Against a Dark Background

17 Conscience Of Prisoners

A warm rain fell on Ikueshleng. The private spacecraft Wheeler Dealer buttoned down through the darkness of Outer Jonolrey towards the fifty-kilometre diameter patch of sunlight that presided over the port. The ship lanced through the encircling clouds of drizzle, its dull-red glowing hull leaving a trail of steam behind it in the dark air, then glinting watery gold as it entered the cloud-filtered shaft of reflected sunlight beamed down onto the enclave from the orbiting mirrors.

The craft puffed vapour as it adjusted its fall and flexed stubby legs. It thumped onto and rolled along a concrete runway on the outskirts of the port. It braked and turned, trundling towards a slowly pulsing holo showing continually descending red and green horizontal lines, stopping when it was in the centre of the holo.

The square of concrete beneath dropped slowly away, taking the ship with it.

“Shit,” Tenel said, glancing at the screen beside the lock door. “Spot check.”

Sharrow checked the screen. In the hangar space they’d been shuffled to, there was a tired male official in Port Inspection overalls holding a clipboard.

“Aw, penetration, man,” Choss said. “Ain’t payin the Ik’s fuckin import dues on this spit.” She started fishing bottles of trax spirit out of her kitbag and leaving them in the corridor by the lock door.

Sharrow watched as the official in the hangar outside yawned and then spoke to his clipboard; his voice carne out of the screen. “Hello, persons on the vessel Wheeler Dealer,” he said. “Transport Standards and Customs check; please have your vehicle documentation ready and baggage prepared for inspection.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tenel said, finger on the screen transmit button. “On our way.”

“One at a time, please,” the official said, sounding bored. “Crew first.”

Tenel flicked a data chip out of the screen slot and, shaking her head, stepped into the lock; the door slid open. The air lock was a standard single-aperture rotating-cylinder design that meant you couldn’t have both doors open at once. The door rolled closed again and they heard the inner sleeve and the outer door rotate together.

Sharrow and Choss watched the official nod to Tenel when she stepped off the external access ramp, take the data chip and stick it onto his clipboard, then inspect her kitbag and wave the clipboard up and down her body a couple of times. He tapped an entry on the clipboard. “Next,” he said.

“Loada shit, man,” Choss muttered. She made a farting noise with her mouth and stepped into the lock. Sharrow was looking at the HandCannon, trying to recall if Ikueshleng required a licence for bringing weaponry in. She couldn’t remember, and she wasn’t sure that going to pick up the gun she’d deposited with Left Luggage here was such a good idea. She shrugged. The worst that could happen would be they’d confiscate it. She stuck it back in her satchel.

“Next, please,” the man’s voice said. The lock door opened; she stepped in. The lock half rotated, then stopped.

She stood there, trapped in the metre-diameter space. She pressed the control patches. Nothing happened. She got the gun out of her satchel, slung the satchel over her head and crouched down.

She thought she heard something, then the lock started to rotate very slowly. The craft’s hull metal came into view at the leading edge of the lock’s aperture. The lock stopped again. She aimed the gun at the edge of the door.

The lock shifted suddenly, opening a gap about ten centimetres wide to the outside. She glimpsed a vertical sliver of unoccupied hangar.

The gas grenade came in from the top of the door, hitting the deck to her right as the lock rotated back, trapping her.

She stared, horror-struck and paralysed, at the grenade clicking away on the floor.

For an instant she was five years old again.

A warm rain fell on Ikueshleng. Ships came and went, flying in on wings or relying on the shape of their bodies for lift, or landing vertically, engines screaming. Other sporadic roars were ships taking off, while every now and again a near-subsonic pulse of sound followed by a great whoop of noise and then a distant bellow of igniting engines announced an induction tube hurling a craft into the atmosphere.

Near one edge of the port’s artificial plateau, a long rectangle of concrete hinged down, producing a shallow ramp into a brightly lit space. Rumbling up from the port’s depths and out onto the rain-slicked surface apron came a tall, boxy vehicle running on four three-metre high wheels; it was joined to another which followed it up into the drizzle, leading another carriage behind it, and another and another.

The twenty-section Land Car started to turn before the final carriages had risen onto the concrete surface. The vehicle’s front wheels ran through puddles on the apron, sending waves washing out to the edges of the shallow depressions. The grimy water surged back in as the wheels passed, only to be pushed out again and again as tyre after tyre of the accelerating Car rolled its intersecting tread over exactly the same path its predecessors had taken.

The Land Car came to the edge of the concrete, where a gate in Ikueshleng’s perimeter fence gave access to the bedraggled scrub beyond. The drop was two metres or more, but the Car didn’t pause; its front section described a graceful arc as it drooped towards the damp ground and the links with the section behind tensed to support it. Its wheels met the ground and took the section’s weight again as the rest of the Car followed, each carriage bumping gently down in a ripple of movement that swept back along the vehicle’s two hundred-metre length like a snake moving from one branch to another. The vehicle rumbled off through the fine veils of rain towards the line of darkness a kilometre away, where the artificial noon of the port gave way to the pre-dawn gloom of a cloudy tropical morning.

Sharrow watched the rain collect on the window of her cell, beyond the plastic-covered steel bars. The raindrops became little slanted rivulets as the Car increased speed. The landscape beyond the thick glass and slip-streamed moisture was flat, covered in scrappy bushes and patches of flail-grass that looked as though they could use the rain. She looked down at the paper note the warder had slipped through the food-hatch in her door.

Heard you’re aboard too. Court Police picked us up in Stager on some nonsense about assassinating Inv19. Next stop Yada, apparently. Who got you?

Love and kisses, Miz and the gang.

She had nothing to write with. She crumpled the note up in her hand. Outside, the reflected sunlight disappeared as though switched off. The Land Car rumbled through the dark beyond.

The hunters who’d caught her were a mother-and-son team; the son had worked for the Ikueshleng Port Authority and had contacts in Trench City’s space port. The Huhsz had leaked the fact she was travelling as Ysul Demri into a data base used by contract security personnel, licensed assassins, bodyguards and bounty hunters. Finding out which craft she was on and arranging to borrow the relevant uniform had been comparatively easy.

The vehicle she was on was one of a fleet of World Court-licensed Secure Goods and Detained Persons’ Surface Transporters, though everybody just called them Land Cars. This one, the Lesson Learned, made regular runs between Ikueshleng and Yadayeypon with goods and people the airlines, rail services, road authorities and insurance companies preferred not to handle.

The Lesson Learned was run by the Sons of Depletion, one of an increasing number of secular Wounded Orders that seemed to be part of a new Golter meta-fashion. Each of the Land Car’s crew had voluntarily been made deaf and mute. Several of the warders she’d seen had gone even further and had their mouths sewn up; Sharrow assumed they had to be drip fed or have a tube put down their nose.

Others had had one eye sewn up too, and one man, an officer by his uniform, had had his mouth and both his eyes surgically closed. He had to be led around the Car by a sighted helper and his only mode of communication was through the Order’s private touch-code, the sender’s fingertips playing over the back of the receiver’s hand as though on a fleshy keyboard.

A Land Car. She remembered Miz mentioning he’d had some cargo stolen from one, but that had been on Speyr, in bandit country. This was Golter, and nobody attacked a Court-licensed vehicle unless they were suicidal or mad. Even Geis couldn’t help her now.

The bounty hunter son came to see her after dawn. Close up he was a pasty-faced, unhealthy-looking individual. He grimaced as he sat down on the fold-down seat across the soft-floored padded cell from her. He kept a stun-pistol pointed at her. She sat cross-legged on the bunk, dressed in the Land Car’s prison overalls. She still had a headache caused by whatever gas they’d used in the grenade.

“I just wanted you to know there’s nothing personal in this,” the man told her, grinning feebly. He was in his late twenties, maybe, thin and clean-shaven.

“Oh,” she said, “thanks.” She didn’t bother attempting to disguise the bitterness in her voice.

“I know all about you,” the man said, coughing. “I always read up all I can on our marks, and I kinda admire you, really.”

“This is all making me feel a lot better,” she told him. “If you admire me so fucking much, let me go.”

He shook his head. “Can’t do that,” he said. “Too much at stake. Told the Huhsz we have you; they’re expecting to trade at Yada. If we don’t turn up with you, they’re going to be awwwful peeved.” He grinned.

She looked at him, drawing her head back a little. “Get out of here, you cretin.”

“You can’t talk to me like that, lady,” he said, scowling. “I can stay and I can talk all I want. I could use this gun,” he said, gesturing with the stun-pistol. He glanced at the door, then back at her. “I could gas you again; I could do anything I wanted to you.”

“Try it, fuckwit,” she said.

The man sneered. He stood up. “Yeah, proud aristo, eh?” He held his hands out. The skin on them was angry and blistered. “I held the Passports in my hands, lady. I seen them. I seen what’s going to kill you. I’ll be thinking of you and all that pride when they put you to death; slowly, I hope.”

She was frowning.

The man buzzed the door. It opened. “Good long journey to Yadayeypon, lady,” he said.

“Wait,” she said, holding up one hand.

He ignored her. “Plenty of time to think about what them Huhsz’ll do to you when they get you.”

“Wait!” she said as he went out of the door. She jumped off the bunk. “Did you say-”

“Bye,” the bounty hunter said, as the deaf-mute Son of Depletion outside closed the door again.

The Lesson Learned rolled across the savannah of the Chey Nar peninsula all day, heading north on ancient drove-ways between the crop fields. By the evening the Land Car had reached the foothills of the Cathrivacian Mountains and started the long detour round them that avoided a heavily tolled pass, heading up through the light forests of Undalt and Lower Tazdecttedy, rising on its suspension to brush the tops of the small trees with its underbody as it climbed through the clouds for the plateau of High Marden.

Traffic stopped on the Shruprov-Takandra turnpike the following morning while the Car passed over it, each set of wheels raising themselves above the turnpike fence and then setting down again to rumble over the road itself.

Somebody in the halted traffic-there was usually at least one-decided to have some sport by jumping the lights and driving underneath the Land Car, timing their approach so that they passed between the sets of wheels. The driver on this occasion failed; his small car caught the edge of one of the Lesson Learned’s nearside tyres and spun, bouncing off the inside of the wheels on the other side and ending up underneath the edge of the Land Car; the the Lesson Learned’s tyres rolled on over the automobile, crushing and compressing it into a half-metre high sandwich of junk.

The Land Car didn’t stop or even slow down; the Order had indemnities against that sort of thing.

It forded the Vounti River near Ca-Blay in a rain storm and turned south-west, setting a course that would take it across the plateau towards Mar Scarp and the downs and valleys of Marden County on the borders of Yadayeypon Province.

They brought her meals on trenchers or disposable plates. She tried to get the guards to bring her something to write with but failed; she made ink from some nuts that had garnished a meal and used one of her bite-sharpened nails to write on the other side of Miz’s note, then put it in the door slot just before that evening’s meal. It was still there when her meal appeared. She buzzed the door, but nobody answered. She checked every part of the cell; there didn’t seem to be any way out without help or equipment. There was no screen. She spent a lot of time just looking out of the small window.

The bounty hunter had said he’d held the Passports in his hands. And he had looked ill. She had known for some time what the symptoms of radiation sickness were; it had been one of the first things the doc had told them about when they’d joined the anti-Tax Navy.

There had been a fashion, millennia ago, for assassination by plutonium amongst the governing classes of the system-pens, medals and articles of clothing had been the favoured delivery systems-and for centuries nobody in a position of power would ever be without a personal radiation monitor, but the practice had been abandoned, banned and outlawed in that order long ago, and only a few Corps, administrations and old Houses with long memories still bothered with such precautions.

It had not even occurred to her, Miz or any of the others that the Huhsz would simply ignore the fact the Passports had been irradiated. She hadn’t thought to tell anybody.

No wonder the Huhsz missions had been able to move so swiftly. They hadn’t bothered with any containment mechanism; they had simply taken the Passports round as normal, and let the energy-broadcasting Holes they contained infect whoever came into range with their soaked tribute of ancient poison.

But why hadn’t Geis noticed? He seemed to have been following all that had gone on pretty closely; why hadn’t he spotted what was going on? She couldn’t understand. He must have known…

It didn’t matter. Whatever had happened, it came back to her. She had done it again. She had caused-was causing-people to die of radiation. Again. Eight years after Lip City and the Lazy Gun’s self-destruction.

“Cursed,” she whispered, when she realised. She thought-hoped-she had probably spoken too softly for the cell’s microphone to pick up.

Cursed, she thought, shaking her head and turning to the tiny barred window again, refusing to re-live that instant of realisation in the dawn-lit hotel room eight years ago, when bliss had been forever contaminated by guilt.

The Land Car moved more slowly in High Marden, where the landscape was cut and parcelled into small units, the countryside was littered with villages and towns and there were many detours to be made round both those and estates and enclaves that would charge the Car a toll.

The Lesson Learned was continually crossing walls in Marden. When the walls were especially high, the big wheels underneath her cell were lifted so far up they blocked her view.

The villages and hamlets passed by; houses were white and coloured dots speckling the green hillsides. The Land Car took to rivers twice, bumping and twisting down their courses, ducking under bridges, splashing through shallows and bridging over the deeper pools, rigid links between the carriages supporting each one in turn.

In the evening light the Car passed along the shore of the Scodde Sea, over gravel fields and open meadows where a variety of grazing animals fled from it, bouncing and leaping across the grasslands in bleating, bellowing herds. As the Car turned a corner round a farm wall, she saw the Lesson Learneds leading carriage, and caught a glimpse of some brown shapes running underneath, between the vehicle’s first two sets of giant wheels.

She had heard that some animals ran on just in front or underneath Land Cars for hours at a time, until their strength or their hearts gave out and they fell.

She looked away.

She rose on the last day she would spend in the Car. A line of white piled clouds ahead marked the Airthit Mountains; beyond lay Yadayeypon. The hills and forests thickened out of the arable land of Marden County as the Lesson Learned started to gain height again. She had given up trying to get them to take messages; they still hadn’t answered the door buzzer.

She watched the trees thin and disappear; when the wind-torn clouds parted above, it was to reveal distant peaks, sharp and brilliant white. The air in the cell became cold and her breathing became laboured. Then they were through the pass and descending into trees again. The Lesson Learned had entered Yadayeypon Province.

She sat in the steeply tipped cell, swallowing and yawning now and again to clear her ears as the air pressure increased, and thought of how she might kill herself.

But she could not see suicide as a way of cheating them; rather it would feel like giving in. It was probably the sensible thing to do, but it would be ignominious. She thought she understood now the old warrior codes which held that when every other choice and freedom had been removed from one, it was still possible to confound the enemy by dying well, no matter how terrified one felt. Certainly she had not felt so without hope since her ship had been tumbling powerless towards Nachtel’s Ghost, fifteen years earlier, but she had survived that. At a cost, perhaps, but she had survived.

She hadn’t slept well during the night, as every revolution of these great wheels brought her closer to Yadayeypon, and the fear and despair grew inside her. She sat cross-legged on the bunk, trying to cheer herself up, until the very desperation of her attempts became pathetic and she wept.

After a while she fell asleep again, wan and exhausted, against the slope of trembling bulkhead behind her narrow cot.

She woke suddenly and didn’t dare hope it was what she thought it might be. An explosion shook the cell, jarring her teeth; she passed through fear, elation and back to fear again in a second.

A jolt sent her flying off the bunk; she landed on all fours on the floor. She could hear gunfire. The cell tipped as the carriage rattled and bounced along an incline, jarring her and everything in it. She struggled up the slope to the bunk and grabbed the window bars, trying to see outside.

The Land Car’s tall shadow was flung up a steep, grassy hillside towards a distant line of trees; the vehicle was crashing over and through what looked like dry stone walls. A smoky trail appeared suddenly from underneath the carriage in front, crossed a small field and detonated against a wall in a dirty fountain of earth and stone. A ripple shook the cell and vibrated through the bars in her hands as a part of the Lesson Learned’s shadow five or six carriages along was suddenly obscured in a dark, blossoming cloud. There was a flash of light from one end of the stand of trees. Something burst from the carriage in front of her, spraying wreckage: the cell leapt around her. A light tank in dazzle camouflage appeared from the trees, tearing down the hillside towards the Land Car; earth exploded into the air in front of it.

There was a terrific crash from behind her, she had a brief impression of the front of the Land Car’s shadow twisting and of the light tank firing again, then the cell whipped and heaved around her, shaking her like a dice in a cup.

The carriage rolled right over six times. She was conscious through it all. She fought the urge to brace herself and just went limp, crashing round the cell with the cot’s mattress and sleeping bag flopping and falling continually around her; it was like being trapped in a tumble drier. She had time to reflect that there was something to be said for padded cells, and that you could tell each time the wheels hit the ground because the bounce was slightly different.

It stopped; she was weightless for a moment, then slammed into the padded cell door, hurting her left shoulder.

The mattress and sleeping bag fell on top of her.

Another massive crash shook the whole carriage.

There was silence.

She stood awkwardly, rubbing her shoulder and feeling her head, looking for bruises or blood. Gunfire sounded in the distance.

She tried to climb up to the bunk but there was nothing to hold on to. She jumped, caught the window bars and pulled herself up, ignoring the pain in her shoulder, but all she could see was dark-blue evening sky. She dropped to the canted floor that the cell door and corridor wall had become. More firing. It went on for a while; a couple of thudding detonations shook the carriage.

She tried the door buzzer but it didn’t seem to be working.

After a while she heard movement outside the cell, then the lock buzzed. She drew to one side, away from the door. Voices.

“Blow it,” she heard a man say.

She buried herself under the cot mattress and stuck her fingers in her ears; the explosion clanged round the cell, leaving her ears ringing.

She looked up into a grey haze. The door had disappeared. She started coughing in the acrid fumes of the blast. A gun and a man’s face appeared where the door had been.

The man wore an armoured helmet painted in a hallucinatory purple and green design. He wore matt-black multi-sights over his eyes and had a little roundel painted on his forehead with the words AIM HERE printed underneath, and an arrow. He frowned at her.

“Haven’t we met?” he said.

She coughed, then laughed. “I was wondering who could be crazy enough to attack a Land Car.”

Another man appeared. He had a dark round face, and was bare-headed apart from a bright yellow bandana with the word REAL smeared on it in what looked like dried blood. He frowned strenuously.

She waved. “Politeness,” she said.

“Politeness,” Elson Roa replied, nodding.

It was warm and humid in the late afternoon air; they were in the tropics and the altitude was less than five hundred metres, though the prevailing winds-spilling down from the glaciers of the continent’s core-kept the temperature moderate.

She stood on what had been the side of one of the Lesson Learned’s cell-block sections; another carriage lay up-ended against its roof. The thin prison overalls flapped in the warm breeze, and she could feel the air moving over her naked scalp. She looked around, smiling, watching Thrial disappear over the mountain ridge to the west.

Segments of the smashed Land Car lay strewn around the bottom of a dry, steep-sided valley like pieces of a toy after a child’s tantrum. Some carriages had turned on their backs, their suspension components looking naked and vulnerable and their wheels pointing pathetically upwards to the patchily clouded sky. Smoke and steam drifted down the valley on the wind.

Solipsists in gaudy uniforms crawled all over the tangled necklace of torn-open boxes that was the Lesson Learned. A couple of light tanks and five half-tracks sat tilted on the grassy banks around the central valley, engines idling noisily.

A group of stunned Sons of Depletion sat on the grass, hands clasped at their necks, guarded by two Solipsists who appeared to be naked apart from skin-paint. Bodies lay near one of the still-smoking carriages.

Roa’s head appeared from a smashed window; she reached down and helped pull him out. He carried a small briefcase and her satchel.

“This is yours,” he said, handing the satchel to her.

“Thank you,” she said, putting the strap over her head.

Roa and the other Solipsist who had rescued her stood looking round the scene, then Roa shrugged.

“Let us go,” he said.

They climbed down through the carriage’s suspension components to the ground. All around, men in gaudy uniforms and body-paint were staggering from the wreck to their own vehicles, loaded with booty.

She followed Roa as he ducked under one of the Land Car’s buckled connecting corridors to the other side of the wreck, where a big, open half-track was waiting; a radar unit revolved on a thin mast above the vehicle. A blonde face grinned down from the rear of the vehicle as Sharrow approached.

“Okay, I believe you about the Solipsists now,” Zefla called.

“Hey, kid!” Miz shouted, turning round.

“These are your apparences?” Elson Roa asked as he climbed into the half-track behind her. Sharrow was hugging Zefla; the others were dressed as she was in dark prison overalls. Miz blew her a kiss; Cenuij tutted and patted at a cut forehead with a handkerchief and Dloan sat massively, grinning at her.

Keteo, the driver who’d taken her and Roa into Aïs City a month earlier, was sitting in the vehicle’s central seat, clutching the wheel. He turned round, saw her and closed his eyes, making a humming noise from beneath his magenta and white-painted steel hat. His combat jacket was bright pink. A body-painted Solipsist-naked except for a beret-sat to Keteo’s left, clutching a microphone.

“Yes,” she said, smiling at Roa and still holding Zefla. “They’re my apparences.”

“Oh, thanks,” Cenuij muttered.

“Then we’d better take them, too,” Roa said, frowning.

Keteo turned round, looking annoyed.

“Molgarin didn’t say anything about-” he began.

Roa slapped him on the top of his armoured hat. “Drive,” he said.

Miz stood up from the half-track’s rear seat, wanting to hug Sharrow too, but was forced to sit back down as the half-track lurched off across the grass. Sharrow and Zefla were thrown back onto the seat, laughing. Roa clutched at the half-track’s roll-bar, which held a small holo-screen, a pair of heavy machine guns and an empty, soot-smeared rocket launcher.

The half-track thumped and crashed over the uneven ground, heading down the valley towards some trees. Roa studied the holo-screen, then tapped the body-painted Solipsist in the front seat.

“Tell everybody there are aircraft coming,” he told the shivering man.

“Attention everybody!” the body-painted man shouted into the microphone. He paused. “Watch the skies!” he screamed, then he threw himself down into the footwell, leaving the microphone on the seat.

Roa shook his head.

A Solipsist dressed in violet and lime, dragging a long, black box, ran towards them, waving. Roa banged Keteo’s tin hat again; the half-track skidded to a stop, ploughing turf with its tracks and sending everybody sliding out of their seats. Roa went, “Oof!” as he was thrown against the roll-bar. He glared at the back of Keteo’s tin hat, then reached down to pull the long, black box into the half-track. He tapped Keteo’s helmet again and hung on grimly as the half-track leapt away.

Sharrow hung onto the radar mast behind the seat, looking back to watch the Solipsists run from the wrecked Land Car and tumble into their half-tracks. The two garishly painted light tanks were already bouncing across the grass, following Roa’s vehicle.

“You all right?” Miz shouted to her over the noise of the machine’s engine.

“Yes,” Sharrow said.

An aircraft screamed overhead. She ducked instinctively. They all watched the sleek grey shape disappear over the sunset-rouged summits of the hills to their right. Another three planes flashed across the valley, higher up.

“Oh shit,” Cenuij said.

Roa readied the twin machine guns.

The half-track skidded off the grass onto a narrow wheel-grooved track leading down through a small forest. Dust tumbled into the air behind them.

They heard the noise of the jets again, then a series of flat, crumping sounds. The half-track’s radio made squawking, screeching noises.

The track steepened and started to twist as it followed a rocky gully downwards. Keteo avoided a large boulder lying at the side of the track by a centimetre or so, skidded and almost sent the machine over the edge of the ravine, then hauled it straight again and gunned the engine.

Roa turned round and looked back up the track to where the first light tank had appeared in its own cloud of dust. A series of sharp explosions came from behind it. Keteo drove off the track and along a stretch of grassy bank to avoid a dead bird lying in the road.

“Interesting driving technique,” Miz shouted to Sharrow, nodding approvingly.

Cenuij closed his eyes. “I felt safer in the fucking Land Car.”

Behind them, smoke rose into the dark-blue sky above the trees. The track left the forest and ran along the side of a wide grassy valley crossed by stone walls and bisected by a stream that appeared from a small side valley. The end of the valley was about half a kilometre away.

“Oh-oh,” Dloan said, turning to look behind them.

Cenuij was looking suspiciously at the long black box by Roa’s feet.

Roa reached under the roll-bar and lifted the microphone off the front seat. “Hello, Solo-” he said.

A great roar of noise slapped down on them; they all ducked again. Sharrow saw the jet tear overhead. Roa threw the mike down, grabbed the machine guns and fired at the already distant aircraft, scattering cartridge cases into the rear footwell.

“Where are the missiles?” Roa yelled.

“Under the seat!” Keteo yelled.

The air filled with a humming noise. Sharrow glanced at Dloan; he’d put his hands over his eyes.

There was a flash of light from behind them. Sharrow half-heard, half-saw a blur of movement to one side as something fell into the grass by the side of the track. Then the half-track’s long hood exploded.

Everything stopped. Silence, as the wreckage tumbled out of the sky around them and what was left of the half-track ploughed into the track in a wave of dust and small stones.

Sound came back slowly; her ears began ringing. There were several other muffled explosions in the confusion as the broken half-track crashed to a stop. She was in the footwell, picking herself up; Roa was above her, looking stunned, his face bloody.

Smoke everywhere.

She saw Miz; he pulled her to her feet, shouting something at her. Dloan helped Zefla down from the vehicle. Cenuij sat, blinking, looking surprised.

Then she was out on the grass, staggering and running. She thought she’d left the satchel behind, but it was there, flapping against her hip. She followed Dloan and Zef; Miz ran at her side. Further back up the track the two light tanks burned fiercely, pools of bright orange fire beneath bulb-headed columns of smoke.

Another plane screamed overhead. Explosions crackled through-out the valley. She kept her head down, hearing shrapnel zizz through the air and plunk into the grass.

They ran towards a small stone animal-pen by the side of the stream. Dloan and Zefla dived over the pen’s stone wall. Cenuij vaulted; she jumped, falling into the grass circle within. She looked over, back to the wreck of the blazing half-track. Miz was helping Keteo carry a long, heavy-looking kitbag. She wiped sweat from her eyes and looked up.

In the sky above the hills, a large plane flew in front of red, sunlit clouds. A line of ruby-tinged shapes fell from the rear of the plane, becoming dark as they fell into the shadow of the hill, and blossoming into parachutes before they were hidden by the hills themselves.

“Definitely safer in the Land Car,” Cenuij muttered.

“Excellent response time,” Dloan murmured.

“Recognise them?” Zefla said.

“No,” Dloan said as Miz and Keteo-limping heavily, face covered with blood-heaved the kitbag over the wall of the pen and then collapsed over it.

“Who we dealing with here?” Miz said, breathing hard.

“Just saying,” Dloan said. “Contract army; couldn’t recognise them.”

“Where’s Roa?” Keteo asked, wiping blood from his eyes.

Zefla looked over the top of the stones towards the wrecked half-track. “Can’t see him,” she said. She looked back at Keteo. “What about the radio guy?” she asked.

Keteo shook his head. “No more,” he said, then knelt, looking over the stone parapet. Miz was tearing the kitbag open, in between glancing up and around.

“What hit us?” Sharrow said.

“Down!” Miz shouted. The scream of a jet came almost instantly. The ground pulsed beneath them and rocks tumbled off the pen wall. They waited for the pattering debris to stop falling, then looked up. A crater had been blasted in the river bed twenty metres upstream; water was pooling into the steaming, smoke-shrouded hole.

“Shit,” Cenuij said, holding his leg.

“Debris?” Zefla asked him, sliding over to him.

Cenuij grimaced. He lifted his leg up, flexed his ankle. “I’ll survive.”

“Tank sensors…” Dloan said, his voice trailing off as he watched Miz pull a large gun out of the kitbag. Keteo went over and pulled another tube-shaped weapon out. Dloan joined them, eyes wide.

Sharrow shook herself; she opened her satchel and saw the HandCannon. She pulled the gun out and searched through the spare clips in the bottom of the bag. Her red-head wig was down there too, but she ignored it.

“Shit, here’s another one,” Cenuij said.

The plane swooped, barrelling straight towards them. Miz lifted the gun he’d found, trying and failing to make it fire. Sharrow found the HandCannon’s bi-propellant clip but it was too late. Something fell from the plane, tumbling. She fired up anyway as the plane tore overhead, the gun thud-thudding in her hand as the jet swept over. Something whistled through the air, just ahead of the zooming jet’s roar.

She hugged the ground. Detonations rippled through the earth and grass; a noise like a million firecrackers burst overhead. The debris was tiny and sounded metallic. She raised her head first. More detonations crackled downstream.

“Terrible aiming,” Dloan said by her side as he took up a large gun. He pulled a magazine out of the kitbag, then another and another.

“Cluster bombs!” Cenuij said, gulping as he looked at where a last few explosions were flashing and cracking down the valley. “Are they legal?”

Keteo banged the side of the tube-weapon he held, muttering.

“They become legal,” Zefla said. “When you do something like attack a Court-licensed Land Car.”

Sharrow threw the empty clip away and emplaced the bipropellant magazine. “Think they’ll stop bombing?” she said, digging for the other rocket clip in the satchel. “Those paras must be pretty close.”

Miz checked the gun he had. “You’ll be lucky,” he said.

“These rounds are all the wrong calibre,” Dloan said, digging through the kitbag. He sounded disappointed.

“Two more,” Zefla said, looking up the valley.

Two sharp, dark shapes turned against the fading evening light, then seemed to hover there, growing larger.

“We should have taken that box,” Cenuij said. “That black box. The Court-”

“Solo!” Keteo yelled. He pointed down the valley.

Sharrow saw two flashing lights; they rose into the air on two masts above a large dark shape. More lights glittered, and the dark shape became a large ACV, two-then, as it slewed briefly, four-large propellers visible above it.

Keteo whooped.

Dloan stared at the hovercraft. “How did they get that up here?” he asked.

“Rivers!” Keteo said cockily.

Sharrow looked back to the two approaching jets as they bellied down, each leaving two thin grey tubes of vapour behind them, curling from their wingtips in the humid evening air. Miz tried to fire at the planes, but the gun wouldn’t work.

“Shit,” he said. “This thing needs a fucking power pack…”

Dloan turned to look at the jets and put down the gun he was holding, watching the aircraft as a third shape turned in the air above the valley head and started on the same bombing run. He shook his head.

“No matter,” he said softly.

The planes floated closer. Sharrow held the HandCannon in both hands, ready. Two black shapes hung under each of the planes’ wings. The canisters detached and started to fall, tumbling through the air towards them.

“Aw, fuck…” she heard Miz say.

“Bye,” Dloan said softly.

Then both planes became cerise spheres. The falling canisters pulsed bright pink in the same instant.

The light was too bright. Sharrow closed her eyes, not comprehending. Dloan shouted something, then he thudded into her, on top of her, putting the light out. The world pulsed and quivered, shock waves hammering into her already ringing ears.

The weight on her lifted. She opened her eyes. Dloan was standing above her, eyes bulging, mouth hanging open.

“Dloan!” she shouted. “Get down!”

Dloan swivelled, mouth still hanging open. Keteo stood up beside him, his mouth open too. He was staring back towards the half-track. Sharrow got up on her knees beside Dloan.

The two jets had disappeared. Tiny glowing bits of wreckage were falling all about, landing smoking in the surrounding grass, hissing in the water and clunking into the stones of the animal-pen like some bizarre hail. Zefla yelped and brushed one red-hot shard off her arm. Echoes rumbled round the valley. There was a long smoking crater on the flank of the hill across from them, tattered wriggles of smoke guttered from a scatter of small fires downstream from the pen, and from the dip beyond a dark black cloud was rising on a shaft of smoke and flame, partially obscuring the view down the valley towards the Solo.

The third jet swept overhead, climbing and turning hard. It too became a vivid ball of light: the explosion shook the ground and the wreckage fell gracefully to the hill in a thousand fiery pieces trailing black smoke like some vast firework gone wrong.

Keteo leapt into the air. “Roa!” he yelled, flourishing the unused tube-weapon.

Sharrow went to the downhill parapet of the animal-pen. They seemed to be surrounded by pillars of smoke. Down-valley, beyond the rising column left by one of the crashed planes, the Solo was visible, stationary a few hundred metres below, engines droning.

The half-track sat, still burning in the gloom beneath the dark hill. Violet light sparkled just behind it. She turned and looked above the hillside where the wreckage burned. A dot in the distant sky burst with light.

“Roa!” Keteo yelled again. He grinned down at Sharrow, then looked slightly embarrassed, and shrugged. “Me, really,” he said.

She shook her head.

“Wow!” Dloan said, looking round at them all. “Wow!”

“That’s what was in that box,” Cenuij said crisply. He snorted. “The wonders of ancient technology.”

“Oh boy,” Zefla said. “Is that bozo Roa in trouble now.”

Light ridged the hilltop above the flaming wreckage of the third plane. Ricochets whined off the stones of a nearby wall as the sound cracked over them.

“Paras are here,” Dloan said, as they all ducked down again.

“I can see Roa moving,” Zefla said, peeking out of a hole in the wall.

Answering fire from the ACV echoed around the valley. More gunfire came from the ridge of the hill, pattering around them.

Miz was crouched down beside Keteo. “Got a communicator?” he asked the youth.

“Yeah!” he said.

“How about using it to tell your pals in the ACV we’re on our way?”

“Good idea!” Keteo said. He pulled a small device from his pink combat jacket. “Solo?” he said.

Miz sidled over to Sharrow, who was taking aim at the hill summit. “Down the stream?” he asked her.

Keteo chattered excitedly to somebody on the Solo.

“Yes,” she said. “Down the stream. Any time you like.” She rose up just enough to fire at the hillside. Some careless soldier skylined, and so died in silhouette. Sharrow ducked back, changing magazines.

“Okay?” Miz asked Keteo, over the sound of bullets thudding into the ground and stones around them.

“Okay!” the boy yelled. “They’re waiting.”

“Let’s go,” Miz said. “Down the stream-bed.” He nodded at Keteo’s pink combat jacket, which even in the gathering darkness looked very pale. “That jacket makes you kind of conspicuous, kid; you might want to ditch it.”

Keteo looked at Miz as though he was mad.

Sharrow declipped the bi-propellants.

Miz watched her, scratching his head. “Will you stop fiddling and fire that damn thing?” he said.

She glared at him. “These are B-Ps,” she said. “No better against infantry and too easy to back-trace.”

“Oh, my mistake,” Miz said, watching her shove a different magazine home. A small explosion threw soil into the air ten metres upstream.

“Rifle-grenade,” Dloan said.

She was ready to fire. She glanced at the others.

“Go!” she yelled. She started firing. Zefla and Dloan-quickly followed by Keteo and then Cenuij-jumped over the stream-side wall of the animal-pen.

Sharrow ducked down again. She changed clips again, her ears ringing again, her wrists aching. Miz was sitting a metre away, his face just visible, grinning at her.

“Get!” she yelled at him.

“You get,” he told her. He held his hand out for the gun.

“No,” she said.

She turned and started firing. Something dropped into the animal-pen a couple of metres away; Miz dived, grabbed and threw the rifle-grenade away towards the road; it exploded in mid air.

She looked round; shrapnel tinkled against the far wall. Bullets sang off the stones they were crouched behind.

“Let’s both get,” Miz suggested.

They leapt the wall, stumbled down across the grass to the shallow river and staggered in, then waded downstream, heads bowed, slipping on submerged rocks, bullets whizzing above.

The Solo was invisible, hidden by the hollow where one of the downed planes had crashed. The ACV’s flashing lights lit up rising smoke in front of them and the grass on either side of the stream ahead. An underwater pulse almost threw them off their feet; a grenade made a white exploding shape in the stream, back near the animal-pen.

They came to the lip of a small waterfall and struggled out onto the grass, running down into the hollow where the wreckage of the aircraft burned in cratered patches and the Solo waited, its slab-sided stern turned to them, rear ramp closed but a small door open above a mesh ladder. Elson Roa was climbing the ladder over the bulge of the hovercraft’s man-high skirt. The Francks were right behind him. Keteo was helping Cenuij, who was limping.

Sharrow and Miz ran down through the big ACV’s prop wash. “Wish they’d put those fucking lights out,” Miz gasped.

They splashed through the stream again as Zefla climbed to the door. Tall splashes in the water announced bullets falling amongst them, and sparks burst off the rear of the hovercraft; air whistled out of small, ragged punctures in its skirt. Dloan waited for Keteo, then picked him up and threw the boy half-way up the ladder. He scrambled the rest.

Cenuij was next, hauling himself hand over hand.

Sharrow and Miz reached the black curve of the ACVs skirt. Dloan made to help her up, but she nodded him to go next. He paused on the way up as something pulled at the dark cloth covering his right leg, then he continued.

“Ah!” Miz said, and whirled round. Sharrow looked back to see him glance at one hand and then stick it behind his back, and look at her. “Nothing,” he shouted above the noise of the engines, grinning. Blood dripped into the water behind him. He nodded at the ladder. “After you,” he yelled.

She stuck the gun in her mouth, gripped the ladder and climbed. Miz was right beneath her.

Cenuij was in the door, reaching down to her. He looked furious.

“Can you believe it?” he said, grasping her hand. “He threw it away! Thought it had stopped working, so he threw it away!”

Cenuij pulled her towards him. Roa was further in, yelling into a communicator. Dloan sat on the floor inside, holding his leg. The ACV was moving. Shots thumped around the opened door.

Sharrow hauled herself into the doorway and turned to reach down for Miz.

At first she thought Cenuij was doing the same thing, then he slumped heavily on top of her and tumbled out of the door.

She grabbed at him but missed; he fell past Miz, bounced off the ACV’s skirt and landed slackly on the grassy bank of the stream, limbs flopping spread around him.

Miz hesitated, looking down and back as spray burst from beneath the hovercraft’s skirt.

Cenuij lay on the grass, staring up at the sky, eyes open, blood pouring from each side of his head.

The ACV moved away and picked up speed, puffing up great shrouding clouds of spray into the hollow in front of the waterfall and punching huge, rolling holes in the smoke from the burning wreckage, all lit by the flames and the hovercraft’s flickering lights. Roa was still shouting. Hands came and held Sharrow’s shoulders.

She saw Miz tense as he looked down at Cenuij, getting ready to leap off the ladder.

“Miz!” she shouted. He looked up at her. The spray rose about him as the ACV accelerated, engines barking and clattering.

Cenuij lay still; ten, then twenty metres away as the pulsing light faded around him. Then the hovercraft’s lights finally flicked off.

“Miz!” she screamed into the shadows.

She reached down, felt his hand and pulled him up.

She and Zefla hauled him in through the door.

The small waterfall reflected the fading flames of the plane-wreck; the hollow became a bowl of shadows as the Solo drew away.

Cenuij’s body lay motionless on the ground, a dark ‘X’, like something pinned out, sacrificed to the encroaching darkness.

18 The Dark City

The android crossed the central plaza and walked along the quiet street through skeins and patches of ground-mist and past the shells of tall, roofless buildings filled with watery morning sunlight. The android was slender and a little below the height of the average Golter male; its outer substance was formed from metal and plastic and it wore no clothes. Its body had been sculpted to vaguely resemble a rather idealised male figure, though without genitalia. Its chest was usually said to remind people of the breastplate from a suit of ancient armour. Its head held two ear-shaped microphones, two eyes like round sunglass lenses, a flat nose with two sensory nostril slits, and a small loudspeaker shaped like a pair of slightly open lips.

Where the buildings gave way to a small park, the android turned and descended a wide set of curving steps, past arcades edged by tattered, faded awnings, down towards the mist-strewn waters of the silent harbour. On the esplanade it turned and made for the Guest’s Quarter. Sunlight threw its long thin shadow behind it, across paving stones that were clean and without litter but cracked and holed.

The android carried a slim plastic folder in one hand; the plastic went slap-slap against its plastic-covered thigh for a few steps as the light breeze caught it, then the tall figure shifted its arm slightly, holding the folder further away from its leg. The noise stopped.

Vembyr was a city of many towers and spires and fine, ancient buildings that curved round a picturesque bay backed by tall forested hills in south-west Jonolrey. It had been aban-doned by humans five millennia earlier after a nuclear power plant further down the coast had blown up and the winds had been blowing from that direction. The fall-out had cov-ered the city, forcing its evacuation. It had lain abandoned for centuries, slowly falling into disrepair and only ever visited by scientists or their remotes monitoring the slowly decreasing radiation levels, until the androids had finally won their legal battle for civil rights, and started looking for a homeland on Golter.

