The Star Fraction

13

The Horsemen of the Apocrypha

Dilly Foyle lay on her chest in long grass. A few hundred metres away, across a culvert-floored green glen, the motorway made its humming and buzzing and howling music. Great bulks of irreplaceable minerals and petrochemicals were hurtling in both directions, cancelling each other out. It had always been for her the perfect example, the paradigm, of how trade and exchange were an intrinsically wasteful plundering of the planet. The combustion engine, the consumer society…The words (if nothing else in the arrangement) were a give-away.

The Human Reich.

To attack it directly was a sure road to dying. One bolt from the crossbow that lay at her hand could blow out a tyre and, with luck, scatter burning wreckage and snarl up miles. But that was only worth doing to harass a military sweep already under way – to do it any other time would only invite one. So the GreenWar partisans preferred to pursue a subtler quarrel, building their Cumbrian communities in abandoned farms and the ruins of the tourism that had been their earliest and softest target. The Lake District was theirs now, in plain view of the towns. On a clear day you can see the revolution…

Her nose, untainted by foul habits or city air, could have told her where she was in the dark. Petrol fumes and damp earth, the oiled steel of the crossbow, the old wood of the stock…her comrades…their horses cropping quietly in a hollow. And, ahead and to her left, the service area, where the reek of exhaust and battery mingled with burnt coffee and wasted food and plastic in all its extruded and expanded, gross and bloated forms.

Synthetic shit.

She didn’t need binoculars to scan the vehicles entering and leaving the service area, and she wouldn’t need glades when night fell. Already the place had its lights on (waste, waste). She would know what to do if the signal came. And, if it didn’t come to her, it would come to other partisans, at other points up and down the motorway. The orders today had been very specific, and urgent.

She waited.

They ran into a local war a few kilometres north of Lancaster. Farm buildings and factories burned. Tanks elbowed across the road. Helicopters racketed overhead. The traffic on the M6 barely kept pace with the refugees trailing along on the hard shoulder.

‘It’s like something out of the twentieth century,’ Janis said.

‘They’re not being strafed,’ Kohn remarked.

‘What’s that supposed to mean? Progress?’

Kohn slid the truck forward a little, then idled it again. The engine’s note dropped below audibility. ‘Progress is like this,’ he said.

‘That car still behind us?’

Kohn scanned. ‘Yeah.’

The sky, eventually, cleared of smoke. Red Crescents and Crosses came out after the camouflage. The gaps between vehicles widened. A polite, hesitant, mechanical cough here and there, and then a roar of combustion engines rose like applause. The truck settled to a steady hundred kilometres per hour in the slow lane. The Cadillac paced it, now edging closer, now dropping back.

‘This is beginning to get severely under my nails,’ Kohn said.

‘What can we do about it?’

‘Don’t know. Ah, fuck it…kill them at the first opportunity.’

‘Do you really mean that?’

‘Way I see it,’ Kohn said, ‘there’s no way whoever’s in that tuna-tin are terrs. Not their style, you know? They go for dispersed forces, raids, guerilla tactics. The military – UK or SD – would go for roadblocks, flagdowns. Tailing, now, that’s cop MO. Using a civilian car isn’t, especially one so obvious. That smells of political police. Or Stasis.’

‘The Men In Black.’ Janis shivered. ‘Wonder why they do that – the suits, the cars?’

‘Checked it out once,’ Kohn said. ‘It’s a fear thing. They were set up years ago when there was that big panic about, I don’t know, messages from space getting into the datasphere and churning out copies of alien software that would take over the world. Remember the TV shows? The Andromeda Strangers. Night of the Living Daylights. Nah, just after the war. Before your time.’

‘After my bedtime.’

‘Looking back now, I’ll bet they planted these stories. Anything to keep people worried about dangerous technologies falling into the wrong hands, and not worried about whose hands it was in already.’

‘You know,’ Janis said thoughtfully, ‘people used to talk about the Breakthrough, the Singularity, when all the technological trends would take off and the whole world would change: AI, nanotech, cell repair, uploading our minds into better bodies and living forever, yay! And it always almost happens but never quite: we get closer and closer but never get there. Maybe we never get there because we’re being stopped.’

