Auger thought for a moment. "White," she said. "Susan White. I'm sure you're familiar with her work. She auth.o.r.ed that report on the EuroDisney excavation last year."

"Know her well, do you?"

"Not especially," Auger said. "We've exchanged a few messages and had the odd conversation at academic conferences. I may have refereed one of her papers; she may have refereed one of mine."

"You consider her a rival, don't you?"

"We're both fighting for the same research budget. It doesn't mean I'd scratch her eyes out." Sensing

that her usefulness to Caliskan was coming to an end, she said, "Look, I'm sure I could put you in touch with her."

"Actually, we've already contacted her."

Auger shrugged, her point made. "Well, then, what do you need me for?"

"There's a problem with White. That's why we've come to you."

"What kind of problem?"

"I can't tell you, I'm afraid." He clapped his hands together and showed her the palms. "That's a matter for the other candidate. Don't feel bad about it, Auger: you were always our second choice, but as a second choice you came very highly recommended." Caliskan dipped his head towards his desk, picked up a ma.s.sive black pen and began to make an entry of some kind in a journal, the nib scratching against high-quality paper.

"And that's it?"

He looked up momentarily from his writing. "Were you expecting something else?"

"I thought..." Auger stopped.

"You thought what?"

"I failed, didn't I? I didn't get whatever it was you wanted me to get."

Caliskan's pen halted its scratching. "I'm sorry?"

"There was something in the map I was supposed to see." Committed now, she felt a heady rush of

certainty as the elusive detail she'd been missing clicked into place. "Well, I did see it. I just didn't know what to make of it."

Caliskan returned the pen to its inkwell. "Continue."

"The map doesn't make any sense, even for one printed in nineteen fifty-nine. It's more like a map of Paris from the twenties or thirties, masquerading as one from thirty years later."

"In what way?"

"The street names. There's no Roosevelt; no Charles de Gaulle; no Churchill. It's as if the Second World War never took place."

Caliskan closed his journal and slid it to one side. "I'm very glad to hear you say that," he said. "I was

beginning to think that perhaps you weren't the right woman for the job after all."

"What job?" Auger asked.

From a desk drawer Caliskan produced a ticket, embossed with the Art Deco flying horse of Pegasus

Intersolar. "I need you to go to Mars for me," he said. "Some property has fallen into the wrong hands and we'd rather like to have it back."

The name of the ship was the Twentieth Century Limited. Auger glimpsed bits of it-never the whole thing-as she was being processed aboard, led from one pressurised embarkation point to the next. It was a huge vessel by Thresher standards, six or seven hundred metres long, but the liner was making its run to Mars at much less than normal capacity. With the increase in tensions across the system, people had cut back on unnecessary travel. So far the hostilities had been confined to dissenting elements amongst the Slashers, but two USNE ships had already been caught in the crossfire, resulting in the loss of civilian lives. Inessential outposts had been mothballed and a number of intersolar transit concerns had declared bankruptcy.

When she had finished her drink in the observation lounge-watching Earth and Tanglewood recede- she checked the local time and made her way back to her cabin. She had opened the door and was moving to flick on the light when she realised that the light was already on and the cabin occupied. Auger flinched-for a moment she thought she had opened the wrong door-but then recognised her luggage and coat on the end of the bed.

It was her room, and the two people sitting on the edge of the bed were Ringsted and Molinella, the Securities Board agents she had already met in Tanglewood.

"Verity Auger?" Ringsted asked.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," she said. "Of course it's me."

"Check her out," Ringsted said.

Molinella stood up and pulled out something that looked like a pen. Before Auger could react, he had expertly pinned her against the door and was holding one of her eyes open and aiming the end of the pen into it. Intense blue-green light zapped her retina and sparked painfully across her brain.

"It's her," Molinella confirmed, releasing his hold.

"You know it's me," Auger said, shaking her head to clear her vision of afterimages. "We've already met. Don't you remember?"

"Sit down," Molinella ordered. "We have a lot to get through."

"Give me a break," Auger snapped. "We've only just left port. We have another five days until we get to Mars."

"Five days would barely cover it even if we had the luxury of that much time." Molinella fixed her with the blank expression of a tailor's dummy. As before, both agents wore suits, but this time the cut was not quite as formal. They could, Auger supposed, just about pa.s.s for a pair of slightly straitlaced Thresher newlyweds.

"But we don't have five days," Ringsted said. "For security reasons, we must complete your briefing today."

"Are you not staying on this ship until we reach Mars?" Auger asked.

"Yes," Ringsted said. "As Caliskan doubtless explained, the Slashers will have this ship under observation, just as they monitor all long-range Thresher traffic. We couldn't get a person on or off the Twentieth in mid-voyage without attracting far too much attention, and attention is the one thing we don't want right now."

"Well, then. What's the hurry?"

"Is that door shut?" Ringsted asked, looking over Auger's shoulder. "Good. Now pull up a chair. We have a lot to discuss."