The android separatist faction took out a ten-thousand year lease on the whole city for a sum little more than nominal.

On the other side of the harbour, the android left the esplanade and climbed another broad curved set of steps, through a slowly rising cloud of mist. About half way up it stopped to watch another android who was walking along a single step with a halting, shuffling gait, crossing from one side of the tall flight to the other. The android walking along the steps passed a metre away from the other; it gave no sign of noticing it, but continued its hesitant walk to the far edge of the steps, then turned and walked slowly back the way it had come. The first android watched it pass again, then continued up the flight. A shallow groove had been worn in the step’s white marble a centimetre or so deep.

The android with the plastic folder walked away along the deserted arcade at the top, and disappeared into the silent mist.

In the street that housed the Irregular Embassy a group of androids of various model-types were dismantling a shining metal tube that crossed the street ten metres up, between two ornately decorated stone buildings which had been recently restored. A couple of large dump trucks sat in the middle of the street, their cranes lifting sections of the transit system tube away as the pieces were freed. An android with a welding arm was cutting at the tube’s shiny surface, producing a waterfall of sparks that descended through the light, golden mist at the end of the street like pieces of splashing, fading sunlight.

The android entered the embassy. Its client was waiting in the courtyard garden.

She sat on a small stone bench by a tinkling fountain. She was artificially bald, a little over average height, and sat more erect than most humans did. She wore heavy boots, a thick, dark-green pleated skirt, a pale hide riding-jacket and a white shirt. A fur hat lay on the stone bench at her side with a pair of hide gloves on top of it.

She rose to meet it when it entered the courtyard.

“Lady Sharrow,” it said. It caught the hint of movement in her arm and duly extended its own, to shake hands with her. “My name is Feril,” it said. “I am to represent you. Pleased to meet you.”

“How do you do,” she said, nodding. They sat on the stone bench. The fountain played with a quiet, pattering noise. In the misty light the small garden seemed to glow around them; they sat surrounded by a precise profusion of tiny, brightly coloured flowers.

“I have news of your friends,” Feril told her. “Their court hearing seems to be going well.”

She smiled. Her face showed traces of having been altered recently; there were hints of inflammation in the corner of her eyes, where the skin had been stuck down, and her blonde eyebrows showed a fraction of a millimetre of dark growth at their roots. The android had seen a picture of her on the city news service when she had arrived a week earlier, and it thought her nose looked different, too.

“Is it?” she said. “Good.”

“Yes. Ms Franck is an able advocate, and Mister Kuma was allowed to use his extensive personal wealth to employ some fine legal brains. The nature of the witnesses will be their greatest asset, I believe, as courts are not often inclined to trust the evidence of hired security personnel. The trial has been fixed for Bihelion next year.”

The woman looked surprised. “Taking their time, aren’t they?”

“I believe that is because you are also indicted, but cannot be brought to trial until the Huhsz Passports have run out.”

She laughed lightly, putting her head back and looking up past the gleaming slates of the embassy roof to the gauzy bright sky above. “That’s very sporting of them.” She looked back at it. “Will the trial be in the jam, or Yada?”

“Ms Franck is attempting to have the venue moved to Yadayeypon.”

She smiled. “Judges named?”

“A number have been suggested.”

“All male and elderly?”

“I believe so.”

She made a clicking noise with the side of her mouth and winked. “Good old Zef,” she said.

“There will doubtless be wrangling over the venue, but your friends ought to be able to return within the next four or five days.”

“Good.” She sighed and put her clasped hands onto her lap. “And what of the Passports?”

“They have been impounded in the quarantine terminal at Ikueshleng, and are themselves the subject of a complex legal dispute concerning radioactive contamination, but they are still operative.” It paused to give her time to say something, then it volunteered, “I should say that it would be a fortnight or so before the city of Vembyr would have to release you to the Huhsz.”

“But in the meantime I’m free to go?” she said. She looked from one of its eyes to the other the way humans often did, as though searching for something.

It nodded. “Yes. I have left the release papers with the embassy here. The terms of your visa require that you inform me of your movements within the city boundary, but you may leave those at any time.”

“Hmm. May I pay a visit to some of the Court-impounded material stored here?” she asked. The android was silent. When it didn’t react she went on, “My grandfather, Gorko; there’s some of his stuff stored here, I think. May I see it?”

“Oh, yes,” the android said, and nodded. “We have charge of some goods that used to belong to your family; once certain legal complications have been resolved the material which the Court has established jurisdiction over will be auctioned. I believe I can arrange for you to inspect the trove, if you wish.”

“Yes, thank you,” she nodded, looking away.

“It may take a few days to gain permission. Might I ask how long you intend to stay in Vembyr?”

“A few days,” she said with a faint smile. “It might be convenient to meet my friends here. Would that be all right?”

“Well, as I trust you have been made aware, humans are advised to stay no longer than forty days in Vembyr, anyway, to avoid too great an exposure to radioactive contamination, but I have been asked to inform you that while every reasonable precaution will be taken, the city administration feels unable to guarantee your safety should you desire to stay here for any length of time. As well as the Hunting Passports themselves, there is a substantial bounty on your life, and while it is unlikely any android would wish such remuneration, it is possible some outside agency could attempt to kidnap or attack you here.”

“Well, no change there.”

“I should also point out in that regard that in four days’ time we shall have the monthly auction, which always brings an influx of people. As this month’s sale is of mainly military and grey-tech goods, the parties we may expect to play host to could well include the sort of person who might wish you harm.”

“Are you saying I ought to leave before then?” the woman asked.

Feril thought she sounded tired. “Not necessarily. There are secure apartments within the old Jeraight fortress in Chine District,” it told her. “You might wish to stay there.”

She rose and walked slowly to the fountain. She looked down at the splashing pool, then stooped and dipped her hand into the water and held some of the fluid in her palm. She shook her head.

“I know,” she said. She moved her head to indicate the embassy building behind her. “They showed me.” She stood up. “Too much like a prison,” she said, brushing water from her hand. “Is there a hotel? Apartments?”

“The City Hotel has politely declined to house you, I regret to say.”

She gave a small, snorting laugh. “Can’t say I blame them,” she said.

“But if security is not your absolute priority, there are many vacant apartments,” it told her. “There is one in my own building; as your legal representative and custodian, it might be convenient for you to live there.”

She smiled oddly, a hint of a frown on her upper face. “You don’t mind?” she asked. “As you say, I tend to attract a deal of unwelcome attention these days.”

“I do not mind. Your past life intrigues and interests me, as does the character it reveals.” It paused. She was looking even more amused. It continued. “We seem to get on well enough, from this initial impression.” It made a shrug. “It would be pleasant.”

“Pleasant,” she repeated, smiling. “Very well then, Feril.”

The Solo had charged down the valley through the darkness, over walls and roads, demolishing farm outbuildings, wrecking a barn, causing several car crashes and terrifying hundreds of animals, especially the ones it rolled right over. It had taken an hour to get to the Yallam river, where it crashed onto the waves from a bank three or four metres high, only its speed saving it from tipping over into the swirling black water. It roared away downstream. Its radar indicated several aircraft following it, but none approached nearer than ten kilometres.

Dloan had shaken his head when Elson Roa admitted he had thrown away whatever fabulous weapon had brought down two planes and their already-launched ordnance in one discharge. The Solipsist leader had attempted to use the weapon against the ground troops on the other side of the valley, and determined when it didn’t work that the weapon had had only a limited number of shots in it to start with, and he had used them all up.

Dloan bit his tongue on the subject of ancient weaponry occasionally being more intelligent than the people who came to use it. Cenuij, Dloan thought, would not have been so tactful, and the realisation was more painful than the trifling wound in his leg.

Zefla couldn’t stop shivering, though it was not cold inside the big ACV. There were only about twenty Solipsists left on board. Nobody else had made it back to the Solo from the attack on the Land Car, though some of the others were believed to have been captured rather than killed. Zefla could not understand how Roa could be so phlegmatic, either about the loss of most of his force and the inevitable loss of the Solo too, or the fact that-by using the embargoed anti-aircraft weapon as well as attacking the Court-protected Land Car-he had done not one but two things for either of which the World Court would pursue him to the ends of the system, and imprison him for life, at least.

Miz sat in the ACV’s medic cabin, watching Sharrow treat the wound in his hand. The bullet had gone right through the muscle at the base of his thumb; he still had about fifty per cent of its use, and it would be a hundred per cent in a month or so. It was the sort of million-Thrial wound conscripts in unpopular wars dreamt about. He tried to joke with Sharrow about it, but later in the heads he found some blood in his hair that was probably Cenuij’s and promptly threw up.

Sharrow felt Cenuij fall against her and watched his body tumble from the door and bounce on the hovercraft’s skirt a hundred times that night, as the big ACV rumbled down the Yallam.

Disaster came at Eph, where the river flowed past and round the city in a narrow gorge. Heavy rains upstream a few days earlier meant the river had risen a couple of metres since the Solipsists had come upstream, and the Solo lost all four of its propellers under the first railway bridge.

They drifted downriver, engines still roaring as Roa’s helmsman tried to use the stumps of the shattered propeller blades to keep some way on the craft. It didn’t work; the Solo bumped into barges, bridge-supports and wharves all the way round the city, watched by townspeople and tracked by a small flotilla of brightly lit pleasure craft held back by a couple of police boats.

“Why?” Sharrow asked Roa when he came staggering down the steps into the ACV’s echoing garage space.

“Why what?” he shouted above the noise of the screaming engines, looking tired and confused.

“Why did you attack the Land Car?” she yelled, steadying herself against the bulkhead as the hovercraft lurched. “What was the point?”

“We were hired to,” Roa shouted, frowning, as though it should have been obvious.

“By whom?”

“I don’t know,” Roa said quietly, so that she saw rather than heard the words. The Solipsist leader closed his eyes and started to hum. The ACV lurched again and he was thrown against the bulkhead. Roa braced himself with one arm, then said, “Excuse me,” and disappeared back up the stairs to the flight deck.

Roa didn’t object when they proposed buying one of a couple of assault inflatables they’d found in the hovercraft’s garage.

He took a cheque.

They took to the waves as they were passing the lagoon of the Stramph-Veddick Circus Lands and made it into the enclave despite a black-bodied, almost silent and armed-looking heli-drone coming down to take a long, hard look at them as they bounced over the chopping dark waters towards the fabulous lights of the Circus.

The Solo sailed forlornly on into the night. The Solipsists had switched its lights back on and the last they saw of it the old hovercraft was scraping under some trees on its way downriver, losing what remained of its propellers against the overhanging branches in a distant, explosive clattering.

Miz had business contacts in the Circus; he talked them out of some money and the team onto a tourist charter flight out of the theme-park that morning. He picked up money from one of his office managers when they landed in BoChen in southern Jonolrey and hired an auto car. They slept fitfully most of the way to Vembyr, and when Zefla woke it was with the opinion that having slept on it, with the exception of Sharrow, probably the best thing they could do was go to Yadayeypon voluntarily and answer their indictments after all.

Miz had taken a few days to be convinced.

“I am sorry you lost your friend,” Feril said.

“Friend,” she repeated, frowning a little. “I’m not sure Cenuij was ever a friend,” she said. “But-” she gave a strange, small laugh “- we were very close.”

She stood on an old tarpaulin spattered with tiny flecks of dried plaster. A single, naked electric-bulb burned brightly in the middle of the room, shedding a fierce yellow-white light throughout the room and casting a deep shadow across the floor behind her. She was thinking about going for a walk. There was something inexplicably soothing about watching the android work, but there was also something about the harshness of the light that made her uncomfortable.

The tall, wide windows looked out onto darkness.

“Have you many happy memories of him?” Feril asked. The android was perched on a step-ladder holding a small bucket in one hand and a trowel in the other.

“Not many,” she said, trying to remember. “Well, yes; some.” She sounded exasperated as she said, “We argued a lot… but I’ve never objected to a good argument.”

“You said he was your team classicist. Will you have to get another?”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t work that way.”

“Oh,” Fenril said. It scooped a glistening lump of plaster from the bucket onto the trowel-blade, then set the bucket down on the top step of the ladder.

“May I ask a favour of you?” she said.

“Yes,” Feril said. An ornate plaster frieze shaped like a long, flower-filled trellis filled the angle between the wall and the ceiling of half the room, starting in the corner by the door and ending where the android stood on the ladder. It carefully applied the plaster to the end of the frieze.

“I’d like to find out if there have been any androids who’ve suddenly left Vembyr and disappeared recently; especially pairs of androids. Androids who could pass for human at very close range.”

The android was silent for a couple of seconds, patiently using the trowel to keep the drooping lump of plaster in place. Then it said, “No, none have been reported leaving the city for the last nine years.”

“Hmm. Before that?”

The machine paused only briefly. “The city records go back five millennia,” the machine said, sounding regretful. “During that time the android population of Vembyr has remained roughly static at twenty-three thousand, with perhaps a tenth of that number at large in the rest of the system. Only a few hundred androids have ever been constructed who might pass for human. None live in the city, and some-about forty or so-are officially missing, untraced. Indeed the majority of missing androids are human simulacra. They are believed to have been taken unwillingly, probably by rich individuals, and used for… a variety of acts, all of which are illegal when perpetrated against humans.”

“I’ll bet,” she said. She put one hand under her armpit and the other to her mouth, tapping her teeth with her fingers. “Does anyone still make androids?”

“Oh, no,” the machine said, turning to look at her. “That has been prohibited for the last twelve hundred years. Even we may only repair existing examples, though we believe the World Court will grant us permission to manufacture a hundred or so androids from currently available spare parts sometime before the end of the next century.”

It turned back to the plaster and-over the next few minutes, as the plaster began to set-it gradually worked the still soft folds of the material into the shape of a delicate white flower, backed by a section of trellis.

Sometime before the end of the next century, she thought. Certainly that was only a hundred and one years away, but it was still strange to realise the scales the androids thought on. It was as though, with their ability to think a thousand thoughts in the time it would take a human to think one, and yet to exist effectively indefinitely, the androids had abandoned what humanity thought of as the normal calibrations of time, to exist on at what was-again, to the human mind, unless one was a scientist used to working in nanoseconds or billions of years the extremities of temporality.

Feril paused, inspecting its handiwork. It glanced down at her for a moment, then took another scoop of plaster from the bucket it held and applied that to the frieze.

“Do you actually enjoy doing this, Feril?” she asked.

“This?” it said, dabbing at the plaster with its hands. “Restoring the plaster-work?”

“Restoring everything.”

“Yes,” it said, “it is pleasant. I do literally what humans talk about figuratively; I switch parts of my mind off. Sometimes, rather than do that, I think about something else: often when plastering I replay old human adventure yarns, re-experiencing them in old books, or ancient flat-screen works, or more modern pieces.”

“Adventure yarns?” she grinned.

“Indeed,” the android said, patting the drying plaster in such a way as to produce a stipple effect on the surface of a roughskinned, globular fruit it had just sculpted. “It is satisfying in the extreme to have done plastering work, or inlaying, or wood-carving; it is hugely enjoyable to drive a vehicle one has rebuilt, or to walk around or just look at a building one has brought from a shell to habitability, but the processes involved are rarely directly rewarding at the time, and to divert oneself with adventures of derring-do is a nice counterpoint, I believe.” It turned and looked back at her. “Your own life will bean adventure story one day, I don’t doubt, Lady Sharrow. I-” It broke off, turning smoothly and resuming its task.

She frowned, then gave a small smile and looked at the floorboards for a moment.

“Not all humans grudge androids their longevity just because we’ve found we cannot afford to grant ourselves that gift, Feril,” she said. “I am flattered you think my life might ever be worth your perusal, when I am long dead and you are still alive.”

The android paused, then turned to her again. “I beg your pardon nevertheless, Lady Sharrow,” it said. “We were, and I was, made in the image of humanity, and in the enthusiasm of the moment I exhibited what was at least a lack of thought, and could have been construed as cruelty. We have always regarded it as our duty to reflect what is best in humankind, given that we are the work of your intellects rather than the processes of blind evolution, however purposeful in that blindness nature may be, and however noble and sophisticated its results. I am guilty of falling beneath both the standards we set ourselves and those humanity has the right to expect of us, and I apologise.”

She looked up at the machine, poised with perfect stillness on top of the ladder, its body spotted with lumps of plaster. There was a small smile on her face. She might have shaken her head just a fraction.

“Contrition so elegant,” she said after a pause, “needs not the parent of hurt to merit its existence, and what was intended to soothe harm just as fitly pleases contentment.”

The android looked at her for a moment. “Vitrelian,” it said. “The Trials Of A Patient Man; Act Five, Scene Three. Lady Sharrow; I have admired the excitements of your life and even envied you in a way, but now I find you are learned, too.” It made a show of shaking its head. “I am lost in admiration.”

She laughed. “Feril,” she said. “It’s just as well you’re not a man; you would break a thousand hearts, if you had the mind to.”

Feril waved its hand expressively as it turned back to its work. “I believe there are various glands and other appendages which would have to be involved too; the coordination required would baffle my humble personality.”

“Dissembler,” she said, and laughed. The noise, echoing in the bare room, sounded strange. She felt a pang of guilt at having so forgotten Cenuij’s death, however briefly.

She stood up and stretched, watching her shadow move about the room, limbs lengthened and magnified. “I think,” she said, “I shall go for a walk.”

“Please take care,” the android said, glancing at her again.

“Don’t worry about me,” she said, patting the pocket of her jacket where the HandCannon was.

She walked through the dark city for an hour or more, along towpaths and through tunnels, past dark ruins and lit buildings, along deserted roads and boulevards and across tall bridges and aqueducts. She met very few androids and no humans at all. One team of androids was cleaning the face of a tall, stone building in the darkness; another group was lifting an old barge from a canal, using a creaking iron and hawser boat-lift, all lit by floodlights.

She walked, hardly seeing the city. In her mind she replayed the destruction of the Lesson Learned and the events following it, trying to remember everything but sure that she was failing, that there was something in there which was very important and she had missed it.

She had not deliberately recalled the Land Car attack since it had happened; it had been enough to know that each time she slept she would replay those last seconds in the rear door of the old hovercraft, feeling Cenuij slip and fall past her, trying to grab him, calling on Miz, seeing Cenuij’s body lying there in the flickering orange light, and then-even while she knew it was a dream-living it again and again, with Miz falling past her, shot and dying, or Miz and Cenuij somehow changing places as one fell past the other, and looking out from the door to see that although it had been Cenuij who’d fallen past her, it was Miz lying there on the grass. A few times-sufficient to wake her up without fail, brow damp, pulse racing-the body lying by the little waterfall had been hers, and she had looked from the retreating ACV at her own blank face, staring blind and dead into the fiery darkness of the sky.

Vembyr’s galleries and arcades echoed to her footsteps like the entrances to dark mines in the city’s mountainous geography.

She used a small torch to light her way in places, and all the time tried to work out what it was that was nagging at her; some detail, some tiny observed incident or throwaway remark that had meant nothing at the time, but which was shouting now from the depths of her memory, insistent and important.

But she could not remember, and returned no wiser than she had left, to a message from Breyguhn which a plaster-spotted Feril handed her without comment.

It was ink-printed on perforated paper.

From the House of the Sad Brothers of the Kept Weigbt.

YOU KILLED HIM. I AM STAYING HERE.

BREYGUHN

For the girl’s fifteenth birthday, Breyguhn’s father had a travelling circus come to the parklands of the family’s old Summer Palace in the Zault hills, where the wealthier Dascens and their guests tended to spend the hot season, if they happened to be in Golter’s northern hemisphere at the time.

Breyguhn had just finished junior college and in the autumn would be going-assuming her father could afford it-to finishing school. Sharrow had narrowed the choice of institution somewhat by being thrown out of the three best, all of which were in Claav, and all of which had expelled her in circumstances of such apparent (but mysterious) turpitude that the schools concerned refused even to countenance accepting another girl from the same family, even if she shared only one parent.

This, which Breyguhn saw as a grievous, shaming and even maliciously intended limitation on her freedom and prospects, had done nothing to endear Sharrow to her; however the two had been sworn at least to attempt to get along with each other by their father, one tearful night a few weeks earlier after he had lost the last of Sharrows late mother’s jewels in a bones game.

On his return from this disaster he had been handed two envelopes by the hotel receptionist: one containing a final demand from the hotel management, the other a message from Breyguhn’s mother-from whom he had been separated for five years-intimating that she had fallen in love again and wanted a divorce.

He had brandished a loaded pistol, and wept, and talked of suicide, and thus suitably terrified both girls and ensured their acquiescence to his demands for a peace agreement.

The visit to the Summer Palace would be the first long-term test of this pact.

Their father had been lucky in the casinos earlier that month, and although the gesture of chartering the circus for a few days used up most of his funds and left his many debts still unpaid, he had convinced himself that his fortunes had changed in some strategic manner with that series of wins, and that lavishing money on his younger daughter was so far from being an extravagance as to be an investment; it would ensure that fate would continue to smile upon him. Like a sacrifice, in a way.

Sharrow, who too well remembered the straitened circumstances of her own fifteenth birthday when, rather than being showered with presents, she had received nothing but apologies and a request that she give her father the jewelled, platinum-cloth gown which was the last un-hocked or unsold possession her mother had left her so that he could pay off an urgent gambling debt, had not been conspicuously enthusiastic in conveying birthday good wishes to her half-sister.

Sharrow found solace in the fact that Breyguhn obviously thought the hired circus would have been a suitable gift for a younger child, not the woman she was so proud of having become (though she was equally obviously determined to enjoy the gift to the utmost). She was also happy not to have to stay very long at the Summer Palace after enduring Breyguhn’s birthday celebrations; she had been invited to go skiing in Throsse with the family of a young man she had met during an open day at her last finishing school.

He was the brother of one of the other girls, the son of a commercial army owner, and Sharrow thought he was quite wonderfully fine. She had almost lain with him that first day; only their discovery in the cupboard by a couple of other girls had prevented them requiting their tryst. It would probably have meant another expulsion if she hadn’t successfully bribed the two girls later. Since then she had written to him and he to her, and she had been just consumed with bliss when she’d received the invitation to join his family at their chalet.

Skiing was not something she really enjoyed, though she had-grimly determined-set about becoming proficient at it while in Claav; but to be with this particular young man she would gladly have undertaken any trial, undergone any torment. Her father had linked his approval of the skiing trip to her attendance at Breyguhn’s birthday, but suffering her half-sister for a couple of days was a small price to pay for the expected ecstasy awaiting her in Throsse. (Compared to that, even her feelings of victorious joy at having been granted a scholarship to go to Yadayeypon University for the coming semester shrank into insignificance.)

“If you’re so utterly wonderful with computers, Shar, why don’t you hack into a bank and make Daddy rich again?”

“Because they’re practically impregnable unless you work in one, that’s why,” she replied scornfully. “Any idiot knows that.”

“Well, you do, anyway.”

“Oh, I’m sorry; was that supposed to be funny?”

“I don’t believe you could hack into a… a calculator.”

“Oh, don’t you? How interesting.”

The sunlit rolling hills of the estate blued away to the horizon, softly ruffled green and yellow waves of fragrant vegetation under a cloudless blue sky. Lakes glinted in the distance.

They sat together in a gently swaying carousel circling round a giant fairground wheel. A number of the children and adults resident at the house for the summer sat in other carousels. What with them and the servants and their children-happily invited to share in the fun by Breyguhn’s father, though Brey herself had been silently chagrined at the idea-the temporary fairground on the grass-ball lawn was almost busy.

“Girls? Hello, girls?”

They both turned round with smiles fixed on their faces to look back and up at their father, who was in the carousel behind. His android butler, Skave, sat at his side, incongruous in the formal servant’s suit their father liked it to wear. A round black butler’s hat sat on its naked metal head.

Skave stared into the distance, its metal hands gripping the safety barrier. The tubular metal barrier looked slightly dented under Skave’s hands, though this probably indicated a minor malfunction rather than some android analog of fear; the machine was elderly, dating from the first Golterian era which had thought fit-and had the ability-to create androids. Their father’s debts meant it hadn’t been properly maintained for the last few years, and recently its coordination and movements had become erratic.

“What, Daddy?”

“Having fun?”

“Pardon?”

“Having fun?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Oh, incredible fun; unbelievable.”

“Jolly good! They’re having fun; isn’t that excellent, Skave?”

“Indeed, sir.”

“Do you remember that old merry-go-round in the ballroom? Sharrow?”

Breyguhn dug her in the ribs. Sharrow sighed exasperatedly and turned round to look back at her father, shaking her head as she tapped one ear. “Can’t hear you,” she shouted.

When the ride finished, the big wheel reversed to let the people off; their father and Skave were first out of their carousel and onto the boardwalk, then it was their turn to step down. Father took Breyguhn’s hand; Skave took Sharrow’s.

Sharrow screamed as the android’s metal fingers crushed hers.

The old machine let go immediately and wobbled as though it was about to fall over, its head shaking in its collar. Sharrow bent double over her aching fingers. “You stupid machine!” she wailed. “You’ve broken my fingers!”

“Mistress, mistress, mistress…” the android said plaintively, still shaking. It looked at its own hand, as if confused.

Breyguhn took a step back, watching it all.

Her father held Sharrow by the shoulders then gently took her hand and kissed it, teasing her fingers out. “There,” he said. “They’re not broken, my love. They’re all right; see? They’re fine, they’re perfect, beautiful fingers. Mmm. just made to kiss. Mmm. What fingers. There, how kissable. You see? Silly old Skave. I must oil him, or whatever one does. Look at him; he’s quivering, silly old sap. Skave, say sorry.”

“Mistress,” the old android said, its voice quivering. “I am most terribly sorry. Terribly, terribly sorry.”

Blinking through her tears, she looked at the machine, conscious of Breyguhn watching her. She tried not to sob. “You idiot!” she told it.

The android vibrated again, hands shaking.

“Oh, my love, my little love; why, silly old Skave didn’t mean it. Here; another kiss…”

“Right,” Sharrow said, swinging into Breyguhn’s room while she was combing her long, brown hair before the mirror. Breyguhn watched as Sharrow plumped herself down on the bed and unrolled a simple stick-on computer. She flicked her hair back and woke the machine up with a couple of keystrokes. “You wanted to see some hacking; I’ll show you some hacking.”

Breyguhn finished doing her hair and tied it up, then joined the older girl on the bed. She looked at the screen. It was all figures and letters.

“Very exciting, I’m sure. What exactly are you trying to do, Shar?”

Sharrow used her right hand to click across the worn-looking surface of the keyboard. Her left hand still hurt but she used it for the occasional shift stroke.

“Hacking into Skave’s homeboard. I’m going to give the incompetent old wreck a nightmare.”

“Really?” Breyguhn said, rolling over on the bed, her nightgown wrapping itself around her. The screen was still boring.

“Yes,” Sharrow said. “Skave is so ancient they programmed something like sleep into it so it can assimilate what happened during the day and amend its own programs. It’s so old and hidebound it doesn’t really need to do it any more, but it’s become a habit. I’m going to shift its snoozing arse into a Nightmare game.” Her fingers performed a ballet across the board.

“What?” Breyguhn said, looking interested as she sidled closer across the bedclothes. “One of those things people dream into, to see how long they can last?”

“That’s the idea,” Sharrow said, watching a complexly folded holo of a deepframe data base’s architecture spring up like a polychromatic mountain range from the stick-on’s screen. She touched it, sliding her fingers into the image, shifting parts of that landscape and tutting to herself as her still sore left hand manipulated the wrong bits and had to correct. Finally she was satisfied and Entered the holo-glyph code.

The folded shape disappeared to be replaced immediately by an infinite corridor that disappeared into the screen. She smiled and reached in with one hand while her other thumb kept Exponential Shift depressed.

“We’re going to give old Skave a night to remember,” she said, selecting a section in the forward-scrolling corridor and stopping there. “Only for him it’ll last for a thousand nights, and he can’t wake up out of it.”

“A thousand nights?” Breyguhn said, trying to see further into the image.

Sharrow rolled her eyes. “That’s how much faster than us they think, you doughball,” she said. She keyed Auto Load; she already had the estate’s smart but non-sentient system well mapped and primed. Glyphs surged and sank, figure-screens race-scrolled and flickered.

“There,” she said after the screen went still.

“Is that it?” Breyguhn said, looking disappointed.

Sharrow looked at her. “Girlie, what I just did was interrupt the system of a ‘droid that’s been around for seven thousand years.” She snapped the stick-on shut. “Watch for it at breakfast tomorrow morning, and don’t order anything hot unless you enjoy eating off your lap.”

She put her hand into Breyguhn’s hair and ruffled it vigorously, shaking the other girl’s head.

Breyguhn put her hand up and forced Sharrow’s away.

Their father was distraught. “Skave!” he said. “Skave!” he still had his napkin tucked in his shirt as he paced round the breakfast room, kneading his hands. “After all these years! I can’t forgive myself. I should have kept him in better repair. It’s all my fault!”

He went to the window again. Outside, two bulkily powerful androids and a man in tech overalls were just closing the doors of the secure van that would take the inert body of Skave away.

The android had been discovered still locked into its download collar in the house’s Mechanicals cellar, its eyes wide and staring, its head vibrating from side to side. A diagnostic scan revealed that its personality had effectively been wiped out, along with much of its intrinsicised programming and even some of its supposedly hard-wired functions-suite.

The android/Al management and leasing company that had been called in to help had advised that only some bizarre and-especially after all these millennia-unlikely nano-physical fault could have caused the fugue, or (rather more likely in their experience) somebody had hacked into the android’s home data base and deliberately fried its geriatric brains.

Sharrow sat looking upset but feeling determinedly smug while her father wrung his hands and paced up and down the room, refusing to be comforted by his relations. She felt the buddings of guilt when she thought about what had happened to Skave, but squashed them with the sheer totality of her success in having proved her hacking skills to Breyguhn-that ought to put the fear of Fate into her-and with the harshly comforting idea that Skave had been old and becoming useless, and hence long overdue for retirement, or whatever happened to outmoded robots.

She put her hands beneath the table and squeezed her left hand in her right, to take her mind off what she had done, and to remind herself of part of the reason why she had thought of it in the first place. She watched her father knead his hands as he paced, and felt the stabs of pain go up her own arms. She squeezed harder, keeping her face straight, until her eyes threatened to water, then she stopped.

Breyguhn seemed genuinely shocked. Sharrow watched glances of delicious complicity alternate with something like horror as they sat at the breakfast table with the rest of the family, listening to their father fret and mourn.

“Lost to us! Lost to us, after all these years! In the family for a millennia and lost to us in my stewardship! Our last asset! The shame!”

Sharrow collected herself, shook her head sadly and helped herself to icebread from the table cooler. Breyguhn sat looking at her, eyes wide.

Sharrow accessed the house system and saw the report the people who’d taken Skave away had sent to her father. They were sending the report by personal letter too. She had no way of intercepting that.

To her relief, it didn’t implicate her or anybody else in the household; the android management/leasing company reckoned somebody had hacked in from outside (they strongly advised a thorough up-grade of the estate’s systems, which they would be honoured to quote for at most reasonable rates). She was briefly proud of their judgement that whoever had done the job was quite possibly a professional, they had covered their tracks so well.

The report concluded that the android required a new brain, and as such had to be regarded as a total loss unless there was a major and extremely unlikely change in the law. As all owned androids were extremely valuable regardless of condition, they assumed a substantial claim on the android’s insurance would be the next step, and would retain the machine in their vaults if required, and cooperate with any insurance assessor.

Sharrow put her head in her hands when she read that part. She knew her father no longer had any insurance on Skave-why pay a premium on something that hadn’t gone wrong in seven thousand years, when the same money could win a million in the right bones game? Why, it would be a waste.

She switched off the stick-on and let it roll itself up.

“That stupid machine was part of our inheritance!” Breyguhn hissed. They were in the skidder rink, waiting between rides while the other adults and children gave up their small cars and walked over the rink’s floor of compacted snow to the side barriers, to be replaced by new drivers. Beyond the shallow bowl of the refrigerated rink the weather was hot and sunny, and every now and again a soft, warm gust of wind would bring a smell of flowers and greenery rolling across the chill of the rink’s own sharply wintery scent.

Breyguhn had taken great delight in charging Sharrow’s skidder several times during the last ride. Sharrow’s preferred method of skidder driving was to avoid all collisions, so as a technique for annoying her these constant crashes were more successful than most of the stratagems Breyguhn employed.

“Oh, so what?” Sharrow said, glancing round to make sure there was nobody to overhear her. “The old fool would only have sold Skave; we were never going to see any of the money it was worth.”

“We might have!” Breyguhn insisted, as the last few people found cars and the klaxon sounded, warning that the signal was about to be transmitted which would switch each skidder’s engine on again.

“Might!” Sharrow laughed. “Not in a million chances, child. He’d have hocked Skave the next time he lost heavily. He’d sell anything to get stake money. He’d sell us to get stake money.” Sharrow made a show of looking her half-sister up and down. “Well, he might get a good price for me, anyway.”

“He loved Skave,” Breyguhn said. “He’d never have sold him.”

“Rubbish,” Sharrow said with prodigious disdain.

“You don’t know!”

“All I know,” Sharrow said coolly as the klaxon sounded and the skidders came alive again, “is that you’re a pain and I can’t wait to get the hell away from here and go…” She flicked her eyebrows and made a thrusting motion with her pelvis, “… skiing.”

She twirled her car away over the white surface, avoiding Breyguhn’s crude lunge at her and showering her with icy spray as she raced off round the oval track.

Sharrow’s car stripped its track a minute later, leaving the broad metal bracelet laid out on the snow behind it like the train of some strange dress. Sharrow kicked at the accelerator but the skidder’s automatics had shut the engine off. She thumped her hands off the wheel, grimacing as her sore hand protested by jabbing pain along her arm, then she stood up in the car and waited for a break in the traffic of hurtling skidders and happily shouting, shrieking people, and made her way carefully but quickly across the white surface to the side.

Breyguhn claimed later she had turned back against the flow of traffic to see if she could help Sharrow, after noticing that her skidder had stopped. She knew it was against the rules but she just hadn’t thought. Then her accelerator had jammed and she must have panicked. She felt terrible about hitting Sharrow and crushing her against the barrier and breaking her leg.

Especially as it stopped her going on her skiing holiday.

Sharrow sat up in the bed, surrounded by cushions. Her father held her in his arms, patting her back.

“I know, I know, my love. Everything’s against us just now, isn’t it? Poor Skave taken from us; you with your naughty leg going and breaking itself, poor Brey hardly sleeping because she feels it was her fault, and me with two such unhappy daughters.”

He patted the back of Sharrow’s head as she rested her chin on his shoulder and looked at Breyguhn, who sat in a small seat near the door. Breyguhn crossed her eyes and shook her head quickly from side to side when their father mentioned Skave, made a silent scream and held her thigh when he talked about Sharrow’s leg, and then closed her eyes and tilted her head to one side as though peacefully asleep when he mentioned her.

“But we’ll be all right, won’t we, my pet? The medics will have that silly old leg sorted in no time, won’t they?”

Breyguhn mimed a limp, crooked leg suddenly becoming straight; she waggled it around.

“Of course they will. It’ll be as though it never happened, eh, won’t it? You’ll soon forget all about it, won’t you?”

Breyguhn mimed sudden forgetfulness with a finger to her lips and a series of stagily puzzled expressions.

Sharrow smiled thinly as her father patted her back. She looked at Breyguhn and slowly shook her head.

Breyguhn crossed her arms and sat there, sneering.

Sharrow bedded one of the younger medics while she still had the cast on, and got him to make sure that her leg would never be perfect again; she would always walk with a slight limp and so never forget.

Her father couldn’t understand why his daughter was still lame. He threatened to sue the family medical franchise, but couldn’t afford to.

At university, Sharrow’s limp became a trademark, a talisman, her insignia; like an eye-patch or a duelling scar.

She always did refuse to have any further treatment.

Her father just couldn’t understand it at all.

19 Spoiling Bid

The android and the woman stood beside an old-fashioned automobile on a weed-strewn quay in the old docks, looking out to sea. The antique car hissed every now and again and leaked steam. Behind it, beyond the shells of the ruined warehouses, mists rose perpetually from the warm waters of the inlet, climbing and re-climbing the frost-grey planes of a lifeless sky. Thrial was a red fruit wrapped in tissues of mist. Buildings in the distance wavered on the boundary of visibility.

The helicopter came swinging round the peninsula, its enginevoice rattling like drumfire off the cliffs and buildings looming through the mist. The machine slowed as it crossed the harbour mole, then swivelled in the air and landed quickly and gracefully in a swirling bowl of curling mist and a small storm of tiny stones and dead, windblown leaves.

She rocked on her feet. The android stood stock still.

Miz jumped down from the pilot’s seat, unclipping the control stalk from his ear and handing the instrument to a uniformed man who was sliding into the seat he had vacated. Miz looked pleased with himself. His right hand was lightly bandaged. Zefla and Dloan appeared from the far side of the helicopter; Dloan limped a little.

Zefla smiled when she saw Sharrow. “It’s Yada, end of next year, with three old cuties,” she said when they hugged.

“I heard. Hi, Dloan.”

“Good landing, eh?”

“Wonderful, Miz. This is Feril; my legalist and custodian while we’re here.”

“Hello to you all,” the android said. It pointed to the ancient, hissing steam car as it donned a set of driver’s goggles. “Allow me to take you to the Lady Sharrow’s apartments.”

Miz looked out over the misty city. The jet-faced sandstone apartment block sat half-way up a built-up hill looking out over an old canal basin connected by a flight of locks and an inclined plane to the city’s inner harbour. Sharrow’s rooms were on the top floor, one storey above the apartment Feril lived in. The android had only recently moved out of the top-floor apartment after renovating it.

It was the androids’ stated intention to return the city of Vembyr to a state resembling its condition during the time of the Lizard Court, when by general agreement the city had been at its most culturally vibrant and architecturally coherent. As well as rebuilding the ancient steam-powered automobile it had used to transport them from the docks, Feril had restored two other apartment blocks over the past few decades; this was its third.

All the rooms were tall. Wood panelling carved with intricate abstract patterns climbed from floors of polished wood to agate and marble dados, from which plain white plaster walls rose to fabulously complicated plaster friezes composed of leaves and vines and little peeking lizard faces. The room they were in was sparsely furnished with black wood and hide furniture that looked both severely formal and strangely organic.

“How much?” Sharrow said.

“Ten million,” Zefla said, nodding. She was standing by a panelled wall, running her hand over it.

Miz spread his arms as he turned from the window. He stood there, silhouetted. “The guy didn’t even look surprised!” he exclaimed.

“Judge did,” Zefla said, peering intently at the panelling. “You could see she’d thought it was just a formality, setting bail that high. She had to consult the Court AI right then, in front of everybody, probably asking if she could re-set the bail beyond anybody’s reach, but the rules say no. So Roa walked free.”

“Who’d risk ten mill on somebody that crazy?” Miz said.

“No clues, I take it?” Sharrow asked.

Zefla left the panelling and came to sit with Sharrow on a long couch. She shrugged. “Bail company. Had the money there in a cash-good chip within the hour. No idea who’s behind it.”

“Maybe it’s the same son-of-a-bitch named the noon race winner Minus A Fifth in Tile yesterday,” Miz said, leaning back against the window sill.

“Oh, Miz,” Zefla said, frowning at him.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know, I’m being paranoid.”

Sharrow felt the nagging sensation return; that feeling there was something she’d missed, something important.

“Miz?” she said.

“Hmm?”

“Come away from the window, will you?”

“What?” Miz said, frowning and looking round behind him. He eased forward, taking his weight off the glass and step-ping away.

Sharrow was aware they were all looking at her. Miz glanced back at the city beyond the window again. She found herself looking round the room for Cenuij. She made a half-exasperated, half-despairing gesture with her arms. “I’m sorry; it’s me who’s paranoid.” She pointed at the window and told Miz, “I’m sure there isn’t a sniper out there, and the glass won’t give way behind you.”

Miz smiled uncertainly at first, then sat down on a pale hide chair.

“Anyway,” Dloan said, flexing his wounded leg a little, “we’re here. What is it we’ve come to see?”

“Something Gorko left behind,” Sharrow told him. She looked round the others, feeling something was wrong, and realised that she was looking for Cenuij again, to catch his gaze. “We go to the warehouse tonight,” she said.

“A warehouse?” Miz said.

“A lot of family possessions are stored here, courtesy of the World Court,” Sharrow said.

“The storage rates are cheap,” Zefla explained to Miz, who was still looking puzzled.

