d help you. That was the deal.’ He turned his head to try and look at her. The weapon was jabbed into his jaw. ‘There is no deal. You made a choice.’ ‘That was the deal!’ he yelled furiously. ‘I help you, you get me off this rap. Jesus!’ ‘You are mistaken,’ she said relentlessly. ‘I didn’t say that. You committed a crime. You must face the consequences. You must be brought to justice.’ ‘Fuck you, bitch. Fuck you. I hope your terrorist blows up a hundred hospitals, and schools. I hope he wipes out your whole planet.’ ‘He won’t. He’s only interested in one planet. And with your help, we can stop him from damaging it further.’ ‘My help?’ the word came out as a squeak he was so shocked. ‘You stupid bitch, you can suck me and I’d never help you now. We had a deal.’ ‘Very well. I will lodge a plea with the judge, asking him for leniency.’ ‘Huh?’ This was so weird it was doing his head in. Right from the start the woman scared him. He wasn’t even sure she was a policewoman any more. More like a serial killer. ‘I will tell him you cooperated fully, and agreed to be my informer. The file will not be encrypted when it is attached to your court record. Do you think your friends will access it when they see you receiving a light sentence? Will they be happy about what it says? My colleagues have already arrested them for tonight’s robbery, by the way. I expect they’ll be curious about how we knew.’ ‘Oh goddamn.’ Sabbah was near to tears. He wanted this whole nightmare to end. ‘You can’t do that to me. They’ll kill me, a total death. You don’t know what they’re like.’ ‘I think I do. Now, are you going to tell me when my target turns up?’ So through clenched teeth he said: ‘Yes.’ And that had been the way of it for nine years. He’d been given a suspended jail term for the robbery, and made to perform two hundred hours’ Citizen Service. It was the last time he’d done a job – well, anything major, anyway, just the occasional rip-off. And every three weeks there would be a message in his e-butler’s hold file asking him if the man had come. Every time he replied: no. Nine years, and that superbitch had never let it go. ‘Time,’ she’d told him on the way to the police station, ‘lessens nothing.’ She’d never said what would happen if he didn’t tell her. But then, it wasn’t something he wanted to find out. So Sabbah walked for several blocks, leaving the chapter house behind. That way his e-butler would be operating through a cybersphere node which wasn’t anywhere near the building. The chapter had several tech-types; heavily idealistic about total-access they all sailed close to anarchistic beliefs, believing all information should be free. They also smoked things they shouldn’t and played sensory immersion games for most of their waking hours. But they did have an unnerving habit of delivering the goods when databanks had to be cracked for the cause. Sabbah wouldn’t put it past the party’s senior cadre to mount a simple surveillance operation around the chapter building, the local network was sure to be compromised. His e-butler entered the code she’d given him. The connection was placed immediately, which was unnerving if not entirely surprising. Sabbah took a deep breath. ‘He’s here.’ * Adam Elvin took his time in the lobby of the Scarred Suit Club while the hostess dealt with his coat. His retinal inserts adapted to the low lighting easily enough, bringing up an infrared profiling which banished shadows for him. But he wanted a moment to take in the whole scene. As clubs went it was pretty standard; booths around the wall, each with an e-seal curtain for privacy, tables and chairs on the main floor, a long bar with an extensive number of bottles on the shelves, and a small stage where the boys, girls, and ladyboys of the Sunset Angels troupe danced. The lighting was low, with topaz and purple spots casting their shady beams onto the dark wood of the fittings. The music was loud, a drab software synth that kept up a constant beat for the performers to remove their clothes to. There was more money in here than there should have been, he thought. That made it protected. At one o’clock in the morning, every table was taken, and the crowd of lowlife around the stage was enthusiastically waving notes in the face and crotch of the two dancers. Several booths were occluded by shimmering force fields. Adam frowned at that, but it was only to be expected. As he watched, one of the Sunset Angels was led over to a booth by the manager. The force field sparkled and allowed them through. Adam’s handheld array had the capacity to pierce the e-seal, but the probe would be detected. So many hiding places was a risk. Again, one he was used to. And in a protected joint, they wouldn’t take kindly to police. ‘Excuse me,’ the doorman said. He was being friendly, not that it mattered, cellular reprofiling had given him the same kind of bulk as Adam, except his wasn’t fat. ‘Sure.’ The doorman glided his hands above Adam’s jacket and trousers. They were heavily OCtattooed, the circuits fluorescing claret as they scanned for anything dangerous. ‘I’m here to meet Ms Lancier,’ Adam told the hostess as the doorman cleared him. She led him round the edge of the main room to a booth two places down from the bar. Nigel Murphy was already there. For an arms dealer, Rachael Lancier wasn’t inconspicuous. She wore a bright scarlet dress with a low front. Long chestnut hair was arranged in an elaborate wave, with small luminescent stars glimmering among the strands. Her rejuvenation had returned her to her early twenties, when she was very attractive. He knew it was a rejuvenation, possibly even a second or third. Her attitude gave her away. No real twenty-two-year-old possessed a confidence bordering on glacial. Her bodyguard was a small thin man with a pleasant smile, as low-key as she was blatant. He activated the e-seal as soon as Adam’s beer arrived, wrapping the open side of the booth in a dull platinum veil. They could see out into the club, but the patrons were presented with a blank shield. ‘That was quite a list,’ Rachael said. Adam paused for a moment to see if she was going to ask what it was for, but she wasn’t that unprofessional. ‘Is it a problem for you?’ ‘I can get all of it for you. But I have to say the combat armour will take time. That’s a police issue system; I normally provide small arms for people with somewhat lower aspirations than yours.’ ‘How much time?’ ‘For the armour, ten days, maybe two weeks. I have to acquire an authorized user certificate first.’ ‘I don’t need one.’ She raised her cocktail glass and took a sip, looking at him over the rim. ‘That doesn’t help me, because I do need it. Look, the rest of your list is either in storage or floating round the underground market, I can pull it in over the next few days. But that armour, that has to come from legitimate suppliers, and they have to have the certificate before they’ll even let it out of their factory.’ ‘Can you get the certificate?’ ‘I can.’ ‘How much?’ he asked before she could start on her sales pitch. ‘In Velaines dollars, a hundred thousand. There are a number of people involved, none of them cheap.’ ‘I’ll pay you eighty.’ ‘I’m sorry, this isn’t some kind of market stall. I’m not bargaining. That’s the price.’ ‘I’ll pay you eighty, and I’ll also pay you to package the rest of the list the way I require.’ She frowned. ‘What sort of packaging?’ Adam handed over a memory crystal. ‘Every weapon is to be broken down into its components. They are to be installed in various pieces of civil and agricultural equipment I have waiting in a warehouse. The way it’s laid out, the components will be unidentifiable no matter how they are scanned or examined. The instructions are all there.’ ‘Given the size of your list, that’s a lot of work.’ ‘Fifteen thousand. I’m not bargaining.’ She licked her lips. ‘How are you paying?’ ‘Earth dollars, cash, not an account.’ ‘Cash?’ ‘Is that a problem?’ ‘Your list will cost you seven hundred and twenty thousand. That’s a lot of money to carry around.’ ‘Depends what you’re used to.’ He reached into his jacket and pulled out a thick bundle of notes. ‘That’s fifty thousand. It’s enough to get you started and prove my intent. Once you’ve assembled the list, give me the location of your secure warehouse where I can send my machinery. When it arrives there, I’ll pay you a third of the remaining money. When you’ve installed it, I’ll pay you the remainder.’ Rachael Lancier’s poise faltered slightly. She gave her bodyguard a glance, and he picked up the notes. ‘It’s good to do business with you, Huw,’ she said. ‘I want daily updates on the state of play.’ ‘You’ll get them.’ * Chief Investigator Paula Myo left her Paris office three minutes after getting the call from Sabbah. It took her eighteen minutes to get across town to the CST station. It was only an eight-minute wait on the platform for the next express. She arrived on Velaines within forty minutes. Two senior detectives, Don Mares and Maggie Lidsey from the Tokat metropolitan police, were waiting for her when the taxi delivered her to their headquarters. Given the level of the request for cooperation from the Intersolar Serious Crimes Directorate, the two detectives had no trouble requisitioning a conference office and departmental array time. Their captain also made it clear to them that he expected them to provide genuine assistance to the Chief Investigator. ‘She’ll file a report on our operational ability when this is over,’ he said. ‘And the Directorate has political clout, so be nice and be useful.’ With Don Mares sitting restlessly beside her, Maggie Lidsey used her e-butler to call up the Chief Investigator’s file. Broad columns of translucent green text began to flow across the virtual vision generated by her retinal inserts. She skipped through the information quickly enough, it was a refresher rather than a detailed appraisal. Everyone in law enforcement knew about Paula Myo. The headquarters array informed the two detectives their guest had arrived. Maggie focused on the lift doors as they opened, banishing the ghostly ribbons of text. The conference office on the eighth floor of the metropolitan police headquarters building had glass walls, as did every cubicle on the same floor. From her viewpoint, Maggie could see the whole layout. At first nobody paid much attention to Paula Myo as she walked down the main corridor, followed by two colleagues from the Serious Crimes Directorate. In a white blouse, prim office suit, and sensible black shoes she fitted into the bustling compartmentalized work environment perfectly. She was slightly short by today’s standards when eighty per cent of the population had some kind of genetic modification. Not that she lacked physical stature; she obviously stuck determinedly to an exercise routine which kept her fitness level an order of magnitude above anything the metropolitan police required from their officers. Though Maggie suspected that was more a personal obsession. The Chief Investigator’s thick raven hair had been brushed straight so that it hung well below her shoulder blades. She always allowed it to sweep in front of her face, partially obscuring her features. Given her notoriety that was understandable. But when she did use a hand to brush those strands aside men would look up from their desks and stare, not just because of the legend she was. The Human Structure Foundation on Huxley’s Haven which had so carefully developed her genome had selected a mix of Filipino and European genes as a baseline, giving her a natural beauty which was utterly beguiling. A rejuvenation five years previously made it look as if she was now in her early twenties. Even though she knew she should never judge anyone by their physical guise, Maggie Lidsey had trouble taking the girl seriously as she shook hands with her and Don. With her size and fresh looks, Paula Myo could quite easily be mistaken for a teenager. The giveaway was her smile. She didn’t seem to have one. The other two investigators from the Directorate were introduced as Tarlo, a tall, blond Californian, and Renne Kempasa, a Latin American from Valdivia, who was halfway towards her fourth rejuvenation. The five of them sat round the table, and the walls opaqued. ‘Thank you for such a swift response,’ Paula said. ‘We’re here because I have a tip-off that Adam Elvin has arrived on Velaines.’ ‘A tip-off from who?’ Don asked. ‘A contact. Not the most reliable, but it certainly needs investigating.’ ‘A contact? That’s it?’ ‘You don’t need to know, Detective Mares.’ ‘You were here nine years ago,’ Maggie said. ‘At least, that’s the official entry in our files. So I’d guess your man is Sabbah. He’s a member of the Socialist Party, as was Elvin.’ ‘Very good, Detective.’ ‘Okay, we’re here to help,’ Maggie said. She felt like she’d passed some kind of test. ‘What do you need?’ ‘To begin with, two surveillance operations. Elvin has made contact with a man called Nigel Murphy at the seventh chapter of the local Socialist Party here in town. We need to keep him under constant watch, virtual and physical. Elvin is here to acquire arms for Bradley Johansson’s terrorist group. This Murphy character will be his link to a local underground dealer; so he can lead us to both of them. Once we have the connection, we can intercept Elvin and the dealer at the exchange.’ ‘This all sounds very easy and routine,’ Maggie said. ‘It won’t be,’ Tarlo said. ‘Elvin is very good. Once we’ve identified him, I’ll need a detective team to help backtrack his every movement to the moment he arrived. He’s a tricky son of a bitch. The first thing he will have done is establish an escape route in case this deal blows up in his face. We need to find it, and block it.’ ‘You guys know it all, don’t you?’ Don Mares said. ‘What he’s doing, where he is. I’m surprised you even need us.’ Paula looked at him briefly, then turned her attention back to Maggie. ‘Is there a problem?’ ‘A little more information would be appreciated,’ Maggie said. ‘For instance, are you sure he is here to contact an arms dealer?’ ‘It’s what he does. In fact it’s all he does these days. He’s just about given up on the party. Oh, he’ll throw the local chapter a bone or two for cooperating with him. But he hasn’t really taken any part in the movement since Abadan. The party’s executive cadre effectively disowned him and his entire active resistance cell after that fiasco. That’s when he hooked up with Bradley Johansson. No one else would touch him, he was too hot. Ever since then he’s been the quartermaster for the Guardians of Selfhood. The acts they commit on Far Away make Abadan seem quite mild.’ Don Mares grinned. ‘Managed to get any of the money back yet?’ Tarlo and Renne gave him hostile stares. Paula Myo looked at him without saying anything. Don met her gaze levelly, showing no remorse. ‘Is he likely to be armed?’ Maggie asked. She glared at Don. At the best of times he could be an arsehole, today he seemed to be going out of his way to prove it. ‘Elvin will probably be carrying a small weapon,’ Renne Kempasa said. ‘But his main armoury is his experience and guile. If there’s any kind of physical trouble, it won’t be him that starts it. We’ll have to research the arms dealer carefully, they tend to lean towards violence.’ ‘So no money, then,’ Don persisted. ‘Not after – what is it now – a hundred and thirty years?’ ‘I also need your office to try and track down Elvin’s export route,’ Paula said. ‘The CST security division will cooperate with them fully on that.’ ‘We’ll liaise with our captain over officer allocation,’ Maggie said. ‘We’ve already arranged for you to have an office and access to the departmental array.’ ‘Thank you. I’d like to brief the observation teams in two hours.’ ‘Tight schedule, but I think we can manage that for you.’ ‘Thank you.’ Paula hadn’t moved her gaze from Maggie. ‘No, I haven’t got any of the money back yet. Most of it is spent on arms deals like this one, which makes it particularly hard to track and recover. And I haven’t got this close to him for twenty years. So I will be seriously disappointed if an individual screws this up. It will be a career wrecker.’ Don Mares tried to sneer off the threat. He didn’t really succeed. Maggie thought it was because he’d realized the same thing she had. Paula Myo never smiled because she didn’t have a sense of humour. * Adam was finishing a rather splendid early breakfast at the Westpool Hotel when his e-butler informed him that an unsigned message had arrived in its hold file. It had come from a one-time unisphere address, and the text it contained was encrypted with a key code that identified the sender to him immediately: Bradley Johansson. Outwardly, Adam drank his coffee quietly as the waiters fussed round the restaurant tending to the other guests. In his virtual vision, he prepared the message for decryption. His wrist array was worn on his left arm, a simple band of dull malmetal that flexed and expanded constantly to maintain full contact with his skin. Its inner surface contained an i-spot which connected to his OCtattoos which, in turn, were wetwired into his hand’s nerve fibres. The interface was represented in his virtual vision by a ghostly hand, which he’d customized to a pale blue, with sharp purple nails. For every tiny motion he made with his flesh and blood hand, the virtual one made a scaled-up movement, allowing him to select and manipulate icons. The system was standard across the Commonwealth, giving everyone who could afford an OCtattoo direct connection to the planetary cybersphere. He guessed that most of the business people having breakfast around him were quietly interfacing with their office arrays. They had that daydreaming look about them. He pulled the appropriate key out of its store in his wrist array, represented by a Rubik’s cube icon, which he had to twist until he’d arranged the surface squares into the correct pattern. The cube opened up, and he dropped the message icon inside. A single line of black text slid across his virtual vision: Paula Myo is on Velaines. Adam just managed to hold on to his coffee cup. ‘Shit!’ Several nearby guests glanced over to him. He twitched his lips in an apologetic smile. The array had already wiped the message, now it was going through an elaborate junction overwrite procedure in case it was ever examined by a forensic retrieval system. Adam never did know where Bradley got half of his information from. But it had always been utterly reliable. He should abandon the mission right now. Except . . . it had taken eighteen months to plan and organize. Dummy companies had been established on a dozen worlds to handle the disguised machinery exports to Far Away, routing and re-routing them so that there would be no suspicion and no trail. A lot of money had been spent on preparations. And the Guardians wouldn’t receive another shipment of arms until he could set one up. Before he did that, he needed to know what had gone wrong this time. They had been so close, too. Rachael Lancier’s last call confirmed that she had put together about two thirds of the list. So close. * Maggie Lidsey’s car drove her into the headquarters building underground car park an hour before she was due on shift. She’d been working longer hours ever since the case started. It wasn’t just to curry favour with Paula Myo, she was learning a lot from the Chief Investigator. The woman’s attention to detail was incredible. Maggie was convinced she must have array inserts, along with supplementary memorycells. No aspect of the operation was too small for her to show an interest in. Urban myth certainly hadn’t exaggerated her dedication. The elevator in the lobby scanned her to confirm her identity: only then did it descend to the fifth basement level where the operations centres were situated. The Elvin team had been codenamed Roundup, and assigned room 5A5. Maggie was scanned again before the metal slab door slid aside to admit her. The interior was gloomy, occupied by three rows of consoles with tall holographic portals curving round the operator. Each one was alive with a grid of images and data ribbons. Laser