‘Stopped by Stasis…and by Space Defense enforcing arms control…yeah, that’s how it works: software cop, hardware cop!’

‘Yes, let’s kill them,’ Janis said fiercely. ‘They’re a waste of space.’

‘Soon be dark,’ Kohn said.

Another border: Cumbria. Another armful of fine work taken from the back of the truck. Tax-in-kind: with most of the economy over the event horizon of cryptography, it was the only way to collect if the owners hadn’t cut a deal and let the state have the code keys. Tax-in-kind went all the way from roadblock rip-offs to US/UN sanctions where entire buildings, warehouses, factories were seized. Usually the owners agreed to operate in the open, where at least you knew the percentages. Except in Norlonto, of course: there they hid their money and handed over the goods at gunpoint if they had to.

At least so far no one had searched the truck. There was an etiquette to those matters, and transaction costs.

After a bit Kohn glanced at the fuel gauge and said, ‘Time to pull in. Could do with a stretch, anyway. Next service area.’

‘What about—?’ Janis jerked her head backwards.

‘We’ll see what they do,’ Kohn sighed.

‘Then kill them?’

‘You’re getting into this, aren’t you?’

The twilight became darkness the instant the truck glided into the halogen floods of the service area. Janis envied Kohn his glades. She could see the writing scribed on the sidepiece nearest her: mil spec 00543/09008. Kohn first drove to the refuelling points, paying cash for diesel oil and charged-up power cells, which were swapped for the spent ones.

‘That’s exactly what I need to do,’ Janis said.

‘Well, they don’t give part-exchange for body waste,’ Kohn said. ‘Recycling hasn’t gone that far.’ He restarted the truck and moved it around to the parking bays.

‘Our friends are just over there,’ he said, pointing to the far corner of the car park where she couldn’t see a thing. ‘Still sitting in the car. Probably don’t eat or shit, just need an oil-change every ten thousand klicks.’

‘I wish I had military specs,’ Janis said. She didn’t understand Kohn’s hoot of laughter, but was grateful when he reached into his pack and pulled out another set of glades.

‘They’re my only spares,’ he said, after he’d shown her how the cheek controls worked. ‘Watch them carefully.’

He put the helmet under his arm.

‘Set the glades to shade,’ he said. ‘We’ll look like tourists.’

‘Heavily armed tourists.’

‘That’s the only kind around here.’

Jumping down and walking across the tarmac to the cafeteria, Janis kept looking around her. These things didn’t just polarize light, they integrated it: the bright lights were stepped down, the dim enhanced.

‘They’re brilliant!’

‘Turn them down a bit then.’

‘Ha, ha. How do they work, anyway?’

‘I don’t know, but I suspect they’re not strictly speaking transparent – the front is a lot of micro-cameras, the back is screens, and in between there’s a nanoprocessor diamond film.’

She paused outside the toilets and stared at the pink Cadillac.

‘Huh,’ she said. ‘They’re eating doughnuts and drinking coffee from a flask. So much for your theory.’

‘That’s what they want you to think,’ Kohn said darkly.

Janis looked again. One black man, one white.

‘I’m sure they’re the ones who came to my lab,’ she said. ‘Goddess, to think I came all this way to get away from them.’

‘You have got away from them,’ Kohn said. He nudged her away from looking at the car. ‘Don’t you worry about that.’

The queues at the meal-machines were short.

‘Ten marks,’ Kohn said indignantly. ‘Each!’

‘Don’t be stingy.’

‘I spilled blood for that money.’

They chose a table by the plate-glass window where they could see the car and the truck. The glades disposed of the reflections, too. Janis found it disorienting to glance from the strip-lit interior – with its truck-drivers eating fast, families eating slowly, youths wandering around sizing up who might or might not be a user – out to the parked or crawling vehicles, and see it all as one scene. What effect, she wondered, would years of seeing like this – no shadows, no reflections, almost no darkness, no comforting distinctions between in here and out there – have on the mind? It matched, it fell into place with one aspect at least of Kohn’s, well, outlook.