"First of all, I need to show you something," Molinella said. He reached into his jacket pocket-the same place he kept the pen-and removed a matt-black cylinder like a cigar holder. He unscrewed the top and slid out a hypodermic, dense with bright-green fluid.

"While you were waiting for the ship," Ringsted said, "you were fed and watered in Caliskan's section of Contigencies."

"I know," Auger said.

"What you don't know is that there were harmless chemical tracers in your food. They've worked their way into your body and tagged themselves on to every new memory you've laid down since you became Caliskan's guest."

Molinella took up the narrative. "The agent in this syringe reacts with those tagged neural structures, dismantling them. Again, the effects won't be fatal, but you'll remember nothing that Caliskan told you, and nothing that we're about to tell you. In fact, you won't retain a single memory from this entire period. Of course, we'll only use it on you if we absolutely have to."

"So if I screw up, or even get on your nerves, I'll wake up with a large hole in my memory."

"Which won't be much help on the eve of a tribunal," Molinella added. "But let's hope it doesn't come to that, shall we?"

"Let's," Auger agreed, with exaggerated pleasantness. "But you still haven't told me why I need to learn all this now."

"The reason," Molinella said patiently, "is that a day from now there will only be one person on this ship who knows anything about the contents of this briefing. And no, that doesn't mean that Agent Ringsted and I are going anywhere." He returned the syringe to its container and the container to his pocket, patting it gently. "If you see us outside this room once this briefing is over, treat us like any other pair of pa.s.sengers. There'll be no point in asking us further questions. We literally won't remember you."

"We'll begin with the essentials," Ringsted said. "The lights, please, Agent Molinella."

Molinella stood up and dimmed the cabin lights.

"This is very cosy," Auger began, but she had barely opened her mouth when patterns of light appeared on one blank wall of the cabin. She traced the rays back to a ruby-stoned ring on Molinella's finger.

The patterns of light resolved into what she presumed was the seal of the Contingencies Board, accompanied by a warning that the ensuing information was covered by a level of security so chillingly high that Auger had never even heard of it.

"Aren't I supposed to have signed something by now?" she asked.

Ringsted and Molinella looked at each other and laughed. "Just watch," the woman said. "And save your questions for later."

The security seal vanished, replaced by a picture of what Auger a.s.sumed to be the Milky Way galaxy, seen from above.

And then a man appeared, superimposed over the image of the galaxy. He wore a mid-grey suit with red cuffs and looked very athletic, his muscles straining against the seams of the fabric. He was very handsome and self-a.s.sured and Auger recognised him with a jolt.

It was Peter.

"h.e.l.lo, Verity," he said, spreading his hands in a gesture of apology and mild embarra.s.sment. "I suspect this probably comes as something of a surprise. All I can do is apologise for the secrecy, and hope that you'll forgive me-all of us, in fact-for the necessary subterfuge."

She opened her mouth to say something, but Peter raised one palm and flashed a knowing smile. "No, don't say anything. You'll just have to listen to what I have to say and fill in the gaps yourself. I'll do my best not to leave out anything critical."

"Peter," she said, unable to stop herself. "What are..."

Oblivious of her interruption, the recording continued. "Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way, shall we? Everything you think you know about me is correct. I am in the diplomatic service, and I have just returned from an extended tour of the Polities, culminating with a trip into the hyperweb. That's the public story, and it's all true. But there's more to it than that. I was also functioning as an undercover agent, gathering intelligence while playing the role of a sweet-talking airhead diplomat." He smiled again, antic.i.p.ating his ex-wife's reaction to this news. "At, I should add, considerable risk to both myself and my friends amongst the Slashers. Things are getting very serious out there now, and spies aren't looked upon too favourably. As it is, I've probably exhausted my usefulness. A pity, as I rather enjoyed being a spook." Peter's measured, actorly voice seemed to come from somewhere in the cabin, rather than the projector ring.

"I suppose I should get to the point, though. And the point, rather predictably, is the hyperweb itself." Peter turned around and spread a hand across the face of the Milky Way, like a farmer casting seed. A bright web of lines appeared, transecting the spiral, and then the entire ensemble rotated to reveal a three-dimensional structure. "This is our best guess as to the extent of the hyperweb network as mapped by Slasher explorers," he said. "It's exceedingly difficult to come up with a rendering like this. When explorers pop out of the far end of a given portal, unless they've exited near some unique, immediately recognisable landmark, like a supernova remnant or a super-ma.s.sive outga.s.sing star, there's no way for them to calculate exactly where they are in the galaxy. All they can do is fix their position using reference points, for which purpose pulsars turn out to be rather more suitable than stars."

"Who made it?" Auger muttered under her breath. "That's all we really care about."