“Some of the stuff’s Gorko’s,” Sharrow told him, “but they haven’t been able to dispose of it yet, and some of it’s still disputed; the Court says it’s theirs, my family says it’s ours.”

“Which category does whatever we’ve come to look at fall into?” Zefla asked.

“The latter,” Sharrow said. “It’s Gorko’s tomb.”

“His tomb?” Miz said.

Sharrow nodded.

Zefla looked mystified. “How did the book lead to the tomb?”

Sharrow looked around the wide, white room, her eyes nar-rowing. “Tell you somewhere else,” she said.

“Don’t you trust your new friend?” Miz inquired.

“Oh, I trust it,” Sharrow said, looking at the delicate leaves, fronds, stems and flowers described in the patterned plaster filling the angle between wall and ceiling. “But who knows…?”

There was silence in the room for a while. Then Zefla clapped her hands together and said, “There anywhere a girl can get a drink round here?”

“Good idea,” Sharrow said, rising. “Let’s try the City Hotel; we need to get you lot booked in, anyway. They won’t let me stay there but I don’t think I’m banned from the bar.”

The warehouse extended into the distance; section after section, aisle after aisle, shelf after shelf after shelf. Sharrow stood with the others at the entrance, while Feril and the warehouse’s caretaker android turned all the lights on from a great board full of switches, slowly filling the cavern with yellow pools of illumination.

“Sheech,” Zefla said, leaning one elbow on Sharrow’s shoulder. “This Gorko’s shit?”

“Yes,” Sharrow said.

“What, all of it?”

Sharrow looked slowly around as the last few lights flicked on in the distance. “This is just one house,” she said.

“Wow,” Miz said.

“Lady Sharrow,” Feril said. “You wished to see your late grandfather’s tomb?”

“Please,” she nodded.

“This way.”

They walked through the dusty debris of her family’s past, amongst the piled crates and past the stacked boxes and faded labels and yellowing lists tied and pinned to the assorted containers. The items that weren’t boxed were covered in translucent plastic wrapping secured by World Court code-seals.

After a short walk they carne to a section of the warehouse dominated by a large plastic-sheeted cube about four metres square, standing on a metal pallet and surrounded by crates, boxes and a variety of loose items also shrouded with the translucent sheeting.

“That is the tomb,” Feril said, pointing at the dark cube.

“Oh,” Miz said. He sounded disappointed. “I’d kind of thought it’d be bigger.”

“That’s all there is,” Sharrow told him.

Fenril found a way through to the cube; they trailed after it. “I shall take the wrapping off,” it told them. It found the plastic sheet’s Court seal and ran its fingers over the input surface. The plastic sheet parted around the sarcophagus and Feril and Dloan pulled it off, revealing the black mirror-surface of the tomb’s polished granite. Sharrow pulled a crate over and stood on it to look through the little smoke-glass window half-way up one black wall.

She put one hand to the side of her face to screen out the light from the warehouse, then took a small torch from her pocket and shone it through the window.

She looked down at the others. “It’s empty,” she said, trying not to sound shocked.

“Your grandfather’s body is in the Noble’s Temple in Yadayeypon,” Feril said. “It was felt that a warehouse was not a fit place for human remains.”

“Same could be said for Yada,” muttered Miz.

“I didn’t know,” Sharrow admitted. She squinted in through the smoke-glass window again.

“The World Court did not publicise the removal of your grandfather’s remains,” Feril said.

“They take his bike to Yada too?” she asked.

“His bike?” Feril said. “Ah, the vehicle in the tomb with him. No. That is… here,” the android said, turning and pointing at a long, translucent bundle.

“Ah well,” Sharrow said, clicking off the torch and stepping down from the pallet. She looked around. “I really wanted to pay my respects to the old man, but…”

“I’m sorry,” Feril said, “I should have realised. You asked to see the tomb and…” Its dull mirror-eyes gazed levelly at her, reflecting the black stone tomb behind. “How silly of me. I do apologise.”

“That’s all right,” Sharrow sighed, looking around at the other boxes. She shrugged. “Would you mind if I have a look at some of this other stuff? I knew house Tzant well…”

“By all means,” the android said. It opened the seals on a variety of nearby crates and packages while Dloan and Miz pulled the wrappings off.

“That’s fine,” Sharrow said, after the android had opened twenty or so of the plastic bundles and-far from showing any sign of stopping-actually seemed to be speeding up.

Feril, bent over to de-seal a tall crate, stood immediately, bowed to Sharrow and said, “Please, look at your leisure. Unless you need me for anything else, I shall be at or near the door.”

“Thank you,” she said.

The android walked away, disappearing between the stacked cases.

“Never seen an android embarrassed before,” Zefla said after a little while.

“Idiot,” Miz said, sitting on a low sideboard constructed from blackwood and seagrain and edged with brushed platinum studded with opals.

“Oh well,” Dloan said. “At least some of this stuff looks interesting…” He gazed round at the opened packages.

“I take it this fouls up the plan,” Miz said.

“Hmm,” Sharrow said, frowning. She stroked a heavy fur cloak of silver inlaid within black, which lay draped over a huge crystal bowl crusted with jewels and strung with loops of precious metals; they both sat on a mirror-rug covering an antique holotank.

Zefla strolled towards a huge, intricately carved wooden cupboard and opened a door. “Whee!” she said, and pulled out a bottle. “A stand-up wine cellar.” She sat up on the sideboard with Miz.

“Look what I found,” she said.

“Amazing,” Miz said, shaking his head and looking closely at Zefla. “Is there anywhere you can’t find a drink, Zef?”

“I sincerely hope not.” Zefla waved the dusty bottle at Sharrow. “Fancy depleting the inventory?”

“Is it legal?” Sharrow asked.

Zefla shook her head emphatically. “Not even arguably.”

“All right then,” Sharrow said, as Zefla took a knife from her pocket and started opening the bottle.

“Let them sue us,” Miz said.

“I know a good lawyer,” Zefla told him.

They drank the wine from the bottle. Dloan inspected a presentation set of hunting rifles. Miz calculated the break-up value of the sideboard he was sitting on. Zefla donned the fur cloak, dragging its metre-long hem across the dusty warehouse floor.

“Fate, it’s heavy,” she said, shucking the cloak and hoisting it back on top of the ceremonial bowl. “They actually wear stuff like that?” She shook her head. “The weight of tradition.”

Sharrow sat side-saddle on the unwrapped motor-bike, looking glum.

“Hey,” Zefla said. “Any more news about Breyguhn?”

“Still staying where she is,” Sharrow said.

“Crazy,” Miz said.

Sharrow nodded. “I tried to call her; the Brothers said she’s there now as a willing guest. They said she wouldn’t talk to me.”

Zefla shook her head. “You think that’s the truth?”

Sharrow shrugged. “I don’t know. They might be lying, or Breyguhn might really want to stay; the way she was when I saw her last, it’s just about believable.”

“Think hearing about Cenuij could have flipped her over the edge?” Zefla asked.

“If she wasn’t long gone already,” Sharrow said. She got off the bike and walked towards the black cube of the tomb, squinting up at it. “Dloan,” she said. “Think you could give me a punt up there?”

“Surely.” Dloan put one of the hunting rifles back in its case, stepped to the side of the tomb and made a stirrup with his hands. Sharrow was lifted towards the top of the sarcophagus and pulled herself up.

“You be careful up there,” Miz called.

“Yes, of course,” Sharrow said, gazing at the top surface of the black granite cube. “I wonder if we can get this thing ope…” Her voice trailed off as she looked down at the bike she had been sitting on.

“Shar?” Zefla frowned.

Sharrow glanced around the warehouse. She sat on the edge of the black cube, turned and lowered herself on her hands, then let herself drop to the warehouse floor.

She walked over to the bike, a strange expression on her face. The others looked baffled. Sharrow put her hand on the bike’s front fairing and stared at the machine.

The bike was long and low-slung and had a single deeply contoured seat aft off a bulging gas tank and above a shiny V4 hydrogen engine. Its two wheels were dark tori of flexmetal, trenched by cross-cut grip-curves.

Above the sweep of the front wheel’s splash-guard, what appeared to be the bike’s light cluster and instrument binnacle was a solid, bulky mass covered with a thin aerodynamic fairing. Two stubby cylinders protruded from the matt-silver of the main casing, ending in a pair of darkly bulbous lenses. A couple of oddly impractical stalks protruded from the casing, a strap with no apparent purpose lay draped across the gas tank, and the two main instrument dials at the rear of the binnacle looked tacked-on.

Sharrow knelt down by the tipped front wheel, patting the roughened silver surface over the two dark lenses.

Miz shrugged. Dloan continued to look puzzled. Zefla took another swig from the bottle. Then her expression changed suddenly from incomprehension to amazement. She sputtered wine and pointed. “Is that the Lazy Gu-?” She coughed, then patted her chest.

“What?” Miz said loudly, then looked around guiltily.

Dloan looked puzzled for a moment longer, then smiled and nodded slowly.

Sharrow shook her head, rising and inspecting the point where the two instrument dials disappeared into holes cut in the binnacle. “No,” she said, inserting a fingernail into the gap and sliding it back and forth. “The real thing wouldn’t let you cut these holes in it.” She stepped back and folded her arms, looking the bike up and down. “But somebody’s gone to some trouble to make it look like one.”

The others crowded round the bike.

Miz peered closely at the instruments. “Maybe you get on, fire it up and it takes you to where the real thing’s stashed,” he said.

“Like a pair of magic shoes in a fairy tale,” Zefla nodded.

“Maybe,” Sharrow said.

Dloan leant closer, inspecting the instruments. He frowned, then tapped both main read-outs. They were old-fashioned electromechanical dials with slim, plastic needles pointing to numbers printed round the edges of the instrument faces.

“Hmm,” Dloan said, gripping the dials and shaking them; they moved in the binnacle.

“What?” Zefla said.

“According to these instruments,” Dloan said, straightening, “this thing’s doing fifty klicks an hour and it’s revving at sixty a second.”

“Never trust a Lazy Gun,” Zefla muttered.

“Really?” Sharrow said. “Let’s see…” She put a hand on each of the two dials and pulled.

“Hey, careful -” Zefla said, stepping back.

The dials clicked out of the binnacle, coming cleanly away. There were no wires trailing from them. Sharrow turned them over; the instruments had no obvious connections anywhere on their stainless steel surface.

“One needle’s moving,” Dloan said quietly.

Sharrow held the instruments in front of her. The speedometer needle swung a little, then steadied. The tachometer needle stayed steady. Dloan reached out, altered the orientation of the instrument cluster so that it was lying flat, then while Sharrow still held them turned the dials around ninety degrees and back. The speedometer needle shifted round the dial, but kept pointing in the same direction, towards one wall of the warehouse.

Sharrow nodded in the direction the needle was indicating. “Then let’s walk that way, shall we?”

They bumped into Feril while they were walking down the aisle, intent on the two instruments. Sharrow smiled awkwardly and turned the dials’ faces to her chest. The android just stood there.

“May I help?” it said.

Sharrow smiled. “May we borrow your car for a while?”

“The vehicle is a little temperamental,” Feril told them, sounding apologetic. “Might I suggest I drive you wherever you wish to go?”

Sharrow and the others exchanged looks. Feril looked up at the ceiling and said, “I know it wouldn’t even cross your mind, but just supposing you were thinking of taking something from the trove, it would be wise not to let the caretaker observe you doing so. I myself am quite neutral in the matter.”

Sharrow opened her jacket and concealed the bulky dials inside as best she could. “We’ll accept your offer of the lift, Feril, thank you.”

“My pleasure,” the android said.

Grey waves dashed themselves against black boulders; spray flew up, sunset lit, to blow across the tumble of stones in quick veils of grey-pink mist, dropping and whirling into the crannies between the rocks.

The wind blew into her face, strong and cool and damp. The sunset was a wide stain of red at the ocean’s edge. She turned and looked up the grassy slope to the road, where the car sat hissing quietly. Strands of steam leaked from beneath the vehicle and were torn away on the curling wind. There was a light on in the automobile’s rear compartment, and through the open door she could see Miz and Dloan peering at a screen they’d unfurled over the floor of the car.

Feril and Zefla sat on a couple of boulders at the side of the road about fifty metres away, looking out to sea, talking.

Miz got out of the car and walked down to her. He stood by her side, making a show of breathing in the brine-laced air.

“Well?” Sharrow asked him.

“I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me how the book led to the tomb,” Miz said, smiling faintly.

Sharrow shrugged. “The message in the casing,” she said.

Miz frowned for a moment. “What? ‘Things Will Change’?”

Sharrow nodded. “That’s the inscription on Gorko’s tomb.”

“But the tomb’s only… what?”

“Thirty years old,” she said. “And the book was missing for twelve centuries.” She smiled thinly at the sunset. “Gorko must have found out what was in the casing, even if he never got to the book itself. Maybe it was just good Antiquities research; maybe one of his agents was able to inspect the book, or remote-scan it while it was in Pharpech. But somehow he found out what the inscription was and had it duplicated on his tomb.”

Miz looked vaguely disappointed. “Huh,” he said.

She looked up at Miz, who was nodding slowly. “So,” she said, “where do the dials point?”

Miz pursed his lips and nodded out across the ocean.

“Over the sea and far away,” he said.

“Caltasp?” she asked.

“Sort of,” he said. He glanced at her. “The Areas,” he added.

She closed her eyes for a moment. “Are you sure?”

“Come and see.”

They walked back to the car. She stood at the opened door, one hand resting on the car’s slatted wooden roof.

The flex-screen lying on the floor displayed a flat map of Golter’s southern hemisphere, distorted to show true direction. They both watched as Dloan traced a line from a compass-rosed point in southern Jonolrey across the Phirar to the region between Caltasp and Lantskaar.

“Depends how accurate these gauges are,” Dloan said, tapping numbers into the calculator display at the side of the map. “And on whether the direction display is working on the GPS or magnetic. But if the speedo shows true direction and the rev counter is kilometres times one hundred, then it’s the Embargoed Areas.”

“Oh, shit,” Sharrow breathed.

They had driven eighty kilometres out of Vembyr along the pitted surface of the deserted coastal highway, heading south and west. They had passed the entombed ruins of the ancient reactor a couple of kilometres back, just before the cut-off for the point. They were about fifty kilometres further west than they had been in the city, and the needle on the bike’s fake tachometer had moved one half of a division on its scale, indicating fifty-nine and a half revolutions per second rather than the sixty it had shown in the warehouse.

“We can get a more accurate fix with a better map,” Dloan said, laying the static-stiffened screen over the dials, then turning it briefly transparent. “And maybe triangulate if we can get a reading from a good way north of the city.”

“I’ll get the copter back,” Miz told Sharrow, nodding.

“That should narrow it down pretty well,” Dloan said, tapping out more figures and studying the result. “But just going on this, if it isn’t under the ocean it’s somewhere in the fjords, in the Areas.”

Sharrow looked up the road at Zefla and Feril. The two were standing now; Zefla was pointing out to sea, her long, blonde hair blown cloud-ragged by the wind. Red light reflected from the polished surfaces of the android’s head and body.

A gust rocked Sharrow on her feet. Her skirt whipped at her boots and she stuck her hands in her jacket pockets, feeling the cold weight of the gun against her left hand.

She saw Zefla glance towards the car, and waved at her. The woman and the android began walking back to the car.

That night she did not dream of Cenuij, but instead dreamt that her arm died; her left arm became paralysed and numb, then began to wither and shrink but somehow remained the same size it had always been, but was still dead, and so she had to find somebody who would bury it for her, and wandered round a city that seemed to be crowded but where she could only find people who looked just like her but weren’t, and nobody would bury the arm for her.

Eventually she tried to make a box, a coffin, for the arm, to carry it around in, but it was difficult to make with just one arm.

She woke in the middle of the night, in the wide, white bed in the shadows of the tall, white room in the apartment block Feril was renovating. She was lying on her left arm, which had gone to sleep. She got up and sat in a seat by the side of the bed for a while, drinking a glass of water and massaging her tingling arm as blood and feeling returned to it.

She thought she would be awake for the rest of the night, but then fell asleep there, to wake up stiff and sore in the morning, her right hand still clutching the other arm as though comforting it.

The monthly auction started the next day. Aircraft arrived from all over Golter, filling the City Hotel with mercenary chiefs, arms dealers, militaria collectors, weapon-fund managers, contract army reps and a scattering of specialist media people. The auction hall itself was an old conference centre three blocks from the warehouse where the Tzant trove was stored.

Sharrow had refused to hide away while the auction was held, and she and Zefla, both wearing veiled hats and dull, loose-fitting suits, sat in a small drinks lounge attached to the conference facility, watching the people come and go.

Miz and Dloan had left the city to travel up the coast in one of Miz’s company helicopters, getting another fix on the position the bike dials were indicating. If the triangulation confirmed the dials were pointing where they seemed to be, Dloan would attend the auction’s second and final day so he could buy the sort of gear they’d need if they were to mount an expedition to the Areas.

“You’re mad,” Zefla said quietly, lifting her veil to drink from her glass as she leaned closer to Sharrow. “You should be hiding.” She sipped her drink, finishing it. “I’m mad, too, for letting you talk me into this. I should have told Dloan, or Miz, or just locked you up. You talk me into the most insane things.”

“Oh, stop whining and go and get us another drink,” Sharrow whispered. Zefla sat back sharply, then made a grunting noise and started to get up.

“Good grief,” Sharrow said, taking Zefla’s arm. “Look who’s here.”

Elson Roa stood at the bar. He was dressed in a sober business robe and carried a sensible hat. A similarly garbed young woman they didn’t recognise stood at Roa’s side, toting a briefcase.

“Wonder what he’s come for,” Zefla said.

“Yes,” Sharrow said, slipping her glass under her veil to sip at her drink. “I wonder.”

They watched the auction through the afternoon, strolling from the lounge to the main hall and back again, keeping track of the events on the centre’s closed-circuit screens.

The multifarious items came up for sale and were knocked down; all the items easily made their reserve price, which meant-according to a media person they overheard filing a report-that the pessimistic large-scale conflict forecasts various analysts had been making recently were being confirmed by the traders. Weapons futures rose another point that afternoon.

Elson Roa didn’t appear to buy anything, but he and his assistant seemed to be watching everybody just as carefully as were Sharrow and Zefla.

The first day’s selling ended late in the evening. Sharrow and Zefla strolled past the docks and then sat on a pair of bollards as though soaking up the late evening sun, watching the people who had come for the auction as they departed in their various craft for yachts offshore, or hotels in nearby regions where the radiation level was what Golter considered normal.

They watched Elson Roa and his assistant approach a chartered VTOL jet, then Sharrow shook her head.

“What is he doing?” she said, then turned to Zefla. “Cover,” she said. She stood up, ignoring Zefla’s protests and walked over to intercept the Solipsist leader.

“Politeness,” she said, putting her veil back.

Elson Roa looked at her strangely as though not recognising her at first, then bowed slightly and said, “Yes, hello.”

“Congratulations on your bail,” she said, searching his expression. He looked mildly surprised. “I believe you’ve set a new record. You must have rich friends.”

Roa shook his head emphatically. “A strong will,” he said, raising his voice to counter the noise of a jet taking off. “I think I am beginning to alter reality.”

“I think you must be,” she agreed. “Does your alteration to reality have a name?”

“I do not believe it needs one,” the tall Solipsist said coolly.

“Perhaps not,” she said. She smiled. “So, what brings you to the auction?”

Roa looked puzzled and pointed to the VTOL. “That,” he said.

Sharrow looked levelly at him. She had the depressing feeling that Roa didn’t realise it was a joke most people got out of their system in junior high.

She shook her head. “Never mind.” She glanced at the female assistant at Roa’s side, not sure if she recognised the woman. “How is Keteo? I don’t see him here.”

Roa’s brows furrowed. “He is gone from me; he proved to be only a temporary apparance.”

“Oh? What appeared to happen to him?”

“He appeared to become religious and join some decamillennialist faith. A section of my personality I am best rid of, I think.”

“Ah-hah,” she said.

Roa looked at his assistant, then at the waiting jet. “I must go now. Good-bye.” He bowed.

She raised one hand. “Pleasant journey. Watch out for low bridges.”

Roa ignored this as he walked for the plane.

She rejoined Zefla.

“Anything?” Zefla said.

“Nothing,” Sharrow told her.

Roa’s plane rolled towards the take-off pad and was gone a few minutes later.

They met up with Miz and Dloan at the hotel and had dinner in their suite. The men had worked out the position the bike dials were indicating to a ten kilometre circle near the head of a ninety-kilometre-long fjord deep in the Embargoed Areas. They discussed the options for getting safely into and out of the Areas.

Later, Sharrow took the service stairs out of the packed, noisy hotel and walked back to her apartments through the quiet. She got slightly lost but then saw Feril’s steam car parked on the street in a pool of light cast from the brightly lit lobby of the apartment block. The lights were on in the apartment Feril was renovating just below her own.

She stood in the lobby waiting for the lift, whistling quietly to herself. She thought she heard the clack-clack of android footsteps on the stairwell at one point, and looked up the steps round the side of the lift shaft waiting for Feril to appear, but they stopped somewhere above.

The elevator appeared and she took it to her floor. She was about to open the door to her apartment when she heard a door open on the floor below.

“Lady Sharrow?” she heard Feril call.

She looked down the stairwell. Feril’s head poked round the side of the lift shaft. “Yes, Feril?”

“I think there was somebody here to see you,” the android told her. It sounded puzzled. “But it was strange.”

“How?” she said.

“The person looked like an android, but it was actually a human dressed to resemble an android; they didn’t respond to my transceiver and a simple EM scan-”

“Did they go in here?” Sharrow said quickly, jabbing her thumb towards her apartment.

“I believe so,” Feril said. “I thought perhaps it was somebody you knew.”

She looked back at the door to her apartment. “Wait here,” she said. She pressed the button for the lift and heard it rumbling in its shaft.

She looked back down at the android. “On second thoughts,” she said, “don’t wait here. Just to be on the safe side; get out of the building.”

The lift doors hissed open. “Do you think-?” she heard Feril say as she swung into the elevator and pressed the button for the first floor. The lift descended. She checked the HandCannon.

There was nobody on the first floor, or in the lobby. She kept against the wall and went to the doors; there was no way she could get out to the street without it being obvious. She sidled back to the rear of the lobby and made her way out of a dusty office and a short corridor into a dark side-street.

She walked quickly to the corner of the building, keeping her boot heels off the pavement so they wouldn’t make a noise. She looked out. Light from the apartment block lobby cast a soft glow for a half-block in each direction. After a few seconds, Sharrow made out a pale figure crouched in the shadows diagonally across the street, in an awninged doorway under another building. The figure-it did look like a rather bulky android-was looking up towards the top of the apartment block, and seemed to be holding something in both hands.

Sharrow sensed movement to her left, at the apartment block doors; she saw the figure in the doorway look quickly down from the top of the building to the doors.

Sharrow glanced to her left, to see Feril come out of the lobby doors and stand on the pavement between the doors and the silent bulk of the antique steam car. Feril looked diagonally across the street towards the figure crouching in the doorway, then raised one hand.

The figure brought a hand gun up and fired at Feril. The android flicked its head to one side; light flared on the stonework immediately behind it as a crackle of noise burst across the street; Feril dropped to the paving stones. Sharrow aimed the HandCannon as the figure raised its other hand and seemed to shake something. She fired the HandCannon.

Light flickered above her an instant before it burst from the muzzle of the gun. The wall beside Sharrow rippled as the gun roared. A mighty thump came through the soles of her boots and then a crushing, numbing pulse of sound rolled down over her, dwarfing the percussive bark of the gun.

She half-fell, half-dropped to the ground, then rolled across the pavement towards the building and under the cover of a broad window sill as the blast echoed and re-echoed off nearby buildings and merged with a terrible, tearing noise. Chunks of masonry and huge long shards of glass began to fall and shatter on the street and pavement.

Dust choked her nostrils; the roaring noise filled her ears through an insistent, cacophonous ringing.

When all but the ringing stopped, she stood up, brushing dust and flakes of stone from her jacket and skirt.

She looked up through a cloud of grey, moonlit dust. The top half of the apartment block had disappeared. Most of it had fallen into the street in front, entirely blocking it and burying the lobby doors and the ancient steam car under a ten-metre-high pile of dust-clouded rubble; there was no sign of Feril.

She tried going back the way she had come, but rubble filled the dark corridor, blocking the way to the office; her little torch made a white cone in the dry, throat-coating dust. She went back out, coughing and choking, and clambered over the rubble towards the doorway where the figure had been crouching.

Whoever it had been, her shot had killed them; the metal and plastic chest bore only a small puncture mark near its centre, but there was a sticky red mess a metre up the wall behind where the person had been crouching and a slowly advancing puddle of deep; dark-red was making its glistening way across the dust and debris-strewn floor of the doorway, its thickly gleaming surface picking up little particles of drifting, coating dust as it moved.

She kicked aside pieces of rubble and pulled at the figure’s head.

The head/helmet came away after she gave it a half-twist.

A man. At first, with an odd sense of relief, she thought that she didn’t recognise him.

But then she took another look at that youthful but now slack face, and with a feeling of sadness that became anger and then a kind of despair she recognised Keteo.

She was unsure whether she wanted to cry or to punch that smooth, boyish, dead face. Then just as she was about to shove the android-head helmet back over the young ex-Solipsist’s head, she saw something glint at the collar of the olive T-shirt he wore.

She drew the thin chain out.

On the end of it hung a small planet-and-single-moon locket, the symbol of an intern-grade Huhsz Lay Novice.

She looked into the youth’s dead eyes again, then let the trinket drop back to his chest. She stood up and let the hollow android head fall beside him in the doorway.

A large truck drew up in the street behind her, wheels skidding through the glass and stone wreckage in front of the main rubble heap. The truck’s lights picked out the dust-shrouded remains of the building. Two androids jumped out of the vehicle and stood looking at the pile, then moved to a section of it and quickly started to pick up lumps of the fallen masonry and throw it behind them, excavating a trench in the debris.

Sharrow left Keteo lying in the doorway and walked over to the two toiling androids, keeping out of the way of the bits of rubble they were sending flying back behind them. Another truck appeared at the end of the street and roared towards the wreckage. One of the androids stopped working when it saw her.

“You must be Lady Sharrow,” it said. It paused. “I have told Feril you are alive and apparently well.”

“You mean it’s alive in there?” she said incredulously, pointing at the huge pile of rubble as the second truck stopped and half a dozen androids jumped out holding construction equipment.

“Yes,” the android told her as it stepped aside to let two larger androids get at where it had been excavating. “Feril is under the car, between the axles, and although trapped and a little dented is in no obvious immediate danger.”

She looked up through the clearing dust at what was left of the apartment block; dark, glassless windows revealed only a shell behind. The top four storeys had either fallen into the street or collapsed down inside the rest of the building. Timbers stuck out of the rubble like broken bones. One white chunk of plaster lay near her foot, its flowers and trellis-work all cracked and coated grey. One of the androids working at the wreckage threw away something that might have been a piece of the old steam car’s slatted roof. She shook her head.

“Tell Feril,” she said to the android who was still standing looking at her, “that…” She shrugged and shook her head and then sat down on the dusty rubble and put her shaking hands over her head as she half-said, half-moaned, “I’m sorry…”

“Sharrow? Thank the gods you’re alive. You have no idea how difficult it is getting reliable information out of that city. Are you all right?”

“Just fine. How are you, Geis?”

“I’m well.”

“So?” she said. “You left a message; what is it?”

“Yes I did, and thanks for calling back.” The flat image on the old wall-phone in what had once been Vembyr’s Central Post Office waved a hand dismissively. “But dammit, Sharrow, I’m concerned for you. For the last time, please let me help you. I’m still at your service.”

“And I still appreciate it, Geis,” she told him, looking at the walls of the old curtained booth to escape the intensity of those staring eyes. “But I still have ideas of my own I want to pursue.”

Geis looked uncertain. “But Sharrow, whatever your plans might be, can they be more dependable, any safer than accepting my help?”

She shrugged. “Who can say, Geis?”

A pained look passed over his face. “I was sorry to hear about Cenuij Mu, but at least the others are still alive. If not for yourself then for their sake, reconsider.”

“We’ve thought it all through, Geis. We know what we’re doing.”

Geis sat back, shaking his head. He sighed, fiddling with something on the desk in front of him. “Well, I don’t know; now we have Breyguhn refusing to leave the Sea House.” He looked up. “If you want, I might be able to have her taken from there, get her away from its influence to somewhere they can try to make her well again.” He sounded eager. “Shall I do that?”

Sharrow shook her head. “Not on my account. If she’s happy, let her stay.”

Geis almost looked amused for a moment. “ ‘Happy’?” he said. “In that place?”

“I believe it’s always been a relative term.” She shrugged. “And maybe that’s where she feels she can best come to terms with Cenuij’s death. Anyway, as far as I understand it, it wasn’t a once-only offer by the Sad Brothers; she’s free to go at any time.”

“Oh yes,” Geis said, playing with the pen on his desk. “But it can’t do her any good, stuck in there.”

“It’s her choice, Geis.”

Geis looked at her levelly for a while. He seemed sad and tired. “Choice,” he said heavily. A small smile disturbed his face. “We all think we have so much of that, don’t we?”

She looked away for a moment. “Yes, terrible old world, isn’t it?” She glanced at the time display. “Look, Geis, I have to go. I’m meeting the others. I appreciate your offer, I really do, but let us try to do this the way we know best.”

He gazed out of the screen at her for a while, his eyes moving about her image as though trying to fix it in his mind. Then his shoulders drooped a little and he nodded. “Yes. You were always so determined, so hard, weren’t you?” He smiled and took a deep breath. “Good luck, Sharrow,” he said.

“Thanks, Geis. And to you.”

He opened his mouth to say something, then just nodded. He reached out. The screen in front of her went grey, leaving her alone in the darkened booth.

In the grand ballroom of the east wing of house Tzant that winter there was a merry-go-round. It sat in the centre of the huge room’s ancient wooden map-floor, rotundly magnificent, gaily painted, flag-bedecked and glitteringly competitive with the extravagantly carved gilt mirrors and enormous sparkling chandeliers of the ballroom. The most splendid chandelier of all, which normally hung like an incandescent inverted fountain in the centre of the room, had been removed to one of the stables to make room for the merry-go-round. The fairground ride ran on electricity and made a rich humming noise as it revolved. Sharrow liked that noise more than the music of the organ which usually played as the merry-go-round spun.

There were eighty different animals on the ride, all life-size and mythical or extinct. She usually rode on the trafe, a fierce-looking extinct flightless bird nearly three metres high with a serrated bill and huge claw-feet.

She was alone on the ride that day, hugging the neck of the trafe as the ride spun round, silent save for the room-filling boom of the electric motor. She watched her reflection sweep past in each of the tall gilt-framed mirrors in turn. The motor-hum seemed to buzz up through the wooden body of the long-extinct bird and resonate through her, intense and numbing and reassuring. Sometimes she fell asleep on the fabulous bird, and travelled for a long time through the warm air of the ballroom, between the enormous mirrors on one wall and the closed curtains of the windows facing them on the other.

She preferred the curtains closed because it was winter and outside lay the snow, blank and cold and soft.

The back of the trafe on the spinning merry-go-round was the only place she knew she could sleep safely. If she did dream while she rode the great bird, she dreamt good dreams, of warmth and cosiness and being hugged; she dreamt of her mother lifting her from her bath, of being dried in huge, delicately scented towels and carried to her bed while her mother sang softly to her.

Too often, in her bed in the room they had given her next to her father’s, she could feel the white of the sheets and see that cold absence even once the lights were out, and falling asleep within that plump whiteness-she’d have the nightmare; the cold tumbling nightmare as she emptied her lungs at the sight of her mother lying on the floor of the cable car, blood pouring from her torn body, arm coming up into her chest and pushing her away, out into the cold and down to the snow, falling away still screaming, eyes wide, seeing the cable car above her burst apart in a bright cracking pulse of sound, an instant before she thudded into the freezing grip of the snow.

“Sharrow?”

She sat up on the bird’s back, seeing her father approaching from the far end of the ballroom. He held the hand of a little girl, perhaps a couple of years younger than she. The girl looked shy and not very pretty. Sharrow turned her head to keep looking at them as the merry-go-round whirled her round, then lost sight of them.

“Skave!” she heard her father shout. “Turn that thing off.”

The old android, standing in the centre of the ride, cut the power and applied the brakes.

Sharrow watched her father and the little girl as they came closer, walking across the map-floor, over the seagrain of Golter’s oceans and the native woods of its continents.

The merry-go-round came slowly to a stop and was silent. The bird she was riding ended up on the far side of the ride from her father and the little girl. Sharrow waited for them to walk round to her. When they did, her father smiled and glanced down at the child whose hand he held.

“Look, my darling,” he said to Sharrow, “This is the surprise I promised you: a little sister!”

Sharrow looked down at the other girl. Her father stooped and caught the child under the arms, lifting her up so that her head was above his.

“Isn’t she lovely?” he asked Sharrow, his eager, puffy face peeking out from the little girl’s skirts. The girl turned her face away from Sharrow. “Her name is Breyguhn,” her father told her. “Breyguhn,” he said, lowering her a little so that her head was level with his, “this is Sharrow. She’s your big sister.” He looked at Sharrow again. “You’re going to be the best of friends, aren’t you?”

Sharrow looked at the other child, who hid her face behind her father’s head.

“Who’s her mummy?” Sharrow asked eventually.

Her father looked dismayed, then cheerful. “Her mummy’s going to be your new mummy,” he said. “She’s an old friend of mine… of your mummy and mine, and…” He smiled broadly, swallowing. “She’s very nice. So is Breyguhn, aren’t you, Brey? Hmm? Oh, don’t cry; what’s to cry about? Come on, say hello to your big sister. Sharrow; say hello to-Sharrow?”

She’d got down off the trafe bird and walked round to the ride’s controls. She glared up at Skave and pushed him out of the way.

“Now, now, Miss Sharrow…” the old android said, stepping back awkwardly and almost falling.

She’d seen the android work the controls. She pushed the brake lever up and swung the power handle across. The merry-go-round buzzed and hummed and started to move.

“Sharrow?” her father said, walking into sight, still holding the crying child.

“Now, now, Miss Sharrow,” Skave said as she pushed it further back through the assorted weyr-beasts, monsters and extinct animals of Golter’s real and imagined past. The old android’s hands fluttered in front of its chest as she kept on pushing it. “Now, now, Miss Sharrow. Now, now-ah!”

Skave fell off the edge of the ride, twisted with bewildering speed and landed safely on all fours, looking surprised.

“Sharrow!” her father shouted. “Sharrow! What do you think you’re doing! Come back here! Sharrow!”

The ride buzzed up to full speed, humming deeply like an ancient spinning top.

“Sharrow! Sharrow!”

She clambered back up onto the neck of the trafe bird and closed her eyes.

She stood on the piazza, leaning on the marble balustrade and looking down at the old blow-stone merry-go-round on the terrace below. The androids restoring the ride were trying to start its ancient hydraulic motors for the first time in centuries; mostly they were finding where all its leaks and inadequately secured seals and joins were, each attempted start resulting in a fresh burst of water from some new part of the furiously complicated, gaudily decorated old fairground ride. The terrace around it was covered with water.

She watched as one more creaking, groaning half-revolution of the antique roundabout culminated in another wet explosion and a hissing fountain arcing into the air.

She glanced at the others sitting, bored, in the pavement section of a cosmetically restored but closed cafe on the other side of the piazza, then she turned to Feril.

“We are going to the Embargoed Areas,” she told the android, “to try to find the last Lazy Gun.”

Feril looked down. “You did not need to tell me that.”

“I suspected you had already guessed.”

“Indeed,” Feril said, “I must admit that I had.”

She cleared her throat. “Feril, I’ve talked this over with the others, and we’d like you to come along with us, if you want.”

Feril looked silently at her for what seemed a long time. “I see,” it said. It looked down at the old roundabout on the terrace beneath, watching its fellows swarm over it, making adjustments. “Why?” it said.

“Because we feel you could be useful,” she said, “and because we feel we need another person along, and because I think you might benefit from the experience, and because… we like you.” She looked away for a moment. “Though it will be dangerous.” She cocked an eyebrow. “Maybe if we really liked you, the last thing we’d do would be to invite you along quite possibly to get killed.”

Feril made a shrugging motion. “If I accompanied you, I would save my current personality with the city,” it said. “Should I be destroyed, I would only lose the memories of the experiences after I left here. I would continue to exist as an entity within the city AI cluster, and I would obtain a guarantee that I would live again when the next batch of androids is allowed to be built.”

She was silent, watching it.

“You are sure,” it said, “that the others in your team would not object to my presence?”

She glanced at Zefla, Miz and Dloan again. Dloan and Zefla were talking. Miz was watching her, chin on his uninjured hand.

“They trust who I trust,” she told the machine. “Any one of them could have vetoed the idea. We want you to come with us.”

The android tapped one steel and plastic finger on the marble, then nodded as it turned to her. “Thank you. I accept. I shall come with you.”

She put her hand out to the machine. “I hope you will not have cause to regret this,” she said, smiling.

It gripped her hand gently. “Regret is for humans,” it said.

She laughed. “Really?”

The machine shrugged and let go of her hand. “Oh, no. It’s just something we tell ourselves.”

20 The Quiet Shore

Trees stood in dense, dark-massed profusion from mountain-top to tideline. The ocean lay flat, black and still against the silent shore as though it had fallen under the heavy green spell of the forest. A bird flew slowly across the water parallel with the land, like a pale sliver of the soft grey clouds cast out of the sky and searching for a way back.

Half a kilometre out from the fjord mouth, the surface of the ocean swirled and frothed, then swelled and spilled from three dark, bulbous shapes.

The tri-hull submarine surfaced and floated stationary for a moment, water streaming from its fins and stubby central tower. Then a series of dull clanging noises chimed out across the water and with a swirl of wash churning round its smooth black flanks the central section and starboard hull slid slowly astern, leaving the port hull floating alone and facing the shore.

When it had dropped just behind the single hull, the submarine went ahead again, using delicate surging pulses of power from its bow to snick its rounded snout into the hull’s stern. A great slow stream of water washed out behind the submarine as it drove quietly for the shore, pushing the hull ahead of it.

The leading hull grounded in the shallows of a small sandy beach on the southern edge of the fjord’s mouth, its hemispherical black nose rising as it pushed a broad bulging wave across the few metres of water towards the crescent’s pale slope. Surf washed up the beach and along the rocks on either side.

“I do hope you understand; I have of course given much thought to this, but in the end I have the safety of my ship and crew to consider. Of course this is covered in our contract-”

“Of course.”

“- but it really would be asking for trouble to take you any further in. The fjord is quite deep-though there are underwater ridges in places according to our deep scan-but it’s just so narrow; a boat this size just wouldn’t be able to manoeuvre at all. With the obvious danger of hostile action, it would be foolhardy to venture further. As I say, I have my crew to think about. Now, if I could just have your signature… I mean, many of them have families…”

“Indeed.”

“I’m so glad you understand. Our underwriters have been blowing very cool in this last financial year, I can tell you, and even switching the log-graph off is going to make them suspicious. You can turn that trick only so many times, believe me. Ah… here and here…”

The captain held his clipboard up for her to sign the release papers. She took off one glove, picked up the stylo and scribbled her name. She was dressed in insulated combat fatigues and knee boots; a warm, ballisticised fur cap covered her head, the ear-pads clipped up. She and the captain were standing on deck near the bow of the grounded port hull; its single hemi-door had swung open and a ramp had been extended from the interior to the shallows. The first of the two big six-wheel All-Terrain trucks fired into life and rumbled slowly out of the hull, down the ramp, through the water and up onto the white-sand beach. The deck beneath them shifted as the vehicle’s weight was transferred from hull to land.

The AT’s grey and green camouflage flickered uncertainly for a few moments as it adjusted, then settled to a suitably nondescript set of interleaved shades that exactly matched the colour of the sand and the shadows under the trees. A heavy stub-nosed cannon sat stowed above one of the two cab hatches.

The captain turned over a couple of pages. “And here and here, please,” he said. He shook his head and made a clicking noise with his tongue. “If only the fjord was a little wider!” He stared concernedly at the mouth of the fjord, as though willing the ridge-straked slopes of the mountains to draw back from the dark waters. He sighed, his breath smoking in the cold, still air.

“Yes, well,” Sharrow said.

The second All-Terrain lumbered out of the front hull section and onto the beach, making the hull bob again. Zefla waved from one of the vehicle’s roof hatches.