She smiled at the thought, and saw Moh smile back.

Bleibtreu-Fèvre brushed sugar from the tips of his fingers, licked them, and replaced the plastic cup on top of the thermos flask. Always a damn dribble of dark liquid. He sighed and looked at his colleague, Aghostino-Clarke. The other man was dressed identically to himself, in a black jacket and trousers, white shirt and a tie the exact colour of coffee-stains. His suit was getting shiny in the same wrong places. His skin was very black and his eyes were brown.

It was lucky they had been prepared; but then, Bleibtreu-Fèvre thought smugly, preparation creates its own luck. When Donovan’s call came through, indicating that Cat had revealed her location and Moh’s, they’d been cruising around the perimeter of Norlonto. They’d been ready to do what they did – send the car into a screaming dash along one of the fast-access roads, the ones that normally only the rich and the emergency services could afford. He’d been right not to put much trust in Donovan’s ability to field a large enough force in a short enough time to deal with the problem, right to have the green partisans on stand-by alert.

That the Women’s Peace Community was near the border had been luck, however: pure luck.

They were going to need some more.

Aghostino-Clarke smiled. ‘Scared?’ he said. His voice was deep: the upward inflection of the question raised it to bass.

‘Nervous.’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre coughed and, as if reminded, lit a ciagarette.

‘It’s what we’ve been trained for.’

‘That’s why I’m nervous.’ He laughed briefly and stared again at the distant shapes of the man and the woman. ‘He behaves so normally, it’s as if he hasn’t a care in the world. One might almost think he’s not afraid of us.’

‘He? Or it?’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre looked at Aghostino-Clarke and nodded thoughtfully. ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘We can make no assumptions about what we may face.’

A literal drug fiend, a man with machine-code in his mind, or just a crazy spacist merc…

‘It would be easy to take him out.’

‘Those days are gone.’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre sighed again. ‘I can feel the footprints of those damn spy sats like shadows passing over the back of my neck…Speaking of which—’

Aghostino-Clarke looked at his watch, rotating his forearm slowly as he scanned the lines of data. ‘We have a six-minute window in two minutes,’ he said. ‘The next is four in twenty-three.’

‘Right,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre. ‘Let’s go for green, huh?’

‘Smoke?’

‘Nah,’ Kohn said. ‘Time to go.’

He stood up and tossed plates and scraps into the recycler. He put on the helmet and connected the comms to the gun. (Hi.) (Active.) He kept his eyes on the car as they went out through the doors. The car park was now more sparsely occupied, and the Cadillac stood on its own in an airbrushed gleam. How easy it would be to take them out. But if he were to blast them, right now, it would be difficult to hop into the truck and slip away unnoticed. They’d just have to wait. He ran scenarios of turning off into side-roads, jack-knifing the truck and coming out shooting.

The doors of the Cadillac opened; the two men inside got out and stood behind the doors. Janis made some kind of sound.

‘Keep going,’ Kohn said, not looking at her. ‘Stand on the running-board behind the door – just like them – and start up the truck. Do it.’

He veered away from her and began to walk across the fifty metres or so of tarmac between him and the car. The men didn’t react. He wondered if the doors were proof against steel-jacketed uranium slugs. He doubted it. Perhaps the Stasis agents expected him to negotiate.

He was letting the gun point downwards, his grasp light but ready to clench. He stopped.

‘Hey!’ he shouted, above the hum of vehicles. The men looked as if they hadn’t heard him. He opened his mouth again and heard at the same moment a yell from Janis and a rhythmic clatter behind him. He whirled around in a crouch, bringing the gun up. Coming straight at him was a horse, and the wild-haired creature on its back was unclipping a crossbow from a slot beside the saddle and reining in the horse and dismounting all at the same time. Everything went slow, even the sparks from the skidding hooves. He saw another horseman, galloping up to the truck from behind. He fired a burst that ripped through the rider’s thigh and into the horse. He saw the forelegs buckle under the beast’s continuing momentum, saw the beginning of the rider’s trajectory, then turned to his own attacker. A barbarian woman. She was two metres away and was half a second from bringing the crossbow to bear on him. (No time to fire.) (What?) He sprang forward and brought the butt down on the woman’s shoulder. The crossbow clattered away. He punched her straight under the sternum. She fell, balled up around her pain.