Something twinkled in Peter's eye as he turned back to the camera. How well he knew her, she thought, even now. "The one thing we don't know is who built it. Neither do our friends in the Polities. Of course, there's a great deal of guesswork, some of it rather compelling. The system is clearly of alien origin, but whoever built it-and presumably used it-doesn't seem to be around any more." Peter, Auger could tell, was rather enjoying this. From airhead, vain diplomat to airhead, vain spy: it really wasn't much of a leap. Then she rebuked herself for her snideness, conjecturing that Peter would almost certainly have been executed (or something worse) had his duplicity become known to his Slasher hosts.

She felt a flicker of admiration: quite unlike her, and most especially so where her ex-husband was concerned.

"What we suspect is this," Peter continued. "The system is old. It's been here for hundreds of millions of years, at the very least. It may be nearly as old as the solar system. Most of the portals that the explorers have found are anch.o.r.ed to solid bodies: terrestrial planets, moons, large planetoids. The Sedna portal is a cla.s.sic example, and as far as the Slashers know it's the only active portal in our system."

Something made the hairs on the back of her neck tingle. It was the way he said "as far as the Slashers know."

Peter tuned back to the representation of the Milky Way, stroking his chin thoughtfully. "We still have no idea how the d.a.m.ned thing functions. Even the Slashers are in the dark on that one, despite their best efforts to convince us otherwise. They have some theories about metric engineering-triple-bounded hypervacuum solutions to the Krasnikov equations, that kind of thing. But really, if we're all honest with ourselves, they're p.i.s.sing in the wind." He tapped a finger against his upper lip. "But let's give them credit where it's due. They found a way to use it. They grafted some of their technology on to the portal mechanisms, found a way to manipulate the throat geometry so they could squeeze a ship through in more or less one piece. You have to admire them for that. Like it or not, they're way ahead of us."

Peter laced his hands behind his back, standing with his legs s.p.a.ced slightly apart. "Now let's talk hard numbers. How far have they reached? What have they actually found out there?"

Auger sat forward, sensing that some kind of climax was imminent.

"We still don't know exactly when they found the Sedna portal," Peter said. "Our best guess is that it was somewhere around fifty years ago, between twenty-two ten and twenty-two fifteen. Since then they've surveyed-or at least visited-somewhere in the region of fifty to sixty thousand solar systems. Pretty impressive, by anyone's measure. There's just one nagging little problem: they haven't actually found anything to justify all this effort."

Auger nodded to herself. She paid scant attention to rumours about the hyperweb, but even so, one thing kept shining through: the whole affair was a bitter disappointment.

"Or at least," Peter continued, "nothing they want us to know about. It's tricky for them, really. They want access to Earth, and the only thing they can really offer us-apart from a drip-feed of UR and other dangerous little toys-is permission to use the hyperweb as paying pa.s.sengers. So they try to dress up the brutal truth of what they have found out there, which is an endless catalogue of dead, uninhabitable rocks and crushing cold giants." Peter unlaced his hands from behind his back and leaned conspiratorially toward the camera. "The funny thing is, though, that even if they had found something out there, they probably wouldn't tell us that either."

"Please get on with it," Auger said, as if it would make any difference.

"The illusion," Peter said, "that the hyperweb has turned up nothing of value is maintained even in Slasher circles, at surprisingly high levels of security. That's why it's been such a tough old nut to crack."

Now the picture behind him changed again. It zoomed in on one specific arm of the galaxy, the scene behind him punctuated by stars. Something loomed out of the darkness between them: a blue-grey world of unnatural smoothness, one crescent picked out in orange-red by an off-stage sun or cl.u.s.ter of suns.

The other limb was a frigid blue, like the colour of moonlight on snow. The view zoomed towards the sphere, until it was much larger than Peter. At this extreme magnification, it was possible to make out some detail on the surface of the sphere. It was nothing at all like the texturing and weathering of a planetary surface.

The sphere was made up of countless neatly interlocked platelets, arranged in a pattern of mind-numbing regularity. It looked less like a planet than some crystalline molecule or virus.

"Let's bring in some scale here," Peter said.

A box surrounded the sphere. Numbers popped up on the axes, indicating that the diameter of the sphere was around nine or ten of whatever units of measurement were in force.

"What..." Auger began.

"These numbers are units of one light-second," Peter said. "The sphere is nearly ten light-seconds in diameter. To put that into context, you could fit the sun into that structure and still have plenty of elbow room. You couldn't fit in the Earth as well, since the Earth's...o...b..t around the sun is eight light-minutes wide, or about fifty times too big to fit into the sphere. But if you put the Earth in the middle, you'd have more than enough room to include Earth's moon."

"Excuse me," Auger interrupted, "but was it me, or did he just call that thing a structure?" The agents ignored her, and she grudgingly returned her attention to the recording.

"I suppose we shouldn't be too surprised that we've actually found something unambiguously alien," Peter said. "After all, we always knew they were out there somewhere. The hyperweb is all the evidence we need of that. But to find something this huge...well, I don't think anyone was expecting that. The first big question, of course, is what the h.e.l.l is it? And the second big question, what can it do for us?"