light spilled out from them in a pale iridescent haze. A quick glance at the one closest to the door showed Maggie the familiar pictures of the buildings which Rachael Lancier used to run her car dealership from; along with shots from the team’s two shadow cars showing Adam Elvin’s taxi as they followed him through midtown. Maggie requested an update, and quickly assimilated the overnight data. The one item which stood out was the encrypted message delivered to Elvin’s e-butler through the Westpool Hotel node. She saw Paula Myo sitting at her desk at the far end of the room. The Chief Investigator seemed to get by on a maximum of two hours’ sleep per day. She’d had a cot moved into her office, and never used it until an hour after both main targets had retired for the night. And she was always up an hour before the time they usually got out of bed. The night shift had standing orders to wake her if anything out of the ordinary happened. Maggie went over to ask about the message. ‘It came from a one-time address in the unisphere,’ Paula said. ‘The Directorate’s software forensics have traced its load point to a public node in Dampier’s cybersphere. Tarlo is talking to the local police about running a check, but I’m not expecting miracles.’ ‘You can track a one-time address?’ Maggie asked. She’d always thought that was impossible. ‘To a limited degree. It doesn’t help. The message was sent on a delay. Whoever loaded it was well clear.’ ‘Can the message encryption be cracked?’ Maggie asked. ‘Not really, the sender used folded-geometry encryption. I logged a request with the SI, but it said it doesn’t have the resources available to decrypt it for me.’ ‘You talked with the SI?’ Maggie asked. That was impressive. The Sentient Intelligence didn’t normally interface with individuals. ‘Yes.’ There was nothing else forthcoming. ‘Oh,’ Maggie said. ‘Right.’ ‘It was a short message,’ Paula said. ‘Which limits what it could contain. My guess is it was either a warning, a go authorization, or a stop.’ ‘We haven’t leaked,’ Maggie said. ‘I’m sure of it. And they haven’t spotted us either.’ ‘I know. The origin alone seems to rule out a mistake by any of your officers.’ ‘The Socialist Party does have a number of quality cyberheads. They might have noticed our scrutineer programs shadowing Murphy’s e-butler.’ Paula Myo rubbed a hand over her forehead, pressing hard enough to furrow up the skin. ‘Possible,’ she conceded. ‘Although I have to take other factors into consideration.’ ‘Yes?’ Maggie prompted. ‘Classified, sorry,’ Paula said. Even though she was tired, she wasn’t about to confide her concerns to anybody. Although if Maggie was any kind of detective she should be able to work it out. As Mares had said, a hundred and thirty-four years without an arrest was an uncomfortably long time. In fact it was impossible given the resources Paula had to deploy against Bradley Johansson. Somebody had been providing Johansson and his associates with a great deal of assistance down the decades. Few people knew what she was doing on a day-to-day basis, so logically it was someone outside the Directorate. Yet the Executive administration had changed seventeen times since she had been assigned command of the case. They couldn’t all contain secret sympathizers of Johansson’s cause. That just left her with the altogether murkier field of Grand Families and Intersolar Dynasties, the kind of power dealers who were always around. She’d done everything she could, of course, set traps, run identification ambushes, deliberately leaked disinformation, established unofficial communication channels, built herself an extensive network amid the political classes, gained allies at the heart of the Commonwealth government. So far the results had been minimal. That didn’t bother her so much, she had faith in her ability to work the case to its conclusion. What concerned her more than anything was the reason anyone, let alone someone with true wealth and power, would want to protect a terrorist like Johansson. ‘Makes sense,’ Maggie said, with a trace of reluctance. She knew there was a terrific story behind the Chief Investigator’s silence. ‘So what action do you want to take about the message?’ ‘Nothing immediate,’ Paula said. ‘We simply wait and see what Elvin does next.’ ‘We can arrest all of them now. There are enough weapons stored at Lancier’s dealership to begin a war.’ ‘No. I don’t have a reason to arrest Elvin yet. I want to wait until the operation has reached its active smuggling stage.’ ‘He was part of Abadan. I checked the Directorate file, there are enough testimonies recorded to prove his involvement no matter how good a lawyer he has. What more do you need to arrest him?’ ‘I need the weapons to be shipped. I need their route and destination. That will expose the whole Guardian network to me. Elvin is important primarily for his ability to lead me to Johansson.’ ‘Arrest him and have his memories extracted. I’m sure a judge would grant the Directorate that order.’ ‘I don’t expect to have that option. He knows what will happen the second I have him in custody. He’ll either suicide or an insert will wipe his memories clean.’ ‘You can’t be sure of that.’ ‘He’s a fanatic. He will not allow us access to his memories.’ ‘Do you really believe that?’ ‘It’s what I’d do,’ Paula said simply. * Paula briefed the watcher teams before the shift changeover, explaining her suspicions about the encrypted message. ‘It changes our priorities slightly,’ she said. ‘If it was a cancellation then Elvin will make a break for the CST station. I need a detail of officers on permanent duty there to arrest him if he tries to leave. Detective Mares, will you organize that, please.’ ‘I’ll see the captain about more personnel, sure.’ During the week of the operation Don Mares had modified his attitude slightly. He didn’t contend anything, nor disagree with Paula; but neither did he put any extra effort into the operation. She could live with that, base-line competence was a depressing constant in law enforcement agencies throughout the Commonwelath. ‘Our second option,’ Paula said. ‘Is a go code. In which case we need to be ready to move. There will be no change in your assignments, but be prepared to implement immediately. The third option is not so good: he’s been warned about our observation.’ ‘No way,’ Don Mares said. ‘We’re not that sloppy.’ There was a grumble of agreement from the team officers. Tarlo gave Renne a fast grin. The boss always generated a high standard of professionalism with whatever police force she worked with. None of them wanted to be known as the one who failed her. ‘As unlikely as it sounds we have to take it into consideration,’ Paula insisted. ‘Be very careful not to risk exposure. He’s smart. He’s been doing this for forty years. If he sees one of you twice in a week he’s going to know you’re following him. Don’t let him see you. Don’t let him see the car you’re using. We’re going to get a larger vehicle pool so we can rotate them faster. We cannot afford mistakes.’ She nodded curtly at them. ‘I’ll join the lead team today. That’s all.’ Don Mares and Maggie Lidsey came over to her as the other officers filed out of the operations centre. ‘If he catches a glimpse of you, it really will be game over,’ Don Mares said. ‘I know,’ Paula said. ‘But I need to be close. There are some calls you can’t make sitting here. I’d like you to take over as general coordinator today.’ ‘Me?’ ‘Yes, you have the qualifications, you’ve taken command of raids before.’ ‘Okay.’ He was trying not to smile. ‘Maggie, you’re with me.’ * They caught up with Adam Elvin when he was taking a slow, seemingly random, walk through Burghal Park. He did something similar most mornings, an amble through a wide open space where it was difficult for the team to follow unobtrusively on foot. Paula and Maggie waited in the back of a ten-seater car which was parked at the north end of Burghal Park. The team had the rest of their vehicles spaced evenly round the perimeter, with three officers on foot using their retinal inserts to track his position, never getting closer than five hundred metres, boxing him the whole time. The Burghal was a huge area in the middle of the city, with small lakes, games pitches, tracks, and long greenways of trees brought in from over seventy different planets. ‘That’s twice he’s doubled back on his route,’ Maggie said. They were watching the images relayed from the retinal inserts on a small screen in the car. ‘Standard for him,’ Paula said. ‘He’s a creature of habit. They might be good habits, but any routine will betray you in the end.’ ‘Is that how you tracked him?’ ‘Uh huh. He never uses the same planet twice. And he nearly always uses the Intersolar Socialist Party to set up the first meeting with the local dealer.’ ‘So you turned Sabbah into your informant and waited.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘For nine years. Bloody hell. How many informants do you have, on how many planets?’ ‘Classified.’ ‘The way you operate, though, always arresting them for their crime. That doesn’t make for cooperative informants. You’re taking a big risk on a case this important.’ ‘They broke the law. They must go to court and take responsibility for their crime.’ ‘Hell, you really believe that, don’t you?’ ‘You’ve accessed my official file. Three times now since this case started.’ Maggie knew she was blushing. * That day Adam Elvin finished his walk in Burghal Park and caught a taxi to a little Italian restaurant on the east bank of the River Guhal which meandered through the eastern districts of the city. While eating a large and leisurely lunch he placed a call to Rachael Lancier, which the metropolitan police had no trouble intercepting. Elvin: Something’s come up. I need to talk to you again. Lancier: The vehicle you wanted is almost ready for collection, Mr North. I hope there’s no problem at your end. Elvin: No, no problem about the vehicle. I just need to discuss its specification with you. Lancier: The specification has been agreed. As has the price. Elvin: This is not an alteration of either. I simply need to speak with you personally to clarify some details. Lancier: I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Elvin: It’s essential, I’m afraid. Lancier: Very well. You know my favourite place. I’ll be there at the usual time today. Elvin: Thank you. Lancier: And it had better be as important as you say. Paula shook her head. ‘Routine,’ she said disapprovingly. * Eighteen police officers converged on the Scarred Suit Club. Don Mares dispatched the first three within two minutes of the conversation. The club wasn’t open, of course, they simply had to find three observation points around it and dig in. Two of Lancier’s people arrived at eight o’clock that night, and performed their own surveillance checks before calling back to their boss. When Adam Elvin finally arrived at one o’clock in the morning, ten officers were already inside. As before, they had managed to blend in well enough to prevent him from identifying any of them for what they were. Some of them assumed the role of business types looking for some bad action after a long day in the office. Three of them hung around the stage, identical to the other losers frantically waving their grubby dollars at the glorious bodies of the Sunset Angels. One had even managed to get a job, trying out as a waiter for the night, and was making reasonable tips. Renne Kempasa was sitting in one of the booths, the hazy e-seal protecting her from view. The remainder of the team were outside, ready for pursuit duties when the meeting was over. Paula, Maggie, and Tarlo were parked a street away in a battered old van, with the logo of a domestic service company on the side. The two screens they’d set up in the back showed images taken by the officers inside the club. Rachael Lancier was already in her booth, a different one this time. Her skinny-looking bodyguard was with her. He’d been identified by headquarters as Simon Kavanagh, a man with a long list of petty convictions stretching back three decades, nearly all of them violence-related. When he arrived he’d swept the booth twice, scanning for any covert electronic or bioneural circuitry. The passive sensors carried by the officers nearby nearly went off the scale. He was using some very sophisticated equipment – as was to be expected from someone who worked for an arms dealer. Paula watched Lancier and Elvin tentatively shake hands. The arms dealer gave her buyer an inhospitable look, then the e-seal around the booth was switched on. Its screening was immediately reinforced by the units which Kavanagh activated. One of them was an illegally strong janglepulse capable of frying the cerebral ganglia of any insect within a four-metre radius. ‘Okay,’ Paula said. ‘Let’s find out what’s so important to Mr Elvin.’ A metre above the booth’s table, a Bratation spindlefly was clinging to the furry plastic fabric of the wall matting. Amid the artificial purple and green fibres, its translucent, two-millimetre-long body was effectively invisible. As well as a chameleon-effect body, evolution on its planet had provided it with a unique neurone fibre that used a photo-luminescent molecule as the primary transmitter, making it immune to a standard janglepulse. It had only half the expected lifespan of a natural spindlefly because its genetic code had been altered by a small specialist company on a Directorate contract, replacing half of its digestive sac with a more complex organic structure of receptor cells. In its abdomen was an engorged secretion gland that threw out a superfine gossamer strand. When it had flown in from the neighbouring booth, it had trailed the gossamer behind it. Gentle lambent nerve impulses from the receptor cells now flowed along the strand to a more standard semiorganic processor which Renne carried in her jacket pocket. In the middle of Paula’s screen a grainy grey and white image formed. She was looking down on the heads of three people sitting round the booth table. ‘So what the hell has happened?’ Rachael Lancier asked. ‘I didn’t expect to see you until completion, Huw. I don’t like this. It makes me nervous.’ ‘I got some new instructions,’ Elvin said. ‘How else was I supposed to get them to you?’ ‘All right, what sort of instructions?’ ‘A couple of additions to the list. Major ones.’ ‘I still don’t like it. I’m this close to calling the whole thing off.’ ‘No you’re not. We’ll pay for your inconvenience.’ ‘I don’t know. The inconvenience is getting pretty fucking huge. All it’s going to take is one suspicious policeman walking into my dealership, and I’m totally screwed. There’s a lot of hardware stacking up there. Expensive hardware.’ Elvin sighed and reached into a pocket. ‘To ease the inconvenience.’ He put a brick-sized wad of notes on the table and pushed them over to Simon Kavanagh. The bodyguard glanced at Lancier, who nodded permission. He put the notes into his own jacket pocket. ‘All right, Huw, what sort of goodies do you need now?’ Elvin held up the small black disk of a memory crystal, which she took from him. ‘This is the last time,’ she said. ‘Nothing else changes. I don’t care what you want, or how much you pay, understood? This is the end of this deal. If you want anything else, it has to wait until next time. Got that?’ ‘Sure.’ Paula sat back in the thin ageing cushioning of the van’s seat. On the screen, Adam Elvin had stood up to leave. The booth’s e-seal flickered to let him out. ‘That was wrong,’ she said. Maggie frowned at her. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I mean, that was nothing to do with additions to the list. Whatever’s really in that memory crystal, it won’t be an inventory.’ ‘What then?’ ‘Some kind of instructions.’ ‘How do you know? I thought it fitted what happened.’ ‘You saw his reaction to the message at breakfast. The camera caught his expression spot on. It shocked the hell out of him. First rule on a deal like this is you don’t change things this late in the game. It makes people very nervous. Rachael Lancier’s reaction is a perfect example. And it’s not a good thing to make arms dealers nervous. A deal this size, everybody is quite edgy enough already. Elvin knows that.’ ‘So? He was shocked his bosses wanted to change things.’ ‘I don’t buy it.’ ‘So what do you want to do?’ ‘Nothing we can do. Keep watching. Keep waiting. But I think he’s on to us.’ * The news about Dyson Alpha’s enclosure broke mid-morning two days later. It dominated all the news streams and current event shows. A surprisingly large number of Velaines’ citizens had opinions on the revelation, and what should be done about it. Maggie kept half her attention on the pundits, both the serious and the mad, who appeared on the news streams while she was sitting around the underground operations centre. Time and again, the shows kept repeating the moment when the star disappeared from view. Diagrams sprang up simplifying what had happened for the general public. ‘Do you think Elvin was rattled by that?’ Maggie asked. ‘After all the Guardians of Selfhood are supposed to be protecting us from aliens.’ Paula glanced at the portal where Dudley Bose was being interviewed. The old astronomer simply couldn’t stop smiling. ‘No. I checked. The message was sent half a day before Bose confirmed the event. In any case, I don’t see how the Dyson enclosure concerns the Guardians. Their primary concern is the Starflyer alien and how it manipulates the government.’ ‘Yeah, I get their propaganda. Damnit, I fall for the message authorship every time.’ ‘Think yourself lucky you’re not the author. I pick up the pieces on those scams as well.’ ‘So they’re not concerned about this instant enclosure, then?’ ‘No. The Dyson enclosure happened over a thousand years ago, it’s pre-history. Irrelevant to the Guardians.’ ‘You know a lot about them, don’t you?’ ‘Just about everything you can without actually signing on.’ ‘So how does someone like Adam Elvin wind up working for a terrorist faction?’ ‘You must understand that Bradley Johansson is basically a charismatic lunatic. The whole Guardians of Selfhood movement is simply his private personality cult. It calls itself a political cause, but that’s just part of the deception. The sad thing is, he’s lured hundreds of people into it, and not just on Far Away.’ ‘Including Adam Elvin,’ Maggie muttered. ‘Yes, including Elvin.’ ‘From what I’ve seen of Elvin, he’s smart. And according to his file he is a genuine committed radical Socialist. Surely he’s not gullible enough to believe Johansson’s propaganda?’ ‘I can only assume he’s humouring Johansson. Elvin needs the kind of protection which Johansson provides, and his beloved party does benefit to some small degree from the association. Then again, maybe he’s just trying to revive past glories. Don’t forget he’s a psychotic; his terrorist activities have already killed hundreds, and every one of these arms shipments introduces the potential for more death. Don’t expect his motivation to be based in logic.’ * The observation carried on for a further eleven days. Whatever additional items Adam Elvin had requested, they appeared to be difficult for Rachael Lancier to acquire. Various nefarious contacts arrived for quick private meetings with her in the back office. Despite their best attempts, the Tokat metropolitan police technical support team was unable to place any kind of infiltration device inside. Lancier’s office was too effectively screened. Not even the spindleflies could penetrate the combat-rated force field that surrounded it. Her warehouses, too, were well shielded, although the team had managed to confirm the two where the weapons were being held. Several modified insects had got through to take a quick look around before succumbing to either janglepulse emitters or electron webs. Secondary observation teams followed the suppliers as they left, watching them assemble their cache of weapons and equipment before delivering it to the dealership. A whole underground network of Velaines’ iniquitous black-market arms traders was carefully recorded and filed, ready for the bust which would end the whole operation. On the eleventh day, the observers logged a call which Adam Elvin made to a warehouse in town, authorizing them to forward an assignment of agricultural machinery to Lancier’s dealership. ‘This is it,’ Tarlo declared. ‘They’re getting them ready for shipment.’ ‘Could be,’ Paula admitted. On the other side of the operations office, Mares just sighed at her. But she did ask for the arrest teams to be put on standby. Maggie was in one of the cars parked close to the dealership. When the eight lorries arrived, stacked high with crates of agricultural machinery, she relayed the pictures to the operations centre. Wide gates in the fence surrounding the dealership compound were hurriedly opened to let them through. There was a brief hold-up as yet another of Lancier’s cars went out on a test run. The lawful business had been doing well for the whole duration of the observation, with up to a dozen cars a day taken out by legitimate customers. Sales were brisk. All eight lorries drove into the largest of Lancier’s warehouses. The doors rolled down as soon as the last one parked inside. Sensors which the observation team had ringing the site reported screening systems coming on immediately. ‘Where’s Elvin now?’ Paula asked. Tarlo showed her the images of their prime target finishing his lunch in a downtown restaurant. Paula settled down at the side of the console to follow him, using the sensors carried by the observation teams. After lunch, Elvin walked round one of the shopping streets, using his usual tactics to try and spot any tails. When he got back to the hotel he started packing his suitcase. Late that afternoon he went down to the bar and ordered a beer. He drank it while watching the portal at the end of the counter, which was showing Alessandra Baron interviewing Dudley Bose. In the early evening, just as the sun was falling below the horizon, his suitcase followed him downstairs, and he checked out. ‘All right,’ Paula announced to the teams. ‘It looks like this is it. Everybody: stage one positions please.’ Don Mares was in one of the four cars assigned to follow Elvin. He waited a hundred metres from the hotel, seeing the big man emerge from the lobby. A taxi drew up at the request of Elvin’s e-butler. His suitcase trundled up onto the rear luggage platform as he climbed in. ‘Stand by, Don,’ Paula said. ‘We’re placing a scrutineer in the taxi drive array. Ah, here we go, he’s told it to take him to 32nd Street.’ ‘That’s nowhere near the dealership,’ Don Mares protested as their car took off in pursuit. ‘I know. Just wait.’ Paula turned to the visual and data feeds coming from the dealership. Rachael Lancier and ten of her people were now inside the sealed-up warehouse with the lorries. The rest of the workforce had been sent home as usual at the end of the day. On the console in front of Paula, data displays began flashing urgent warnings at her. ‘Hello, this is interesting. Elvin is loading some infiltration software into the taxi’s drive array.’ She watched as the police scrutineer program wiped itself before the new interloper could establish itself and run an inventory on the operating system. ‘He’s changing direction,’ Don Mares reported. There was an excited note in his voice. ‘Just stay calm and stay with him,’ Paula said. ‘But don’t get too close, we’ve got him covered.’ Out of the six images of the taxi which the console’s big portal offered her, only one was coming from a pursuit car. The others were all feeds from the civic security cameras which covered every street and avenue of the city. They showed the taxi sliding smoothly through the rush-hour traffic. Elvin must have ordered it to accelerate. It began to speed up. ‘Don’t be obvious,’ Paula muttered to the observation team as the taxi took a sharp right. It was a good hundred and fifty metres ahead of the first pursuit car now. Their standard boxing tactic had put the lead vehicle out of the picture. She watched the grid map with its bright dots, seeing how they rearranged themselves to surround the taxi. Elvin turned right again, then quickly left, taking off down a small alleyway. ‘Don’t follow,’ she instructed. ‘It’s only got one exit.’ Pursuit car three hurried to reach the street where the alleyway finished. The taxi emerged smoothly, and took a left. It was heading in the opposite direction to car three. They passed within a couple of metres. Don Mares’s car reassumed its tag position. The taxi began to speed up again. Screens along Paula’s console showed the blurred lines of car lights on either side of it, stretching away through the tall buildings of the city centre. The taxi turned onto 12th street, one of the broadest in the city, with six lanes of traffic, and all of them full. It began to switch lanes at random. Then it slowed. An overhead camera followed it as it passed under one of the hulking bridges which carried the rail tracks into the CST planetary station. ‘Damnit, where did he go?’ Paula demanded. ‘Don, can you see him?’ ‘I think so. Second lane.’ Two cameras were focused on the other side of the bridge, covering every lane. A constant flow of vehicles zipped past. Then the cameras were zooming in on the taxi. It had changed to the outside lane again. ‘All right,’ Paula said. ‘All cars, reduce separation distance. Stay within eighty metres. We can’t risk loss of visual contact again. Car three, get under the bridge, check it out. See if he dropped something off.’ The taxi carried on with its evasive manoeuvres for another kilometre, then abruptly turned onto 45th Street, and stayed in one lane. Its speed wound back to a steady seventy kilometres per hour. ‘He’s heading right for us,’ Maggie said. ‘Looks that way,’ Paula agreed. ‘Okay, all pursuit cars, back off again.’ Eight minutes later the taxi pulled up outside Rachael Lancier’s car dealership. The gates opened and it went in, driving right through the open door of a warehouse. It stopped beside an empty repair bay. Paula squinted at the portal image. The warehouse door had been left open, allowing the team’s sensors and cameras a perfect view. Nothing moved. ‘What’s happening?’ Tarlo asked. ‘I’m not sure,’ Paula said. ‘Rachael is still in the warehouse with the lorries. No wait . . .’ Simon Kavanagh was walking across the brightly lit concrete of the open warehouse floor. His bank tattoo paid the taxi charge. The rear luggage platform opened, and Elvin’s suitcase rolled out. It started to follow the slim bodyguard as he walked away. The taxi drove out of the warehouse. ‘Oh hell,’ Paula grunted. ‘All teams, you have a go code for stage three. I repeat, we are at stage three. Interdict and arrest. Don, stop that taxi.’ The city traffic routing array fired an emergency halt order into the taxi’s drive array. All four pursuit cars surged forwards, forming a physical blockade around the vehicle. Maggie was already moving as the taxi emerged from the warehouse. The sun had finally sunk from the sky ten minutes earlier, leaving a gloomy twilight in its wake. Behind her, the towers of the city centre cut sharp gleaming lines into the shady sky. Ahead, there were only a few murky polyphoto strips fixed on the warehouse eaves to cast a weak yellow glow across the dealership with its rows and rows of parked cars. On the far side of the compound, an elevated rail line blocked the horizon, a thick black concrete barrier separating the city roofline from the darkening ginger sky. A single cargo train hissed and clanked its way along, a badly adjusted power wheel intermittently throwing up a fantail of sparks which marked out its progress as it slid deeper into the city. Her fellow officers were advancing beside her, scuttling between the silent, stationary cars as they closed on the locked and screened warehouse. She activated her armour. The system, which looked like a chrome-blue skeleton worn outside her uniform, started to buzz softly. Its force field expanded, thickening the air around her. She prayed the power rating was good enough. Heaven only knew what calibre weapons they’d be facing. Cars skidded behind her with tyres squealing like wounded animals. Up ahead, the point members of the police tactical assault squad had reached the warehouse door. They barely stopped to fire an ion bolt at the bonded composite panelling. A dazzling flash threw the compound into monochrome relief, accompanied by a thunderbolt crack. Splinters of smouldering composite hurtled through the air, revealing two large holes in the building. Squad members raced through. ‘FREEZE, POLICE.’ ‘DO NOT EVEN THINK OF MOVING, MOTHERFUCKER.’ ‘YOU, HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM. NOW.’ Adrenaline was singing in Maggie’s veins as she rushed through the gap. She cleared the little layer of smoke on the other side, her ion pistol held ready, retinal inserts on full resolution. Surprise at the scene before her almost made her stumble. Rachael Lancier was standing casually at the front of a lorry. The ten employees who had stayed behind were clustered round her. Heavyliftbots had removed several crates from the lorry, stacking them neatly on the floor. A bottle and ten glasses were standing on top of one, clearly waiting for a toast to be drunk. ‘Ah, good evening, Detective,’ Rachael Lancier said as she saw Maggie’s insignia. Her mocking grin was pure evil. ‘I know I offer a good deal on my cars, but there’s no need to rush. I have something to suit every bank tattoo.’ Maggie cursed under her breath, and slowly engaged her pistol’s safety catch. ‘We’ve been had,’ she said. ‘Don?’ Paula was asking. ‘Don, is he in the taxi? Report, Don.’ ‘Nothing!’ Don Mares spat. ‘It’s fucking empty. He’s not in it.’ ‘Goddamnit,’ Paula shouted. ‘This is a stitch-up,’ Maggie said. ‘The bitch is laughing at us. I’m standing five metres away from her, and she’s still bloody laughing. We’re not going to find anything here.’ ‘We have to,’ Tarlo cried furiously. ‘We’ve been watching them for three goddamn weeks. I saw those arms go in there with my own eyes.’ Now it was over, now the hype had cooled, the adrenaline cold turkey kicked in, Maggie felt dreadfully weary. She looked directly into Rachael Lancier’s triumphant gleaming eyes. ‘I’m telling you, we’ve been royally fucked.’ * The one make-or-break moment came when he rolled out of the still-moving taxi under the rail bridge. Adam hit the ground hard, yelling at the sharp pain slamming into his leg, shoulder, and ribs. Then he twisted again, and surged to his feet. The second, empty, taxi was parked ready not five metres away. He dived in through the open door, and his Quentin Kelleher e-butler told it to take him directly to the A+A. The vehicle slid smoothly out into the busy traffic flow. As he looked around, he could see a car brake hard under the bridge. Two people jumped out, and began scanning round. He grinned as the distance built behind him. Not bad for a fat seventy-five-year-old. Room 421 was just as he’d left it, and the scanning array gave him an all clear. He limped in. The bruises were starting to hurt badly now. When he sat on the edge of the jellmattress and stripped off his clothes he found a lot of grazed skin that was oozing blood. He applied some healskin patches, and flopped down to let the shakes run their course. Sometime later, he began to laugh. * For two weeks he never left the room. The dispenser mechanism delivered three meals a day. He drank a lot of fluid. His e-butler filtered the output of the local and Intersolar news shows, with a special search order for items concerning Dyson Alpha. He lay on the bed for twenty hours a day, feeding on cheap packet food, and crappy unisphere entertainment shows. Standard commercial cellular reprofiling kits cocooned his torso and limbs, slowly siphoning the fat out of him, adjusting the folds of skin to fit his new, slimmer figure, and ruining most of his OCtattoos in the process. A pair of thick bands with a leathery texture were attached to each leg, on either side of his knees. They were the deep pervasion kits which extended slender tendrils through his flesh until they reached bone. Slowly and quite painfully, they reduced the length of his femur and tibia by half a centimetre each, altering his height to a measurement which was absent from any criminal database. The adjustments left him weak and irritable, as if he was recovering from a bout of flu. He consoled himself with the mission’s success. It had cost them another hundred thousand dollars, but Rachael Lancier had cooperated enthusiastically. Over the last ten days of the mission, every car leaving the dealership compound had been carrying a part of the order. They’d been dropped off all over town at buildings he’d paid her to rent. Rachael’s workers had parcelled them up in the crates he’d shipped in months before. The entire list was on its way to Far Away via a multitude of circuitous routes. They’d arrive over the next few months. His only regret was not being able to see Paula Myo’s face as the extent of the deception became apparent. That would almost be worth the feel of restraints clasping his wrists. Seventeen days after the fateful night, Adam dressed himself in a loose-fitting sweatshirt and trousers, and left the A+A. A twenty-minute taxi ride took him to the CST planetary station. He wandered through the concourse without setting off any alarms. Content with that, he caught the express train to LA Galactic.