Kohn dropped and rolled. Something buzzed over his head. Snap. Sting of stone on his face. Ricochet. The shot had come from the Cadillac. To his horror he saw Janis leap from the truck’s running-board and dash towards him, head down and firing off pistol shots inexpertly behind her with her left hand. Her glades were on clear and he could see her eyes behind them, tightly closed.

The Cadillac roared forward, doors still open, gun muzzles poked above them. Flashes. There was a terrific bang as a tyre blew out. Suddenly the car was yawing. Janis dived past the front fender and down on top of him. She rolled over and sat up, bringing another hand to the automatic’s grip. The rear of the car swung past. Janis fired and a dark body dropped from the open left door.

She turned to him and opened her eyes.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘Come on.’ He jumped to his feet and pointed back to the doors of the cafeteria. ‘In there.’ The car, steadying now, was between them and the truck.

They ran for the doors and pushed them open, hurdled the prone bodies of terrified civilians to the stairs. At the first turning Kohn saw a Man In Black just reach the doors. There was no way to shoot at him without spraying half the foyer. On up the steps to the glass-enclosed walkway above the road, leading to a mirror-image service area on the other side. They started the hundred-metre dash across.

Something was coming up the stairwell on the far side. Halfway along was a recess with fire extinguishers and an emergency phone. Kohn hauled Janis into it after him. They flattened back and Kohn glanced out.

Another horseman was cantering along the walkway. In the opposite direction Kohn saw the Stasis man leap to the top of the stairs and hit the floor, a heavy pistol clasped in both hands in front of him. Kohn jerked back.

The padding hooves stopped, close.

‘Throw out your weapons.’ The agent’s voice sounded strained and strange. ‘Don’t say a word or you’ll be shot.’

‘Oh, shit,’ Kohn said through his teeth. Some part of his brain began displaying detailed pictures of what would happen to it if he were captured. He wrenched his attention away from images of bone-saws and drill-bits and trodes in time to catch Janis’s urgent low whisper: ‘…just the guns, then use anything you’ve got left, they mightn’t expect all you’ve got…’

Kohn looked at her and nodded. She tossed the pistol on the floor. Kohn followed it with the gun. It landed on its bipod. Kohn raised his arms and was about to step out when he heard the creak and tinkle of thin glass breaking.

‘FIRE!’ said the alarm, in a deep, calm chip voice.

The gun opened up. Janis stepped smartly forward before he could stop her. She’d grabbed a fire extinguisher. She jumped in front of the horse and aimed the foam straight for its eyes. It screamed and reared, striking the rider’s head against the ceiling. He fell backwards. Janis was at the horse’s side in an instant, shoving at the saddle. The animal tottered, off-balance, rear hooves beating a desperate prance, the fore-hooves hammering at the glass. The rider’s legs kicked until his feet disengaged from the stirrups. He slid down the slope of the horse’s back. The huge window broke. The horse went through the glass in a sickening slow motion and vanished. Janis ducked, scooping up the pistol. The rider was sprawled on his back, one arm underneath him, the other making warding-off motions. Janis stood astride him and pointed the pistol at his face.

‘Don’t!’ Kohn yelled.

The gun continued its scything fire. Kohn threw himself behind it. It was supposed to respond to his voice only. He forgave it, this once. The agent was gone. Must have rolled to the stairs. Nice. None of the holes in the far wall were lower than half a metre.

The gun stopped, out of ammo. Kohn peered through the howling gap down at the mound of meat on the central reservation.

He looked at Janis.

‘That was dangerous,’ he said. ‘You might have killed somebody.’

She glanced back as Kohn slammed another clip into place.

‘We’re in the army now,’ she said, and turned back to the man at her feet.

