He leaned forward again, the friendly smile dying away from his face. It had never quite reached his eyes. So why don't you cut this spaceman shit, he spat.Who are you working for, andwhat is going on?

Who do you think? Lafarge said.They don't believe me, he realized.They seriouslydon't believe me!

We don't know. We don't know who was dealing with those posse hopheads in the warehouse, or how your deal went wrong, or why you were using them-smuggling biohazards, whatever the hell you were doing. Hell, maybe you're working for the Russians; they may not be communists anymore, but they're not all that friendly. Wedo know it was dirty, and wedo know you're going to tell us all about it.

He laughed. Unless you beam up really quick.

Ken braced his palms against the arms of his chair. Mr. Andrews, he said quietly. If I don't convince you, events will . . . but by then it will be very late, very late indeed. You're gambling with the future of the entire human race.

And you're not in the offices of theNational Enquirer, Andrews barked.Sit down. This administration takes matters of national security seriously, whatever the previous occupants thought.

Debrowski put two heavy hands on Lafarge's shoulders and pushed, using his considerable weight. The thin leather cushion smacked under his buttocks, and the high arms cramped him.

Mr. Andrews, he said quietly. I appreciate your position, and I realize you think you're doing your duty.

In a sense I'm an American too- Not according to our files, Andrews said. Your ID is good paper but there's nobody of that age, name or Social Security number. I suggest you stop lying.

-but the stakes are too high. I can't let you detain me.It might well find out.

And if it did while he was immobilized and separated from his equipment, he was a dead man. The planet with him.

Debrowski spoke for the first time. Let? he said.Let us detain you?

Andrews loosened his tie. You're on the third floor of a high-security building, he said. You'realready detained. I also suggest you start exercising a little realism.

Good advice,Lafarge thought regretfully.

His hands darted up behind his head and closed on Debrowski's ears.Crack. The older man's nose smacked into the crown of the Samothracian's head. He bellowed with pain, recoiling backward; then struck down with both hands, a double chop that would have severed his opponent's collarbones like green branches . . . if the situation had been what he assumed.

Time slowed as the net laid along his nerves activated.

First level,he commanded: the biological price was too high for anything more. His bladed palms chopped up and out, thudding into Debrowski's forearms with a meaty, rubbery sensation. He used the momentum to drive himself upward, aiding the powerful spring of his legs and capturing the other man's arms under his own for a second.

Crack. Crack.He punched the rear of his head into the others face again, slightly harder this time.

Despite the reinforced bone, that was still a little painful for him, but much more so for Debrowski. The bulky figure toppled away behind him. Andrews was coming erect, his lips moving slowly and the gun coming out from under his arm. Lafarge's time-sensor clocked the movement; remarkable reflexes. The automatic system brought his softsuit flowing out from cuffs and collar to complete its coverage of his body. Cool neutrality insulated his skin, like dipping into dry water; it pressed his short-cropped hair against his scalp.

Transparent,he commanded-no use giving away more than he had to. The locals would see only a slight shimmer over his skin, if they saw anything at all in the heat of the moment. He turned and leaped through the glass door, one foot driving down on the seat of the chair. Glass exploded away from his outstretched fists as his hundred and ninety pounds dove forward. He landed on his hands and front-rolled. The outer office was empty; and now he knew why Andrews had insisted on an evening meeting. Fewer witnesses, when they took his sedated body away to someplace secluded.

Smart boy,he thought. Smart in the day-to-day sense, at least. Pity he didn't have much imagination.

Lafarge skidded slightly as he cornered to drive down a corridor between rows of cubicles separated by movable partitions. The disguising shoes gave poor traction; no amount of strength or speed could increase the gripping surface on the soles of his feet. And- WHACK The 9mm bullet struck the base of his skull. Red-tinged blackness surged in, and the floor came up to strike him. The iron and copper taste of blood filled his mouth as teeth gashed lips or tongue.