“And one last one here…” the captain said, folding the flimsies back over the clipboard. Sharrow signed again.

“There,” she said.

“Thank you, Lady Sharrow,” the captain said, smiling. He put his gloves back on and bowed deeply. The sunglasses he hadn’t needed when they’d surfaced fell out of a pocket in his quilted jacket. He stooped to retrieve them, his gloves making the operation difficult.

He straightened to find her smiling bleakly at him, holding her hand out. He stuck the sunglasses in his mouth, the clipboard under his armpit and took one glove off again. He shook her hand. “A pleasure, Lady Sharrow,” he told her. “And let me wish you all the best in…” his gaze flicked round the quiet forests and the tall mountains, “… whatever you may be undertaking.”

“Thank you.”

“Well, see you in four days’ time, unless we hear from you,” he said, grinning.

“Right,” she said, turning away. “Until then.”

“Good hunting!” he called.

Sharrow made her way down a thin, metal ladder to the hull’s interior, where the sub’s deck crew were getting ready to retract the ramp and close the door again; she checked there was nothing left behind, then walked down the ramp to the shore, her boots sinking into the sand.

Just as she turned to look back at the gaping round mouth of the hull, a white jet of steam flew up into the air behind it from the submarine’s conning tower. The shriek of the vessel’s emergency siren shook the air above the beach, then cut off as the white feather of the steam plume stood, just beginning to drift in the air. The men in the mouth of the opened hull section froze. A voice boomed out above them; the captain’s, breathless and panicky. “Air alert!” he shouted through the speakers. “Aircraft coming! Repeat; aircraft approaching! Abandon the hulls! Scuttle both!”

“Shit!” Sharrow said, spinning on her heel.

The men in the hull swarmed up the ladder to the deck; Sharrow clambered into the cab of the second AT. Zefla was standing on her seat, head and torso out of the hatch above, watching the seaward skies through a pair of high-power field-glasses. Feril was at the vehicle’s wheel, poised and delicate amongst the AT’s chunkily business-like controls.

“Fucking hell,” Miz’s voice said over the Comm, “that was quick. Thought they didn’t bother much with the surv-sats these days.”

“Maybe we were misinformed,” Sharrow said, glancing at the android as the AT in front sprayed sand from its six big tyres and lumbered up the beach for the rocks bordering the saplings and grass at the edge of the forest. “Follow MIZ,” she told Feril. The android nodded and slipped the vehicle into Drive.

The truck lurched forward, following the leading AT towards the trees. Sharrow looked back through the side window to watch the last few crewmen jump from the sub’s beached section to the main hull, then saw the water froth round the rear of the fat boat as the vessel abandoned both hulls and powered astern, surrounding itself with foam. The small figures sprinted along the hull and disappeared down a hatch, swinging it shut. The submarine surged back through its own wake, starting to turn and submerge at the same time; the grounded hull section bobbed in the wash while the jettisoned starboard hull rolled back and forward, gently rising and falling in the waves.

“There’s no fucking way into these trees!” Miz yelled.

“Then make one,” Sharrow told him.

“No,” they heard Dloan’s calm voice say. “Look.”

“Hmm,” Miz replied. “Narrow…” The leading AT swivelled right.

“Zef?” Sharrow said, glancing up. “Zef?” she shouted.

Zefla ducked down, shaking her head, her hair gathered up inside a combat cap. “Nothing yet,” she said, grabbing an intercom stalk and clipping it to her ear as she stood again.

The AT in front of them bounced over rocks and charged across the grass towards the trees, tyres gouging scooped trenches in the grass and spraying earth back at them as it climbed over springy saplings and pressed between the taller trunks beyond. Clods and stones thumped and whacked into the sloped chin and screen of their AT.

Sharrow glanced back; the submarine was submerged save for its tower, sinking rapidly into the swirling water as it continued to swing out astern from the shore.

Miz and Dloan’s AT shouldered its way between the trees, slowing.

“Got it,” Zefla said through the intercom. “Single plane. Low; looks big… fairly slow.”

“Think they saw us?” Sharrow asked as Feril manoeuvred the snout of their AT to within a metre of the vehicle in front.

“Difficult to say,” Zefla said.

Miz was turning his vehicle into a small clearing to the right, the ATs mottled camouflage darkening as it burrowed deeper under the overhanging branches.

“No sign they’ve seen us…” Zefla said quietly.

“That’s about as far as we go,” Miz said. The leading AT rolled to a stop; Feril halted theirs immediately behind. Sharrow reached into the footwell and unzipped a long bag with a crude anti-aircraft symbol scrawled on it. She pulled a missile-launcher out and stood up on the seat, swinging the hatch back and sticking her head and shoulders through.

The plane was a lumpy black speck, low over the water. Where the sub had been there was just a patch of disturbed water near the abandoned floating hull. The plane’s image enlarged in the missile-launcher’s sight, went briefly fuzzy then came sharp; she flicked the safety off.

Then something waved in the sight, close and un-focused and partially obscuring the aircraft. Sharrow frowned and looked away from the launcher’s sight; some of the young trees behind them had risen up again after being caught under the ATs, forming a thin screen between them and the shore.

She squinted back into the sight and watched the plane’s silhouette tilt and thicken. It was a flying boat, about the size of an ancient heavy bomber; pairs of engines high on each wing root and a V-strutted float near the tip of each wing. Six small missiles, under the wings. The plane banked slowly, almost languorously away. She tracked it until it disappeared behind the trees.

Sharrow listened to the sound of the plane’s jets, echoing distantly among the mountains. She put the missile-launcher back to standby.

“Where’d it go?” Miz said.

“Think it went down the fjord,” Dloan said. Sharrow turned to see Dloan in the hatch of the stationary leading AT, its nose stuck into the trees. He was pointing the cannon over their heads at where the plane had been.

“See any markings?” Sharrow asked Zefla.

Zefla shook her head. “Didn’t look like a Franchise ship to me.”

“I saw one of those old things in Quay Beagh,” Dloan said. “While we were negotiating for the sub.”

“Think it could be another private operator?” Miz asked. They heard him grunt as the leading AT rocked fractionally back, then attempted to plough forward again, only to be resisted once more by the flexing trunks of the trees. “Now that’s what I call contempt for the Areas Laws,” he said, sounding almost amused. “Barrelling right in with an antique that belongs in a museum of flight. Shit, we could have used ACVs after all.”

“Whatever,” Sharrow said, “it might be back. Let’s head along the coast and find somewhere better to hole up.”

“We are kind of hidden here,” Zefla pointed out.

“Only kind of,” Miz said. “And if anybody’s going to look for us, that hull’s where they’re going to start.”

“Our brave captain said something about scuttling the hulls,” Zefla said.

“Yeah, but the one on the beach isn’t going to sink too far.”

“Zef?” Sharrow said. “What do you think; did the plane see us?”

Zefla shrugged. “On balance, probably… yes.”

“So let’s go,” Sharrow said.

They reversed the two ATs out of the forest. The grounded submarine hull had settled by the stern; its cavernous open mouth towered over the little beach like an expression of silent surprise. The jettisoned hull had rolled over onto its back, rocking back and forth as it sank slowly into the dark water.

The two All-Terrains picked their way along the jumbled rock and tattered grass line between the water and the trees.

The plane had left a faint line of exhaust smoke a hundred metres or so above the centre of the broad fjord. Zefla stayed on watch; Sharrow sat back in her seat with the missile-launcher on her lap. She looked over at Feril, sitting with apparent unconcern as it guided their AT after Miz and Dloan’s.

“Sorry about all this,” she said.

“Please, don’t be,” the android said, turning its head to her for a moment. “This is highly exciting.”

Sharrow shook her head, smiling. “Could get more exciting yet if we can’t find a place to hide.”

“Oh well,” Feril said, and turned from her to look around at the fjord to their right and the steeply forested mountains on either side. “Still,” it said as its hands worked the wheel of the AT, picking its way between the boulders littering the stony shore. “This is quite beautiful scenery, don’t you think?”

Sharrow grinned, briefly shaking her head at the android. Then she tried to relax, and took a slow, deliberate look round at the liquid silence of the calm black waters, the pitched abundance of the enfolding forests and the rippling, half-hidden morphology of the tree-smothered slopes, jagged-rimmed against the pale wastes of sky.

“Yes,” she sighed, and nodded. “Yes, it is beautiful.”

They had gone less than a kilometre down the side of the fjord and found no breaks in the trees, no fallen boulders large enough to hide behind and no other form of cover, when Zefla shouted.

“It’s back!”

The flying boat appeared, a grey dot against the dark mountains towards the head of the fjord.

“Hell’s teeth,” Miz growled.

Sharrow watched the flying boat tilt and turn until it was heading straight towards them. She shook her head. “This is no good-”

“Firing!” yelled Zefla. Two bursts of smoke curled from under the wing roots of the plane.

“Stop!” Sharrow told the android. She grabbed her satchel from beneath the seat. “All out!”

“Shit,” Miz said. Both ATs skidded to a stop.

“Head for the fucking trees,” Zefla muttered, dropping from the hatch, bouncing on her seat and kicking the door open. She jumped to the ground holding a small back-pack, followed by Feril. Sharrow jumped from the other door. Miz leapt from the AT in front and ran for the trees as well.

“Out, Man!” Sharrow yelled. She was heading for some large rocks near the water’s edge. She clicked the safety off the missile-launcher.

Dloan stood in the hatch of the front AT, sighting the cannon at the plane; the two missiles were bright points at the end of smoky trails, racing closer over the black, still water. “Dloan!” she yelled. She threw herself down between two rocks and sighted the missile-launcher.

The missiles zipped in; they missed the two ATs and screamed overhead, detonating in the forest fifty metres behind them. Dloan started firing the cannon; she could see each tracered eighth shell arcing up and out across the water, falling a hundred metres short of the plane in distant, tiny white splashes. She fired the missile; there was a bang as the tube juddered against her shoulder, then a flash and a clap of noise when the missile ignited and a whoosh as it raced away.

The plane flew lazily on up the centre of the fjord, maybe two thousand metres away now; the missile lanced out on an intercept course.

Dloan had stopped firing the cannon.

The missile was a kilometre away, then five hundred metres.

“Oh well,” Sharrow said to herself. “Just ignore it then, assholes.”

Light glittered around the nose of the flying boat.

The missile blew up; it flashed and disintegrated in the air, creating a thick black paw of smoke from which dozens of little dark claws trailed out and down, falling into the water in a flurry of tail splashes.

“Son of a bitch,” Sharrow breathed. The plane tipped towards them once more.

Dloan fired the cannon again, sparks arcing high towards the plane. The plane flew through the rising bulb of smoke left by their intercepted missile. It fired another two of its own.

Sharrow glanced at the AT. “Dloan!” she screamed. She saw him crouch down a little behind the cannon. He fired a last burst of shells, then sprang out of the hatch and ran along the top of the AT’s roof. Sharrow could have sworn he had a great big smile on his face.

Dloan jumped the three metres to the ground, rolled and dived into light cover a half second before the pair of missiles screamed into the ATs and blew them both to smithereens.

She must have ducked. She lifted her head to the smoke and the flame. Both vehicles had been obliterated. Hers lay on its back, burning fiercely. The other AT still seemed to be the right way up, but its body had been torn half off, lifted so that the three engines lay exposed between the flayed, burning tyres. What was left of it shook, crackling with secondary detonations; she ducked down again and watched the sea plane fly past a half-kilometre out and curving away from them again.

A line of black smoke curled from its starboard engine. It was losing height and it sounded rough and clattery. Somebody whooped from the trees.

She looked at her left hand, resting on the ground. It hurt. She pulled it away, peering at the blood, then shook it, cleaning earth away from the cut. It didn’t look serious.

“Yee-ha!” whooped the same voice from the trees. Dloan.

The flying boat laboured on through the air for another kilometre, gaining height; then it tipped and banked, turning and heading back down the fjord again, this time angling for the far shore as the black smoke behind it thickened and it dropped closer and closer to the water.

The air cracked and rang as more explosions sounded in the two wrecked ATs; smoke piled into the sky.

“Sharrow?” Miz shouted during a lull.

“Here!” she shouted. “I’m all right.”

The flying boat hit the water, bounced in a double curtain of spray and hit again, stopping quickly and slewing round as it came to rest facing them, fifteen hundred metres away.

She slung the satchel onto her back and crawled away from the shore-side rocks, staying in the cover of some smaller boulders until she was near the trees; then she got up and ran in a crouch to where the others were lying just inside the cover, watching the ATs burn and the flying boat near the far shore sink. Its glassy, complicated nose was already raised in the air; one wing float was canted out of the water, the other submerged.

She dropped down beside them.

“Okay?” Zefla asked her.

“Yes. Nice shooting, Dloan,” she said, wiping her bloody hand on the trousers of her fatigues.

“Thanks,” Dloan grinned. “Fancy missile-intercepting laser couldn’t deal with old-fashioned cannon shells.” He sighed massively, looking happy.

“Yeah, but now what do we do?” Miz said, looking at her. “Swim the rest of the way?”

“Oh,” Feril said, “look. What unorthodox camouflage.”

Sharrow looked.

Zefla squinted through the field-glasses. She groaned.

“I don’t fucking believe it,” she said. She handed the binoculars to Sharrow. “No, that’s not true.” She shook her head. “I do believe it.”

Sharrow watched through glasses; the faceted nose of the flying boat was tipped high up now, pointing at the sky. From doors just under the wing roots she could see perhaps three dozen or so small figures clambering into what she guessed were inflatable boats. It all looked a little confused.

Sharrow could make the figures out easily because they were dressed in shocking pinks, lime-greens, blood-reds, loud-violets and bright-yellows that were even more vibrant and obvious than the orange boats they were packing into. She put the glasses down.

“They really are mad,” she said, more to herself than anybody else. “It’s Elson Roa and his gang.”

“That maniac?” Miz said, eyes wide. He gestured at the sinking plane, its fuselage now vertical to the sky and submerged almost to the wings. Two bright clusters of colour were just visible to the naked eye, heading slowly away from the sinking aircraft towards the thick green blanket of trees on the far shore. “That’s him?” Miz said. “Again?”

Sharrow nodded slowly, setting the field-glasses down on the ground. “Yes,” she said. “Again.”

The ammunition in the burning ATs continued to explode for a few minutes, then the fires began to die and the detonations ceased. They ventured out from the trees and searched the wreckage scattered round the remains of the two ATs until they heard a series of quiet phutting noises and saw thin fountains in the water nearby.

“Machine gun,” Dloan said, looking towards the far side of the fjord. The air cracked and whined; little clouds of dust jumped off rocks around them. They retreated quickly into the forest.

They had one light emergency tent and survival rations in a small back-pack Zefla had rescued; Sharrow had her satchel, which contained the HandCannon, the two dials from the old bike, and a first aid kit. Miz had rescued a medium machine gun and a single anti-aircraft missile. They’d found some clothes and a few more ration packs while they’d searched the wreckage. Apart from that, all they had was what they stood in; fatigues or hiking gear, a pistol each, a couple of knives, one small medical kit and whatever else had happened to be in their pockets.

“I should have thought,” Sharrow said, banging the heel of her hands off her temples. She winced as her left hand hit; she had washed the wound in a stream and put a plaster on it, but it still hurt. Miz still wore a small bandage on his hand, too, and Dloan limped a little, just as she did.

We are coming to reflect each other, she thought.

They sat in a small hollow, round a smoky, feeble fire they had finally lasered alight. The late afternoon was made evening by the tall trees rising around them.

“I should have thought,” she repeated. “We could have got more stuff together to take out of the ATs while we were looking for a place to hole up.” She shook her head.

“Look,” Miz said. “We’re all alive; we have a tent, some food, and we have guns; we can shoot what we need to eat.” He gestured at the forest around them. “There must be plenty of game in here. Or there’s fish.” He patted one pocket in his fancy, much be-pocketed hiking jacket. “I’ve got hooks and some line; we can make a rod.”

Sharrow looked dubious. “Yes. Meanwhile, we’ve got four days to walk two hundred klicks,” she said, “for a rendezvous our brave captain probably isn’t even going to try to make.”

“We could leave somebody here,” Zefla said. She held her combat cap out on a stick in front of the fire, drying it. She sat loosely cross-legged, at her ease.-Dloan had his injured leg out in front of him. Miz had rolled up a rock to sit on; the android squatted on its haunches, looking skeletally sharp and angled. “Some of us could go on to the end of the fjord,” Zefla continued, “while somebody stays behind to meet the sub and tell them to come back later.”

“We’ve nothing to signal with,” Sharrow said, taking her pocket phone out of her jacket. “The dedicated comm stuff was in the ATs and these won’t work here.”

“Well,” Dloan said, “technically they do, but the calls get transferred to the Security Franchise and they come to investigate the source.”

“Yes, Dloan,” Sharrow said. “Thank you.”

“I could signal the submarine,” Feril said. It tapped its chest. “I have a communicator; it’s not long range, but it need not utilise the phone frequencies. I could communicate with the submarine even when it is underwater, if it comes within a few kilometres.”

“Could you get in touch with it now?” Miz asked.

“I suspect not,” the android admitted.

“What about the Solipsists?” Dloan said. “Maybe they don’t realise who we are.” He looked at Sharrow. “We could try radioing them.”

She shook hear head. “Somehow, I think they know exactly who we are,” she said. “Anyway, it’s not worth breaking silence.”

“Oh, come on,” Miz said, poking at the fire with a branch. “The Franchise people can’t have missed that performance.” He nodded in the direction of the wrecked ATs, smouldering on the shore a hundred metres away through the trees. “They’re probably on their way in now to pick us up.”

“Of course,” Dloan said, “they might just nuke us instead.”

Sharrow glared at him.

“So do we hike to whatever’s at the end of the fjord, or what?” Zefla said.

Sharrow nodded. “We’d better, or Elson and his boys’ll get there first.”

She took the two bike dials from her satchel. “Still pointing that way; range is down to just under a hundred klicks. If the maps were right and these are accurate, whatever they’re pointing at is at the head of the fjord.” She put the dials away again. “Or was.”

“Pity we lost the maps,” Dloan said, flexing his leg.

“Actually,” Feril said, holding up one hand tentatively. “I have remembered the map of the area.”

“Oh yeah?” Miz looked sceptically at the android. “So how far is it to the end of the fjord?”

“Hugging the coast, approximately eighty-nine kilometres,” the android told them. “Though there are a couple of sizeable rivers to be forded.”

“Two days in and two back.” Dloan said.

“If I may say,” the android began. They looked at it. “I could perhaps get there and back in about twenty hours.” It looked round them, then made an almost bashful shrugging motion.

“So Feril could scout ahead,” Zefla said. “But what do we do when the rest of us get there?”

“If we find the Lazy Gun,” Sharrow said, “we just make a phone call. When the Franchise forces come in to investigate, we take whatever they arrive in; aircraft probably.”

“Just like that?” Zefla said.

“We will have a Lazy Gun,” Miz said, grinning.

“And if the Gun is not there?” Feril asked.

Sharrow looked at the android. “Then we think again.” She picked up a length of branch and threw it into the smoking heart of the fire.

They kept near the edge of the trees as far as possible, ten metres or so from the shore. The interior of the forest was very quiet. The only noise they heard over those first few hours, while the early winter light faded gradually around them, was that of rushing water in the tumbling, rock-strewn streams they crossed, and the sound of branches and twigs breaking underfoot.

The floor of the forest was covered with old trees and rotting trunks; trees were tilted and canted at various angles, producing tangles they had to walk round. Clearings made by fallen trees bristled with new growth and afforded them glimpses of the grey and darkening sky.

“Kind of disorganised, isn’t it?” Miz said to Sharrow, ducking under a fallen trunk raised off the ground by the bowed trees nearby. “I thought forests were just trunks and a nice soft carpet of-shit!” The hood on his jacket snagged on a branch and almost pulled him off his feet. He released it and glared at Sharrow before continuing. “Trunks and a nice soft carpet of needles.”

She ducked under the trunk. “Those were plantations, Miz,” she told him. “This is forest; the real thing.”

“Well, it’s damn messy,” he said, brushing rotten wood out of his jacket hood. “Might as well be back in the fucking Entraxrln.” He looked around. “We’d have had a hard time getting through this lot with the ATs, anyway; might have had to stick to the shore, sats or not.” He slipped on a root hidden in the ground cover of needles and fallen twigs and staggered. He shook his head. “Fucking Solipsists.”

Sharrow smiled.

They camped when the light got too dim for them to see properly; they had two sets of nightsight glasses, but two people would still have to have gone without, and they couldn’t have travelled very quickly. They were anyway tired after only a couple of hours walking; they found a level area next to a stream, hidden from the other side of the fjord by the bank, and decided to stop there.

Sharrow changed the dressing on her cut hand. Dloan worked out how to pitch the thin emergency tent. Zefla looked for wood to make a fire. Miz sat on a stone and started unlacing his boots. His feet were sore; he’d been hobbling for the last half hour.

Feril put wood down by the circle of stones it had set in place, then attempted to help Dloan with the tent until the man shooed it away. It came and squatted near Miz.

“Damn boots,” Miz said, struggling to untie the laces. They seemed to have become tighter after they’d got wet. He’d thought the boots looked great in the store in Quay Beagh; really chunky and rugged and outdoorsy, in hide and with real laces, like something out of an ancient photograph, but now he was starting to wish he’d gone for a more modern pair with memory foam inserts, heater elements and quick release buckles. Of course, he hadn’t chosen his boots thinking he was actually going to be doing much walking in them.

“Don’t suppose you have this problem,” Miz grunted, glancing at the android as he pulled at his laces.

“Not really,” Feril said. “Though I do have pads on my feet that have to be replaced every few years.” It looked at its feet.

“What a fucking Fate-forsaken place,” Miz breathed, looking around the dark enclosure of trees.

Feril looked around. “Oh, I don’t know,” it said. “I think it’s rather beautiful.”

“Yeah,” Miz said, trying to tease one lace out from under another. “Well, maybe you see things differently.”

“Yes,” the android said. “I suppose I do.” It watched Zefla dump a load of wood onto the ground by the fire and then heap pieces into the centre of the stone circle. She used her laser pistol on low power and wide beam to dry and then ignite the twigs; they burned smokily.

“Hey,” Miz said to the android, looking embarrassed. “My fingers are getting cold. Could you give me a hand here?”

Feril said nothing as it came over to kneel before Miz and untie his bootlaces.

They sat round the fire in the black darkness of a deep forest under thick overcast, four hundred kilometres from the nearest sunlight-mirror footprint, street light or headlamp. They chewed on emergency army rations. They had enough for perhaps two more days.

“We’ll catch something tomorrow,” Miz said, chomping on a foodslab, looking round at the others, their faces seemed to move oddly in the flickering orange firelight. He nodded.

“Tomorrow we’ll shoot something big and have a proper roast, real meat.”

“Yuk,” said Zefla.

“We haven’t seen a damn thing so far,” Sharrow told him.

“Yeah,” Miz said, wagging the half-eaten foodslab at her. “But there must be all sorts of big game in these mountains. We’ll find something.”

“Excuse me,” Feril said from the top of the river bank, a couple of metres above them. Its metal and plastic face looked down at them, glinting in the firelight. It had volunteered to keep watch while they ate.

“Yes, Feril?” Sharrow said.

“What I believe is an inflatable boat has just left the far shore; it is heading this way.”

Dloan reached for the machine gun and stood up. He slipped on a pair of nightsight glasses.

“How far away is it?” Sharrow asked.

“A hundred metres or so out from the far shore,” Feril said.

“Let’s take a look,” Sharrow said.

They trooped down to the trees facing the shore, Dloan leading Zefla and Sharrow leading Miz, who tripped a couple of times on his undone laces. They lay on the ground; with the nightsights zoomed on infrared Sharrow and Dloan could just see the heat signature of the people in the inflatable.

Dloan found a boulder and rested the machine gun on it, its barrel pointing at nearly forty-five degrees.

“Should just about have the range,” he said. “Better get back,” he told the others, “just in case they have something that can home in on this.”

They fell back a little into the trees.

Dloan fired a dozen or so rounds, filling the night with sound and light; Sharrow had to turn the sights away, the fire was so bright. There were no tracers in the shells, but when she looked back she could see the tiny sparks of the bullets in the nightsights for about half their arcing journey over the fjord. As they cooled they disappeared.

“Just over them and to the left,” Feril called out.

Dloan adjusted his aim then fired again. They heard the sound of the gun echoing off mountains and cliffs far away.

A clatter and a snicking sound announced Dloan was changing magazines.

“Still a little to the left,” Feril said.

Dloan fired once more. Sharrow saw no alteration in the furry-looking image in the sight.

“Yes!” Feril said.

Dloan paused, fired again. “Right! To the right!” Feril shouted as Dloan fired. The gun fell silent.

“I believe they are in difficulties,” Feril said.

Sharrow watched the hazy image in the nightsight change; it grew smaller and eventually, after a minute or so, there was just the hint of a few tiny heat sources in the water.

“Their craft has sunk,” Feril announced. “They appear to be swimming back to shore.”

“Good shooting again,” Sharrow told Dloan.

“Hmm,” he said, sounding satisfied.

He came back up from the shore. Sharrow turned to go as Dloan passed them, then saw the android still staring at the far side of the fjord. She checked the glasses but ail they showed were the same few indistinct heat-glows against the grey clutter of the fjord’s cold waters.

She watched the android for a few moments. It didn’t seem to notice her. “Feril?” she said.

It turned to her. “Yes?”

“What is it?” she asked.

Miz made a tutting noise and took Zefla’s hand, to follow her following Dloan back to their camp.

“Oh,” the android said, after the briefest of pauses. It glanced back out to the dark waters. “I was just thinking; given that there appeared to be eight or nine people in the inflatable, and only seven are swimming back to shore, and what could well be one or two bodies are floating where the boat went down…” It turned to face her again. “… I believe I have just been party to a murder; two murders, perhaps.”

She was silent. The android looked back out to the water again, then back at her.

“How do you feel about that?” she asked.

It made a shrug. “I am not sure yet,” it said, sounding puzzled. “I shall have to think about it.”

She inspected its image in the nightsight.

This close up, people in a nightsight glowed vibrant and gaudy and obvious. The android was a vague light-sketch in comparison, its body only fractionally warmer than its surroundings.

“I’m sorry,” she said eventually.

“What for?” it asked her.

“Involving you in all this.”

“I was delighted to be asked,” it reminded her.

“I know,” she said, “but still.”

“Please, don’t be,” it told her. “This is all… extremely interesting for me. I am recording much of what has been happening recently at maximum saturation for later replay, enjoyment and analysis. I get to do that very rarely. It is novel. I am having fun.” It made a human gesture with its hands, lifting them briefly, palms up, from the sides of its body.

“Fun,” she said, smiling slightly.

“In a sense,” Feril said.

She shook her head, looking down at the faint, seeping warmth of the forest floor.

“Shall I make my reconnoitring expedition?” the android asked. “Shall I go to the head of the fjord?”

“Not yet,” she said. She turned to look at the weak, almost transparent signature of their fire’s column of rising smoke, thirty metres away in the forest. “I’d like you to keep watch tonight, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course not,” it said. Feril turned to look back at the fjord again. “You are worried that they still have another boat and may try to repeat the apparent attack we have just thwarted.”

“Exactly,” she smiled. “Spoken like one of the team.” She laughed lightly. “Well, sort of.”

Feril drew itself back a little. “Thank you,” it said. It nodded up the slope. “I shall keep watch from there, where I can see the fjord and the immediate vicinity.”

They walked that way. The android turned and sank down on its haunches at the point it determined gave it the best sight lines. “Ah ha,” it said.

She looked too.

There were two fires burning on the other side of the fjord; two tiny, hard-yellow specks vibrating in the granular darkness. She took the nightsights off and could still just see them from the side of her eyes.

She put the sights back on. “They’ve made more distance than we have,” she said.

“About three kilometres,” Feril said.

“Hmm,” she said. “We still have one heat-seeking missile left. We could give them an unpleasant good-night present.”

“Indeed,” Feril said. “Though the fires could be decoys.”

She watched the distant fires. “How far have they got to walk to the end of the fjord?”

“One hundred and nine kilometres,” Feril said. “There are two small fjords off the main one on their side.”

“Though they probably still have an inflatable.”

“Yes; they could use that to ferry themselves across the mouths of the side-fjords, though it might be vulnerable to attack with the machine gun.”

“Hmm,” she said, and yawned. “Oh well. Speaking personally, it’s time for bed.” She looked down into the hollow where the small tent lay inflated. It was supposedly comfortably two-person and could take three at a pinch. It was fit for four only if everybody was on very friendly terms indeed.

“Oh,” she said. “Would you like a gun while you’re on guard?”

“I think not.” Feril watched her yawn again. “Good-night, Lady Sharrow,” it said. It sounded very formal.

“Good-night,” she said.

Cenuij sat in the burning truck, looking baleful and sighing a lot. The flames and the exploding ammunition didn’t seem to harm him. He was cradling something in his arms wrapped in a shawl. She recognised the shawl; it was one of the family’s birthing shawls. She had been wrapped in that when she’d been a baby, as had her own mother, and hers before her… She wondered where Cenuij had got it, and worried that the baby inside the shawl might be harmed by the flames of the burning truck.

She shouted to Cenuij but he didn’t seem to hear her.

When she tried to move round the burning truck to look into the shawl and see who the baby was, Cenuij moved as well, swivelling and hunching up so that his shoulder hid the infant.

She threw something at him; it bounced off his head and he turned angrily; he threw the shawl and what it held straight at her and she put out her arms to catch it as the shawl unwrapped itself from the flying bundle and fell to the flames. It was the Lazy Gun she caught.

The shawl burned brightly in the wreckage, then lifted and rose flagrantly into the sky like a lasered bird.

She rocked the Gun in her arms, singing quietly.

She awoke to the stale, half-repellent, half-comforting smell of human bodies. She sat up and the dream faded from her memory. She felt stiff and tired; the seemingly soft ground under the tent had concealed rocks or roots or something that had made lying down uncomfortable, no matter what position she had assumed. Every time she had rolled over she had woken up, and-packed in amongst the others, sleeping equally lightly-she had probably woken them up each time too, just as they had her. She was cold on the side facing the flank of the tent; the single blanket they had between them had disappeared from over her early on in the night. She made a mental note in future to accept the boys’ offer to take the two outside positions. The plaster-covered wound on her hand throbbed dully.

She clambered over the others and opened the tent to a bitterly cold morning and the sound of wind roaring in the tree-tops. She stretched and grunted, feeling hungry and wondering what the hell they were going to use for toilet paper. Feril waved from its position at the top of the bank.

She replaced the plaster on her hand and poured more antiseptic over it, aware she was using up the supplies in the medical kit faster than she’d have liked.

It seemed to take a long time to get everybody up and moving and ready to set off; she had the dispiriting impression that the Solipsists, for all their martial eccentricity, would have been up at dawn and long since set out on their march; singing soldierly songs and beating drums, in her imagination.

They struck camp at last and headed away through the forest beneath the swaying, roaring tops of the trees. Their bellies rumbled. Breakfast had been a quarter of a foodslab each; they had seven of the bland but filling bars left.

The fjord was a wind-ruffled, sometimes white-flecked expanse of grey through the dark trunks to their right.

They walked through the day. It rained once for an hour, spattering light, torn drops through breaks in the canopy above. Miz wanted to stop and shelter, but they kept on going. They took turns to walk near the edge of the trees, keeping watch on the far shore, but didn’t see anything. They had spied a few birds, glimpsed movements high in tree branches and heard plenty of quick, tiny rustles in the undergrowth, but encountered no large animals.

Lunch was half a foodslab each, and all the icy stream water they could stomach. They had to drink from their cupped hands; Sharrow felt hers going numb after the second scoop. By the time she had finished drinking, the only thing she could feel was the cut in her left hand, still throbbing.

The android sat patiently by the stream. Zefla was down at the shore; Dloan had disappeared into the woods and Miz sat on an exposed root, re-tying his boots and grumbling.

She sat beside the android. Her feet were aching. “How far have we travelled so far, Feril?”

“Seventeen kilometres,” it replied.

“Seventy-two to go,” she said wearily. “Too slow. How long would it take you get to the end of the fjord and back now?”

“I estimate about sixteen hours,” it said.

She sat there, feeling hungry and dirty, itchy and foot-sore, her hand-wound nagging at her like toothache. The android looked just as it always had; at once delicate and powerful, smooth and hard. A few tree needles stuck to its lower legs, but otherwise its metal and plastic skin seemed unmarked.

“If you go,” she said, “you’d best take a gun.”

“If you think I ought to, I shall.”

“I think you ought to.”

“You will keep guard yourselves tonight?”

“We’ll set up some sort of rota.”

She talked to the others about Feril going on ahead. Miz was reluctant to part with a gun, and thought it risky giving the android the bike dials too, but it was agreed.

“Do be careful,” she told the android, presenting it with the dials. “We don’t know what’s up there, but whatever it is it’ll probably be well guarded.”

“Yeah,” said Miz. “Old automatics can end up getting pretty trigger-happy.”

“I shall be careful, believe me,” the android said.

Sharrow put her good hand on its shoulder. The plastic-covered metal was cold to the touch. “Good luck.”

“Thank you,” it said. “I shall see you tomorrow.” It turned and set off, the dials and a small laser pistol clutched to its chest. It ran quickly and gracefully away between the tree trunks, the pale pads on its feet dully flashing in the forest gloom. It disappeared.

“Hope we really can trust that thing,” Miz said.

“It could have murdered us all in our sleep last night if it had wanted to,” Zefla told him.

“It’s not that simple though, is it?” Miz said, looking at Sharrow, who shrugged.

“It’s become simpler since the vehicles were destroyed,” she said. “We’ll see what Feril finds up there.”

“If he comes back,” Miz said, hoisting the small back-pack.

“Oh, stop whining,” Sharrow said, turning to follow the android. “Come on.”

She fell asleep during her watch that night, waking from a dream of fire and death in which she and Cenuij walked hand in hand through a terrible silent pitch-darkness to the noise of thunder and the flickering pulse of lightning amongst the clouds and summits on the far side of the fjord.

Cold rain, that had been warm blood in her dream, spattered her face. The tree she was leaning against creaked and groaned in the wind, lusty and furious in the canopy above.

She shivered and stood up, feeling stiff and sore. A headache pounded dully over her eyes. She looked around to check that all was well. The fjord was a rough, wind-whipped surface visible between the tree trunks. At least the weather made another water-borne attack by the Solipsists unlikely.

The tent, behind her in a little dip in the ground, glowed with a soft, enveloping warmth. She looked at the time display in the nightsight. Still an hour before she could wake Miz and claim her place between the other two sleepers.

She walked around a little, trying to keep awake and warm. Her swollen hand pulsed regular messages of pain up her arm. The rain tumbled through the branches in great gathered drops, plopping onto her cap and shoulders and wetting her face. The camouflaged fatigues were waterproof, but dribbles had snuck down her neck, perhaps while she’d been asleep; she could feel them insinuating their way down her back and between her breasts with a cold, unwelcome intimacy.

She sat on a fallen trunk, looking out at the spray-shredded surface of the fjord and listening to the gusting wind charging out of the dark, thick-clouded night. The rain cleared for a while, revealing details on the far side of the fjord, so that she was able to look out to where the Solipsists’ fires had burned that night. That pair of fierce specks had glittered through the evening like baleful eyes from the depths of an ancient myth, and-despite the fact that the shore the Solipsists were travelling on had looked more rugged and indented than their own had been that day-they had burned still further ahead than they had the night before.

A great gust of wind shook the trees above her, dislodging drops that struck her face. She wiped them from the nightsight lenses with the heel of her good hand.

Where the Solipsists’ twin fires had blazed against the steep dark mat of forest there was only one faint image left now; a last dying memory of warmth in the loud surrounding night, like one of those eyes slowly closing, the life within it going out.

She watched that hazy, uncertain image and-for all that it was the product and symbol of people who had for no good reason she could discern suddenly become her enemies-she willed that distant, ember memory to prevail against the leaching cold that made her teeth ache and her body shiver, and against the laws that ran the universe and the system and the world and every thing and body within it; the laws of decay, consumption, exhaustion and death.

Then the rain came again, brushing its way up the fjord in tall sheets, and by that interposing sweep extinguished-if not the fading embers themselves-the projected image of that fire in her eyes.

21 A Short Walk

“But what’s he like?”

“Oh… Attractive, I suppose.”

“What? Tallish, darkish, handsomish? Hunkish?”

“All of the above. Well, maybe not hunkish… But that’s not it; it’s his… manner. When you hear him, it sounds like something between philosophy and politics, and even if you don’t agree with what he’s saying you can’t help being impressed by the way he says it. It’s as though he knows even more than he’s saying, knows everything, but still really needs your approval, your agreement for it to be true, and you just can’t help but give it. You feel flattered, privileged… seduced.

“It looked like there was a big but vague organisation there; something that had grown up organically around him. And even though most of the people I saw were young, there were plenty of older people there too, and I got the impression he was talking to the establishment on the Ghost; maybe beyond. But he was just an amazing person.”

“Obviously,” Zefla said, smiling at her as they walked.

It was cold. The weather had turned just before dawn, the heavy rain clouds blowing away before a chill, clear sky that had shed moonlight and sparse junklight on the forested mountains of the fjord, coating them in silent silver. Then Thrial had risen, casting a rich glow like pink gold down the fjord.

After a miserably small breakfast which had left them all hungry, and with only a quarter of a foodslab left each, Miz and Dloan had decided to make a serious effort to kill something edible for lunch. The two men had set off uphill when they broke camp that morning, hoping to find game in the higher forest.

Sharrow and Zefla walked through patches of frost and puddles skinned with brittle crusts of thin, glass-clear ice. Their breath smoked in the air.

Sharrow felt spacey and vague and slightly numb; she kept shivering, even though she didn’t really feel cold. She put it down to lack of food. She felt ashamed at how pampered she had become; she hadn’t realised how much simple things like toilet paper and a toothbrush meant to her, and felt demeaned that their absence could assume such significance.

Her hand throbbed dully inside her glove; she had taken some painkillers. She hadn’t changed the plaster that morning because the hand had swelled up during the night and it hurt too much when she’d tried taking the glove off. She’d decided just to let it be; perhaps it would get better of its own accord.

“Probably end up as one of those sordid cult leaders,” Zefla said after a while as they plodded into a bare area of the forest where a fire had left thousands of tree trunks standing upright and bare, black posts already surrounded by slender young trees forcing their way towards the sky around them. “You know, pedalling some weird concoction of re-tread gibberish and living in a palace while their. followers sleep shifts and work the streets and give you this big flatline smile when you tell them where to stuff their tracts.”

“No,” Sharrow said, shaking her head (and felt dizzy when she did that, and stumbled on a blackened branch crusted with white). “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen to this guy, not at all.”

Zefla looked at Sharrow as they walked, an expression of concern on her face. “You all right?” she asked.

“Hungry!” Sharrow laughed. She nodded to herself, breathing deeply in the chill air and staring up at the blue expanse above. “How about you?”

“Never better,” Zefla said, scratching through her gathered-up hair to her itchy scalp. “Could use a shower, though.” She took another look at Sharrow as she stumbled again. “Maybe we’ll take another rest soon.”

“Yes,” Sharrow said, shaking her head briefly as though trying to clear it. “Why not?”

They tramped amongst the fresh young trees and the burned dead.

Sharrow and Zefla stopped in a small clearing near the shore to eat the last of their food, then waited for Miz and Dloan to rejoin them. Sharrow continued to deny there was anything wrong with her, then fell fast asleep, propped against a tree trunk. Zefla was worried; she thought Sharrow looked ill. Her grey, drawn face twitched as Zefla watched, and her lips worked.

Zefla looked up at the mountain slopes. She was surprised they hadn’t heard any shots. She left Sharrow to sleep and went down to the shingle beach. She left her little back-pack there, so that Miz and Dloan wouldn’t walk past them. Then she went back to sit with Sharrow.

The men arrived an hour later. They were both limping; Dloan from the bullet wound he’d received the night Cenuij had died, Miz from the combination of hard boots and soft feet.

They were empty-handed. Zefla thought they had brought something, but it was only the back-pack she’d left on the shingle. They had shot at a few birds with their laser pistols and killed one, but it had been crawling with parasites when they’d picked it up and they hadn’t thought it was worth eating. They still hadn’t seen any large animals, though they had heard impressive bellowing noises from still further upslope.