‘So you can’t shoot him now! He’s out of it!’

Janis shook herself and stepped back. ‘OK, OK.’ She gingerly took an automatic and a sheath-knife from the man’s belt and rolled him off his broken arm. He’d already fainted.

They ran back the way they had come. Janis stood clear as Kohn crawled to the top of the stairs and used the gun’s sensors to look over the edge. Nothing there. They went down the stairs and out across the foyer, back to back. Nobody had responded to the fire alarm. Just as well.

The whole place looked as if a gas bomb had hit it. Everything intact but bodies everywhere. Vehicles still pulling in seemed suddenly to go on automatic: driverless. Good reflexes, these civilians. Nothing between here and the truck but the Cadillac, and the slumped body of the agent Janis had shot. They got behind an inexplicable object, a sort of concrete tub filled with packed earth. (Kohn had always vaguely assumed the things were provided to give cover in shoot-outs. Part of the facilities.) He edged around it and very deliberately pumped a few more shots into the body.

‘I’ll go first,’ he said. ‘Give you cover.’

He crossed the tarmac as in an unpredictable dance with an invisible partner: dash and stop, turn, fall, roll, jump, run, swing around…He’d just passed the body when the head and arm came up. A pistol shot zipped past his ear. Kohn looked at the body – dark skin, dark suit, dark stains spreading, the unsteady hand squeezing for another go. Gun, you do let me down sometimes. He aimed carefully, and sent the agent’s pistol spinning away. The man moaned on to his broken hand. Kohn looked at him, then shrugged and walked to the cab. The engine was still running. He waved to Janis. She dashed across, her only manoeuvre a wide swing around the man they’d both failed to kill.

As they pulled away the other agent sprinted across their path. Kohn swerved to run him down, but missed. The last thing he saw in the rear-view before going down the exit ramp was the Cadillac transfigured, shining in a beam that matched its colour and stabbed straight down from the sky.

Janis looked at her hands. They were shaking, and no effort on her part could make them stop. Of course not, she thought, annoyed with herself, and looked out at the vehicles ahead. Outlined with almost diagrammatic sharpness by the glades, their colours a spectrum-shifted stab in the dark, the cars and trucks and tankers paced and cruised and fell back and overtook. Slow relative to each other, cruelly fast from the roadside view, the pedestrian perspective. Or the equestrian. The thought raised a smirk.

She turned to Kohn. He was mouthing into the mike that angled in front of his lips. He saw her looking and stopped.

‘Just arguing with the gun,’ he said. ‘I think it’s become a pacifist.’

He looked so serious that Janis laughed.

‘I’ve gone back over everything in my mind,’ Kohn went on, ‘and it seems to me that I aimed at the head and not the leg of that rider who was coming up on you. The gun says it went for the larger moving target. The woman who attacked me – I was just going to blast her, but the gun flashed at the time that there was no time to fire. So I had to break her collarbone instead.’

‘It didn’t interfere when you shot that MIB to finish him off. But…you didn’t finish him off!’

‘No, that was gen,’ Kohn said. ‘Five lead rounds went into him.’ He laughed, not turning from the road. ‘It’s like I said. They ain’t human – at least, not all the way through.’

‘You could have tested that theory on his head. Or was that the gun again, staying your hand?’

Kohn grimaced. ‘No. It’s just – it’s all right to shoot somebody if they’re down but might still be a threat, but otherwise, no. Something like that. I should have killed him, you know. That green you brought down – very well done, by the way – you can’t finish off someone like that. Just a grunt like us, basically. Disarm and leave if you can’t take prisoner or help. Stasis is different. They’re not under the Convention – secret police are like spies in wartime as far as I’m concerned: anyone has a perfect right to shoot them down like dogs.’

‘So why didn’t you, damn it?’ She was surprised at how angry she felt.

After a moment Kohn sighed and said, ‘Just a bad mercenary habit.’