A diminishedpinnnnnng caught at the edge of his attention as the ricochet whined off to lose itself in a computer or potted plant or water cooler. He twitched, fingers scrabbling at the synthetic carpet. The softsuit could sense the bullet coming and turn instantly harder than diamond and more frictionless than liquid mercury on dry ice. It couldn't repeal the law of conservation of momentum. A substantial fraction of the bullet's energy moved his head forward, and his brain surged backward in its bath of fluid as inertia prevented it from moving quite in synch.

Time for concussion later.The combat web dumped chemicals into his carotids and stimulus into the motor centers of his brain. He rose to his knees.

Bang-ptannng.Again and again; the next three shots hit him between the shoulders, ripping the disguising clothes and torquing his body around just enough to see the pistol coming out the shattered office door with Andrews's face snarling behind it. Partitions collapsed as he lurched against them. He scuttled forward like a mechanical crab on hands and knees, the fabric of his trousers ripping with his haste. More shots, none hitting this time; Andrews wavered sideways as Debrowski's body struck him at the waist.

Stop that, you stupid fuck!Andrews screamed. He snapshot again as Lafarge pistoned up from the floor, running like an Olympic hurdler and leaping desks with a raking stride.I've got him, I've - Another shot struck Lafarge in the back of the knee. The softsuit saved the joint from the sideways leverage, but it cost him momentum toward the windows. The rectangle of the gasgun slapped into his palm, thrown forward by the holster. He shot; the windows burst away in a cloud of needles as the slug of ultracompressed air hammered them out of his way like an invisible piledriver. He followed in a soaring leap.

He brothk my dose! De bathurd brothk my dose! Debrowski yelled, as much in rage as pain.

Fuckyour nose, Andrews shouted.

The wounded man tumbled sideways, knocking over the wastebasket. The younger agent wrenched the door open-both panels of frosted glass were gone in a pile of shards that shifted treacherously underfoot. He went through in a skittering crouch, gun in a two-handed grip, down the aisle to the windows overlooking the parking lot. The bastard's body wouldhave to be there. He wasn't necessarily dead; Andrews was fairly sure he'd hit him with at least one round, and a three-story fall onto pavement had to break bones, but doing wet-work you learned how tough the human body could be. He wouldn't be going anywhere, though. Not fast.

Nothing, he said, with more obscenity in the word than ten minutes' scatology. Then, quietly and with conviction: Shit.

He holstered his weapon. Alarms were ringing downstairs, and the stairwell doors burst open as a couple of the guards came through. Andrews spread his hands.

It's Andrews, he said, repeating it in a loud, clear voice.

You couldn't tell what men would do when they came charging into a room expecting a firefight; except that it wouldn't necessarily be what hindsight thought best. When the gunmen straightened up from their crouch he went on: Get a medic. Fast. Then get on the horn to the local police, put an APB out on Kenneth Lafarge, the picture's on my desk, armed and dangerous, wanted for assault and attempted murder. His calm broke.

Move! Now!

God alone knew who this fruitloop was really working for. God alone knew what he'd be doing now.

Andrews shuddered slightly. In reaction, and for what might be. The Firm had dozens of scenarios on bio-terrorism, none of them pretty. Whoever had been using the Jamaicans as a conduit knew more about genetic engineering than anyone should; that arm from whatever-the-fuck-it-was proved that.

Genetics was low-cost science, much easier to do in a private lab than nuclear weapons, even with plutonium coming out of Russia like piss out of a horse.

He swallowed the sour throat-scraping taste of failure.Ebola, he thought. The Ebola virus had nearly gotten out of Africa twice; it was contagious as hell, and had a fatality rate of better than 90 percent.

Someone with this group's skills could engineer something like that as they pleased. Give it a year-long incubation period with the victim contagious all the time. Ebola turned your connective tissue into mush . .

He ejected the magazine of his Glock, snapped in a fresh one and bolstered it, all automatic reflex before he got a cupful of water and went over to kneel by George. The heavy-set man was holding a wad of tissues to his nose and dripping red down a sodden shirt.

Dink we'll be hearing de randsub deband zoon?

Time will tell. At least we've got a clear make on one of them.

And when the ransom demand came, they might have to pay up.

These are very fine diamonds, Mr. Smith, the dealer said, laying aside his loupe.