“Fish,” Miz said, as he and Dloan tore into the last of their foodslabs and Sharrow looked sleepily at them, frowning and rubbing her left glove. “We’ll do some fishing.” He grinned at the others. “Fish; we’ll eat fish tonight.” He patted the pocket of his fancy hunting jacket that held the fishing gear.

They heard what sounded like gunfire just as they were setting off again; a distance-dulled crackle that seemed to come from further down the fjord in the direction they were heading.

They ran to the shore and stood there, gazing down the fjord.

“Shit,” Miz said. “Wonder what that means?”

Nobody suggested anything.

They had been walking for about an hour when they saw Feril jogging towards them through the trees.

“Welcome back,” Zefla said. Sharrow just stood there, smiling at the android.

“Thank you,” Feril said. It still had the dials and the laser they had given it; it presented both to Zefla.

“So?” Miz asked it.

“I have been to the end of the fjord,” the android began.

“Let’s walk and listen at the same time, eh?” Zefla said.

They hiked on; Feril walked backwards in front of them without once putting a foot wrong, which was an unsettling but also rather impressive sight.

“The ground between here and the end of the fjord,” it told them, “is similar to that you have already traversed. There are two sizeable streams to be crossed, one of which has a fallen tree across it and so is quite easy, the second of which is more difficult and has to be waded. There is a place where one must either cross a very exposed beach only a kilometre or so from a point on the far side, or make a four or five kilometre detour round some cliffs.”

“What did you do?” Zefla asked.

“On my outward journey,” Feril told her. “I crossed the beach without incident; on my return I again started to cross the beach. But then I was fired upon.” Its upper body did a quarter turn to show a bullet graze on one shoulder. It kept on walking. “I returned fire with the laser pistol but then decided that my position was too exposed, and entered the water. I completed that part of the journey crawling along just under the ford’s surface.”

Zefla smiled. Miz shook his head. Dloan looked vaguely impressed. Sharrow just blinked and said, “Hmm.”

“Where is this beach?” Dloan asked.

“About ten kilometres from here.”

Dloan nodded. “We heard the gunfire.”

“So they’re that much further ahead?” Zefla said.

“I believe only a sniper has been left on the point opposite the beach,” Feril said. “I think I saw the main body of the Solipsists earlier, about another three kilometres further down the fjord, ferrying themselves across the mouth of a side-fjord in an inflatable boat. I attempted to fire on the boat, but the range was approximately four kilometres and I was not able to observe any effect.”

Dloan shook his head understandingly.

“So,” Miz said, “what have we got to look forward to apart from finding the Solipsists there first?”

“There are no more major obstacles after the beach I mentioned, though there is a small hill to be climbed, avoiding a cliff which is sheer to the water. The end of the fjord has many small islands and rocks, starting from about ten kilometres or so from its head; I believe these are why the flying boat did not simply land immediately. The end of the fjord is quite sudden; there is no significant narrowing, just the islands and then an almost straight length of shore in front of a marshy plain, which looks as though it is the result of land reclamation.

“The Gun is, I believe, in a stone tower. The tower is approximately fifteen metres high and seven metres in diameter and topped with a hemispherical black dome of indeterminate substance. It stands in the centre of a stone square about fifty metres to a side; the square has a circular wall half a metre high built upon it which just touches the mid-point of each edge of the square, and a metre-high stone post at each corner. A small river delta forms the far boundary of the square; on this side there is a field of tall rushes.

“The stone tower is surrounded by numerous human bodies, pieces of equipment and debris; these are mostly within the circular stone wall. From the state of decay involved, I would estimate that some of the bodies and pieces of debris have been there for many decades. The most recent bodies in the vicinity appear to be those of two young men I took to be Solipsists by their uniforms. Both bodies were attached to parachutes; one lay against the inside of the circular wall, his parachute snagged on a small tree just outside the square; the other parachutist appeared to have been dragged for some distance through the rushes before being stopped by rocks, and I was able to determine that he had been killed by some form of laser device which had removed his head. It had also left a hole in his chest and another in his groin, consistent with a sixty-millimetre beam. I deduced that the dome on top of the tower housed such a device, perhaps along with the concomitant detection and tracking equipment it would require.”

“Amazing deduction,” muttered Miz. He glanced at Sharrow but she didn’t seem to have heard.

“I noticed,” Feril continued, “that the few birds which overflew the area kept well away from the tower, though there were avian bodies of various species distributed around it, along with those of numerous small animals. Insects appeared to be tolerated. I conducted a brief experiment with pieces of wood, and found that anything moving within twenty-five metres of the centre of the tower with a frontal area greater than approximately two square centimetres will be attacked by the tower’s defences. I believe this to be a powerful X-ray laser, though the beam used on the pieces of wood I threw into this zone was considerably smaller than those which had killed the two Solipsist parachutists. I also noticed that when the dead parachutist resting against the inside of the wall moved-when his parachute was caught by a gust of wind-the beam that hit him was narrow and attenuated, and one of several dozen or so which had seemingly hit him after his death while he was presumably in the same state of morbid mobility.”

“Well,” Sharrow said. “Sounds good news and bad.” She looked distracted, grimacing as she rubbed at her left glove. “Let’s assume whatever’s in the tower is… intact, but-”

“But how the hell do we get in when nobody else has?” Miz said, kicking at a rotten branch in his way.

“Ah,” the android said. It held up one finger. “I mentioned the stone posts at each corner of the square.”

“Yes?” Zefla said.

“Beneath a cover on the top of each post,” Feril said, “there is a hand-lock plate; a security device in the shape of a doublethumbed hand. From their construction I would say that they are designed to react to some chemical or genetic trigger rather than the more usual handprint-pattern. At least two of these posts appear to be operational, the other two having been partially dismantled. All four bear the legend, ‘Female Line’.”

Sharrow stopped; they all did.

Zefla looked at her. “Sounds like Gorko again,” she said. “Might just switch the thing off for you, eh, kid?”

Sharrow was staring at her feet. Then she looked up at Zefla and seemed to shake, and then smiled and nodded. “Yes,” she said. She gazed at her left hand, holding it awkwardly. “Yes, it might.”

“So even if the Solipsists do get there first,” Miz said, “they won’t be able to do anything.”

“Yeah,” Zefla said. “But if they do get there before we do, they can make it impossible for us to do anything either.”

Sharrow swayed, blinking, trying to think. There was something else, too. So hard to think.

Zefla looked at Feril. “When will you have to set off if you’re to rendezvous with the sub?”

(Yes, that’s it, Sharrow thought.)

“In about thirty hours,” Feril said.

Zefla nodded, looking at Sharrow. “Onward?” she asked.

Sharrow swallowed. “Onward,” she said.

Her hand hurt. She felt hungry and nauseous at the same time. She recalled Miz talking about eating fish and suddenly her mouth filled with saliva as she remembered the taste of spiced, blackened fish. That had been in Shouxame, in Tile, many years ago. She had sat at the rough wooden tables with the others, beneath the lanterns and the firecracker strings and the glow-ropes. They had eaten fish caught in the lake that afternoon and drunk a lot of wine; then she and Miz had gone to bed, and then while they were making love the firecrackers had gone off, and she was there again, in the hotel in Malishu, on the bed under the membrane roof in front of the tall mirrors, but even as she thought about that something dragged her further onwards, transported her forward and back at the same time, to that quiet hotel in the mountains, with the view over the hills and the windows opened to the cool breeze which blew the gauzy white curtains softly in and made her skin tingle and dried her sweat and gave Miz cold bumps, and her hands stroked him, fingers stroked him, smoothing the skin on his back and his flanks and shoulders and behind and chest, urging him, controlling him, moving him, and he was a beautiful grey shape above her in the first hint of dawn, and a slowly pulsing presence inside her, a soft-hard rocking nudging her closer and closer to an edge like the edge of the balcony, grey-pink stone through the haze of curtains, shoving and nuzzling and pressing her closer and closer, his breath and her breath like the noise of surf, so that she remembered building sand-castles on the shore once when she was young.

Breyguhn and she; they had each built a castle and made it as high and as strong as they could, right alongside each other; they had each put a paper flag on top of the tallest tower of their castles, and waited to see whose castle would collapse first; the two-moon tide had come in strong and fast and the waves beat at the walls they had each built, and she had seen her own castle start to crumble at the edges, but knew she had built better and had really been watching Breyguhn’s, willing the waves to hit the base of that sea-facing wall, and watched wave after wave after wave hit the sand, bringing the wall to the point of crumbling but not quite undermining it sufficiently, and slowly an incredible sensation of expectation and frustration had built up in her chest and belly, along with a fury that the sea could so nearly hand her victory but then hold back-as the power and strength of the waves seemed to ebb briefly, and no more damage was done-and started to believe that it was never going to happen, that neither castle was ever going to fall, but then seen the waves come strongly in again, breaking and surging and sucking at the castles’ walls, and then finally, finally, finally, with a sudden last pulsed rush of waves-waves that went on and on, piling into the sand when the thing was done and the contest decided-the whole wall of Breyguhn’s castle collapsed and fell, tipping out and breaking in the air and disintegrating into the waves, turning them golden brown as the surf fell tumbling over the wreckage and burst against the rough vulnerability of the sand revealed inside, and smoothed that and slipped back and surged forward again and smoothed and slipped and smoothed and slipped and smoothed, tumbling Breyguhn’s tower and flag into the water.

But then the light had flared, beautiful and terrifying, sublime and sickening, erupting over the beach and the mountains as the burst, glittering ship spun end over end towards the cold planet where she fell forever to the snow; a snow-flake amidst the fall.

There had been another night when she slept badly, trying to curl up round her injured hand, holding the thing to her like a treasure and trying to will the pain to stop and let her sleep until eventually she fell into a kind of coma from sheer exhaustion, a semi-sleep in which she dreamt of the distant sparks of the two fires on the other side of the fjord, so far in front of them now that they could only just be glimpsed with the naked eye, flickering through the trees. She had thought she’d heard Cenuij calling to them from the trees ahead, but at least he hadn’t actually appeared in her dream.

Then she was woken with the others to the freezing cold of another day when the floor of grey flat water and the ceiling of grey flat clouds were shackled together by chains of sleet, and in the clear spells between the hail and the sleet showers they could see that the mountain tops were covered in white.

She marched on, talking with the others and to herself and getting hungrier and thinking about food and wishing her hand would stop hurting, and telling the others she was fine even though she wasn’t. They took the detour the android had suggested, around the beach in front of the cliff, near the point on the other side of the fjord, then crossed the first of the two large streams the android had warned them about by going across a fallen tree. Miz cut some branches off it with a laser to make the traverse easier but still she almost fell.

The forest was a cold, dark, damp place and she hated it. She hated her hand for hurting and her belly for being empty and her head for being dizzy and sore and her anus and vagina for itching and her eyes for not focusing and her brain for not working properly.

The android carried her across the second stream, the cold water washing round its chest.

They walked on as the weather cleared a little then got even colder while dark, tall clouds built up to windward and started towards them. Sometime about then she began to forget which day this was and where exactly they were and what they were looking for and why they were looking for it.

Plodding on became everything; her being became centred on the in-out ebb and flow of breath, the thud-thudding of her feet hitting the ground one after another and the lifting, dropping, lifting, dropping motion of her legs, sending vibrations up through her that she received as though from far away and in slow motion. Even her voice sounded distant and not really hers. She listened to herself answer the things the others asked her, but she didn’t know what it was she was saying and she didn’t really care; only the onwardness of walking mattered, only that slow thud-thudding that was her feet and her heart and the wounding pulse of her poisoning pain.

She was alone. She was quite alone. She walked a frozen shore in the middle of nothing, with only the solitude to stalk her either side, and she began to wonder whether she really was a Solipsist, the traitor amongst them.

A brain in a body; a collection of cells in a collection of cells, making its way in a menagerie of other cell-collections, animal and vegetable, wandering the same rough globe with their own share of its dumb cargo of minerals and chemicals and fluids carried strapped and trapped in and by that cage of cells-temporarily-always part of it but always utterly alone.

Like Golter; like poor, poor Golter.

It had found itself alone and it had spread itself as far as it could and produced so much, but it was still next to nothing.

They had grown up-had they only known it-in one room of an empty house. When they began to understand it was a house, they had thought there must be others nearby; they had thought perhaps they were in the suburbs, or even a well-hidden part of the city, but though they had colonised those other rooms, they had looked out from their furthest windows and tallest skylights and found-to their horror, and a horror only their own increased understanding made them fully able to appreciate-that they were truly alone.

They could see the nebulae, beautiful and distant and beckon-ing, and could tell that those faraway galaxies were composed of suns, other stars like Thrial, and even guess that some of those suns too might have planets round them… but they looked in vain for stars anywhere near their own.

The sky was full of darkness. There were planets and moons and the tiny feathery whorls of the dim nebulae, and they had themselves filled it with junk and traffic and emblems of a thousand different languages, but they could not create the skies of a planet within a galaxy, and they could not ever hope, within any frame of likelihood they could envisage existing, to travel to anywhere beyond their own system, or the everywhere-meaningless gulf of space surrounding their isolated and freakish star.

For a distance that was never less than a million light years in any direction around it, Thrial-for all its flamboyant dispersion of vivifying power and its richly fertile crop of children planets-was an orphan.

There was this wall. She was coming slowly up to this flat wall. The wall was white and grey and studded with little round stones; to one side there was a larger boulder shaped like a giant door handle. She wondered if the wall was really a door. Somehow, she was sure that Cenuij was on the other side. She could see ice and frost on it. The wall was coming closer all the time and seemed to be very tall; she didn’t think she’d be able to see the top. It kept advancing towards her even though she was sure she had stopped walking. Walking had been everything for longer than she could remember; it had been her universe, her existence, her whole reason for being, but then she had stopped and yet here was this wall coming towards her. Very close now; she could see frozen trickles of water between the small stones, and what might have been small, frosted plants. She looked for Cenuij’s eye, peeking through at her from the other side. Somebody else must have noticed the wall because she thought she heard a shout from somewhere far away.

The wall slammed into her. There seemed to be a safety rail. Her head hit the wall anyway, and everything went dark.

The android saw her falling and rushed forward as Miz shouted out. It couldn’t hope to save her properly, but it was just close enough to stretch out a leg and get a foot under her upper chest, slowing her descent just a little before her falling weight took her down and she fell to the stony beach and lay there, face down and still.

Feril hopped once, unbalanced, then knelt with the others as they gathered quickly around her.

“Is she hurt?” Miz said, as Zefla and Dloan gently rolled her over. There was a small graze on her cheek and another on her forehead. Her face looked old and puffed. Her mouth opened slackly. Miz took her right glove off and rubbed her hand. Feril touched her left glove.

“She’s lying in this water,” Zefla said. “Let’s get her to the trees.”

They took her into the forest and laid her down. Feril ran its fingers over the taut left glove again. “There appears to be something wrong with her hand,” it said.

The others looked at the glove. “She did cut her hand a couple of days ago,” Zefla said. Dloan tried to undo the glove.

They had to cut it eventually. Her hand was bloated and discoloured; the original wound oozed from beneath a small, sopping plaster. Miz made a face.

Zefla drew her breath in. “Oh, oh,” she said. “Oh, you silly thing…” She touched the swollen skin. Sharrow moaned.

Dloan drew his laser, opened the grip and adjusted the controls.

“What’s that for?” Miz asked, staring at the weapon.

Dloan closed the grip again, turned and fired the gun into the needle litter at his feet; a tiny, continuous red ember burned. Dloan seemed satisfied and clicked the beam off.

“Poison,” Dloan said, gently taking Sharrow’s wounded hand and laying it as flat as possible on the ground. “Antiseptic? Dressing?” he said.

Zefla was rummaging in Sharrow’s satchel. “Here,” she said.

“Might wake her up,” Dloan said, kneeling so that he could hold Sharrow’s hand securely. “Want to hold her down?”

“Shit,” Miz said, and took her feet. Feril held her other hand and pinned her shoulders; Zefla smoothed her hand over Sharrow’s forehead.

Dloan pointed the laser pistol at Sharrow’s wounded hand and pressed the trigger. The flesh spotted, blackened and split, parting like the skin of rotten fruit. Sharrow moaned and stirred as the liquid inside spilled out, sputtering and steaming under the laser’s power. Miz looked away.

Zefla rocked back and forth, stroking Sharrow’s forehead and cheeks; Dloan grimaced and screwed his eyes up as the fumes bubbling from the wound reached him; but kept the laser pointed at her hand, lengthening the incision. The android looked on, fascinated, while the moaning woman moved weakly beneath him.

They built a fire. Zefla had a last lump of foodslab left she’d been saving; they warmed it with the laser and tried to get Sharrow to eat it. They used a laser to heat some water in the hollow of a stone, soaked a bandana in it and got her to suck at it. Her face seemed to grow less puffy, and her breathing became slower and deeper. She passed from unconsciousness to something more like sleep. The smell of antiseptic spread around the hollow.

They had travelled only ten kilometres from their last camp; they still had thirty left to travel to the tower at the head of the fjord. Feril thought that given the state of the ground on the far side of the fjord the Solipsists might be significantly delayed; but it would be close-run thing, and while it could carry Sharrow until the next camp it would have to leave soon after darkness if it was to get back to the mouth of the fjord in time to attempt to make contact with the submarine.

“We don’t really have much choice, I guess,” Miz said. He still felt ill after watching what they’d done to Sharrow’s infected hand. His feet ached and his stomach felt like it was eating itself; he was light-headed and shivery with hun-ger. He couldn’t stop thinking about food. But at least the pain of walking helped take his mind off his empty belly.

“You’re sure you can carry her safely?” Zefla asked Feril.

“Yes.”

“I could kiss you,” Dloan said.

The android paused. “Thank you,” it said.

“Okay,” Zefla said. She lifted the satchel. “Let’s go.”

The small group of people walked along the cold, grey shore under a dark, lowering sky. The tall leading figure walked lightly, even gracefully, but the one following looked too slight to carry the burden in its arms as easily as it appeared to, and the last two in the group were limping.

Above them, a sky the colour of gun-metal shook free the first few tiny flakes of snow.

Elson Roa watched from the top of a bluff through a pair of high-power binoculars. He saw the leading figure of the group on the far side of the fjord take an object from a satchel and stop briefly while they examined it. Then they replaced the object in the bag.

Roa switched the field-glasses’ stabilisers off and listened to their slowly dying whine as the air above the waters of the fjord began to fill with snow, wiping the view out in a swirling grey turmoil of silence. The sniper at his side checked the range read-out on her rifle again and shook her head, tutting.

Roa looked behind him to where his comrades stood, healthy and alert and waiting. A little snow drifted out of the dull expanse of cloud hanging between the mountains and settled gently on their dirtied but still gaudy uniforms.

They moved through a limited world; the falling snow obliterated everything save for a circle perhaps ten metres in diameter consisting of forest-edge, rocky shore and flat water. The patch of the fjord’s black surface they could see specked continually with white flakes that vanished the instant they touched that darkness. No waves beat. Where the snow-flakes touched the ground, they sat amongst the rocks and pebbles for a brief moment, then melted. The sky was gone, brought down to an indeterminate low ceiling where the mass of grey-white flakes became a single cloud of chaotic, cluttering movement.

Feril followed Zefla Franck, putting its feet where hers had gone. Sharrow was a slight burden in its arms; her extra weight meant that it had to lean back a little as it walked to keep its centre of balance vertical, but it could continue like this indefinitely if it had to. It kept looking around even though there was little enough to see. It maintained its audio sweep, listening for anything unusual.

They had pulled the hood of Sharrow’s jacket up over her face when they’d set off; when Feril looked down at one point it saw that the hood had fallen back, and flakes of snow were falling onto her sleeping face. The soft white scraps touched her cheeks and became tiny patches of moistness. Where they fell on her eyelashes, they lasted long enough for the android to be able to see the shape of the individual crystals, before each unique shape was dissolved by the heat of her body and flowed into the skin around her eyes like tears.

Feril watched for a moment and then pulled the hood back up, sheltering her.

Zefla Franck was leaving footprints now; the snow swarming from the closed and heavy sky was beginning to lie, collecting flake by tiny flake on the rocks and pebbles and the rough-surfaced trunks of the trees at the forest’s hem and building small bridges of softness over crevices and rivulets, which had begun to freeze.

The shore became too steep and the snow too heavy; they returned to the forest, walking among the trees in a scarcened filter of flakes, enlivened every now and again as a clump of snow fell suddenly from the canopy above through the branches to the forest floor.

Zefla cut through the tangles and fallen branches they encoun-tered with her laser, leaving the charred smell of burned wood curling behind on a cloud of smoke and steam.

Sharrow made occasional small, whimpering noises and moved in Feril’s arms.

They walked on until it became too dark to see, then stopped to rest. Sharrow slept on, Zefla sat still, Miz complained about his feet and Dloan offered to take Sharrow. Feril said there was no need. Then they walked on, all but Dloan equipped with nightsights. He followed just behind Miz. The falling snow thinned, then thickened again.

Feril could see Zefla Franck’s previously well-balanced gait becoming ragged and clumsy, and hear Miz Gattse Kuma’s wheezing, laboured breathing behind. Dloan slipped and fell twice. They were only about nine kilometres from the head of the fjord, but the ground ahead was rough and much of it was uphill. It suggested they stopped and made camp.

They sat, exhausted, on a fallen trunk. Sharrow lay across their laps, her head cradled in Zefla’s arms. Feril found wood and used a laser to light the fire. It erected the tent for them, too. They put Sharrow inside; Zefla wrapped her in the blanket. Miz and Dloan sat at the fire.

“I could go on the last nine thousand metres with Lady Sharrow,” it told them, once they had gathered round the fire. “Even if she does not wake up, her palm, applied to one of the tower’s stone square’s posts, might well open the tower up.”

None of them seemed to have the strength to reply; they just stared at the flames of the fire. Snow-flakes fell towards it, then were caught in the updraft and whirled away. The snow seemed to be thinning again.

“Alternatively,” Feril told them, “I could return to the coast and signal the submarine. Though I’d have to leave now.”

“Or you could stay here on guard,” Zefla said from the tent, putting Sharrow’s satchel under her head as a pillow.

“Or he could head for the tower again,” Dloan said. “With a gun, he might be able to hold off the Solipsists for a while.”

“I still think we should get word to outside,” Miz said. “Get the sub to call up some air support. Hell, the Security Franchise people didn’t bother about Roa’s fucking great flying boat, and one lousy fighter-bomber would be all we’d need.”

“Nobody sane would take it on,” Zefla said, after satisfying herself that Sharrow was comfortable. She hunkered down on the other side of the fire, her voice sounding faraway, distorted by the column of heated air rising between them. “So, we need to get word to outside, we need a guard tonight, and we need to guard the tower, too, to prevent Roa getting to it first.”

“All these things are possible,” Feril said. “What would you like me to do?”

They all looked at each other; and they each glanced at Sharrow, a bundled shape in the tent.

“Vote,” Zefla said. “I say… oh, guard the tower.”

Dloan nodded. “Me too.”

Miz made a tutting noise and looked away.

“Feril?” Zefla said.

“Yes?” It looked at her.

“What about you?”

“What-? Oh, I abstain.”

Zefla glanced back at the tent. “Guard the tower it is.”

They gave the android a laser pistol; the snow had stopped and the sky was clearing.

The fjord was pure black. A clear blue light came down from Maidservant, gibbous in the sky above; it coated the mountains and the dozens of small, snow-covered islands with a ghostly silver. Junklight sparkled in the northern skies, towards the equator. There were no fires on the far side of the water.

The android flitted away into the trees, silent and quick.

22 The Silent Tower

Zefla awoke in the middle of the night, her bladder full. She had tried to stave off the hunger pangs by drinking quantities of water made from snow they’d melted. Miz had talked about doing some night-fishing through a hole in a frozen stream, but then fallen asleep.

Snuggled down between the warmth of Dloan and Sharrow, she didn’t want to get out of the tent but knew she’d have to. She checked on Sharrow, who seemed to be breathing peacefully, then got up as carefully as she could, extricating herself from the others and wriggling her way out through the tent door. Somebody-probably Miz-lying cradling the machine gun murmured behind her, and she whispered, “Sorry!”

The fire was still glowing. It was light enough for her to see without a nightsight. She walked downhill through the quiet carpet of snow and squatted amongst the trees near the shore. The night was still and cold and clear. She heard a couple of muffled crumping noises in the distance, and guessed it was snow falling off trees.

She got up, fastening her fatigues. Steam filmed up from beneath her, just visible in the moonlight. Maidservant stood big and silver above the mountains on the other side of the fjord; it would be disappearing soon. She looked at it all for a few moments, thinking how beautiful this place was, and wishing the ache in her muscles and the hunger and the steady gnawing fear in her guts would vanish and let her enjoy it.

She turned and made her way back towards the camp.

The two figures were about twenty metres from the tent. They wore matt-black suits which covered their faces, and they each held small hand guns. They were creeping slowly closer to the tent, coming from the direction of the fjord head down a small ridge.

Her mind raced. Her gun was in the tent. The two figures hadn’t fired yet though they were well within range and must have realised there was no guard posted. They didn’t seem to have seen her. If she simply shouted, rousing Miz and Dloan, the two figures might shoot straight into the tent.

She shrank back and ducked, then ran downhill and curved round to get behind them. She tried to go as quietly as she could, slipping twice on buried roots but not making any appreciable noise. She found the rear of the ridge and ran up it, crouching.

The two black figures were right in front of her, still creeping toward the tent. She stayed where she was for a moment, getting her breath back, keeping her mouth wide so that her breathing didn’t make a noise.

The two figures were separating; one stayed where he was, crouched on one knee, gun pointed at the tent, while the other started to circle.

Zefla drew both her gloves off, placed them on the snow and crept down towards the kneeling figure, her hands out in front of her. There was a tickling feeling in her throat, probably because she’d been breathing hard. Fate, girl, she told herself, this is no time to cough, or sneeze, or get the hiccups… She got within five metres of the crouching figure, then something in the fire collapsed with a snap and a cloud of orange sparks swirled into the air.

She froze. So did the person circling round to the front of the tent. If they turned to look at the kneeling figure in front of her, they’d be bound to see her. She wasn’t close enough to make a dive for the kneeling figure. She watched the one near the tent, her heart thudding.

The circling figure kept its gaze on the tent, then moved slowly closer. Zefla relaxed fractionally and crept on towards the kneeling figure, her breath silent. The tickle in her throat wasn’t so bad now. Four metres; she would get to the kneeling figure with the gun before the other one got to the tent; three metres.

The snow fell from a tree immediately behind her without any warning.

She heard it, started to straighten as she thought there might have been another attacker behind her, then-realising, but knowing it was too late-pounced, shouting, at the man in front of her as he whirled round, bringing the gun up and firing as he rolled.

Miz had woken from a dream. He had been aware of somebody getting out of the tent. He felt stiff and sore and incredibly hungry. He still had the machine gun in his arms. He started to ease his arms and shoulders into a different position, then heard a whooshing, thumping noise, followed immediately by a scream and two shots. He tore the tent entrance open to see a black-suited figure right in front of him looking to one side, then turning to point a gun at him.

He had gone to sleep dreaming about this; his thumb flicked the safety an instant before his finger pressed the trigger. The gun shuddered and roared in his arms, trying to burrow back down past him and blowing the figure outside backwards, gun firing up into the trees.

Miz threw himself out of the tent. He felt Dloan follow.

There was a body lying in the snow, and an impression of move-ment downslope. Miz ran after the fleeing figure. The black-suited figure dropped the hand gun it had been carrying, dived into the water, swam for a few seconds then dived, disappearing in a black swirl of moonlit water.

Miz raised the machine gun and sighted at where the black suit had disappeared, then raised the gun a fraction. After a few moments there was a hint of turbulence to one side of where he was aiming; he corrected and fired, moving the gun around as though stirring the distant, fountaining water. The magazine ran out and the gun fell silent.

He remembered the nightsight and clipped it on. The body in the water floated darkly, oozing warmth.

Miz let the machine gun drop to the ground, then picked it up and started walking back up to the tent, shaking. He had just realised: the body on the snow had been wearing fatigues, and Zefla hadn’t been in the tent.

A sickness worse than any hunger grew in his belly as he walked, then ran, back up the slope to the tent.

Sharrow had woken with the noise, still groggy; then she saw Zefla’s pale, slackly unconscious face, and the blood oozing from the wounds in her chest and head.

Now their earlier roles were reversed and Sharrow knelt in the tent, tending to the shallow-breathing, trembling Zefla. Dloan looked on, his body shaking more than his sister’s. He held her hand, staring at her face, his eyes wide and terrified.

“Call for help,” Sharrow told Miz.

“What?” he said.

“Of course,” Dloan said, his eyes shining. “The Franchisers. We can call the Franchisers.”

“But-” Miz began, then looked from Sharrow’s face down to Zefla’s. He shook his head. “Oh, Fate,” he said with a moan. He took his phone from a pocket and opened it. He tried pressing a few buttons, frowning. Dloan saw the expression and looked, wide-eyed, for his phone. Sharrow dug hers out from her satchel and found Zefla’s.

None of them worked; it was as though they had been turned off from outside.

There was little they could do for Zefla. The bullet in her chest had gone right through, puncturing a lung; the front wound bubbled with each shallow breath. The bullet that had struck her head had left a long gouged mark along her temple a centimetre deep; tiny shards of bone marked its edges. They couldn’t tell if the round had pierced her skull or grazed off. They sprayed antiseptic on her wounds and bandaged them.

Feril arrived back twenty minutes later; it had heard the noise from its position near the tower. It tried broadcasting a distress message using its own comm unit, but didn’t hold out much hope of it being picked up unless somebody was deliberately looking with a targeted satellite.

It put its hands gently to Zefla’s head, feeling carefully around, and told them there was a bullet lodged inside her skull near the back.

The android suggested it went on guard now. Miz gave it the machine gun. It closed the tent and left them to tend to the wounded woman as best they could.

It knew now that it should have spoken its mind earlier when they were trying to decide what to do; it ought to have suggested that it stay here, on guard, but it had not felt it was its place to say anything. They were experienced at this sort of thing, their lives were more totally at risk than its was, and it had not wanted to be thought presumptuous or patronising.

Fool, fool, it told itself, taking the safety off the machine gun. Fool, Feril; fool.

It sat down in a pile of freshly fallen snow near the top of the small ridge above the camp, and nursed the gun until the bitter dawn arose.

They set off just after dawn, leaving Dloan behind in the tent with Zefla. She was still breathing shallowly. The bandage round her chest was soaked red, and they had to keep her turned on her side to let her cough up blood without choking. Dloan just sat there with wide, frightened, child-like eyes, stroking her hands and whispering to her.

“She’ll be all right,” Sharrow told him, not believing it but feeling it was the only way to dam his despair. The big, powerful man looked about five years old.

Dloan said nothing but looked at Sharrow with a faint, tremulous smile, and kept on stroking Zefla’s hand. Sharrow ran her hand over Zefla’s pale, hot face and stroked her cheek.

“You’ll pull through, eh, girl?” she said, trying to keep the choke out of her voice, then pulled away and stood shakily outside the tent where Miz and Feril were waiting.

She hesitated, then went to the body lying frozen just up the slope from the tent; it had been torn almost in half by the machine-gun fire. Sharrow pulled the black mask off the figure’s head, remembering Keteo. It was a woman’s face.

Again, she thought at first she didn’t recognise it, then recalled the woman at Roa’s side in Vembyr, during the auction and then afterwards at the docks. It was her. She let the mask snap back and rejoined Miz and Feril.

“Let’s go,” she said.

They set off into the snow-quiet forest under skies like milk.

Feril knew the fastest route; they moved as quickly as they could, uphill through broken boulders and deformed, wind-blasted trees. Sharrow walked until the android saw her stumble and gulp for breath, then offered to carry her.

She said nothing for a moment. She stood breathing heavily, her bandaged hand hanging at one side. For a moment Feril thought it might have mistimed its offer, but then she nodded.

Feril picked her up easily and strode off through the trees. Miz struggled to keep up; the air was like freezing water in his throat, his legs weak and shaky with hunger and fatigue.

They were fifteen hundred metres away when they heard the firing up ahead.

They stopped for a moment and Sharrow got down from the android’s arms. Machine-gun fire crackled and laser fire snapped; there were sharp explosions that might have been grenade or mortar rounds, and a booming ripple of fire that could have been a cluster munition. Trees around them reacted to the shuddering air, loosing powdery falls of snow.

“What,” Miz wheezed, “was all that?” His breath smoked in front of his face. “The Solipsists… couldn’t have had… ordnance that heavy… could they?”

“I believe I heard jet motors,” Feril said.

The gunfire and explosions died away, the echoes fading slowly to silence amongst the mountains.

They listened a while longer, then Sharrow shrugged. “Only one way to find out.” She looked back the way they had come, as if trying to see the tent. She let herself be lifted when Feril offered her the cradle of its arms again.

A few minutes later they saw the smoke rising above the trees ahead, piling silently up to the calm skies, spreading and fanning in the shining space above the peaks.

They came to the tower quarter of an hour later.

The trees ended four hundred metres from the tower; the slope descended to a delta of tall rushes. The stone square containing the shallow-walled circle with the stubby tower at its centre was just as the android had described it, near the straight edge of the fjord’s end with the braided river delta beyond.

They looked out onto devastation. The whole small estu-ary around the stone square and the tower was dotted with smouldering fires, bodies and wrecked vehicles. The decaying superstructures of a couple of long-foundered boats rested above their still images in the quiet waters of the calm fjord.

It was hard, at first, to distinguish ancient wreckage from fresh carnage, then the android pointed to the trail of bodies that led from a break in the trees on the far side of the river delta and stretched towards the tower. Smoke still rose from several of the corpses.

“Those the Solipsists?” Miz asked it. Most of the bodies were too blackened for any colours to be visible.

The android took a moment to reply.

“Yes,” it said eventually.

They could see the two parachutists the Solipsists had dropped; they must have been hit again, because both their bodies were burning, too. Sharrow caught the smell of the individual pyres on the breeze and felt sick. There was just one other gaudily uniformed figure visible, sprawled at the corner of the stone square nearest them.

“Who did all this?” Sharrow said. “Was this all the tower defences?”

The android lifted a hand, pointing towards the forested valley behind the small estuary, then seemed to droop.

“I believe…” it began, its voice small, then it fell over slackly, thumping into the ground and rolling a little way downhill, limbs flopping.

“What-?” Miz said, stumbling after the android with Sharrow.

They lifted Feril’s head.

“Fate,” Sharrow said. “How do you bring one of these things round?”

“Can’t see any switches,” Miz said. “Think this was natural? You know; just a fault in the android, maybe? No?”

She looked around the silent mountains, the valley and the river delta. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t think so.”

They gazed at each other. Miz’s face looked strained and grey. Sharrow had never seen him look so old and careworn. She wanted to take his head in her hands and kiss his poor face better.

“I don’t like this, kid,” he said. “This isn’t good.” He glanced at the tower, pulling his hunting jacket closer around him. “This isn’t a good place.”

She unhitched the machine gun from the android’s shoulder, pulled it free and handed it to Miz.

“I know what you mean,” she said. “But there’s nowhere else to go, is there?” She looked across at the tower. “Not if we’re going to get Zef out of here.”

Miz took the machine gun and checked it. He shook his head. “I hate it when you’re right.”

She readied the HandCannon, holding it awkwardly in her right hand, then they left Feril where it had fallen and walked down towards the stone square and the tower; a rough stone stump capped with black.

They passed ancient burned-out tanks and rusting All-Terrains and motor-bikes, wrecked helicopters and the hulks of small ACVs. The bodies were mostly long-decayed, reduced to bleached bones and faded rags that had been clothes and uniforms, all gone to tatters.

They crossed the field of chin-high rushes, their boots crunch-ing through shallow, ice-dried pools. Miz hauled himself up onto the plinth of the stone square near one corner; he reached down and hauled Sharrow up after him.

They walked through the flat expanse of snow to one of the small stone posts set in a corner of the square. It was like a tiny model of the central stone tower; a stump rising to a black hemisphere.

A garishly coloured, motley-uniformed body lay in front of it, face Jown, limbs spread; the snow here was pitted with neat holes that ended in shallow, blackened craters in the flagstones. Miz turned the body over with one foot, keeping the gun trained on it.

Elson Roa’s dead face stared up at the sky. His chest had been opened and burned by a laser. He looked surprised.

Miz looked at Sharrow, but she just shook her head.

He pushed Roa’s body off the edge of the stone square, down into the rushes beneath.

The pitted metal cover on top of the post swung back easily. It was on a spring; Sharrow held it back with her bandaged hand. The double-sided hand-print was there, just as Feril had said.

Sharrow gave the HandCannon to Miz, took the glove off her right hand using her teeth, then-after a look at the hand-print there, and the cryptic legend-put her hand down firmly on the slick chill of the plastic template.

Nothing happened for a few moments. Then the plastic under her hand lit up and glowed softly; a four-by-five grid of little bright dots appeared on a panel above Sharrow’s middle finger and started to disappear at one per second.

Miz and Sharrow looked at each other, then round the estuary, feeling exposed and vulnerable. A wind came out of the valley and ruffled the tops of the trees, scattering snow.

The last of the dots disappeared.

There was a grinding noise behind them; they turned quickly to see two shining metal shell-doors sliding up out of the tower, gradually covering the black hemisphere at the summit of the squat structure and meeting with a hollow clunk.

Another grinding noise came, from the side of the tower facing away from the fjord. Sharrow took her glove out of her mouth and threw it over the low stone wall into the circle. The glove landed unharmed in the snow. She shrugged, stepped over the knee-high wall and started walking to the tower.

Miz followed her.

On the valley-facing side of the tower a door had dropped vertically into the floor, revealing what appeared to be another door of black glass. There was a hint of a small space behind the black glass door the daylight did little to illuminate. A smell of plastic wafted from the tower’s entrance. As they looked in, lights came inside; the Lazy Gun sat on a pedestal in the centre of the room, gleaming.

“Yes,” Miz breathed.

Sharrow moved forward; another hand-print appeared at face level on the surface of the black glass door. She put her palm to it, and with hardly a pause it, too, sank into the floor.

She looked at Miz. He nodded at her. “You go on; I’m staying out here.”

She walked forward, entering the tower. She stepped quickly over the doors that had sunk into the floor, and went to the Lazy Gun. It looked real. She lifted it from its plinth and swung it around. It was light but massy; a strange, disturbing sensation, like something from a dream.

So it was real. This was the eighth and last Lazy Gun. Her head swam; she felt dizzy. She put the Gun down on its pedestal again and walked to a hole in the floor where a broad ramp led down beneath the tower.

She went half-way down to the floor below; a softly lit space perhaps half the area of the stone square outside stretched away around her. She saw equipment of a hundred different types, and boxes and cases that might have concealed a hundred more; a billion more, on some scales. There was a strange, car-like device near the foot of the steps, resting on one canted wheel, its single-seat cockpit open. What looked like a fabulously hi-tech suit of armour stood nearby. A rack of bewilderingly complex guns stood to one side of what might have been a cluster of black-body satellites gathered together to resemble a carousel.

Something that resembled an old radar unit sat on the back of what was probably a small ACV.

She was still looking for something that looked remotely like a comm set when she heard the firing.

Miz watched Sharrow enter the tower. He felt nervous; there were too many dead people around here. Even the android had keeled over once he’d come back within half a klick of the place.

The wind gusted, lifting snow from the trees in the valley behind the tower and from the stone square itself, blowing it across the square and into Miz’s eyes. He blinked.

He heard something like clattering feet coming from behind him. He turned and looked through the cloud of drifting snow.

A huge black four-limbed animal was charging towards him, its head down. Something on its head glittered. Miz stared. The animal was thirty metres away. A sial; a racer; one of the things they raced in Tile, one of the beasts somebody had been naming after his defeats and setbacks for the past half year or more.

He blinked; this couldn’t be happening. The animal charged on; its warm breath powered out of its black nostrils and curled in the air. Miz raised the machine gun and fired.

The animal vanished utterly. The noise of its hooves faded a second later, then came back, again from behind him.

He turned: another night-black sial with something glittering on its head. He sighted the gun. When the beast was ten or so metres from him, and he could have sworn he could feel each shuddering hoofbeat through the flagstones under his boots and make out the great silvery spike attached to its forehead by a glinting harness, he fired; that animal too disappeared, just like a hologram.

The noise faded, swung round behind him. He turned again: two animals, racing towards him, heads lowered. He glimpsed movement in the doorway of the tower and saw Sharrow. She sagged against the doorway, then fell forward into the snow.