There was no indication of pursuit, but they decided they’d better enter ANR territory by a less direct route than Kohn had originally planned. They swung east and came into Edinburgh from the south. They turned left at the North British Hotel on to Pretender Street, then right and up Stuart Street, across Charles Edward Street and down the long hill towards the Firth of Forth. (The city council had changed dozens of street-names in a fit of pique at the Restoration, and no one had since dared to change them back.) At Granton Harbour Kohn drove the truck carefully out along the long stone pier to a wooden jetty at the end. The harbour was full of small sailing-boats. Rigging chimed against masts. Away to the west they could see against the sky-glow of towns the twisted remnants of the Forth Bridge, like a shy child’s fingers over its eyes.

‘Looks like the road stops here,’ Janis pointed out.

‘We just have to wait.’

‘You’ve done this before!’

‘Yes, but not here.’

After about an hour – Janis dozing, Kohn smoking – they heard diesels chugging. A trawler, its bow-wave unhealthily phosphorescent, the green-white-and-blue tricolour of the Republic snapping from its stern and a shielded machine-gun at the bow. It came to a halt in the water about ten metres from the pier.

‘Get out of the truck,’ said a barely raised voice.

They clambered down. Kohn wondered how they were supposed to identify themselves.

‘Who are you?’

They gave their names.

‘Fine, fine,’ said the voice. ‘The machines told us tae expect you.’

The boat pulled in and a rope was thrown on to the jetty. Kohn, rather awkwardly, wrapped it around a bollard. A dozen people swarmed out of the boat and all over the truck, turning load into cargo. Whenever either Janis or Moh started forward to help they were politely told to get out of the way, and after the third time they did. The truck was backed along the pier and driven off to be returned to the Edinburgh branch of the hire company, with paperwork to show that it had been somewhere else entirely. Janis and Moh were escorted aboard and the boat cast off and headed across the water to the dark coastline of Fife.

‘Funny thing,’ Janis remarked as they stood in the wheelhouse, sipping black tea, ‘you can’t smell the fish.’

Kohn made a smothered, snorting noise, and the helmsman guffawed.

‘There hasna been a smell of fish here for years!’

This comment was borne out when they landed at the harbour of what, to Janis’s enhanced vision, looked even more like a ghost town than it was. It had obviously once been a fishing port, then a tourist/leisure marina. The few people who lived here now were ANR. It wasn’t exactly a front-line place – there was no front line – but it was on a tacitly acknowledged border of one of the patches of territory that made up the Republic. A controlled zone.

Two vehicles waited on the quay. One was a truck, to take the cargo. The other was a low-profile version of a jeep, a humvee. Janis and Moh stood uncertainly on the quay with their bags and weapons. A tall man and a short man got out of the humvee and walked up to them.

The tall man was wearing a dark jumpsuit with a row of tiny badges – national and party – on the breast pocket. Kohn recognized it as the closest the ANR had to a uniform, and, judging by the large number and small size of the badges, this guy had to be of very high rank. Face fleshy – more with muscle than fat – relaxed mouth, broken veins on the cheeks. The small man was almost hidden in a bulky overcoat and a homburg hat, in the shade of which his fine-boned face was lit by the glow of a cigarette. Only one people had features quite like that.

The tall man smiled and shook hands with Janis, then Moh. He knew their names.

‘Welcome to the Republic,’ he said. ‘My name’s Colin MacLennan. I’d like you to meet a man who’s very keen to meet you.’ He turned to the small man with a flourish.

‘Our scientific adviser, Doctor Nguyen Thanh Van.’

‘We have to look very closely at the influence of Gnosticism, right, because there we can see a major opposition to Paul’s misogyny, OK, which was later on to manifest itself in the so-called heresies of the Middle Ages—’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre slithered sideways, made a frantic grab for a handhold, caught a bunch of something like hair, and got heaved off the animal’s back for the fifth time. He ran after the beast and remounted, while four anarcho-barbarist terrorists looked politely away. He almost wished he were lying forward strapped to the horse’s neck, like Aghostino-Clarke. On the other hand, if they’d both been as helpless he wouldn’t have put it past this lot to butcher them and black-market the bionics.