Kenneth Lafarge sat back in the rickety office chair and nodded. The little room was cramped and musty, piled with papers and ledgers; the desk held what this world considered a very up-to-date computer system, and a square of heavy paper with a spill of jewels across it.

Gem quality, and not listed on the system as prohibited merchandise.

The dealer had a thick accent and wore a skullcap. That seemed to be usual on 47th Street, in this weird analog of New York. The skin between his shoulder blades crawled slightly as he smiled. This wasn't the city that had died in thermonuclear fire in 1999, but his mind's eye still saw those images. Samothrace had passed them down from generation to generation after the Exodus, a heritage of loss and revenge.

Of course, you understand, without documentation, the price . . . A delicate shrug from the diamond dealer.

He nodded.Plenty more where those came from. In fact, as long as he had carbon for raw material, any number of them. The suitcase contained a very compact little molecular assembler, well up to such simple tasks.

Why don't you tell me what you think is reasonable, Mr. Feldman? he said. It wouldn't do to arouse suspicion by not bargaining.

Ken replaced the phone with a sigh. No luck withanyone at the investment bankers.

Granted, he couldn't give them enough details to show that he was anything but a crank. Yet . . . these people didn't seem to have any healthy paranoia at all!

Futile,he thought. Still, one had to make the effort. These businessmen didn't know what they were getting into.

The sign outside the building readSmith Computer Services; the cover was convenient, and it was pathetically easy to fox the IRS machines. Most of the big rooms were full of improvised rigs, cobbled together from local components. The rear of the building held a single spartan bedroom, and a gallery big enough for him to exercise and practice in. The main problem was people trying to buy computer services from him.

He sighed again and turned to a terminal.Progress? he asked.

The voice-melded from his implant and the much more capable machine in the suitcase-replied: very little, the enemy's transducer includes all standard domination counterinfiltration infosets and is being used to protect the local machinery, i will need a direct landlink to penetrate.

Hmmm.The police?

as directed, the fbi have received the communication routed from the Canadian authorities,the dispassionate voice in his brain continued.an agent in receipt of the information has travelled to new york. the other intelligence agencies will be denied access. data relating to your encounter with the two agents will be protected.

Ken ground his teeth at the memory of the fiasco in Washington. The local police and government were worse than useless.I have to assume the snake is watching. It wouldn't be any great problem to put flagging markers in the local infosystems; and there was no way he could keep the natives from using them if he revealed himself. Ifit found out he was here, things could get very bad.

I could put together a laser-triggered fusion weapon,he thought.

contraindicated. probability of earth/1 detection increases asymptotically in that scenario.

Moodily, he took up a sheaf of printout. More research on the divergence point between this line and Earth/1. Even the primitive, rudimentary infoweb of this 1998 had substantial research potential. The AI logged on to the . . . net, they called it . . . and asked questions under a dozen different user IDs.

Definitely the 1770s,he thought. There was a two-year difference in the date the Netherlands entered the War of the Revolution. Some more subtle changes as well; the British seemed to have done slightly better throughout the Revolution here than they had in the history he learned.Wait a minute. Ferguson.

Major Patrick Ferguson, according to the printout, had been killed in the British defeat at the battle of King's Mountain in 1779. He called up memory: a Major-later General-Patrick Ferguson hadwon the battle of King's Mountain in 1779. He'd also invented the first workable breech-loading rifle; the Loyalist exiles who founded the Domination-to-Be in southern Africa had used it on the natives there, immortalized it as the Gun That Broke the Tribes. Here, breechloaders hadn't come into common use for seventy years after that.

Ahh, he said, leafing through the sheaves of printout again.

Here on Earth/2, Ferguson had been badly wounded during the American retreat from Long Island, in 1776; the unit equipped with his new rifle had been broken up. In Earth/1's history, he'd beenslightly wounded and his riflemen had continued to be a thorn in the American side. In Ken's history, Franceand the Dutch had entered the war against the British in 1779. Here, the Dutch had stayed neutral until 1781.