“Fucking set-up!” he roared.

He glanced at the two animals tearing towards him through the snow, hooves flinging curves of powdery white behind them. He fired, saw the image flick out of existence and turned to see two more beasts coming from the other direction. He fired at them too, until the gun’s magazine ran out; then he ran for the doorway.

He realised then that he had seen only one of the first pair of sial disappear. He glimpsed something bearing down on him to his right. He turned to use the machine gun as a club and put his hand to his pocket for his laser.

The firing came again before Sharrow could stumble from the ramp to the doorway; when she got there, she saw Miz firing through a hazy cloud of wind-blown snow. She opened her mouth to shout and then the pain struck her, incandescing. An instant later the pain shut off abruptly and was replaced by a terrible numbness, exactly as though somebody was using a nerve weapon on her. Her arm holding the HandCannon wouldn’t move. Her legs folded under and she collapsed against the side of the door, before falling forward into the snow.

She could move her eyes and blink and swallow; nothing else. Her bladder had emptied, and if she had had anything to eat for the last few days her bowels would have voided. Her heart spasmed, beating quickly and irregularly. Her breathing was shallow, uncontrollable. She had a view forward across the snow-covered stone square to the low circular wall and the dark-on-white chevrons of a forested mountain beyond.

She felt the stones beneath the snow ring to hoofbeats like a drum-roll and glimpsed movement from the corner of her eye.

There was a scream and a terrible tearing noise, then great hooves pounded past; a pair of camouflage-clothed legs kicked and struggled in the air in front of the flashing hooves, and then the scream gurgled to nothing.

She closed her eyes.

There was a single loud shot and then a ragged thump a few metres away. She opened her eyes to see the black back and haunches of the great beast fall heavily to the snow. A single, jacketed arm flopped into the snow beyond the head of the animal.

A sial. One of the things they raced in Tile, with criminals’ brains emplaced. She stared at the arm lying loose on the snow, and saw movement. She watched the fingers clench, then slowly unfold and go limp.

The sial’s hide steamed gently in the cool air. She could see blood on the snow, where the animal had passed in front of her.

She waited. The paralysis went on. Then she heard the squeaking, cramping sounds of somebody walking towards her across the snow. Two sets of footsteps.

Two identical pairs of boots came into view; one pair went over to the fallen sial. She could see the person wearing them up to about mid-thigh level; he was standing near Miz’s motionless arm. The butt of a large hunting rifle was lowered to rest on the snow. She could hear other footsteps, but only those two pairs of boots were visible. The pair in front of her tilted as the person wearing them squatted. She saw knees, then a pair of clasped hands, held in front of a smart uniform jacket the colour of dried blood and decorated with insignia she didn’t recognise; then a face.

The young man pushed the cap back from his blond-browed, gleaming face, revealing a bald scalp. He favoured her with an enormously wide smile.

“Why, Lady Sharrow!” he exclaimed. “Fancy meeting you here!” He glanced over to where his twin was also squatting down, still holding the hunting rifle and studying the dead animal.

The one with the rifle saw her looking at him and waved cheerily. He lifted the limp arm lying on the snow in front of him, and made that wave too.

Miz’s hand was made to flop up and down. Tears came to Sharrow’s eyes.

The young man said, “Yes, and you brought some of your little friends with you. How chummy. What a pity Mister Kuma seems to have taken all our criticism to heart!”

He laughed, and then she felt herself lifted up by the armpits until she was half-resting on her knees. The young man stood behind, holding her.

“Oh, look,” he said. “Isn’t that a shame.” He tickled her under the armpits. “But Molgarin will be pleased.”

Molgarin, she thought groggily. Molgarin; that means some-thing; that was what I was trying to remember. Molgarin…

She looked over the bulging, still-steaming corpse of the dead sial to where Miz lay sprawled on the snow, joined to it.

The sial had had some sort of great metal spike secured to its head by a collar fitted round its neck and head. The spike was a metre and a half long and perhaps ten centimetres thick at its base. The artificial horn had pierced Miz through the chest; it protruded from the back of his hunting jacket for nearly a metre. The snow around him was bright with blood. His face looked like Roa’s had; slightly surprised.

The tears welled in her eyes. Then the young man let her down and laid her carefully on her back. She had time to see camouflage-suited men with guns slung over their shoulders coming out of the tower’s door carrying boxes, and glimpsed two dark, fatly sleek shapes approaching through the air above the valley; as she saw them they slowed and dropped and she heard the sound of their jets.

As soon as her back pressed into the snow her tongue started to slip down her throat, but then the young man turned her over on her side and she could breathe again.

“Don’t go away, now,” she heard him say. His footsteps sounded in the snow, fading behind her.

He had lain her down where she could see Miz’s face. She wanted to look at it for just a little longer.

Then the one squatting by Miz took out a long viblade knife and put it to his neck. She closed her eyes.

When the humming noise stopped and a few more seconds had passed, she opened her eyes again to see the second young man walk past her, carrying a bag.

The noise of the jets was suddenly very close. Their engines shrieked and a great bustling, tumbling cloud of dusty white rolled across the stone square.

Miz’s beheaded body leaked blood onto the snow.

Her tears trickled onto the snow, too. The paralysis meant that she couldn’t sob.

They put her on a stretcher and carried her towards the bomb-hold of one of the two heavy VTOL bombers, along with their loot from the tower and the equally paralysed body of Feril.

She was still lying on her side when they carried her across the square, so she was the first to see Dloan sitting at the edge of the trees not far from where she, Miz and the android had emerged a quarter of an hour earlier.

Dloan sat observing the scene, out in the open where he was easily visible and apparently unarmed. Even from that distance she thought she saw in the way he sat there, in his posture and bearing, something hopeless and terrified and alone.

She watched him watching them all, with no tears left to cry.

Somebody saw Dloan; she heard shouts. Guns were turned towards him. Dloan stood slowly, as though weary. He took something from his pocket and aimed deliberately at the men on the stone square.

He didn’t have to fire; Sharrow heard projectile rifles and lasers crack and snap all around her, and she saw Dloan jerk and shake and fall in a small storm of kicked-up flurrying snow.

The firing stopped quickly and he lay still.

They carried her into the belly of the great dark aircraft.

23 All Castles Made Of Sand

“Of course, I personally-the two of us-bore Mister Kuma no personal ill-will. But you know how it is; orders are orders, eh? Shame about the old Solipsists, too, but such is life; they got involved beyond their depth. We only hired them to attack the Land Car but then they went and got ideas about beating you to the Gun. They should have backed out when they were told to. But, hey, there I go; I don’t want to anticipate whatever Molgarin may choose to tell you. That’s where we’re heading now, my lady, to Molgarin’s Keep in the cold desert beyond the Embargoed Areas, in Lantskaar!” he said, pronouncing the word with a kind of hammy relish. “Exciting, isn’t it?”

There were sixteen people secured within the brightly lit bomb-hold of the leading bomber, strapped tightly against its walls in bucket seats: Sharrow, Feril, the two identical young emissaries in their smart red-brown uniforms and twelve effi-ciently anonymous men in blanked camouflage suits, mostly armed with lasers and micro rifles. One carried a stun rifle; presumably that was what they had turned on her. She could see properly only because she was so tightly strapped in, her head held back against the bulkhead behind her by a harness. This was not a special security measure for her; the rest of the hold’s passengers were similarly tied down. Only she and Feril did not have a quick-release handle clenched in their hands.

The booty from the tower sat webbed and tensioned in front of them in the centre of the hold. The boxes and various indecipherable pieces of apparatus bounced and jiggled against their restraints as the airframe around them bucked and swerved and sank and rose, all accompanied by an enormous tearing, screaming noise.

The young emissary had to shout above the racket. “Don’t worry about being intercepted by the Rebel States forces or the Security Franchisers; we have an understanding with the former and the latter can’t track us.” He rolled his eyes to indicate the aircraft. “We’re currently doing over three times the speed of sound at little more than tree-top height. They tell me travelling at this speed so close to the ground is such a terrifying experience for pilots-and the chances of them being able to correct a mistake by the terrain-following automatics so remote-that it’s considered kinder to black out the cockpit screens altogether!”

He was silent for a moment, then chuckled as a particularly violent manoeuvre rammed him and Sharrow hard back against the metal wall. The equipment from the tower seemed to hang above her and the young emissary; she could see the webbing holding it in place going taut and starting to stretch. “Gosh,” the young man said, his voice sounding strained as he fought to speak against the pressing g-force. A roaring noise. louder than the bomber’s engines was drowning him out anyway. “Hope that stuff’s properly secured. Eh, Lady Sharrow? Or we’re both meat paste!”

She was still trying to work out if this meant he wasn’t an android after all, or if it was just an attempt to deceive her, when she blacked out.

She awoke to open air and the jangling sensation of feelings returning; her flesh sparkled with pain, like a million tiny pinpricks. Even her teeth hurt. She was being carried by two soldiers; one held her under the knees, the other under her armpits. One of the young emissaries was at her side, taking deep breaths and slapping himself on the chest, then rubbing his hands together.

She was carried out from beneath the shadow of the bomber. It had landed on a gritty, dusty desert; the air felt powder-dry and bitterly cold. There were low, ash-grey mountains a few kilometres off, forming a bowl round the clinker-dark plain, which was empty save for the two sleek, black aircraft and a few trucks and other vehicles. She saw other, smaller shapes curving through the heavy grey skies above the encircling mountains.

The emissary saw her trying to move her head, and beamed a broad smile at her as the two soldiers heaved her into a small open car.

“Back with us again, Lady Sharrow?” He held his arms out wide and spun round, boot heels grinding on the grit. “Welcome to Lantskaar!” he said. He leant on the side of the little open car. “And to Molgarin’s Keep.”

He watched her trying to look around the featureless desert and the barren hills around it. He laughed. “It’s all underground,” he said, climbing in beside her. She saw Feril being carried out of the bomber’s hold by a quartet of soldiers. “Though there are,” the young emissary said, waggling his eyebrows at her, “some incredibly ancient force-field projector-walls which can spring up to trap the unwary in the event of an attack.” The car jerked and rolled forward, heading for a long rectangular hole in the plain. “Believe me,” the young man said, “you don’t want to be standing astride one of those when they power up, let me tell you.”

He chuckled again as the car angled down a ramp into a dully lit tunnel. The tunnel curved, spiralling down into the ground; a series of huge, metre-thick doors swung or irised open for them. The car’s motor whined; behind, she could hear the deeper notes of what she guessed were the trucks. After a while her ears popped. The young emissary started to whistle.

There was a huge, echoing underground vehicle park, full of cars, trucks, light-armoured transports and tanks. She was carried to an elevator that descended to what looked like the foyer of an hotel. Her skin still tingled and her muscles felt like jelly as they put her in a wheelchair, secured her and pushed her along a gently lit corridor to what smelled like a clinic.

A male nurse rose from a desk and nodded to the emissary, who patted her on the head and said, “She’s all yours, matey.”

She was pushed into a surgery. Her heart thudded as she saw an operating table through a glass screen. A female doctor and two female orderlies appeared, pulling on gloves.

The doctor put something cold to the back of her neck, muttered something, then came round and squatted on her haunches in front of her. “I think you can hear me,” she said, talking quite loudly. “We’re just going to get you washed and cleaned, do a proper check-up and then let you sleep for a while. All right?”

She stared at the woman; middle-aged, a little plump, hair bunned; brown eyes. She had no idea whether what she’d just been told was the truth or a lie.

The two orderlies stripped her, removed the bandage on her hand, cleaned the wound and put a temporary dressing on it before they washed her in a warm pool. They dried her with towels; efficiently, neither gently nor roughly. They helped her to stand, then slipped a plain white shift over her head. They supported her from either side and made her take a few unsteady steps, then took her through to a couch. The doctor she’d seen earlier ran nerve-response tests which tingled but did not hurt. She re-dressed the hand-wound and took a small sample of blood in a vial, which she slotted into an analyser. The doctor asked Sharrow to speak. She tried but only drooled. The doctor patted her arm.

“Never mind; you should be all right in the morning.” She prepared a gas-syringe and put it to Sharrow’s neck.

The last thing she remembered was the gentle jolting of the wheelchair being trundled along an unseen corridor that seemed to go on forever.

She awoke in a snug bed. She saw a time display in the darkness that indicated it was early evening. A glowing patch alongside proved to be a light switch.

She was in a small room furnished like a cabin. She was lying on her side, curled up in an alcoved bed with a shallow wooden panel down half the open side. She was wearing the shift they had dressed her in earlier. She tried moving her arms and legs, then sat up and after a pause swung her legs out of the bed, holding on to the wall as she stood.

The carpet beneath her feet was deep and rich. The air was warm. The room held a recessed bookcase full of repro books, a desk and chair, a screen that didn’t work and a wardrobe full of clothes all of which were her size. Attached was a bathroom with various toiletries, though nothing that could cut.

There were no windows; air came silently from porous tiles in the ceiling. It was so quiet she could hear her heart beat. A lump of black glass the size of an eyeball was wedged in a top corner of the room, from where it would have a view of everything except the bathroom.

She tried the door; it was locked. She felt weak and sat down on the bed, then lay down and fell asleep again.

The Lazy Gun came to her in her dreams. It looked like a man, but she knew it was the Lazy Gun. They were sitting in the small cabin in Molgarin’s Keep where she was sleeping. Hello… Hello. So, what would you like to know? said the Gun. What do you mean? What would you like to know? the Gun repeated patiently. She looked around. Where is Cenuij? she asked it. Dead, of course, it said. What else? What about the others? They’re dead, too. I know, but where are they? The dead aren’t anywhere. Unless you count the past. Won’t I see them again? Only in your dreams. Or recordings. She started to cry. You are the last one, the Gun told her. What? You are the last one. You are the last of the eight. You are just like me; I am the last of the eight as well. You are me and I am you. We are one. No I’m not, I’m me. Yes, you are you, the Gun agreed. But you are me, too. And I am you. She kept crying, not knowing what to say. She wanted to wake up but didn’t know how to. Listen, said the Gun. Is there anything I can do? What? Is there anything I can do? Just tell me. What can you do? Destroy things. All I can do is destroy things. It’s the only thing I’m any good at. Would you like me to destroy something? I want you to destroy everything! she screamed. Every fucking thing! All the evil men and compliant women, all the armies and companies and cults and faiths and orders and every stupid fucker in them! All of them! EVERYTHING! I can’t destroy all of everything, but I could destroy a lot of it. You’re being stupid. I’m not; I could destroy lots of things and people, but not all of them.

You’re mad, she said, wanting very much to wake up now.

Neither of us is mad, Lady Sharrow, the Gun said.

The man got up to leave the cabin.

Anyway, we’ll see what we can do.

What do you mean? she said.

About destroying everything. We’ll see what we can do.

She clenched her injured hand, trying to wake herself with the pain, but it wasn’t sore enough.

What are you? she asked it.

The man was at the door. I’m you, the Gun said. I’m the last of the eight.

It winked at her.

We’ll see what we can do.

Now go to sleep.

She awoke to a smell of food and saw a laden tray sitting on the desk. She just missed seeing whoever had left it; the room’s door clicked shut with a solid, massive sound and sucked itself tightly closed.

She lay there, thinking about the dream she had had, and shivered. Then the smell wafting from the tray dragged her back to the immediate.

The tray contained a breakfast sufficient for two hungry people; she ate all of it. It was mid-morning. The screen was working, so she watched the news.

The Huhsz were in trouble because they’d irradiated senior officials on Golter, Miykenns and Nachtel’s Ghost; the World Court was under severe pressure to allow the terminally afflicted bureaucrats access to war-time restricted medical technology. The Court in turn was leaning heavily on the Huhsz for apologies, scapegoats, financial recompense and guarantees of future behav-iour, all of which the Order seemed comprehensively unwilling to give. The World Shrine was virtually under siege and there was talk of force being used; Huhsz cantonment defences and Lay Reserves Martial throughout the system had been mobilised.

There was a news blackout around the Embargoed Areas and the Security Franchise, with rumours of an air clash between the Franchise forces and the Rebel States. Travel in the far south of Caltasp was restricted.

People were apparently still talking about and commenting on the attempted assassination-seen live on screen on Nachtel’s Ghost and still being repeated and re-repeated throughout the system-of some new philosopher-guru from the Ghost called Girmeyn.

She sat closer to the screen, dialled up a news archive and found the filed item from a couple of days earlier; a studio, a live debate; politicians and religious representatives arguing against Girmeyn, and he winning charmingly but decisively.

Girmeyn looked as she remembered him; black hair and dark eyes, and that strange sense of empowered calmness. Then a figure lunging from the audience, stretching over a table, swinging something. Confusion and shouts and a sequence of brief, wild camera angles, most with people getting in the way; a shot of a vicious-looking sacrificial knife lying bloody on a desk with security officers waving guns behind; Girmeyn bleeding from a head-wound, holding one hand up to it, motioning aides and others out of the way with the other hand and talking to the man being held down.

Then came a silent shot from behind glass of Girmeyn, head discreetly bandaged, in a room with the same man; just the pair of them sitting in two small seats facing each other, talking, and the man breaking down, putting his head in his hands, and Girmeyn hesitating, then putting his own hand out, touching the man on the shoulder.

She watched it again, then a third time. The last word on Girmeyn had him in retreat on some asteroid habitat.

She returned to the current news. The usual small wars and civil conflicts, minor and major disasters and the occasional heart-warming filler item.

She sat back in the seat, watching the main news items again. She felt dizzy, the way she had when she’d seen the Lazy Gun and looked into that storehouse of ancient treasure under the stone tower.

After a while she shook her head and switched the screen off.

She showered, and afterwards caught sight of herself in the bathroom’s full-length mirror as she towelled behind her back. She stopped and looked at herself. An artificially bald woman in early middle-age. A dressing on one hand. The skin under her eyes dark. A face that had aged recently.

Alone, she thought. Alone.

She wondered what was behind the mirror, looking back at her.

She dressed in a dark suit of trousers and jacket and a pair of heavy, sensible shoes. In the course of dressing she effectively searched the room, but found nothing that would serve as a weapon.

She sat down eventually and watched some screen; an old fast-paced slapstick comedy that kept her from thinking too much. The smartly uniformed young emissaries came calling at her door half an hour later and invited her to an audience with Molgarin.

The two young men walked on either side of her. Two guards followed a few paces behind. An elevator took them even further down, pausing occasionally while muffled whirring and thudding noises announced what were probably blast shutters opening and closing.

Finally a short corridor walled with roll-doors brought them to a shallow ramp leading up to darkness. The guards stayed at the foot of the incline. She walked up between the two young emissaries; they took one of her arms each, gently but firmly. A rumbling noise behind them closed off the light.

The space they arrived in was a giant circular bunker, blackdark save for a series of twenty or so slit-like projections spaced regularly round the walls, apparently looking out across the cold grey desert to the distant ring of ash-coloured mountains she had seen the day before. She wondered if the projections were recorded images, but guessed they were real-time. The sky above the mountains looked clear and thin and blue.

Distance was hard to estimate, but as they marched her towards the centre of the bunker she guessed it wasn’t less than forty metres in diameter. The darkness made the encircling desert views shine, hurting her eyes.

The two emissaries halted; she stopped, too, and they let go of her arms.

Ceiling spotlights blazed in front of her, shining down onto a black circular dais; steps were just visible, gradations of shade against shade. The dais was crowned by a tall, plain throne made from a gleaming black material that might have been glass, jet or even highly polished wood.

The man sitting in the throne was dressed in a sumptuous robe of many colours, though purple and gold predominated. The thick robe hid his frame; he could have been anything between an average build and obese. His face looked plump but healthy; he was clean-shaven and his head, covered in short, black curls, was bare. There was at least one ring on each of his fingers, and he wore two sets of earrings and a pair of jewelled nostril scuds. A brow-brooch glittered over his right eye.

His fingers sparkled magnificently as he clasped his hands lightly together. He smiled.

“Lady Sharrow,” he said. “My name is Molgarin. We met once long ago, but I don’t expect you remember; you were very young.”

His voice was even and quiet; it sounded older than he looked.

“No, I don’t remember,” she said. She thought her voice sounded flat. “Why did you kill Miz like that?”

Molgarin waved one hand dismissively. “He cheated me out of something that was rightfully mine, many years ago. One of the skills one develops during the course of a long life is that of relishing one’s revenge, and both planning and executing acts worthy of that skill.” Molgarin smiled. “Finally, though, the truth is that I had him killed to distress you.” The smile faded. “Please, sit down.”

The two young emissaries took her arms again and urged her forward; the three of them sat on the bottom step of the dais, their bodies twisted slightly so that they could still see Molgarin. He put his arms out to his sides slowly.

“I felt that you insulted my young emissaries here,” Molgarin said. (The two young men both smiled smugly at her.) “And through them,” Molgarin said, “me.” He shrugged. “And so I punished you. I always make a point of punishing those who insult me.”

“Yeah,” the emissary in front of her said. “You should see what we have planned for that cousin of yours.”

Molgarin cleared his throat and the young man glanced up at him, then back at Sharrow with a conspiratorial leer. The spotlights reflected on his bald head.

“Whatever,” Molgarin said, “the wretch is dead. But please don’t imagine that all that has happened has been done to upset you, or as revenge on Kuma. My purpose has rather more substance than that.”

Molgarin settled back in his throne, clasping his hands again. “You have-as you have doubtless realised by now-been used, Lady Sharrow. But used for something infinitely more worthwhile than personal gain or individual glory. The interests I am pleased to represent, and I myself, have little enough concern with the trappings of power. Our concern is with the health of Golter and its system; with the good of our species.”

“You’re not just another dick-head power-junkie?” she said matter-of-factly. “Oh, that’s all right, then.”

Molgarin shook his head. “Oh dear,” he said. “Something worse than cynicism must be abroad if even our aristocracy cannot accept that the rich and powerful may be motivated by purposes beyond acquiring yet more money and increased influence.” He put his head to one side, as though genuinely puzzled. “Can’t you see, Lady Sharrow? Once one has a certain amount of both, one turns to hobbies, or good works or philosophy. Some people become patrons of the arts or charities. Others may-charitably-be said to raise their own lives to the state of art, living as the common herd imagine they would live if they had the chance. And some of us attempt not merely to understand our history, but to influence meaningfully the course of the future.

“I grant that, in my case, because I am beyond the jurisdiction of the chancre we call the World Court, I have a greater personal interest in the future than most, because I expect to live to see it, but…” Molgarin hesitated, anticipating a reaction where she had given none. He went on. “Yes, I am what we choose to call immortal. I have been so for four centuries and expect to be so for considerably longer than that… But I can see you are not impressed. Probably you don’t believe me.” He waved one hand. “Never mind.”

“He is, you know,” the emissary behind her whispered.

“Romantic children like your cousin,” Molgarin continued, “would try to return us to a golden age that never existed, when people respected the aristocracy and power rested safely in the hands of a few individuals. My colleagues and I believe a more enterprising, more corporate style is required: one that releases the natural resourcefulness and entrepreneurial spirit of humanity; freeing them from the dead hand of the World Court and its miserable, gelding restrictions.

“For this, we-like your cousin-thought it prudent to gather as many of the treasures and achievements bequeathed to us by earlier and more progressive eras as we could, especially given the decidedly feverish atmosphere beginning to be generated by the approach of the deca-millennium. Though in our case this sudden burst of acquisitiveness was as much to prevent the artifacts concerned from falling into hands as rash as your cousin’s as to assist directly in our own plans, which do not need to rely on such vulnerably physical specifics.”

Molgarin shrugged. “It’s a shame, really; we thought at one point that your cousin might be of a mind with us. We even invited him to join us, but he proved to have these silly, vainglorious ideas of his own. He has, frankly, been a considerable annoyance to us.” Molgarin shrugged. “No matter. Now that we possess all that you have so kindly provided us with, he can be dealt with at our leisure. These… gadgets will act as bait, if nothing else.” Molgarin smiled thinly. “Your friend Elson Roa learned what happens when somebody at first cooperates and then opposes us; your cousin will find the lesson equally hard, though I intend to draw the process out a little where he is concerned. Conversely, those who help us-like Seigneur jalistre, whom I believe you know from the Sea House-find the rewards considerable. I think I might give him something from this selection as a present.”

Molgarin looked to one side. More ceiling lights came on, revealing Feril standing ten metres away, a bulky collar round his neck. The Lazy Gun was nearby, resting on a thick column of clear glass beside the odd vehicle with the single slanting wheel she had seen underneath the tower, and a dozen or so other bits and pieces of what appeared to be suitably ancient and exotic technology, none of which she recgnised.

“Call me a sentimentalist,” Molgarin said. “But I thought it only right to rescue everything the tower and its undercroft contained, even though all the rest is baublery next to the Lazy Gun. See; we even brought your little android friend.” Molgarin raised his voice fractionally. “You may wave, machine.”

Feril raised one hand stiffly and waved.

“It is worried about the restrainer collar,” Molgarin explained to her, smiling. “Really, it is safe as long as it takes no more than a step or so from where it is now.”

Molgarin got up from his throne and went over to the Lazy Gun. He was a little less plump and rather taller than Sharrow had guessed. He patted the Gun’s gleaming brushed-silver casing. She noticed that there was some sort of device fitted to it, too; a thick looped metal bar twisted round the right-hand grip, secured with a lock, prevented access to the trigger mechanism.

“This will,” Molgarin said, “when the time is right, make life considerably easier for us.” He turned to smile at her. “Really your family has done so much for our cause, despite opposing us at practically every turn, that I feel almost mean that I have had to do what has been done.” He moved away from the Gun, though not towards his dais. “Not to mention what has to be done.”

Another spotlight came on, and revealed a figure standing beside Molgarin. It was her.

Sharrow looked at herself. Her image was blinking in the strong overhead light, looking with an expression somewhere between fear and bewilderment at Molgarin.

This new Sharrow still had all her long, black, curled hair; she was dressed in a long, conservatively dark suit identical to that Sharrow had chosen earlier and now wore.

Molgarin reached out a hand to the other Sharrow; the woman offered him her left hand. Molgarin curled it up in his.

Sharrow felt the fingers in her own left hand start to ache. She tried to rise but the young man behind gripped her round her neck while the one in front grabbed her feet.

Her image, hand crushed inside Molgarin’s, cried out just before she did.

The pain disappeared, cutting off. She saw her image crying and touching her injured hand with the other.

Molgarin shook his head and smiled broadly at the real Sharrow. “If you only knew the self-restraint I have had to exercise with this toy,” he said. He turned and stroked the woman’s cheek. She seemed not to notice. “Though of course I have enjoyed her,” Molgarin said. He looked back at Sharrow. “Quite empty,” he said, nodding at her image. “Her mind is quite empty.” His smile grew wider. “Just as it should be, really.”

He drew something from his robe. It was a HandCannon. “Allow me to introduce your clone, Lady Sharrow,” he said. He pointed the gun at the woman’s face. “Sharrow’s clone,” he said softly. “This is Sharrow’s HandCannon.”

The woman looked into the muzzle of the weapon, puzzled.

Sharrow struggled. “You fuck!” she screamed.

The clone glanced at her when she yelled, then looked away again. She gave no impression that she had recognised herself in Sharrow.

“Oh, I’m afraid we never really bothered to teach her any languages, Lady Sharrow,” Molgarin said. “Never showed her a mirror, either,” he added absently. He moved the gun right up to the woman’s eye. She drew her head back just a little.

“She’s sweet, isn’t she, my little day-fly?” Molgarin said, moving the gun from one of the woman’s eyes to the other. Her eyes crossed following the weapon’s movements.

“I’ve had her for a couple of years now,” Molgarin said conversationally. “I’m only sorry we didn’t collect the necessary cells when you were in that mining hospital on Nachtel’s Ghost, when I had you implanted with the crystal virus. Still.”

Molgarin continued to move the gun from side to side, then said, “Yes; I’ve enjoyed her company over the past two years or so. But I have the real thing now.”

He fired into the woman’s right eye.

Sharrow flinched, biting off a scream and feeling her eyes close on the image of the back of the woman’s head disappearing in a red cloud and the body being blown backwards into the darkness. She kept her eyes shut, feeling herself tremble uncontrollably; she tried to stop it but could not.

The young man behind her shook her. “Oops!” he whispered.

She opened her eyes, still trembling, her chest heaving. She choked the sobs back and listened to her own breathing, gazing through tears at Molgarin coming towards her.

“Oh, save your grief, Lady Sharrow,” he said, putting the gun back into his robe, a small frown joining the faint smile on his face. “She was a blank,” Molgarin said, spreading his hands. “A nothing; scarcely human.” He laughed lightly. “For whatever that’s worth.”

He stood looking down at her for a moment, then swivelled and returned to his throne. He sat back with one leg crossed over the other.

“What, Lady Sharrow?” he said after a pause. “No insults, no threats, no curses; no bravado?” He shook his head. “I warn you I shan’t be satisfied until you’ve called me something vile-doubtless involving that disagreeable word ‘fuck’-and come up with some unlikely and painful-sounding fate you may merely wish on me but which I have the means-and for all you know the intention-of inflicting upon you.” He contrived to look terribly amused with himself.

She was still breathing hard, fighting back her terror, trying to find strength from somewhere, from anywhere. She stared at him, not knowing how to express anything she felt.

Molgarin gazed at her with a look of tolerantly amused patience.

Then his expression changed. He frowned and looked up at the slit-views of the desert displayed in a wide circle around the chamber.

“What?” he said. He looked distracted. He peered at the screens, turning to stare at those behind him. “What?” he said again, and raised a hand to one of his earrings. “How?”

She looked up. The slit-views of the desert were no longer static sections of a peaceful panorama. Dots danced in the skies above the mountains on three sides. What looked like a cavalry charge was taking place on two of the screens; Keep guards were running from the mounted troops, throwing their guns away.

“Well, do it!” Molgarin said, still with his hand at his ear and looking away from her. “Now!” he shouted. “Anything!”

She saw the emissary in front of her looking worriedly at the one holding her arms. The one at her feet let go and drew a small laser pistol out of his uniform jacket.

There was sudden movement on several of the screens. A series of great grey explosions lifted slowly from the surface of the desert. They continued to expand and lift. They looked so immense she expected to hear them, no matter how deep they were, but then they started to fall back in silence.

Molgarin turned back. He glanced at the two emissaries, then smiled shakily at her. “We seem to be-” he began.

The floor trembled and a full third of the view-slits suddenly went dark. Feril was staring intently at the confused scenes portrayed in the ones that were left. Molgarin glanced at the dark screens. The emissary holding the laser pistol stared at them.

“We seem to be under attack, Lady Sharrow,” Molgarin told her. “Possibly from that irritating cousin of yours.” He seemed to have difficulty swallowing. “I promise you this will be his last piece of romantic melodrama, lady. He’ll suffer for this, and you’ll watch him suffer.” Molgarin looked at the two emissaries. “Mind her,” he told them, then put his head back against the throne and gripped its arms tightly.

The topmost step of the dais rushed upwards, taking the throne with it on a great gust of air and a thunderous rumble from beneath the chamber; the throne vanished into the ceiling ten metres overhead, leaving a single solid black column in the centre of the circular room.

Before the two emissaries could react, the whole chamber shuddered, the remaining view-slits went black and every light in the place blinked out, leaving utter darkness.

She hauled, twisted and ducked, bringing the yelping emissary holding her arms tumbling over her back. “No!” he screamed.

There was a sudden snapping noise and brief stuttering blink of light, then, as she threw herself to one side and the emissary rolled away from her, a scream that became a sizzling, gurgling noise. She lay, silent, on the steps. A smell of roasted flesh wafted over her.

“Twin?” said a tremulous, hesitant voice. It was answered by a bubbling noise. She started to move. “Twin?” the voice said again, an edge of panic in it now. Another bubbling, gurgling noise. She moved closer, correcting, anticipating. A tremor shook the bunker; there was a tremendous crack, and a crashing, tinkling noise off to one side. “Twin!” the voice screamed.

That last anguished shriek was enough. She stood silently, closing her eyes and lashing out with her foot.

“Tw-oof!” The voice cut off.

She stepped to one side; a blink of white laser light fired at where she had just been was enough to show her both of them, captured as though by a flash of lightning; the one who had held her, lying spread out on the floor at the foot of the steps leading to the black column, and the other one, crouched sideways on the floor in front of her, looking towards the steps, holding the laser in one hand and his lower chest with the other.

She swung her left foot at his head. The heavy, sensible shoe connected with a crack that jarred her whole leg. She fell to the floor.

The burbling sound came again from a few metres away, then a noise like a snore from nearby. The bunker shook once more and she heard what sounded like debris falling somewhere.

“Lady Sharrow?” said a distant voice. Feril.

She said nothing. “Lady Sharrow,” Feril said calmly. “I can see you. The laser pistol which the man you just kicked was holding flew from his hand and is lying approximately seven metres to your right.” Feril paused. “I do not believe either of the young men will trouble you for the moment,” it said.

She stood and walked quickly to her right, still silent.

“Just two steps further,” Feril said. “Stop. The pistol is now a metre to your left.”

“Got it,” she said, lifting the weapon.

“I believe one of the young men you disabled has the chip key to the explosive restrainer collar I am wearing,” Feril said as another tremor shook the floor beneath them. “If you intend to remove it from me, that is,” it said. It sounded apologetic.

She swivelled and started walking through the utter darkness. “Am I going the right way?”

“Stop,” Feril said. “Yes; you are a step away from the young man you kicked.”

She felt down. “So they weren’t androids,” she said.

“No, I believe they are clones, but otherwise perfectly normal human beings,” Feril said. There was a pause. “Well…”

The man was breathing shallowly; she kept the gun pointed at where the breathing was corning from, then felt in his uniform jacket. “This feels like a chip key.”

The android directed her to it. “The slot is at the back,” it told her.

The key snicked in, the collar buzzed alarmingly, then a small white light flashed and the collar clicked open. She removed it and put it on the floor, which trembled again as she set the collar down. More smashing, tinkling noises sounded in the distance.

“Which direction to the Lazy Gun?” she asked.

“Your hand?” Feril said. She shivered, gritting her teeth as she put her hand out into the darkness. Feril held her bandaged hand gently; they walked forward. “Here it is,” the android said.

She felt for the device and lifted it. “Great,” she said. “Now all we have to do is try and find a way out of this place.”

“If I may make a suggestion,” Feril said, its voice calm. “While I was standing near it earlier I had the opportunity of scanning the monowheeled vehicle taken from the tower. It appears to be in working order.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Or we could just wait here for my cousin to appear.”

“Ah,” Feril said carefully. “I am not sure about that.”

“You’re not?”

“I was able to observe the action taking place on the desert surface and in the nearby hills by way of the high-definition screens built into the walls of this place. Those in the first wave of comparatively lightly armed attackers were not identifiable. However, those in the second wave, who seemed to be fighting both the Keep’s defending forces as well as the first wave of attackers, were almost certainly Huhsz.”

“Huhsz?” she said into the darkness.

“I believe so. There were certain insignia on the wings of the aircraft forming-”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“I am sure of what I saw on the screens,” Feril said cautiously.

“Fate,” she said. Then, “But if Geis is mad enough to start crossing the Areas, they certainly are.” She hoisted the gun to her hip, holding it like a child. “Where’s the monowheel?”

“This way.”

The floor bucked beneath them, almost throwing her off her feet. Another devastating crash sounded from a distant part of the bunker.

The android helped her into the monowheeled vehicle’s open cockpit. She shoved the Lazy Gun into the long footwell past what felt like a pair of hanging pedals, then she sat. There was a small compartment just to the rear of the cockpit; Feril climbed up and stuck its legs into it, sitting on the rear of the vehicle just in front of the tilted monowheel. The vehicle moved fractionally, with the hint of a whine.

“Now what?” Sharrow said, raising her voice above a roaring noise coming from somewhere ahead in the darkness. A gust of hot air blew around them, flinging dust into her face. She closed her eyes.

“Try this,” it said. “Excuse me.” She felt it lean over her, bending her forward; she heard a click, then lights glowed. The android leant back again. She looked round at it; its face gleamed softly in the green light spilling from the vehicle’s screen and instruments.

“Perhaps you should drive,” she said.

“The position here is a little exposed,” it told her. “Allow me to navigate.”

“All right.” She turned back and studied the controls; a twinstalk hand-grip with various buttons arranged on the columns, two pedals for her feet; various dials, screens and touch-bolos, and a head-up display seemingly hovering in mid-air in front of her.

She pressed a pedal; the monowheel’s nose dipped. The other pedal brought it level again. She took the hand controls and squeezed both; her left hand was stiff and hurt a little, but it was bearable. There was a beeping noise from the instruments. Nothing else happened until she let go the left grip. The monowheel leapt forward, banging her head against the seat’s head-rest.

“Stop!” Feril yelled.

She released the grip and they stopped quickly. She sensed the android turning behind her.

“Oh well,” it said, turning back. “I don’t believe you were too keen on that young man, anyway.”

“Dead?” she asked.

“Thoroughly,” Feril said.

She found the lights and another holo display, switchable between radar, ultrasound and passive EM. “Hell,” she said, “I had a unit like this on a bike once.” She adjusted the display to optimum on EM.

She was sitting on the safety harness; she lifted, pulled the straps out and fastened them round her. The holo display showed the whole bunker ahead of her in grey; the roof had collapsed in at least two places. The ramp she had been brought up was lying off to her left.

There was a muffled rumble from above, followed by another hot gust of air.

“I think we should leave this place fairly soon,” Feril said.

“So do I,” she said. “Ready?”

“Ready. I suggest you head for the ramp.”

“On my way.” She pressed the right grip lightly, sending the monowheel humming forward over the floor, then tipped the wheel; the vehicle turned. She looked at the squashed body of the young emissary she’d kicked and then run over. The monowheel was obviously quite heavy.

The other emissary lay still at the foot of the dais. His chest, neck and face were still cooling. She thought she heard him moan.

She took the laser from her jacket, reached out over the side of the cockpit and shot him twice in the head.

She paused just once more, at the other cooling body on the floor, then left her image lying there and powered the monowheel down the ramp.

There was a door. “Just a minute,” Feril said. “This seems to require a fairly simple radio code…”

The door trundled aside, revealing the short corridor walled with roller doors.

“Well done,” she said, moving the monowheel forward.

“My pleasure.” The second roller door on the left rippled as a rumble of noise sounded all about them. “The door opposite that, I think,” Feril said. “It will require the vehicle’s cannon.”

“Cannon?” she said, looking round at the android.

It nodded. “I believe this was a robo-tank hunter; a sporting vehicle used by the Vrosal Moguls following the-”

Another blast shook the roller door.

“Aiming and firing controls?” she said quickly.

“You aim the whole vehicle,” Feril said. “The pedals control nose angle, the red cursor on the head-up is aim-point and the red button on top of the left hand-grip fires.”

She fired at the door; there was a burst of light from beneath the monowheel vehicle, an ear-ringing bang and a single small hole appeared in the roller door. An instant later the door bulged and burst open as the shell exploded behind it.

Wreckage tumbled past them; she ducked, glanced back at Feril, who seemed to be unharmed, then eased the monowheel over the remains of the door. The vehicle rolled with uncanny smoothness into a circular-section tunnel fitted with twin toothed-metal rails. There were flat rail-cars sitting on the rails; beyond them the tunnel spiralled upwards.

“This is how I was brought in,” Feril said. “I believe it leads to just below the surface.”

“Maybe so, but how do we get over these flat cars?”

“I believe this vehicle is quite sophisticated for our. day; I suggest just driving at them.”

“All right,” she said. She sent the monowheel forward slowly; it climbed over the flat cars as though they weren’t there. She looked back and shrugged, then powered on up the spiral tunnel.

There were blast doors but they had all been opened.

The monowheel hummed up the spiral tunnel for several minutes without incident, eventually emerging into an underground marshalling yard. She heard heavy-calibre gunfire echoing in the distance and saw flashes reflect off the ribbed grey concrete of the ceiling.

“That way, I think,” Feril said, pointing past some supporting columns, away from the firing but towards an area of the yard where the view was hazed with smoke.

The monowheel raced over a tracery of tracks, keeping perfectly stable. The vehicle crossed a bridge over another level of the underground yard where smoke billowed up; past the smoke they found the bodies of a Keep guard and one of the original attackers. The Keep guard still clutched his rifle. He had been beheaded, presumably by the bloody sword hanging by its lanyard from the hand of the other dead man, who lay against the railings of the underground bridge, his tunic blown almost right off by the grenade explosion that had killed him.

