"I hate to tell you this, Auger, but you're all as crazy as each other."

"Bet you're sorry you signed up for this now, aren't you, Floyd?" Not waiting for his answer, Auger

turned back to Ca.s.sandra. "Where are we in this sorry little mess?"

"Oh, we're nowhere near Mars now," the girl said. "We've been on our own high-burn trajectory ever since we s.n.a.t.c.hed you out of the atmosphere."

Another icon dropped into the image, about halfway between Mars and Earth, which were both situated

on the same side of the Sun.

"That's us?"

"That's us," Ca.s.sandra confirmed. "Maintaining a high-burn trajectory, with a second ship just behind us."

"A high-burn trajectory?" Auger shook her head. "It doesn't even feel as if we're moving."

"Trust me, we're moving. We're also executing some rather violent evasive patterns."

Something wasn't right. Auger had heard many things about the Slashers' advanced technology, but she had never heard that they had developed the means to nullify acceleration. Perhaps they were even further ahead of the USNE than intelligence had ever suggested.

"What do you know about this second ship?" she asked.

"We think it might be one of Niagara's allies, or possibly the man himself. It's a Polity design, part of

the original concentration of aggressor elements. It may be responding to Caliskan's signal from Tanglewood."

"We have to get to him first," Auger said.

"That's more or less the idea," Ca.s.sandra replied laconically. "We'd be there in eight hours under

optimum conditions. Unfortunately, the ship behind us is doing its best to make life difficult. These violent evasive manoeuvres are costing us time and engine fatigue."

"Maybe I'm missing something," Auger said, "but I don't feel any violent evasive manoeuvres."

"Mm." Ca.s.sandra said thoughtfully. "There's something you need to see, I think."

"What?"

Ca.s.sandra led them across the chamber and opened a door into another corridor. A little way along, she stopped at a smooth expanse of convex walling and created an observation window. "I may as well show you something else on the way. Apart from the two of you, there are eighteen other casualties on this ship."

Auger brightened, remembering Skellsgard. Perhaps she was safe after all, despite Ca.s.sandra's doubts.

"Refugees from Phobos?"

"Not directly, no. I'm sorry-I know you want good news about your friend, and I would give it to you if I could."

The observation window overlooked a large interior chamber. Ca.s.sandra made the lights come on, revealing the stubby, streamlined form of a Thresher-manufactured s.p.a.cecraft: the kind that could skim in and out of an atmosphere and land on a planetary surface, such as Mars or t.i.tan, or on one of the high-alt.i.tude landing towers on Venus. It was about twenty metres in length, just small enough to fit into the bay. The shuttle had bulky thrust nacelles and bulging insectile undercarriage pods; against the scorched white skin, Auger could make out a green flying horse logo near the black heat-absorbent panelling of the nose.

"That's a Pegasus Intersolar ship," she said.

"Yes," Ca.s.sandra said. "As a matter of fact, it's a transatmospheric shuttle from the liner Twentieth Century Limited."

The ship was braced into the chamber on enormous shock-absorbing pistons, gripping it from all angles. Even as Auger watched, the ship lurched one way and then another, as if subject to immense lateral forces. "I took the Twentieth to Phobos," she said, feeling slightly seasick. "What's one of its shuttles doing here?"

"The liner was hijacked. Hostile ships made rendezvous and hard docking beyond reach of systemwide law enforcement."

"Slasher forces?"

"Not obviously so. According to eyewitnesses, they behaved just like your run-of-the-mill extralegal agents. Pirates, in other words. Luckily, the liner was running at nowhere near maximum capacity. There was room for most of the pa.s.sengers and crew to escape on shuttles."

"And the pirates just let them go?" Auger asked incredulously.

"They had nothing to gain by butchering those on board. There wasn't enough room for everyone on the shuttles, and some of the crew elected to remain aboard. They were allowed into a secure compartment with life-support capability and provisions. That's where the ones who stayed aboard were all found, when the Twentieth drifted within reach of Thresher police."

Auger thought she had misheard her. "Drifted?"

"She had been gutted," Ca.s.sandra said. "Stripped of her entire drive a.s.sembly."

"That's insane."

"Oh, there was some attempt to dress up the piracy as being for the usual reasons," she said, "but it was all cover, really. The main thing they were after was the drive core."

"But why would anyone want the drive core of an old junkheap like the Twentieth? The Slashers will happily sell anyone a more efficient engine, provided they stump up the costs."

"That's precisely what bothered me," Ca.s.sandra said. "The entire operation to steal the Twentieth's engine must have been quite expensive in its own right. Several ships had to make that rendezvous, including one large enough to contain the entire drive a.s.sembly. It's not the sort of thing you dismantle."

"It doesn't make any sense," Auger said.

"But you sense a connection none the less. Why steal an antimatter engine when we can offer something infinitely safer, and just as powerful? The only practical use for such a thing would be-"

"As a bomb," Auger said.