In Earth/1's history, the British had seized the Cape Colony, and used it to resettle the Loyalists and Hessians after the surrender at Yorktown in 1781. Over a hundred thousand of them, joined a little later by the French refugees from the Negro uprising in Santo Domingo.

That had been the seedbed of the Domination-a slave-based caste society of ferocious aggressiveness spreading out over southern Africa in the next generation.

On Earth/2, the Cape remained Dutch for another two generations, and never received the mass migration that started it on the road to world power. Eventually the natives took it over again. The great gold and diamond mines stayed undiscovered for a full century, until the 1880s; in his world they'd been exploited from the 1790s, and financed the industrialization of Africa.

Fascinating.The changes broadened out from there.

It was a more innocent world than his; poorer, more troubled in some respects, backward technologically, but without the monstrous weight of victorious totalitarianism that had crushed his ancestors at the end of the twentieth century.

And it's up to me to preserve it, he said softly.

The working desk held a printout-flat, in 2-D-of his family back on Samothrace, standing in front of the ranchhouse. Mother, Dad, his sisters, the low sprawling stabilized-adobe structure his ancestor had built when men first came to the Alpha Centauri system, bringing the inheritance of humanity and liberty.

He would never see them again; that was something you had to get used to, in the interstellar service-it might change with the molehole technology, but he'd been raised to think in sublight terms. He'd left them to protect them, a parting as final as death.

There was a world of people like them here, though.

Direct attack on the drakensis in its nesting site,he asked.

probability of detection from earth/1 negligible,the machine said,probability of mission success imponderable due to random factors.

He leaned back in the swivel chair.Yes, he decided. The snake would be getting stronger all the time. It was designed to dominate, to rule, to work through others. The longer he waited, the more layers of innocent-or at least unknowing-true-humans he'd have to wade through to get to it.

It was probably monitoring air traffic. An ocean approach, though . . .

And he'd keep trying the financial people. Maybe one of them would listen to him, in the end.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

Florence was a shock, Gwen decided. Mainly because so much was thesame. The Eurasian War of her 1940s had killed a tenth of humankind and left most of northern Europe beaten flat, to be rebuilt in the conqueror's fashion. Italy had been overrun swiftly and with minimal combat, though. Her grandparents had settled in the country near here in 1946; her human mother was bom there in 1954. Gwen had been cloned and implanted in a clinic in Florence, in the 1970s.

Not far from right . . . here, she mused, shouldering through the crowds.

Still the same low sienna-colored skyline of tile roofs. The white-ribbed red dome of the Cathedral, with Giotto's bell tower; still a church, here. The Palazzo Vecchio,not a Security Directorate regional headquarters, here. The same narrow streets. And yet everything sodifferent from the city of her youth.

Hotter, crowded. Far too many of the absurd stinking ground vehicles; they were monstrosities even in the Americas, insane in this medieval street pattern. Noisy, gabbling, stinking feral humans everywhere, invading her sphere of social space, refusing to give way, some of them even daring totouch her. At first it was all she could to not to lash out, forcing her mind to clamp down on her glands. The air was better than New York's, but that was all you could say for it.

I don't like what they've done with my home, she whispered subvocally.

That was illogical; the Domination's District of Tuscany had never existed here. The Ingolfsson plantation was a village called Radda, and had never known her family's footsteps. In fact, the Ingolfsson who'd founded the line had probably died in Iceland in 1784, rather than arriving in the proto-Domination as a refugee settler.

This mockery of her birthplace still put a subliminal growl in her throat. It might have been better to meet the scientist in Berlin.

No point in delaying.The Locanda Scoti was a moderately goodpensioni not far from the Duomo, marked only by a plaque markedP. Scoti, right across from the Strozzi Palace. Inside was dark and quiet, the furnishings mostly eighteenth century. The staff looked at her with suspicion-she was in hiker's gear, and holding a knapsack-but she ignored them and took the stairs with a quick springy stride.

Herr Doktor Mueller? she said, knocking at the door.

There was a single human male inside: middle-aged and not too healthy, she could tell that from the scent and the sounds of breathing and heartbeat. Also the smell of alcohol, some potato distillate.

Frau Ingolfsson?

Ja.