She stared at the man’s naked right arm as they passed, slowing down for a better look.

She shook her head and accelerated again. The black mouth of another tunnel expanded to swallow the speeding monowheel.

The Advance Tactical Command Team entered the Deep Citadel through an aperture in the roof. They were covered in dust and stank of smoke. A couple of them had been lightly wounded, though really they had been almost unopposed. The Keep’s own defenders seemed to have been effectively disarmed by their original attackers, who themselves had not been equipped with heavy ordnance.

One of the Keep’s defenders had been captured and made to cooperate; he had guided them here, to the throne room.

The throne itself had gone, vanished into the roof; tech teams were still trying to break into the secure tunnels on the two levels immediately above. They suspected the master of this underground maze had flown, and taken their quarry with him. There were many tunnels and escape routes into the desert and the mountains around and they had not been able to find all of them in the short time they’d had available, between being granted permission to make this incursion and the launch of the attack itself, precipitated by that of the quaintly mounted and lightly armed forces who had preceded them.

They explored the remains of the circular chamber, using nightsights.

Ghosts, thought the Priest Colonel. We are like ghosts.

They were almost a kilometre underground, and they feared that once the man who had ruled over this sunken fortress had made good his escape, it would all be destroyed.

“Sir!” a yearfellow shouted from the other side of the black column that filled the middle of the dark chamber.

The Priest Colonel and his aides approached the yearfellow, standing pointing his quivering gun at the body on the floor.

They all looked at it for a while.

A couple of his men wept; several offered up muttered prayers of thanks.

“It’s her,” a voice said.

“Analysis,” the Priest Colonel said. One aide crouched down to the body, unstrapping a bulky piece of equipment from his back-pack. “Send the results direct to the Shrine,” the Priest Colonel said. Another aide knelt, unhitching a powerful comm unit.

The Priest Colonel knelt too and removed one of his armoured gloves. He reached out and touched the dead woman’s pale, cold hand.

“I want physical tissue samples sent immediately to the Shrine,” he said. The first aide took a small vial from his tunic and tore off a strip of flesh left near what had been the woman’s right eye. He sealed the bloody scrap in the vial and handed it to another of the faithful, the young yearfellow who had first discovered the corpse.

“Take my own craft,” the Priest Colonel told him, removing a ring from his finger and handing it to the yearfellow. “Fly straight to the Shrine. God go with you.”

The yearfellow saluted and ran off.

The Priest Colonel stared at the body lying on the floor, as the gene-sampling machine hummed and clicked.

The battle had extended far and wide. The bandamyion-mounted troops had been de-planed from their transports, drawn up ready to attack, and had just begun their advance after the electronic disablement of the Keep’s defences when they had themselves been overwhelmed by the Huhsz forces, their light-harness cannon, laser-carbines, pistols and ceremonial swords no match for the Huhsz high-velocity projectile weapons, smart missiles, pulse-shaped tunnelling demolition charges and airborne X-ray lasers.

The monowheel sped through the shattered iris of a door low in the foothills above the desert, then turned smartly and accelerated up the hillside, every traversed ridge and boulder a soft ripple of movement as its wheel flowed or its body leapt over the obstructions, leaving only a faint trace of dust behind, while its camouflage-skinned body flowed with constantly changing patterns and shades of ochre and grey. Air roared; the transparent cockpit-screen rose liquidly around her of its own accord, reducing the wind-blast.

She pressed the accelerator grip a little harder; the monowheel screamed still faster uphill, forcing her head back against the seat. She let the grip go; they coasted towards the summit of the ridge.

She braked the monowheel with the left-hand grip. The vehicle purred to a halt, then stood perfectly still and silent on its one slanted wheel.

The woman and the android looked down into the bowl of the desert. The battle was a great broad, slow column of smoke and dust over the centre of the depression. A dozen or so craters had been punched into the surface of the desert, each a hundred metres or more across and half that deep; smoke piled out of three of them.

As they watched, a grey shape rose quickly out of one of the other craters, twisted once in the air and powered away, climbing rapidly as it angled north-east and took on the colour of the sky. Its sonic boom sounded almost soft amongst the crackling detonations of munitions in the desert below.

She watched the aircraft go, its half-seen outline disappearing over the pink-lit mountain peaks, then she turned and squinted downwards. She dragged the Lazy Gun out of the footwell and pointed it over the edge of the monowheel’s cockpit, bringing its sights down to her eyes.

Perhaps six score bandamyions lay strewn across the desert, in small groups. A few of their riders were still firing, some of them using the bodies of their dead mounts as barely effectual cover from the armoured Huhsz troops.

She looked up to see Huhsz weapon platforms cruising above the killing ground, firing monofilament bi-missiles and cluster rounds almost casually into the fray, their every discharge turning a few more of the fallen bandamyions into chopped meat and killing a rider or two.

A couple of arrowhead shapes circled high above, black on blue. To the south, beyond a distant filigree of contrails, the sky sparkled sporadically. The Lazy Gun showed no more detail.

She moved the monowheel fifty metres along the ridge to where a dead bandamyion rider lay, crushed underneath his fallen mount.

She looked, frowning, at his out-thrown arm.

“They seem better armed,” Feril said.

She turned and caught sight of a last group of riders; just a few black dots against the cinder-grey of the hills four or five kilometres away. A Huhsz gun platform exploded in the air near the group of riders and fell smoking to the ground.

She looked through the Lazy Gun again, turning up the magnification.

The view wavered. The bandamyion riders were like ghosts against the trembling image of the barren earth of the mountains. The group of ten riders ascended quickly to a pass in the mountains, then stopped. One of them stood up in his saddle. Another raised something to his shoulder and a pink spark flamed, washing out the view in the Gun’s sights for a moment; she looked away and up and saw first one, then both of the arrowhead shapes high above blossom with silent fire against the blue, and start to fall.

She looked back through the Gun’s sights.

The rider standing in the saddle-outlined against the start of the sunset, body made thin and stick-like by the wash of pastel light behind-seemed to look down into the desert.

She thought she saw him shake his head, but the quivering image made it hard to be certain.

“That is, perhaps, your cousin,” Feril said quietly. “I might be able to contact him, if you like.”

She looked up at the android, then over to the rider crushed under his dead mount.

“No,” she said, putting the Gun down. “Don’t do that.” The group of riders at the pass in the distant mountains were barely visible dots, a tiny, dark flaw against the pale sunset light. “Just a moment,” she said.

The monowheel dipped millimetrically and made the tiniest of whining noises as she got down from it and walked to where the dead man’s arm stuck out across the dust from beneath the tawny pelt of the dead bandamyion. The rider’s gun lay nearby.

She lifted the rider’s cold, grey hand up; the sleeve of his tunic fell further back. She inspected the mark on his wrist.

“What do you see, Feril?” she asked.

“I see a patch of slightly abraded, calloused skin which I would guess extends to a two-centimetre wide ring round the dead man’s wrist,” Fenril said. “There are two immediately adjacent outer rings which look as though they formed the limits of a wider band of callusing in the past.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I see, too.”

She let the dead man’s hand fall back to the dust and picked up the light laser-carbine that had fallen from his hand.

She walked round the bandamyion, looking for anything else, and saw the Keep-uniformed body of a guard lying half-in and half-out of a shallow trench downhill. She turned him over; he’d been shot with a small-beam laser.

She tried to fire the guard’s gun but it only clicked.

She looked into the distance. “Mind Bomb,” she whispered.

She returned to the other side of the dead animal and looked up at the darkening blue vault above, then at the android sitting patiently to the rear of the perfectly still vehicle’s cockpit, the tilted monowheel itself curving out behind Feril’s slender body like a rounded fin.

“Do you know roughly where we are?” she asked.

“Only to within about one or two hundred kilometres,” Feril said apologetically.

“That’ll do,” she said. “Think this glorified monocycle could take me to Udeste?” She dusted off her hands as she walked back to the vehicle.

“Udeste?” Feril’s head moved back a fraction.

“Yes,” she said. “I was thinking of heading into the sunset and turning right when I saw the ocean, but maybe you can find a more direct route, if this thing has the range.”

“Well,” Feril said. “I suppose I could, and I suppose this could, technically. But aren’t there forces between here and there who might attempt to stop us?”

“There are indeed,” she said, swinging back up into the cockpit. She patted the Lazy Gun. “Though if we can get the lock off this, they won’t be able to stop us.”

“I am not sure that will be easy,” Feril said. “What if we cannot release the weapon?”

She looked into the machine’s sunglass-eyes, seeing herself reflected twice. She watched her tiny, distorted images shrug.

“If they get us they get the Gun too, and everybody gets to go with a bang.” She pushed the Lazy Gun forward into the footwell and sat in the seat, hauling on the harness. “To tell the truth, Feril,” she said, “I really don’t care any more.” She glanced up at the android. “You don’t have to come, though; just point me in the right direction. I’ll let you off wherever. You can say you were abducted; you’ll get home.”

Feril was silent for a second, then said, “No, I’ll accompany you, if you don’t mind. Given that you are prepared to risk your life, it would be lacking in grace of me not to gamble the loss of a week’s memories.”

She shrugged again, then looked towards the sunset, to the pass in the mountains.

The riders had gone. Before she looked away a single, large aircraft powered into the skies beyond and headed north-west, angling across the sunset and dispatching another distantly diving arrowhead shape above as though it was an afterthought.

The monowheel vehicle turned and rolled away down the far side of the ridge, picking up speed as it descended towards a dry valley, then accelerated smoothly away in a trail of chill, falling dust.

24 Fall Into The Sea

The evening light deepened as the monowheel spun quickly down a succession of shallow clinker valleys devoid of snow, vegetation or significant.obstructions towards a range of mountains, then came out into a broad gulf between jagged peaks whose summits still held a snow-pink trace of sunset. They found a wide shelf of till sand and gravel that traced a barren contour on that great valley and drove along it; after a few kilometres its surface bore a dusting of snow that thickened gradually as they drove. The tree line was fifty metres lower down.

“Is this a road?” she said, puzzled, as they headed into and out of a long narrow side-valley she’d have thought it easier to bridge at the mouth.

“I believe it is what is called a parallel road,” Feril said. “Caused by the waters of a temporary lake, probably formed when a glacier block-”

Feril went silent, then said, “Electromagnetic pulse.”

“What?”

The mountain-tops on the other side of the broad valley were suddenly blazing white.

She stopped the monowheel.

They turned and looked behind them, but the snow-caped shoulders of the mountain at their back cut out much of the sky.

“I believe the Keep has been destroyed by a thermonuclear device,” Feril said.

She watched for a moment as high, feathery clouds above the mountains slowly faded yellow-white, then started the monowheel again and powered on along the sand and gravel road.

The ground-shock arrived a little later. The monowheel absorbed the pulse without a murmur but they saw the snow-smothered ground nearby shake and ripple.

Sharrow and Feril looked up the white mountain slopes on their right, to see them covered with hazy white clouds, gradually spreading and enlarging.

“Oh, shit.”

“I believe those are avalanches.”

“So do I. Hang on.”

They raced along the white shelf of the ancient beach to the shelter of an outcrop of rock. The avalanches were a smoothly building roar of noise that terminated in a blast of icy air and a sudden dimming of the late-evening light; the sky above the summit of the outcrop disappeared. A tearing dim greyness flowed all around the sheltering rock-face and a whistling noise came through the throaty bellow of the avalanche. They were suddenly surrounded by their own heavy, swirling snowfall.

A noise like thunder sounded downslope as the tsunami of snow and ice hit the forest.

When the roaring stopped and the last few flakes had fallen around them, they brushed themselves down and went slowly on through a dim white haze across the ice-rubbled mounds of settling snow. She found the cockpit heater control and turned it up.

Feril leant over the side of the vehicle and peered underneath as they traversed one of the house-high pillows of snow.

“Impressive,” she heard the android say. She glanced round. “The wheel beneath has ballooned to this width,” Feril said, spreading its hands over half a metre apart, “and appears to grow spikes where it contacts the surface.” The section of angled wheel protruding behind Feril was thin as a knife.

“Yes,” she said, turning to the front again. “Well, don’t lean back.”

The parallel road had all but disappeared under the icy debris and scattered falls of rock. Downhill, through a haze of settling snow, much of the forest had disappeared under the white flows, the shattered trunks of the trees sticking jumbled from the snow like broken bones.

She kept the monowheel on what felt like the right level until they saw a huge flute of ice and snow like a scree slope leading down through the wrecked forest to the flat valley floor. She swung the vehicle onto it and down while the last of the day’s light leached from the sky.

They followed the frozen river for an hour through the moonlit darkness, then stopped.

She parked the machine off the white highway of river in the shelter of a C-shaped bay of rocks topped by snow-dusted trees. Feril studied the lock on the Lazy Gun while she stretched her legs and inspected as much of the monowheel as she could by moonlight.

The single wheel was angled at about thirty degrees off the vertical; it looked solid but couldn’t be. She remembered the bike back in the warehouse in Vembyr, but even flex-metal couldn’t do what this material seemed to be able to. She got Feril to move the vehicle forward a little. The single wheel seemed to flow rather than merely revolve. It was the colour of dulled mercury; its chevron-corrugated tread looked like a giant gear-wheel.

The cannon muzzle was scooped into the chin of the vehicle on the centre-line. The shining tubes sticking from the rear, which she had mistaken for engine exhausts, were the recoilless weapon’s gas-ports. Feril checked the weapon-state screen and reported that they had another thirty-one shells left of various types.

“I’m afraid the cannon will remain our most powerful weapon,” Feril said sorrowfully, putting the Lazy Gun down and tapping the trigger-lock. “This is a cryptogenetic code-lock. It is impossible to open without the correct base-sequence key.”

“Well, never mind,” she said. “It was always a long shot.”

“I am sorry,” Feril said. “However, I believe I have worked out the link between your interest in the mark on the wrist of the man you looked at earlier and the reason you wish to go to the province of Udeste.”

She hauled herself back into the vehicle. “Took you a while,” she said, yawning.

“Yes,” Fenril said contemplatively. “I am a little disappointed myself.”

“Well,” she said, “you can redeem yourself by taking the night-shift. I’m tired.”

“I shall drive with all due care and attention.”

“Yes,” she said, sliding down into the footwell, yawning. “Lantskaar welcomes careful drivers.”

They put the Lazy Gun in the compartment behind the cockpit; Feril sat on the Gun with its legs either side of the driving seat. After a little experimentation, she found a comfortable way of snuggling down into the footwell while the android leant over to the controls in a position that would have been tortuously uncomfortable for a human but with which it assured her it was perfectly happy.

She slept while Feril drove through the night.

So far, so good.

Eh? What?

I said, So far, so good.

The man who was really the Lazy Gun was sitting in the monowheel cockpit alongside her. There wasn’t room for him, but he was there.

What do you want now? she asked the Gun. I want to sleep.

I beg your pardon. I just wanted to say, well done. Sorry I can’t do any destroying yet, but like I said, we’ll see what we can do…

Yes, yes, she said. Now go away, I’m tired.

All right. Good-night, Lady Sharrow.

Good-Fate, I don’t believe this; I’m saying good-night to my own subconscious.

Of course you are, the Gun said.

Now sleep.

The air was warm around her as she spun through it, safe in the midst of the surrounding cold. The android was at the controls. The antique machine hummed beneath her, transporting her among reflections.

In her dream she hugged the broad neck of the trafe bird.

The sky was an insane blue; an endless curve of land died before the wheel, forever reeling away towards an expanding horizon. The mountains became snow-dusted hills, which became tundra. They rolled across the plains of frozen lakes among the mountains, found old tracks through the hills and skirted the marshy tundra until they found an old turnpike, its metalling cracked like the surface of an ancient painting and dotted with the erupted blisters of ice hummocks.

They avoided settlements and once swung off a better-maintained length of the tundra road to let a military supply road train pass, but otherwise saw no sign of people. Feril’s internal knowledge of Golter’s geography didn’t cover northern Lantskaar and the Embargoed Areas in great detail, and the monowheel seemed to have no strategic navigational systems whatsoever, but the android was what it described as cautiously certain they were now around the centre of the Areas, near the Farvel coast, a thousand kilometres due west of the fjord where they had found the Gun. They had travelled approximately seven hundred kilometres from the Keep.

They saw many aircraft contrails, and on one occasion heard but did not see low-flying jets while speeding through a low forest by the side of a long lake.

The monowheel absorbed the shock of potholes and boulders, leapt larger depressions, and turned its wheel into a tall ellipse to ford rivers. Once, when she was driving quickly up a shallow slope on a hillside towards a long bridge that had fallen into a ravine, the vehicle slammed to a stop as she was still squinting at the revealed rim of broken concrete and thinking about braking.

She turned round to Feril.

“Did you do that?”

“No,” the android said. “The vehicle would appear to be what is sometimes called ‘smart’.” Feril sounded slightly condescending. “Though not sentient, of course.”

“Of course.”

“I myself was just about to suggest braking.”

“Right,” she said. She looked for a way down into the ravine, then whirled the monowheel around towards a hairpinning side-road descending into the forest.

She walked, windmilling her stiff arms, by the side of a waterfall in low hills they thought must be near the north-western limits of the Areas. The android stood in the pool at the foot of the waterfall, waves lapping round its thighs. She was determined not to ask it why it was doing this.

“Hey,” she said, peering under the rear of the vehicle. “There’s a mark, a gouge or something here.” She looked at the android. “What happened to the due care and attention?”

“Oh,” Feril said quietly, staring into the water. “That will be a bullet mark.”

“A bullet mark?” she said.

Feril nodded slowly, still staring at the water. “We picked that up last night at the Lantskaarian border.” It looked at her briefly, head turning smoothly to and fro. “It all happened very quickly,” it said reassuringly. “By the time I had an opportunity to waken you, we were out of danger. I thought it best to let you sleep.” Its voice was soft.

She was not sure what to say.

Feril stooped, dipping suddenly, one hand flicking into the water, then it straightened and walked towards her, a half-metre-long fish flapping powerfully in its hand.

She looked at it.

“You said you were hungry,” Feril explained. “I suggest we grill the fish with the laser.”

She nodded, wondering why they had not thought to ask the android’s help when they had all been starving at the fjord.

“Thank you, Feril,” she said. She no longer felt hungry, but she supposed she had better eat. “I’ll get the gun.”

They reached the Security Franchise strip that afternoon, traversing several military roads in the forested hills while Feril monitored leakages of comm and sensory wavelengths. It guided them away from the roads and the areas where the electromagnetic clutter was thickest; they took to tracks, then paths, then the forest floor, thick with rotting leaf-scales and mosscovered boulders.

They crossed what they guessed was the border into Caltasp by wading the monowheel through a rushing stream beneath a ramshackle, electrified fence; the vehicle reduced the portion of the wheel under its body almost to nothing at one point, and at another was actually afloat, in a dark pool under the everleafed trees. Even then, it remained perfectly stable and level in the water, gyros whining distantly. A light flashed on the instruments and Feril suggested pressing the glowing area; when she did the monowheel surged forward through the water, leaving a foamy wake.

The machine purred out of the water, rose smoothly up the muddy bank and entered the forest again.

“Great toy,” she said.

“Quite.”

They returned through the concentric layers of surfacetravelling civilisation to forest paths, then tracks, then winding metalled roads in the foothills, then a narrow turnpike, heading arrow-straight through the plantations of low crop-forests. Vapour trails wove a net through the clear blue sky, and twice again they heard low-flying jets.

A third group of jets went right over them; this time there was no warning build-up of noise, just an impression of their shadows-a single flicker across the road-followed by a stunning, titanic slap of sound and the scream of their engines fading in both directions at once while the trees on either side of the road whipped back and forth in the sudden storm, losing scales, twigs and whole branches. The monowheel reacted to the gust by squatting slightly, but otherwise remained level.

They rolled on.

She had never seen a turnpike in Caltasp so deserted.

“Where is everybody?”

“It’s a little worrying,” Feril said above the slipstream noise. “I’ve been monitoring the public broadcast channels, and several of them appear to consist only of a soundtrack of what I believe is called martial music. Other channels have been showing nothing but old entertainments. There have been a couple of weak EMPs in the last hour, too.”

She looked round at it. “You mean nukes?” she asked.

“Perhaps not; they may have been caused by charged-particle weapons.”

She turned back, watching the trees stream past on either side. “Either way,” she said.

They side-stepped two military convoys by taking once to the forest and once to the hummocked tundra. The turnpike avoided towns and other settlements as a matter of course.

The tundra became huge prairies of grain.

They ploughed a course through one vast field to avoid a road block, then on an ordinary but straight road accelerated to out-pace a helicopter that seemed to be trying to follow them.

She switched roads several times immediately after that, always heading north or west through the dying light of the cold afternoon.

Finally the military traffic became too thick, and they left the metalled ways altogether. They took to tracks and forest fire-breaks, old drove-ways and canal tow-paths. They passed hill villages and dark-looking towns, old orchards and walled compounds; the monowheel rose and fell and banked and paced through the gloaming.

She thought she smelled something in the air as they rolled down the bed of a half-dried river, over water-meadows and sand banks and through clear shallows between hills bright and clear in the winter dusk. The river splayed out, deepening to become a tree-studded estuary; they took to the bank, then summited a sand dune.

They were facing the sea.

Feril drove through the depths of the night, once she had gone to sleep. They had made good time along the cold beaches of the coast and watched the skies to the south and east flicker and pulse with different-coloured lights. Feril picked up officially sanctioned broadcast reports of limited engagements taking place between Security Franchise units-backed by World Court licensed forces-and the armed services of Lantskaar, following acts of aggression and an invasion by the latter; the situation was being contained and there was no need to worry. The broadcast ended abruptly in another, strong, electromagnetic pulse.

Stretched forward over the cockpit, Feril only glanced at the monowheel’s nightsight display now and again to check on its sensitivity. Sea, surf, beach and dunes were bright in the moonlight. The strand was flat and smooth in places, strewn with braided streams and shallow pools in others; the monowheel thrummed across it all as though over glass.

She was on a station platform, in the middle of a snowy plain. An old steam train huffed behind the crowd of people. The Gun was there again, but it wasn’t saying anything this time; it stayed in the background while she said good-bye to Miz and Dloan and Zefla and Cenuij. They were whole and fit and well, as she’d have liked to remember them. She tried not to cry as she hugged them and said good-bye. She kept thinking there was somebody else there, too; somebody she could only see from the corner of her eye, a faceless figure in a wheelchair, but whenever she turned to look at the figure, she disappeared.

Then she saw Froterin and Cara and Vleit standing behind the others, and they looked great and hadn’t aged at all, and she laughed and cried and hugged them too, and they were all talking at once and everybody was hugging everybody else, all so glad to see one another after all this time, but soon it was time for them all to go, and her eyes filled with so many tears she couldn’t see properly as they all boarded the train, waving and smiling sadly as the old engine went huff, huff, and gradually pulled the dark carriages away from the little station in the snow.

She and the Gun watched the train disappear into the white distance. Then she looked at the Gun and It smiled.

The sleeping woman stirred beneath the android, sighing and turning over in her sleep. Feril pushed the speed up as they flashed past a town, burning in the darkness. More lights flared in the sky to the south, and the broad band of junklight sparkled intermittently.

The monowheel forded two rivers and swam three.

Lady Sharrow woke with the dawn.

The sky was a shroud of low cloud; light drizzle fell. They zipped along the tide-wet shore, leaving their single cryptic track behind on the winter beach. The sky ahead looked dark, solid and certain after the hollow blueness and the overcast’s grey indeterminacy.

The beach went on into the distance, and she let the speed climb until the monowheel would go no faster. The cockpit closed right over and the noise was still colossal. The streaked sand and water flashed at them and beneath them to be pressed and flung, arcing and falling into the whirling vortex the vehicle left behind as it screamed along the shore, its whole body humming, vibrating like a tensed, quivering animal, their speed so great that its suspension was finally registering bumps and small shocks. She smiled. The dunes to her right were a blur. The velocity read-out indicated that they were travelling at about seventy per cent of the speed of sound.

Feril was hunched over the rear of the liquid glass. She risked a glance. The android’s expressionless face gave no hint of its emotions.

The beach became uncomfortably bumpy and changed to a mixture of sand and gravel; drizzle sounded on the screen like blasted shot. She relaxed and slowed the car until the cockpit glass opened a hole above her head. The roaring noise was still terrific.

“You okay?” she shouted.

“Extremely!” Feril said loudly, and sounded as though it meant it. “What an exhilarating experience!”

She drove on; three hundred kilometres an hour suddenly seemed terribly slow. Surf boomed to their left as the drizzle became rain and the cloud overhead thickened. She took the monowheel into the dunes in the cloud-dark noon.

On the far side of a stinking marsh guarded by ancient, crumbling concrete monoliths and a series of weed-scummed lagoons, they came to the fence. It looked dilapidated but still strong. There was a guard tower nearby but it was unoccupied and strung with blow-weed.

The cold wind moaned through the hexagons in the fence and the metal support legs of the tower.

They got out of the vehicle. Feril could detect no surveillance devices. She considered using the cannon just for speed, but it would be noisy; she cut the fence’s steel mesh strand by strand with the laser instead. The monowheel curtsied through the hole and they rolled on through the chill levels of marshland beyond.

She brought the vehicle splashing out of a greasy, polluted stream and charged it up the wet-dark sand to the bottom of a dip between two tall dunes.

The Sea House lay in the rain-dulled distance, its dark bulk shrouded in squalls and cloud. Its top hundred metres were hidden, the spires and towers vanishing into the murk like the giant trunks of a petrified forest.

The cold wind gusted; a stench of rotting seaweed flowed around the stationary vehicle like a slimy, stroking hand.

“Ah-ha,” said Feril.

“Yes,” she said, tilting the wheel towards the slope of gravel beach beneath and squeezing the throttle. “Ah-fucking-ha.”

The monowheel skimmed easily across the weed and pools in the bay, climbed the greasy stones of the causeway’s steep sides without a pause and came to rest near the middle of the isthmus, facing the Sea House and standing absurdly on its single disc like a resting bird. She climbed out; Feril remained in the vehicle.

She walked, limping, to the great iron door overhanging the incline at the end of the causeway. Her hands were empty; they shook. Her belly grumbled and she felt faint. The blood pumped and coursed within her, and with each beat of her heart the whole vast edifice seemed to quake and pulse and shiver, as though for all its mountainous solidity the Sea House was merely a projection, something held in the power of her blood-quickened eyes.

There was no sign that anybody had noticed her approach. Clouds bundled round the House’s crenellated slopes, snagged there and were dragged away again. The rain was cold on her face. She reached the tilted gatehouse and found a heavy stone. She slammed the rock against the great iron door repeatedly. Chips of stone and rust fell together to the damp cobbles. Her muscles ached; the bones in her arms seemed to resonate with each quivering concussion.

“All right! All right!” a voice said. She dropped the rock and stooped to the opened grille.

“What do you want?” the voice said from the darkness.

“In,” she said.

“What?”

“Let me in,” she said.

“Who are you? What’s your name? Have you made an appointment?”

“No. Let me in. Please let me in. It’s very important.”

“What? No appointment? This is disgraceful. Certainly not, go away. And if that’s your car, you can’t park there.”

“Stand away from the door,” she said, stepping slowly backwards.

“What?” said the small, scratchy voice.

“Stand well away from the door if you want to live,” she called, still walking backwards. “Stand back!”

She turned and ran, waved to the android in the monowheel, then dived to the causeway’s flagstones, her arms over her head.

The monowheel’s cannon boomed eight times in quick succession; immediately following the first blast there began an answering sequence of eight thunderous explosions. After the last, she got up and ran to the monowheel, which was already moving towards her. Feril put out a hand and hauled her easily into the cockpit.

She took the controls as Feril leant back, sending the monowheel curving down the causeway while debris was still falling from the wrecked gatehouse. As the monowheel splashed into the shallow pools among the weed at the bottom of the causeway, the Sea House’s great iron door fell forward in one vast, dusty, smoking piece and slammed into the slope, cracking the causeway and throwing flagstones and cobbles into the air. The rest of the gatehouse’s facade crumbled and slid, collapsing into a smoking pile around the fallen door and leaving a huge broil of dust above a ramp of rubble and a dark, gaping breach.

The monowheel sped away, charging round the curve of the bay in front of the Sea House’s curtain wall and into the slack retreating waters of the old tide, wading to a point in the towering walls a third of the way round the structure from the wrecked gatehouse.

“There,” Feril said.

She turned the vehicle towards the scooped trench of a weed-draped tunnel in the towering granite walls.

The monowheel crept up the stinking sewage outfall to a portcullis of corroded iron bars. A torrent of dirty water fell from a level half-way up the two-metre diameter grille. She picked up the laser.

“It looks very rusty,” Feril said. “Try nudging it.”

She sent the monowheel forward; the iron frame creaked then shifted. She reversed the monowheel quickly. The portcullis fell forward, splashing into the tunnel and releasing the dammed-up pond of sewage behind. She heard it flowing past them, and almost passed out with the smell.

They travelled another twenty metres up the sewer before reaching a junction beyond which the pipes became too narrow for the monowheel. They looked up; grey light filtered down through a grating. Feril stood on the top of the vehicle and pushed the grating up and back.

The android climbed out; she passed it the Lazy Gun, then Feril pulled her up to join it. She strapped the Gun to herself while Feril replaced the grating. She handed Feril the laser rifle anal kept the pistol for herself.

They were in a broad, damp gallery; tall windows on one side contained not a single intact pane. Rain gusted in. Moss grew on dulled mosaics underfoot as the woman and the android jogged along to the darkness of a doorway. They turned a corner and ran right into a small monk walking towards them, one iron-manacled hand chained to the wall at his side, his gaze fixed on the steaming bowl he was carrying.

Sharrow bumped into the monk, splashing the gruel over his habit and the wall at his side. He looked angry for a moment, then his mouth fell open as he saw the android. His brows furrowed as he looked at their chainless hands. He had time to look frightened, briefly, before Sharrow cracked his head off the stones above his chain track; he slid unconscious down the wall.

Feril looked back at the prone figure as they ran on.

They climbed what seemed a never-ending spiral of steps rising out of a vast gallery, exiting at the top of a massive stone tower and crossing to the main House over a thin stone bridge, high over an ancient deserted dock where dilapidated cranes stood pierced with rust and coated with moss. Thigh-thick lengths of rope lay coiled on the rotting dock-sides like enormous worm-casts.

They followed the chain system through draughty corridors and dark halls, turning each time the number of rails decreased. They had to hide twice as monks passed them in gloomy corridors. The second group carried rifles and were running in the direction of the distant gatehouse.

The chain system’s inset hierarchy took them constantly upwards and inwards, ascending broad, shadowy flights of steps, ramps that spiralled and zigged and zagged higher and higher into the middle then upper levels of the House. Halls and balconies, tunnels and corridors filled the stone-space; their feet sounded off paving-slabs, wooden planks, ceramic tiles and pierced metal. The tracks on the walls were reduced to two, then one as they penetrated the vast building.

Finally they found a corridor whose walls were quite smooth, with no rails whatsoever. They walked cautiously into a small, walled courtyard ceilinged with chill grey mist where bedraggled plants lay beaded and heavy with moisture. What appeared to be a well in the centre of the courtyard looked down into a vast hall where they saw tiny figures moving to and fro. A rancid draught of air rose from the well, bringing the noise of small, alarmed voices.

They looked round the windows facing onto the hidden garden. Feril nodded at a door in one corner.

It wasn’t locked. They walked into a short corridor lined with pornographic holos. Feril stopped outside a door. She could hear voices now, too.

They burst in. The girl in the bed gave a shriek and ducked under the bedclothes. The fat, naked man sitting at the screen whirled round, his eyes wide. A senior brother’s habit lay folded on a chair. She lasered the screen; it had been on sound only. The naked man put his arms up, sheltering himself from the debris of the exploded screen.

“You have five minutes,” she told him, “to take us straight to any ‘Honoured Guests’ who’ve arrived here in the last three days.” She looked at Feril. “Start counting.”

The fat man sat up, trying to muster his dignity. He took a breath.

“And you had better fucking know who I mean,” she told him, before he could speak, “or you’re cooked meat.”

“Daughter,” the man said, standing, his voice confident and controlled. He pointed to the habit on the chair. “At least allow-”

“Oh, at least nothing,” she said, suddenly angry. She fired the gun at the floor between his feet. Splinters burst from the varnished wood. There was a yelp from beneath the bedclothes and the fat man hopped on one foot, holding the other. His eyes had gone wide again. “Move!” Sharrow yelled.

They walked through the apartments; the fat brother limped, leaving a trail of blood. She limped after him, frowning at the red spots they were leaving in a trail behind them. She kept looking back. They climbed steps, crossed a terrace underneath a roof of stained glass, and then the fat man pointed a shaking hand at a door.

She stationed him two metres back from the door, a finger to her lips. “Keep him there,” she told Feril quietly. The android stood behind the naked man, gripping his quivering shoulders. She went to the wall at the side of the door and tested the handle. It turned and she pushed; the door swung open.

“No!” the fat man screamed, an instant before his torso exploded open through a giant red crater in his midriff. Blood gushed from his mouth as his eyes rolled back and his entrails flooded out. She ducked and rolled across the bottom of the door, firing.

Feril let go of the man and stepped to the side.

Sharrow jumped up and stuck her head round the side of the door; Molgarin lay on the floor inside, screaming.

“You?” she said, frowning.

Molgarin was propped up on his elbows, howling. He was dressed in a dull habit; the HandCannon lay where he had dropped it. The laser had burned deep into one shin and shattered the other; blood pumped onto a dark carpet.

He saw her. “Don’t kill me!” he screamed. “Don’t kill me! I’m not immortal! I’m an actor, not some warlord! My name’s Lefin Chrolleser! I worked in a rep company on Trond I swear! For pity’s sake, please! He made me do it! He made me! I’ll take you to him! Please don’t kill me!” He put his head back, sobbing and spluttering. “God, my legs! My legs!” He looked back at her, eyes streaming, and wailed, “Oh, please don’t kill me, please… I promise I’ll take you to him…”

Sharrow looked at Feril. “Could you carry him?” she asked.

The android nodded. “I think so.”

She burned the man’s leg wound with the laser to stop the blood. His screams echoed through the stained-glass rooms.

They walked unhindered through the midst of the chained. Nobody followed them. Feril carried the moaning man. She limped in front, following his whispered directions.

They took a creakingly ancient lift, descending into the bowels of the House down a circular shaft.

He watched the scene at the gatehouse on the monitor. Armed monks swarmed over the wreckage and ran along the walls. Ancient weapons were hauled out from under tarpaulins inside long-neglected towers; geriatric tanks were trundled out of storage and hauled into positions where their rusty cannons could cover the breach.

He shook his head. He ought to have attended to this. He had been foolish to rely so much-as they had-on the reputation of the place keeping people away.

He checked the bank of broadcast and subscription-beamed monitors again. Most stations local to southern Caltasp were blanked out. The rest of Golter was reporting on the small war that had broken out with the Rebel States. The Court was keeping a surprisingly firm grip on the relevant facts. His own information was that the war had already gone tactically nuclear, and larger weapons couldn’t be ruled out. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it was depressing and elating at the same time; another pointless war, another increase in Golter’s lamentably high background radiation level and yet more destruction… But this might be the beginning of the end for the World Court. The time might be coming.

He looked at the House monitor screens.-They really ought to have proper security surveillance. There wasn’t even any surviving record of exactly what had happened at the gate; the recording apparatus had been sited in the gatehouse itself.

The chamber’s rear-interior door chimed. He checked the monitor.

It was that fool Chrolleser… He started to look away.

… and Sharrow.

He looked back, stunned.

Chrolleser looked feverish and sweaty; he held the HandCannon he’d asked to keep after the fiasco in the Keep. It was pointed at Sharrow’s head.

“Sir!” he gulped. “Sir; look! I have her! And she has brought the Gun!”

He closed his mouth; it must have fallen open. He pulled the monitor view back. The two were alone in the long corridor that led back to the old elevator shaft. The Gun was strapped to Sharrow’s side. Her eyes looked old and defeated, her face grey and wan. So that was who had wrecked the door! He should have guessed.

“Come in!” he yelled, punching the door button. He buzzed the Restricted Library, switched the desk camera on and directed the transmission to the Library, then jumped up from his seat and ran across the chamber, up the flight of stone steps and along the balcony to the opening door.

He skidded to a stop in front of it as Sharrow clicked a magazine back into place in the stock of the HandCannon, cocked the gun and pointed it at a spot between his eyes.

Behind her Chrolleser seemed to have fainted, head lolling to one side, even though he was still standing up. Then something moved underneath his bulky habit and he bent forward. The actor collapsed to the floor, moaning; the android the team had taken with them from Vembyr slid out from under the back of Chrolleser’s habit, holding a laser rifle.

He was aware that his mouth had opened again. He stared from Sharrow to Chrolleser to the android, then back to Sharrow again.

She smiled. “Hello, Geis,” she said. The HandCannon in her bandaged hand barely wavered as she punched him in the jaw with her other fist.

“No! No, Sharrow! You’ve got the whole thing wrong! I captured Molgarin. He’s my prisoner. Look, I’m just glad you’re safe!” He laughed. “That’s quite a right jab you have there, but come on, this is ridiculous. Sharrow. Untie me.”

The chamber was big, irregularly shaped on several levels and tall-ceilinged. It was so packed with treasures that it looked like nothing more than a giant junk shop. Geis sat tied to one seat, Molgarin or Chrolleser or whatever his name was to another. The android stood in front of them, the laser rifle in its hand.

Geis had bled a little from one side of his mouth. He worked his chin now and again as he talked to her. The other man was mumbling, barely conscious.

Sharrow walked round the big stone table that dominated the chamber’s central area and on which she had deposited the Lazy Gun. The enormous table was loaded to overflowing with a whole trove of treasures; the less valuable items were not quite priceless.

She looked up from the casing of the Universal Principles to a rack of weapons she recognised from the undercroft of the tower in the fjord. A system of pulleys kept a load of jewel-encrusted harnesses suspended over the table. The harnesses looked about the right size for bandamyions. On the wall behind were a couple of giant diamond leaf ikons from the time of the Lizard Court. They were each the size of a house and she had read about them in school; they had been missing for three thousand years. There was a small door underneath the two ikons with wall tracks leading from it; the chain system extended even to here.

She drew her hand over the ceramic cover of a book probably old enough to have predated the first millennium, and looked round the chamber again, rubbing her fingers together. She thought she recognised some of the more classical treasures from the old gold mine store, deep under the Blue Hills in Piphram.

“You’ve always liked a clutter, haven’t you, Geis?”

“Sharrow, please,” Geis said. “You’re making a terrible mistake here.”

She turned and frowned at him. “Good grief,” she said. “Do people actually say that? Well, well.”

She opened the case of the Universal Principles. The Crownstar Addendum lay inside, draped over what looked like a piece of cut glass the size and approximate shape of a crown.

“What’s this?” she said, hauling the heavy, thickly glittering ring out. There was some sort of writing engraved round the rim; she didn’t recognise the alphabet.

“That,” Geis said, “is the Crownstar.”

“This lump of glass?” She didn’t try to disguise the disappointment in her voice. The so-called Crownstar’s prongs were cut off-set, like a series of sharp, canted escarpments.

“It’s not glass,” Geis said, sighing. “It’s diamond. A single, pure flawless diamond. Be careful with it.”

“Uh-huh,” she said sceptically. “Feril?”

The android looked at the torus in her hands.

“It is a diamond,” it said.

“See?” Geis said to her, smiling. “The Crownstar.”

“Well,” Feril said with a hint of apology in its voice, “it might be that, too, but originally it was part of a triple-filament deep-crust drill-bit.”

“What?” Geis said, looking at the android as though it was mad.

“Fourth millennium,” Feril said. “They lost one drill at ninety kilometres under the Blaist mountains and the replacement was never used. That must be part of the back-up head.”

“What about the inscription?” Geis protested. “The runes?”

“Serial numbers,” Feril said.

“Rubbish!” Geis said. He looked furious, but didn’t take the argument any further. Molgarin/Chrolleser groaned in the seat alongside: Geis glared at him. “Oh, shut up!”

Sharrow put the Crownstar back in the casing with the Addendum and closed the cover.

She paced on round the table. She drew an ornamented, jewelstudded sword from an equally impractical-looking scabbard. The sword’s edges were thick and flat. She shook her head and slid the sword back into its sheath.

“What exactly is this place, Geis?” she asked as she continued to look around. “Some sort of den?”