The horses were picking their way down a slope along a barely visible path between birch trees. Water dripped on him and added irritation to discomfort. As soon as he was more or less settled on the horse, the leader of the gang, Dilly Foyle, continued her enthusiastic explanation of her political ideas. She was NF: National Feminist. Patriarchy, she’d already told him at some length (five kilometres, so far), was a Jewish invention, as was obvious from the Bible. Its function was to assist the effete city-dwellers in their struggle against the free barbarians, by turning the free barbarian men against the free barbarian women. She’d already given her estimate of the optimum human population of the planet: about fifty million.

‘…of course the whole defence of living in cities that’s wrecking the world right now comes not entirely but primarily from people who’ve adapted, you could even say degenerated…’

I bet you could, he thought.

‘…into dependency, and there’s only one ethnic group that has literally been urban without interruption for thousands of years. Now I’m not saying this to be anti-Semitic, far from it, but I think it’s no coincidence that socialism and capitalism are the two main industrialist ideologies, and when you find that Tony Cliff’s real name was Ygael Gluckstein and Ayn Rand’s was Alice Rosenbaum…’

He fell off again. After a couple more falls and a statistical analysis of the ethnic composition of media ownership which was only about one hundred per cent wrong, Bleibtreu-Fèvre murmured that he’d certainly look into the matter as soon as possible. Foyle thanked him for his interest, and fell into a thoughtful silence which worried him more than her talk.

Better to burn one city than to curse the darkness…now where had he heard that? Bleibtreu-Fèvre cursed the darkness, and he cursed the coherent light that had burned the car. Goddamn Space Defense. He was sure, still, that they weren’t on to the case: it was just their way of handling jurisdictional disputes, like they handled arms-control violations. They didn’t like Stasis, and they especially didn’t like Stasis shooting people. It would all have worked out fine if the goddamn greens hadn’t been so incompetent. Of course, he had known that the target killed greens as a profession, but his contacts had sworn by these. No low-risk lab-sabs them, but real guerillas, who’d fought off the native army itself on occasion. So much for the native army. Probably bought it off, more like.

It became obvious the path was going diagonally down the side of a hill. The trees thinned out and were replaced by gorse bushes, then the long wet grass of a meadow. Cows ignored their passing. He heard water, and a dog barking. They passed some of the traditional buildings of low-tech organic farming: Fuller domes, Nissen huts, a wind-power generator. Battered old cars with cylinders on their roofs that stank of methane. The horses were walking on moss-outlined stones now. They stopped, and those who could dismounted.

Within a minute people from the green community were all around, starting to help with their three injured comrades. Bleibtreu-Fèvre, with minutely directed help from a green who claimed to be a traditional healer and had bones through his ears to prove it, lifted Aghostino-Clarke off the horse and laid him on a stretcher. The black man moaned and opened his eyes.

‘You’re going to be all right,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said.

‘What…happened?’

‘The target’s moll shot you. And then the target shot you. He could have killed you, but he didn’t.’

‘Should…have,’ Aghostino-Clarke muttered, and closed his eyes again. Bleibtreu-Fèvre palped his arm gently until he found the drug panel, flush with the skin, and pushed the morphine key for another dose. His colleague had enough bionics and prosthetics and by-passes built into him to survive, just as long as none of them were hit.

They moved the wounded man into a house apart from the others, who were helped or carried to their own dwellings. Bleibtreu-Fèvre keyed himself a shot of anti-som and sat by a window until dawn. In the early light he saw what he was waiting for: a tiny automatic helicopter, a remote, drifting in across the wet pastures.

He went outside to speak to it. He’d barely completed giving it a message to arrange a pick-up later in the morning when he sensed the presence of Dilly Foyle at his side, glaring suspiciously at the hovering, insectile shape over the sights of her crossbow.

‘It’s all right,’ he told her. ‘We’re as anxious to keep this secret as you are.’ The little machine buzzed up towards the low cloud. Foyle still tracked it. ‘Remember what Jesus said.’

The machine disappeared from sight.

‘What?’

‘Don’t worry about the ’mote,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said grimly. ‘Worry about the beam.’