"I'm sorry?"

"Think about it, Ca.s.sandra. It has to be a bomb. That's the only thing that drive can give the Slashers that you don't already have. Your bleed-drive engines suck energy from the vacuum in tiny, controlled doses. I know. I've seen the sales brochures."

"They're very safe," Ca.s.sandra said defensively. "The vacuum potential reaction is self-limiting: if the energy density exceeds a critical limit, it shuts off."

"In other words, very useful for making a safe drive, but not much use as a Molotov c.o.c.ktail."

Beside her, Floyd smiled. "I almost thought I was going to get through a whole conversation without understanding a single word. Now you've gone and spoiled it."

"I confess I have no idea what a Molotov c.o.c.ktail is," Ca.s.sandra said. "Is it some kind of weapon system?"

"You could say that," Floyd said.

"I still don't understand," Ca.s.sandra said. "You're implying that someone wanted the antimatter engine to use as a bomb. But what use is such a thing? A ship large enough to contain the stolen drive a.s.sembly could never approach close enough to a planet or habitat to do serious damage. It would be intercepted and destroyed in interplanetary s.p.a.ce, light-seconds from any target. As soon as we issue a systemwide alert-" "Go ahead and issue your alert," Auger said, "but I don't think it will make any difference. I think you'll find it a lot more difficult to track those ships than you're expecting. I also don't think they intend to use that antimatter against anything in this system."

"You're making me most anxious to have a peek inside your skull," Ca.s.sandra said ominously. "I thought we had an agreement."

"And you said you had something else to show me."

"It concerns the evacuees," she said. "And, in a way, you."

She made the window vanish, then led them a little further along the corridor and opened another gilded doorway.

The room beyond was a kind of dormitory. Inside, ranked against the two long, incurving walls, were twenty or so coffinlike containers. Again, they had the spongy, vegetative look of recently extruded hardware, their bases merging into the floor. Pulpy, rootlike tendrils connected the pods to each other and the walls.

"This is where we're keeping the eighteen pa.s.sengers and crew from the shuttle," Ca.s.sandra said, inviting Auger to take a closer look at one of the pods. The upper part of it consisted of a curved, glossy lid, veined like a leaf, through which the head and upper body of one of the evacuees could just be discerned. She was a tall, dark-skinned woman, encased in what looked like a thick turquoise-blue support matrix of some kind. Auger even thought she recognised her as one of the other pa.s.sengers she'd seen on the Twentieth.

"Is she ill?" Auger asked.

"No," Ca.s.sandra said. "See that bluish gel she's floating in? Pure machinery. It's invaded her completely, right down to the cellular level."

"Who gave you permission to do that?" Auger asked, outraged. "These people are Threshers. Most of them would never consent to having machines pumped into their bodies."

"I'm afraid they didn't have a lot of choice in the matter," Ca.s.sandra said. "It was either that or die. We can quibble over consent later."

"Die of what? You just said that none of them were ill."

"It's the evasive pattern, you see. We're sustaining ten gees, which would be bad enough in its own right, but our random manoeuvres superimpose one or two hundred gee transients on top of that background load. It's quite intolerable for an unmodified person. Without the buffering from those machines, they'd be dead."

"Then why aren't we?" Auger asked.

"I'll show you."

Ca.s.sandra waved them through to the back of the dormitory. "I mentioned eighteen evacuees from the

Twentieth," she said, "but you'll notice that there are twenty caskets in this room. We wouldn't have bothered creating the extras without good reason." She gestured to the last two, set against the far wall. "You and your companion are in those two."

"Wait..." Auger began.

"There's no reason for alarm," Ca.s.sandra said. "Come closer and look inside. You'll see that you're perfectly unharmed." Auger looked through the transparent cover of the first casket. There, suspended in the same blue gel as the woman, lay the sleeping form of Floyd, his eyes closed, his face an unmoving mask of serenity. She stepped aside to let him see, then viewed her own body in the other casket.

"Why does this feel as if everything's just turned into a bad dream?" Floyd asked.

"It's all right," Auger said, reaching out to squeeze his hand in an attempt to give rea.s.surance that she didn't really feel herself. No matter how much this bothered her, she could not begin to imagine what Floyd was feeling. "Isn't it, Ca.s.sandra?"

"I didn't want to alarm you immediately," the Slasher said, "knowing how Threshers tend to feel about

our machines-"

"She's telling the truth," Auger said to Floyd. "We are on a s.p.a.ceship and we were rescued from Mars.

I'm pretty certain that much is true. But we still haven't been woken up."

"I feel pretty awake for someone who hasn't been woken up."

"You're fully conscious," she said. "It's just that the machines are fooling your brain into thinking that you're walking around. Everything that you see or feel is bogus. You're really still in that tank."

"It's the only way we can keep you alive," Ca.s.sandra said, with evident concern. "The acceleration

would have killed all of us by now."

"So you're...?" Floyd began, not really knowing how to frame the question.