“Breyguhn found it,” Geis said with a tired air, “when she came in here looking for the Universal Principles. After the Sad Brothers refused to ransom her, I meant to use this place to provide apartments for her, even though they insisted she still had to be chained. Later they went back even on that concession, but by that time I was looking for somewhere secure and I came to an arrangement with the Sad Brothers.”

“And where is Brey?” Sharrow asked.

Geis glanced over at the screens on the wall. “Now? Probably having to listen to Tidesong; then they let her eat with the other prisoners.”

Sharrow looked around the tall, shadowy spaces of the chamber. “And you were going to give all this to Brey, were you?”

“Yes,” Geis said. “Because she’s family, Sharrow. The way you’re family.”

“Right. And of course you’d never dream of doing anything horrid to me, would you?”

“Sharrow,” Geis said. “I’ve been trying to help you from the beginning; I have been helping you from the beginning. I tried to rescue you from this… monster, at his Keep.” Geis nodded at the man tied to the other seat. “It wasn’t my fault the Huhsz attacked at the same time. I’d no idea they were there.” Geis sounded bitter. “Some of my forces did get in and found this material here; they managed to retrieve it and bring it to me. Brave men died to rescue this collection, Sharrow. You shouldn’t make fun of it.”

“Geis,” she said, not looking at him, “you’ve had minutes to think up a better excuse than that. I’m disappointed.”

Geis closed his eyes for a moment. “You, whatever your name is,” he said wearily to Feril. “You must be capable of reason. Please try to talk some sense into my cousin.”

“I am afraid that as far as I understand them, I believe Lady Sharrow’s suspicions may well be justified, Count Geis,” Feril said regretfully.

“You fucking piece of junk,” Geis roared, shaking the chair he was tied to. “Untie me!”

Geis was breathing hard and looked flushed. He had been wearing trous and a slim-fitting tunic-top over a white shirt; Sharrow had torn the shirt into strips to tie him and Molgarin/ Chrolleser up with. She hadn’t bothered to put his tunic-top back on and he looked pathetic and vulnerable, stripped to the waist. She frowned at his midriff.

“Geis,” she said. “Is that the start of a paunch?”

“Sharrow!” Geis shouted, sucking his belly in. “Stop this nonsense! Let me go!”

“Maybe,” she said. “Once you’ve given me the key to the Lazy Gun.”

“I don’t have the key,” he said. “I do have clinics… which could perhaps help rid you of that awful thing in your skull which-”

“You don’t have the key,” Sharrow said, “but you do have clinics where they might be able to crack the lock’s genetic code and manufacture a key, yes, Geis?” she said, smiling. “Except you’re not supposed to know what sort of key is on the lock. Though, actually you might; old Molgarin here might have told you it was a gene-lock. There was no need to cover up there, but you did.” She shook her head. “You’re slipping badly, Geis.” She looked disapproving. “I have to say I think you’re letting the whole family down here.”

“Sharrow-” Geis said evenly.

“Oh, Geis, just admit it. You’ve been following in old Gorko’s footsteps, collecting all the things he tried to collect, trying to complete his work and somehow-I don’t know what your absurd scheme actually is-at least weaken the World Court, even if you can’t actually destroy it.” She looked at the bank of screens which filled one alcoved wall of the chamber. “Oh; how is our latest war going?” she asked. “Does it fit in with your plans, or not?”

“Sharrow,” Geis said again, struggling to control his voice. “I know you’ve been through a tough time recently-”

(She grimaced and shook her head and made a well-not-really motion with one hand.)

“- but you really are being quite thoroughly paranoid!”

“What a wonderful idea it must have seerned,” she said, ignoring him and crossing her arms as she sat up on the big stone table. “Doing that old Mind Bomb trick again. You know; the one old Ethce Lebmellin did for you, where one signal turns everybody’s guns off. But this time doing it with an entire fortress, and it meant your boys-well, not your boys, because you couldn’t risk your own people being caught, but the people you could use who nobody knew were yours; the Sad Brothers-they could come in like knights of old; with bandamyions! And swords! And flowing capes!”

She clapped her hands. “You’d get it all, wouldn’t you, Geis? Miz dead; taunted and played with for months using all that nonsense about the sial races in Tile so everybody thought he was being paranoid, and then finally killing him off with the paranoia made real! My, you must have been creaming your pants when you thought that one up. And you’d have all the things we looked for, all the things you wanted but couldn’t be seen to go for yourself, and you set up this dummy-” she nodded at Molgarin/Chrolleser, “- to be fall-guy, so you could blame it all on him. No doubt you told him he’d get away, but would he? Would he always be out there so you had something to keep me safe from, or were you going to run him through with your mighty broadsword, just for me?”

Geis stared at her, appalled.

“And I was supposed to feel so fucking grateful, wasn’t I, Geis?-” she said, shaking her head. “I was meant to fall into your arms. Or am I flattering myself?” She looked puzzled. “Was that part of the deal or not?”

“I loved you, Sharrow,” Geis said, sounding more sad than anything else. “I still love you. Just let me out of this and I’ll prove it all. I do love you, and I do love this family and our race-Oh, smile your cynical smile if you want, Sharrow, but I mean it. Everything I’ve had to do has been done for love.”

Feril turned to her then and said, “I think somebody is coming.” It nodded at the low door set underneath the two giant diamond leaf ikons.

Sharrow turned to face the door and pointed the gun at it. She heard the chink-chink noise of a chain and guessed who it might be.

The door opened and Breyguhn entered. She was dressed as Sharrow remembered, in a plain, grey shift, though the gown was dirtier than it had been. Her eyes looked wild; when she gazed at Sharrow, then at the android, then at Ceis, it was with a strange blankness. She carried a pile of books awkwardly in her arms. Her right hand was still joined to the track in the wall via a manacle and chain, but it was steel now rather than iron.

Sharrow let her gun down. “Hello again,” she said. “Feril; this is my half-sister, Breyguhn.”

Feril turned and bowed slightly.

Breyguhn dropped the books at the same moment, revealing a pistol. She fired it at Sharrow’s head as Geis half-stood and whirled round, whacking the back legs of the chair he was tied to into the legs of the android.

Sharrow felt something smack into the side of her head and spin her round. She slumped against the table, trying to bring the laser up to bear on Breyguhn, then fell to the flagstones, the gun bouncing out of her limp fingers.

She lay there. Her head was sore. As though through a fine mist she saw Feril staggering from the blow Geis had dealt it with the chair. Breyguhn fired at the android; Feril’s right leg blew off at the thigh. The android hopped round on one leg, trying to stay upright. Another shot cracked across its chest, raising sparks. It kept on hopping. It still held the laser rifle but it didn’t seem to want to use it. She tried to shout at it to shoot all the dirty bastards, but her mouth wouldn’t move. Feril kept on hopping and hopping, banging into the stone table and stumbling, the rifle still clutched in its hand.

Then Geis shouted something, and fell over on the floor still tied to the chair. Breyguhn came over and kept the gun on the hopping android while she pulled at the strips of shirt restraining Geis.

As soon as he was released Geis stood up, pulled the bluntbladed sword from its scabbard on the table, flicked one of its jewels so that its blade edges flickered with pink fire, and swung it at the hopping android.

It wasn’t a powerful stroke, but it separated Feril’s head from its trunk as though its neck had been made of paper. Feril had raised one arm over its head while trying to balance, and that was sliced off in the same blow. The head fell to the floor and rolled under the table; the arm fell onto it. The android’s headless body tottered on its single leg for a second. Geis raised the sword over his head and brought it scything down. Feril’s body parted down the middle and fell apart in halves, like something from a cartoon.

Sharrow made a last attempt to raise her hand, then gave up. She closed her eyes.

Are you all right?… Hello? I said, Are you all right?

… You… You again… Now what?

This isn’t really going as we hoped, is it?

…No.

Well?

Fate… Who cares?

Nobody, if you don’t. It’s your life.

… Exactly. Oh, I’m tired. Fuck it, just let me die.

No, I don’t really feel we’ve destroyed enough yet. One of us has to. We are each other, after all. We are the last of the eight.

Oh, fuck, yes, sure… We’ll see what we can do…

That’s right. Now wake up.

I don’t want to wake up.

I said, Wake up.

No, won’t.

Wake up!

No, wo-

Now!

No.

N

People were arguing. Her head hurt and people were arguing. She hated it when people argued. She screamed at them, told them to shut up; it was bad enough the Gun wouldn’t give her any peace. Screaming just made her head hurt worse. They didn’t seem to hear, anyway.

“You have to kill her.”

“No! There’s no need; I almost had her convinced before you came in.”

“Oh, it’s my fault now, is it? I save your skin and-”

“I didn’t say that! That’s not what I meant.”

“Kill her. Kill her now. If you can’t, I will.”

“How can you say that! You’re her sister!”

Half-sister, Sharrow thought.

“Because I know what she’s like, that’s why!”

Shut up, shut up! she screamed at them.

“She’s coming round. I heard her say something.”

“No she isn’t. Look at her; lucky you didn’t blow her brains out.”

“I was trying to.”

“Well, I’m not going to let you.”

She was tied. Tied sitting to a seat, much like Geis had been. Hands and feet tied; no, taped. Tape over mouth, too. Head hanging forward. Sore. She wanted to tell them to shut up again, but didn’t. She raised her head and looked at them.

They stood in front of the table, arguing. Breyguhn was still joined by her chain to the wall. Sharrow didn’t understand the chain; Brey must have some sort of special place she could change over from the main system to some private line. At least they had given her a chain of steel rather than iron. Probably a really generous concession for the Sea House…

She had to let her head drop again. They didn’t seem to have noticed, anyway. Everything went grey again. Still had sound, though.

“Kill her, Geis. Please keep your personal feelings out of this; this is for-”

“Keep my personal feelings out of it? Well, that’s rich, coming from you!”

“I stayed here for you! My Fate; I came in here for you! Who was it found you this place? And I could have left; but I stayed for you, for you and the family. I won’t let her ruin everything. You know she will, Geis; you know what she’s like. She won’t forgive; she can’t forgive! Geis, please, kill her. For me. Please. Please…”

“I didn’t ask you to stay; you wanted to.”

“I know, but please, for me… Oh, Geis…”

“Get off me! You stayed because you wanted to, not because of me or the family. You’re more attached to that chain than me!”

She thought she heard a sharp intake of breath. She wanted to laugh but she couldn’t put her head back. Oh Geis, she thought, you were always too literal.

“How dare you! You’re frightened! All right, I’ll show you how it’s done!”

“Brey! No! Put that-!”

The sounds of a struggle. A shot was fired; she heard a ricochet nearby. The crack of a slap. Silence, then a cry, then lots of weeping, and some sobbed words she couldn’t make out.

“Brey…I-”

“Have her, then!” Breyguhn cried. “It was always her you wanted, anyway. Well, do what you want!”

Then the sound of her chain rattling, followed by a door slamming. A door in the place where there were not supposed to be any. But she had seen lots of doors here today. Lots and lots of doors… It all drifted away from her again.

Suddenly there was something under her nose and she was sniffing a sharp, noxious vapour and her head seemed to clear and there was an odd ringing noise somewhere.

Geis squatted in front of her.

“Sharrow?” he said.

She lifted her head and flexed her eyebrows.

“Sharrow,” Geis said, “I just want you to know that I always loved you, always wanted you to be happy and to be a proper part of the family. You belong with me, not that criminal Kuma, not with any of the others. They don’t matter; none of them mattered. I forgive you for all of them. I understand. But you’ve got to understand, too. The things that were done, they weren’t all done by me; there were people who thought they were doing what I wanted them to do, but they didn’t know. Sometimes I didn’t know what was happening. People can be too loyal, you know, Sharrow? That’s the way it was, I swear.”

Geis glanced at the man still tied to the seat next to hers, the man whose name she’d forgotten but who wasn’t Molgarin. He looked dead.

“These people did that,” Geis said. “They overstepped the mark, I’m not denying that. But they meant well. Like the crystal virus; that was put in on Nachtel’s Ghost, but I didn’t know how it would later be used. I didn’t know Molgarin would start trying to build his own power base and use you to do it. I didn’t know you’d been tortured.” Geis looked agonised. He’d put his tunic-top back on, she noticed. “At least I knew it was safe, though,” he said with an attempt at a brave smile. “I have one of those implanted in my own head; did you know that?”

She shook her head. Of course she didn’t know that.

“Yes,” Geis said, nodding. “A fail-safe; a way of taking every-thing with me until I choose to disable the system.” Geis tapped the side of his head. “If I die, the crystal virus lattice senses my death and sends a coded signal; everything I own destructs. All of it, it’s all wired to go: asteroids, ships, mines, buildings, vehicles, even pens in certain politicians’ and Corp execs’ pockets; they blow up. You see? Even if they get me, even if the Court gets me, they might start a war. The insurance claims and the commercial disruption alone could wreck everything. You see how important one person can become? Do you understand now?”

She made a little whimpering noise behind the tape. He reached up and gently unstuck the tape from her mouth. It still hurt.

“I understand,” she said, her voice sounding mushy. He looked pleased. “I understand,” she said, “that you’re as fucking mad as Breyguhn, cuz.”

She sighed and looked away, expecting to be slapped or punched. Her gaze fell on the table. The Lazy Gun lay there. It looked different. The lock had been taken off. Geis had had the key. Of course he had.

Something moved on the table a metre from the gun. She started to frown, then her chin was held in one hand while with his other Geis stuck the tape back over her mouth.

“No, Sharrow,” Geis said. “No; not mad. Just long-sighted. I’ve been preparing all this for a long time now, prepared your eventual role in this from way, way back.” Geis paused. He was looking very serious now. She got the impression he was considering whether to tell her something important. She shook her head slowly, as though trying to clear it.

There was something moving on the stone table behind Geis.

He gripped her knees. “We are the past, Sharrow,” Geis said. “I know that. All this…” He looked round, and she thought he might see the movement on the table, but whatever was moving there stopped just as Geis turned his head. “All this might help what I’ve prepared, might serve as rallying points, battle standards, bribes, distractions… whatever. But only a new order can save poor Golter, only some new message can win people’s hearts and minds. All you see here, however precious it might be to us, might have to be sacrificed. Perhaps we need a new beginning; a clean slate. Perhaps that is our only hope.” He was talking quietly now. The ringing in her ears was fading and she was feeling a little stronger and less groggy. She was able to focus on what was moving on the stone table.

Fucking Fate, it was the android’s hand!

Its forearm, the one that had been chopped off by the same stroke that had beheaded it. The arm had fallen to the table and that was where it was now, crawling over the surface very slowly and quietly, using its fingers.

She felt her eyes go wide, and turned the motion into what she hoped looked like another attempt to clear her head.

Geis looked concerned, then said, gently, “Sharrow, this is all a lot for you to take in just now, but you must believe me that I’ve made sure your name will live forever.” He smiled mysteriously. “Not as you might have imagined, but-”

Gods, the arm was heading for the Lazy Gun. She stared at Geis and smiled inanely.

“- well, but in a way you might be rather proud of, even if it was never a way you could have imagined.”

She looked for Feril’s head. It wasn’t under the table where it had fallen. Its body wasn’t lying in separate pieces on the floor, either. Then she saw it: both halves of the body were propped against what looked like a giant electrical junction box in one corner, near the door Breyguhn had come through. The head…

The head, Feril’s head, had been set on an end-post of the weapons rack from the fjord tower, in the middle of the great stone table. From where it was perched-and assuming the android’s head could still see-it had a perfectly good view of the Lazy Gun and the hand that was now less than half a metre from the Gun’s open trigger mechanism.

Geis was still talking.

“- hate me for what I’ve done, initially at first, but I know, I really do know that eventually, once all that’s going to happen has happened, you’ll know I did the right thing.”

What was this idiot talking about? She tried to concentrate on her cousin’s face and ignore the android hand scraping its way across the surface of the stone table towards the matt-silver body of the Gun.

What could the hand do when it got there? The trigger wasn’t supposed to be especially stiff, but what about aiming? Would the half-metre length of arm and hand have the strength to turn the Gun, even if Feril could aim it with its head three metres away? What had the sights been set at? How wide a field? Feril would need to point the Gun at Geis; at the moment it was pointing at… at the casing of the Universal Principles.

She stared at Geis, not listening.

Holy shit, she thought; even if Geis considered the casing of the Universal Principles disposable, he wouldn’t think the same about the Addendum and his ludicrous Crownstar.

Fate, she might get out of this yet. She felt herself start to cry and was furious with herself. Hope could be more painful than despair.

“Oh, Sharrow,” Geis said tenderly, “don’t cry.” He looked sympathetic. She thought he might be about to burst into tears himself. Revolting. At least this performance was keeping his attention on her and away from the table. “- this could end well yet,” he told her. “We’re together, don’t you see? That’s a start…”

The arm and hand crawling along the table had almost made it to the trigger of the Gun. She was trying to watch it from the corner of her eye, staring wide-eyed at Geis and absurdly frightened that just by the intensity of her stare he might guess she wasn’t really listening to a word he said.

“- and I’m glad you came here, glad you saw this place; no, really, I am. Because this is my most private place, my sanctum, the one place where I am the real me, not surrounded by flunkeys and yes-men and-”

She found herself wondering where Feril’s brain was; if it was inside its head or some other part of its body. She assumed it was watching with the eyes in the head and telling its arm what to do by a comm link, but where from? Stop it, stop it, stop it, she told herself. It doesn’t matter.

“- we’ll be happy again,” Geis said. “We’ll all be happy. We have it in our own hands to matte it so, and you and I are going to make it happen. Even that criminal you thought so much of, even he’ll have something more than he deserved to commemorate him. Because we all have a criminal past, don’t we, Sharrow? That’s what poor old Golter’s had on its conscience all these ten thousand years, isn’t it? That first war, and the billions who died.

“Year zero, after twenty thousand years of civilisation. That’s what we’ve never really been able to forget, isn’t it? But our sentence is almost up, Sharrow. The deca-millennium. It’ll be just another day like any other, we all know that. But these symbols matter, don’t they? That’s what all this has been about, from the beginning; symbols. Hasn’t it?” He looked upset. He put his hand out to her tape gag, then hesitated. “Oh, Sharrow,” he said. “Just say you understand, just say you don’t hate me utterly. Please? Will you?” He looked as though he wasn’t sure whether to trust her or not.

She nudged her head forward in a series of little nods and made little whimpering noises.

Geis’s eyes narrowed, then he reached up and took the tape off her mouth again.

“Now,” she said, “take all the rest of the tape off me or the android wastes the Addendum, the Crownstar and the U.P. casing.”

Geis looked at her, uncomprehending. He laughed.

“Pardon?” he said.

“You heard;” she said. “Turn round very slowly and take a look; the android’s hand is on the trigger of the Lazy Gun.” She smiled. “I’m serious, Geis.”

He turned round slowly.

One of the fingers on the android hand gripping the Lazy Gun’s trigger-guard peeled away for a moment and made a little waving motion. Geis went very still.

“Count Geis,” a tiny voice whispered in the quietness of the chamber. It was Feril’s voice. “I am terribly sorry about this, but I am quite prepared to do as Lady Sharrow says.” The eerie, just audible voice from the head perched on the weapons rack sounded regretful.

Geis was still squatting. He swivelled slowly on his haunches to look at Sharrow again. He swallowed.

“Don’t talk, Geis,” she told him. “Just do it.”

He reached slowly round behind her and started to strip the tape away from her arms. Sharrow looked at Feril’s head, high above the table on the weapons rack.

“I had no idea you had quite such a degree of survivability built into you, Feril,” she said as one of her hands came free.

“It was never relevant before,” Fenril whispered, its voice almost drowned by the rip of tape being pulled away from Sharrow’s feet.

Geis stopped. Sharrow had one hand and one leg free. She nudged him in the shoulder with her knee. “Keep going,” she said.

Geis stood up, shaking his head. “No,” he said. “No.”

He went round the back of the chair.

“What?” she said, glancing at Feril’s head. “Geis-”

He stood behind her, a viblade knife in his hand; he grabbed the rear of the small chair with his other hand. “No, I don’t believe it’ll do it, but if it does…” He put his hand on her collar, the knife to her throat.

“Geis-” she said.

“Breyguhn!” he roared. He started dragging Sharrow on her seat backwards across the flagstones towards the door. She put her free hand to his arm holding the knife, but didn’t have the strength to tear it away. She could only hold on. “Breyguhn!” Geis shouted again.

“Geis-” Sharrow said. She thought she could hear Feril saying something as well, but there was too much noise to hear what it was.

“Breyguhn! I know you’re out there! Stop sulking! Get in here! Brey!” Geis got to the door. Sharrow looked back at the table; Feril’s head couldn’t see them any more, but the hand and forearm holding the gun was jerking, dragging itself round in one direction, then whip-lashing itself back in the other like a skewered snake, gradually scraping the Lazy Gun round to point towards her and Geis. “Brey!” Geis roared.

There was a clinking sound from the other side of the door. At the same time one half of Feril’s body, propped up in the corner near the door, spasmed suddenly rigid, bringing the remains tumbling past the electrical junction box and clattering down at Geis’s feet. He yelled with fright as Breyguhn came back through the door looking sulky. She still had the gun in her hand.

Geis spun away, letting Sharrow’s seat drop sideways to the floor; he hacked at the twitching bits of android body with the viblade, then threw it away and lunged across the stone table, grabbing the sword he had used earlier. He swung it at the body parts moving on the floor.

The hand holding the Lazy Gun clenched. The junction box behind Geis flashed and boomed. The lights in the chamber blazed then went out. Emergency lighting globes glowed feebly. Geis hacked at the half of the android body writhing on the floor with the great sword, chopping through the metal and plastic and gouging trenches into the flagstones beneath. Breyguhn was screaming. Sharrow used her free left arm and leg to push herself under the stone table, then tried to roll, tearing at the tape still securing her to the chair and looking for the viblade Geis had thrown away.

She heard shots and more screams, then light blazed and there was a noise like a thunderclap and a sound like a million windows shattering.

Breyguhn screamed, loud and shrill. “Stop it! Stop it!”

“I’m trying to!” Geis bellowed.

A great thump made the floor under Sharrow quiver as she finally got free of the last of the tape and scuttled out from under the table.

Her feet splashed. She looked down, then up. Water was pouring into the dimly lit chamber from a half-metre wide hole in one wall. Geis was still hacking at the android’s body; Breyguhn was holding her gun with both hands and aiming at the android’s head; the hand clutching the Lazy Gun was jerking and clenching apparently at random, turning and firing the Gun every second or so. One of the diamond leaf ikons had shattered; it lay in a scree of glittering shards between the door and the sparking remains of the junction box. Molgarin/Chrolleser was dead, arched back in his seat with his eyes staring at the ceiling, a set of great, naked bone-jaws clamped round his neck like a man-trap, blood leaking from where the curved teeth had punctured. Even as Sharrow stared, the jaws disappeared again.

The water gushing from the breach in the wall was up to Sharrow’s ankles. She grabbed the first weapon she saw lying on the stone table; the HandCannon.

Breyguhn fired her pistol again; the shot spun Feril’s head round on the post. The Lazy Gun spun round too, as the arm. holding it jammed against the casing of the Universal Principles. The Gun pointed straight at Sharrow; she ducked under the table, into the water. A titanic pulse of sound shook the air, followed by a vast crashing, tumbling noise. A cloud of dust rolled forward from the wall, followed by a wave of dirty water that pushed Sharrow towards the other side of the table. She was floating; her head bumped against the underside of the stonework. She pushed forward as the rumbling noise behind her eased. She looked beyond the lower edge of the table, trying to see Breyguhn’s legs on the far side of the flooding room, but the dark air was full of dust.

There was a flash from the side and a painting covering one wall began to burn. The dust-filled chamber had shrunk. Half of it, including the door she and Feril had first come through and the balcony where they’d encountered Geis, was now a vast pile of rubble, fallen from layers and levels above, where the ceiling now stretched up into darkness; sparks and water fell out of the heights. The burning painting lit the dusty chamber with a yellow, flickering light. She still couldn’t see Breyguhn or Geis. The Lazy Gun was hidden by the piled treasure in the centre of the table. The weapons rack Feril’s head had been on had disappeared.

Something tumbled out of the darkness above; she dived to one side into the waist-deep water as a massive piece of stonework whistled down and smashed into the stone table, splitting it and hurling everything on it into the air. A wall of water came surging towards her; she was washed towards the small door under the remaining diamond leaf ikon.

A terrible, thrumming vibration travelled through her legs as the waves slapped and hissed against the electrical junction box where Feril’s body had lain.

She waded through the water, slipping on the bank of diamond debris under her feet, then hauled the door open against the sucking weight of water and stumbled splashing up a dark, inclined corridor beyond. She checked the HandCannon as she went, thinking it felt wrong, and cursing when she dis-covered there was no magazine in it. She stuffed it into a pocket.

Another quaking burst of sound came from behind her and a great, dark fist of smoke pushed out from the chamber, pulsing along the surface of the ceiling above her.

The corridor rose; the water around her legs became shallower.

Cables hanging from the ceiling swung back and forth, making her fight her way through, crashing off walls and cable-runs and buzzing metal boxes. Smoke preceded her along the shad-owy corridor as she finally waded up some steps and out of the water.

She ducked under drooping, humming cables, through a haze of acrid smoke, a stink of burning insulation and a scrape of sparks as the broken end of a cable swung back and forth across the damp flagstones.

She straightened on the far side to see Breyguhn standing five metres in front of her, right wrist chained to the wall, her right hand gripping a pistol. She was bleeding from a head-wound. The thin yellow light made her look deathly pale.

Breyguhn pointed the gun at Sharrow. “He’s gone, Sharrow,” she said sadly. “Taken his silly sword and gone.” She shrugged. “Frightened the Gun was going to do something irresponsible…” Breyguhn smiled bleakly.

She took a step towards Sharrow, who retreated a step and then flinched as she backed into the hanging cables. The cable at her feet sparked and crackled.

“Taken his silly sword and gone…” Breyguhn said in a girlish, sing-song voice. She aimed the gun at Sharrow’s face. The chain squeaked.

Sharrow ducked as the gun fired; she grabbed the live cable and jammed the exposed end into the chain-track on the wall.

Breyguhn screamed. Her gun loosed off its remaining rounds into the wall as she shook, her wrist smoking.

When the gun stopped firing, Sharrow hauled the cable out of the chain-track.

Breyguhn collapsed like a heap of rags, only her still smoulder-ing wrist held upright against the wall by the chain.

Sharrow gagged on the smell of burned flesh as she stum-bled forward. She turned Breyguhn’s face to the light and felt for a pulse. Her half-sister’s eyes stared up the tunnel, motionless. Sharrow shook her head and dropped the other woman’s arm.

Another explosion from the chamber behind blew her off her feet and along the tunnel.

She started running.

There was another door where the chain-track disappeared; she ignored it and ran limping, head pounding, breath ragged, down the tunnel. It ended in a tall space lit from above-and from a downward slope in front-by grey daylight. It smelled rank and fetid and the stone floor was covered with straw. She saw large stalls on either side; harnesses and bridles and tall saddles hung on the walls. There were no animals in any of the stalls. The grey light from the slope in front of her came from another short, high-ceilinged tunnel.

She limped down it, under the barbed teeth of two enormous portcullises, out into the cold drizzle of the day.

She was standing on a weed-smothered slope that led from the foot of the Sea House’s towering walls down to the sand and gravel floor of the bay. The sea was a line in the distance, light-grey against dark. A broad stone ramp sloped away to the sand pools and gravel banks the retreated tide had revealed. The grey water piled and hummocked in the distance, out to sea. There was no land visible.

A large animal carrying a single rider was picking its way through the humped shoals of gravel beyond a stretch of sand dotted with shallow pools where the animal had left its hoofprints. As the rider glanced back, the wind lifted his riding cape and blew it out to one side.

She ran down the slope, skidding on the weed, and splashed into the first sandy pool. A sliver of sand-duped land was just visible in the distance round the side of the House’s dark walls.

She ran on a way, then stopped.

What was she doing? The bandamyion reared up and turned round, stepping delicately forward across the gravel shoal until it found the relative firmness of the sand again.

You idiot, she told herself. You’ve got an empty gun in your pocket. What the hell are you going to do with that? Throw it at him? You should have run the other way, round the walls to the outfall; you could have got the monowheel and chased the asshole on his stupid animal in that.

Geis brought the bandamyion trotting forward. He was about thirty metres away. He reined the beast in. It stood shaking its wide, tawny head. He leant over the saddle, staring at her.

“Satisfied, Sharrow?” he said. His voice sounded thin and reedy in the cold, salty wind. “Do you know what you’ve done?”

Geis was edging the bandamyion slowly closer, its heavy hooves splashing in the pools of water.

“But you’d ruin that, too, wouldn’t you, Sharrow?” Geis said, still advancing. “You’d wreck that plan like you’ve wrecker everything else, wouldn’t you?”

She just stood there. She wondered what else there was to do. Cold water seeped into her shoes.

“Do you?” Geis shouted.

She looked back at the Sea House. It was its usual massive self. If the Lazy Gun was still causing havoc somewhere inside it, at least it hadn’t yet decided to destroy the whole thing.

She looked back at Geis and shrugged.

“And I once thought I loved you,” Geis said, shaking his head. He said it so softly she hardly heard him.

Geis drew the jewel-encrusted sword from its saddle-sheath and switched it on; its edges were suddenly lined with pink fire. “I’m going to make you the mother of God, Sharrow,” Geis said, urging the bandamyion forward a pace or two.

She wasn’t sure she’d heard him right.

“Girmeyn,” Geis said. “Girmeyn, on Nachtel’s Ghost. He will be the Messiah; a new voice for the new age, a line written under all we’ve done in the last ten thousand years and a new hope for the next ten thousand.

“He’s mine. I had him raised; I held his life, all he was, contained in my hand,” Geis said, holding up the hand gripping the bandamyion’s reins. “I had him brought up, trained, educated. All that you destroyed in there today,” Geis said, nodding at the House behind. her, “all that was to be his birthright, my final gift to him. But you took it away from him. He’s on a Foundation asteroid now; one of mine. That’s where Girmeyn is, Sharrow, and he’s your son.”

Son? she thought.

The bandamyion trotted forward.

“Your son,” he shouted. “Yours and your thief friend! Taken out after you crashed on the Ghost; stored while my clinicians found a way to save it, then grown like a clone; only actually born ten years ago, but aged in the tank and fed the wisdom of ten millennia and a set of perfect, optimised stimuli by an AI devoted to the purpose; and all to my design. So he’s mine, perhaps more than he’s anybody’s. But biologically he’s yours, Sharrow. Have no doubt.”

Son? she thought. Girmeyn?

Who, me? she thought.

She could see the facets in the bandamyion’s dark eyes now, dull glisters in the grey light. She took a step back, then another. She really ought to have gone for the monowheel.

“I would make you the mother of the Messiah, the mother of God, and you’d spit on it, wouldn’t you, Sharrow?” Geis kicked the bandamyion’s sides. The spur terminals buzzed and the animal trotted, rolling its great head. She stepped back.

The sword hanging in Geis’s hand made a humming noise; drizzle spat and hissed when it hit the pink projected edges, producing little wisps of steam. More vapour smoked from the nostrils of the bandamyion as it vented its warmth to the cold air.

“We’re on the brink, Sharrow,” Geis said, raising his voice a little. “Can’t you tell?” He made a show of sniffing the breeze. “Can’t you smell it? We’re right on the cusp of something better, something new and fresh and everything I’ve done has been to prepare for it and make its birth easier. But you’d spoil that too, wouldn’t you, Sharrow? You’d let your vanity, your pride, your own small-minded need for revenge get in the way of a new future for everybody, wouldn’t you?”

Yes, she thought, yes. I’ve been selfish; that’s all I’ve ever been. And what if the fool is right, and there is a new world waiting? Fate knows it’s an old refrain; we always think there’s something better just round the corner and we’re always disappointed, but we have to be right eventually, don’t we?

“That can’t happen,” Geis said quietly, now that he was so close. He nodded slowly. “You’re not armed,” he said. “I suppose I should be thankful. I’m not sure even knowing he was your son and that he’d die with all the rest would stop you, would it?”

She looked from the huge heavy face of the bandamyion up to his eyes. Oh yes, the crystal virus he claimed he’d had implanted in himself for that pre-prepared act of final petulance. She didn’t know if Geis was telling the truth about that or not, but it sounded psychotic enough to be part of his repertoire.

And Girmeyn. Girmeyn now in one of Geis’s space habitats. Even if he wasn’t her son, how could she kill him?

Easily, she thought, standing there with her feet sinking into the watery sand and the stinking breeze blowing about her. All of them, all of it; easily.

How many tyrants had begun by being charming, beguiling, attractive? Still, they all ended up the same.

We are a race prone to monsters, she thought, and when we produce one we worship it. What kind of world, what translation of good could come from all that’s happened here?

She saw them all die again: Miz crumpled in the snow, speared through; Zefla, pale and dying in the pathetic little tent; Dloan falling on the cold hillside; Cenuij tumbling past her into the night (and Feril, hacked, blasted, destroyed, even if a week-younger copy would be revived in the future… and Breyguhn too, sacrificed to Geis’s plans, and all of them; Keteo and Lebmellin, Tard and Roa, Chrolleser and Bencil Dornay, Fate alone knew how many other Solipsists, Huhsz monks and nameless spear carriers; everybody who’d suffered and died since she’d stood on the glass shore of Issier with Geis).

And her mother, she thought, as something within her gave way under the pressure of so much remembered death, and she was five years old again, standing in the wrecked cable car surrounded by smoke and blood and broken glass, crying and screaming, bewildered and terrified while her mother raised herself up, body broken and butchered and put her hand out-to touch, to comfort, to caress, she’d thought, she’d been sure-and pushed her out of the door into that cold gulf of grey.

She remembered the faceless woman in the wheelchair, from her dream, and the little station in the snow and the waiting train that had gone huff, huff, each vertical jettisoning of smoke and steam like breath, like an explosion.

Gunfire. It was the first thing she really remembered; that scarifying, punishing noise as the cable car rocked and blew apart and the bodyguard’s head burst open. It felt like her life began then; it always had. There had been something vague about a mother and warmth and safety from before, but that all happened to somebody else; the person she was had been born watching people die, watching her mother ripped open by a high-velocity bullet and then reach out to push her away and out, a second before the grenade exploded.

All I’ve ever been was made by weaponry and death.

Not armed, she thought. Not armed. I am the Lazy Gun, the last of the eight, and I’m not fucking armed, just got this one stupid, empty gun…

She put her hand in her pocket. Her fingers closed around the HandCannon, feeling the gun’s odd lightness and the wide empty slot in the grip where the magazine should be.

Of course, there might be a round in the breech.

A round in the breech, she thought.

She couldn’t remember if she’d cocked the gun earlier or not. She’d taken the magazine out of the HandCannon when she’d made Molgarin/Chrolleser take the gun, and she’d put it back in when Geis had come along the balcony towards them, but had she cocked the gun then? Had she sent a round into the breech?

She had no idea. Even if she had, she still didn’t know whether whoever had taken the clip back out again had removed a round from the chamber as well.

What if I can kill him? Suppose there is a round in the gun? How many more people die if he’s telling the truth?

“I’m sorry, Sharrow,” Geis said, and shook his head. The spur terminals crackled again; the bandanmyion trotted forward.

Sorry? Of course he was sorry. People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it was. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped. Fate, I’m sick of it all.

Geis kicked once more at the bandamyion’s flanks and the animal cantered towards her. Geis raised the sword, swinging it out and back.

Sorrow be damned, and all your plans. Fuck the faithful, fuck the committed, the dedicated, the true believers; fuck all the sure and certain people prepared to maim and kill whoever got in their way; fuck every cause that ended in murder and a child screaming.

She turned and ran.

In her pocket, her hand fitted round the grip of the gun.

The round might be there. How could she not take the chance?

When she heard the bandamyion’s hoofbeats right behind her, she dodged to the side and went down on one knee.

She pulled out the HandCannon, aimed and pulled the trigger.

The bandamyion was turning towards her. In the imperative physicality of that instant she had no idea what she had aimed at, only that she’d knelt and pulled the trigger. The gun fired, spasming once in her hands and then she was diving to the side, throwing the gun away in the same moment, falling and turning, eyes closing as she dropped and curled up.

There was a quick, keen slicing noise.

Something whacked into her side. The pain burst entirely through her body, making her cry out. She splashed into a shallow pool.

The water was cold. One side of her face and body had gone numb. She raised her head and tried to sit up.

The pain flicked on, making her gasp. She crouched, swivelling in the sandy pool so that she was hunched over; the pain faded.

She had at least one broken rib; she recognised the pain from injuries in childhood and adolescence.

She sat up carefully, shivering, and looked towards the Sea House. The bandamyion was hunkered down near the entrance to the underground stables, licking at some blood on one shank. Its saddle hung half-off, askew over its haunches.

She looked around and saw Geis, lying a few metres away in the direction the beast had been charging. She got up, shouting as the pain came back. She held her arm across her chest, waited for her head to clear, then limped towards the man.

The sword lay nearby on the sand. It was dull, the pink fire that had edged its blades extinguished. From the marks on the sand, it looked like the bandamyion had taken a tumble. She inspected her jacket over the place where her side hurt. There was no cut; the sword-stroke must have missed and she’d been hit by a bandamyion hoof. Her side ached; it felt like more than one burst rib. She supposed she had been lucky, even so.

She limped on, over spots of blood.

Geis lay face down in a shallow pool, his cloak stuck wetly to him over his shoulders and head. She pulled the cloak back; the water in the pool was filling with red. The GP round had taken most of Geis’s neck away.

His face was underwater. She pulled at him, turning him over. Blood poured from the fist-sized hole in his neck. His head hung slackly; his eyes were half-closed and pink water dribbled from his mouth. She pulled him out of the water onto the sand and laid him on his back by the side of the red-stained pool.

There was a muffled explosion from the Sea House. She turned; the bandamyion was jumping and bucking near the entrance to the stables, something at its rear end burning. One final kick sent the animal’s saddle smoking into the rocks. The bandamyion turned its head and licked at a patch of scorched hide.

Another explosion sounded from the House, then another and another. She saw debris rise and fall amongst some distant towers after one blast, and smoke started to rise from the vast building in a dozen different places.

She looked back at Geis’s slack, dead face.

A tremor shook the sand under her feet. The bandamyion, just starting to hunker down again, jerked upright and looked from side to side, grunting in distress.

She closed her eyes and waited for the Lazy Gun’s own thermonuclear farewell.

There was an almost inaudible rumbling for a few seconds, something close to infra-sound felt in the bones and the water and the ventricles of the heart and brain.

Then nothing.

She opened her eyes. The Sea House was still there. A few dark wisps of smoke rose from it. A grey-brown cloud flowed out of the stables entrance and drifted on the breeze. The bandamyion had hunkered down again, and looked annoyed at having to get up and move away from the smoke. It trotted along the weeded slope under the high granite walls, shaking its head and snorting.

She sat there for a while, beside the dead man on the cold sands in the foul wind and the soaking drizzle.

Eventually she rose slowly, favouring her injured side.

She looked around. The bandamyion was a still-moving tawny dot half-way round the side of the Sea House. A few small twists of smoke rose amongst the building’s undisturbed topography of towers. In the distance, the waves of the new tide creased grey across the horizon.

Nothing else moved that she could see.

She hobbled to the sword lying on the sand. She tried switching it on, but its flat edges remained dull. She let it fall back to the sand.

She lifted her face to the drizzle and the evening greyness, staring into the flat expanse of dull sky, as though listening for something.

She lowered her head and stood for some moments. She gazed from the sand at her feet, across the pools to the gravel banks and on up to the seaweed and the spray-froth beyond, and over that to the grey streaks of gravel and the weed-choked sands that rose into the tall dunes.

She shook her head and limped across the sands to where the HandCannon lay. She picked the gun up, turned it over in her good hand, blew sand off it and stuffed it into her jacket pocket.

Then she started back, retracing her steps towards the impassive granite walls of the Sea House.

She shook a handkerchief free from her breast pocket as she walked and started tying it round her nose and mouth, using only one hand; her muttered curses accompanying this undertaking were snatched and flung away by the stiffening breeze.

A little later the monowheel vehicle spun backwards out of the sewer outfall, pirouetted vertically like a saluting mount, swung down across the greasy slope of stones at the base of the House’s walls, dodged uncoordinated gunfire from a nearby tower and accelerated quickly away across the tide-flooding sands.