'That was a bad slip you made,' Breisch told him calmly. 'We're going to have to work on your response times. It's a weakness that any half-decent fighter could exploit, Senator.'

'I appreciate that, Mr Breisch,' Corso replied, picking up his shirt and using it to wipe the sweat from his neck and face. Breisch was one of the best deadly-combat trainers in the Freehold, and it had taken a lot of money to persuade him to leave Redstone and become his personal trainer.

'The gravity here on Eugenia may also be an issue,' Breisch added. 'We may have to work on more strategies for coping with different strengths of gravity, particularly if you keep moving around as much as you have been.'

'Noted,' Corso replied. 'We'll pick up from here tomorrow morning.'

Breisch nodded and left the room. Corso stepped through to a shower room and washed the blood and sweat away, then used some coagulant to stop the bleeding before applying a strip of bandage to the wound.

'Report,' he said to the air, once the water had shut off.

There was a soft chime in his right ear, and a female voice with rounded tones began to speak. 'Nisha here, Senator Corso. There's been another sabotage attempt. A robot cargo transport deviated and made straight for Eugenia. The good news is that we caught it long before it got anywhere near us.'

'You're certain it was sabotage? Not just a systems failure?'

'The platform's brain had been very expertly hacked, Senator. There's no doubt it was deliberate.'

Corso groaned silently, and started to towel himself dry. Another crisis to deal with. 'Anything else?'

'An urgent request from Ted Lamoureaux, who wants a meeting with you straight away. Something for your ears only, he said.'

'First things first.' Anger flowed like heat through his thoughts; there had to be some way to make people understand he wouldn't tolerate these constant acts of terrorism. 'We need to be seen to be reacting to this strongly and positively. Do we have any idea at all who's responsible for the sabotage?'

'Nothing clear as yet, but we've got a.n.a.lysts taking the transport's brain apart right now.'

Sometimes he wondered just whose bright idea it had been to give him this much responsibility, and then he reminded himself, for the millionth time, that he had volunteered for the job. Previous investigations of attempts to either kill him or hurt the colony in Ocean's Deep had a nasty habit of running into dead ends. Would-be executioners and saboteurs either proved to be mercenaries with no knowledge of who'd hired them, or simply turned up dead by the time the Consortium's own intelligence services tracked them down.

'Who's our most likely suspect?' he asked. 'I'm talking governments here, Nisha. Who would you say wants rid of me the most of all this week?'

'I would guess. . . the Midgarth security services are near the top. There are rumours they've been soliciting secret talks with both Morgan's World and Bohr. In addition, they've been openly vetoing our request to take part in the next round of crisis talks. Also, some of their more recent candidates for navigator training turned out to have connections deep within their respective intelligence communities. We rejected them, naturally.'

'We've been sitting around while other people take potshots at us for far too long. Where's Willis right now?' Corso asked, referring to his security head back at Ocean's Deep.

'Probably asleep, Senator. I reckon Leo Olivarri would be on active watch-duty about now.' Olivarri was Willis's deputy.

Corso grunted and checked the bandage in a mirror, to make sure it wasn't going to slip. His arms and chest were marked with a fine criss-crossing of scars, like memories of pain and death carved into his flesh.

He started to get dressed, pulling on an anti-ballistic vest made from compacted layers of genetically enhanced spider-silk, then a formal dress shirt on top. A carefully concealed holstered pistol was next, followed by a slim blade tucked down the back of one boot. He kept himself armed at all times these days, and had recently spent a lot of time in the company of men like Breisch, learning how to properly use the various weapons he carried.

In the two years since Dakota had left, his chest had broadened and any excess fat had drained from his face, lending him a much more angular appearance. His fingers had grown calloused from months of weapons and hand-to-hand combat training. There was a long, dark burn mark on the inside of his left arm, invisible beneath his shirt testament to a challenge he had taken part in less than a year before.

'All right, Nisha, this is what we're going to do,' he said, pulling on his jacket. 'Tell Leo to wake Willis up. I want them to locate and round up every Midgarth representative to the Fleet he can find at Ocean's Deep, and have them hauled in. They can call it protective custody, but make sure that, one way or another, at least some of them are formally arrested and charged on suspicion of espionage.'

'I'm not aware that we have sufficient leads to warrant any such arrests, Senator.'

'It doesn't matter. Do it anyway. If they don't like it, they can catch the next ship going home.' He thought for a moment. 'And if we can't find any leads, keep them locked up, anyway. Let's see if we we can stir up some s.h.i.t for a change.' can stir up some s.h.i.t for a change.'

'They won't be happy, sir.'

Understatement of the century, thought Corso, but said, 'f.u.c.k them. I also want all of their representatives' a.s.sets, financial and otherwise, frozen pending an immediate investigation. Have the office put together a general press release after the fact, nothing too specific. But I want it worded in such a way that it's clear we intend to take a stand. Even if Midgarth isn't involved, maybe some of the others will think twice if they think their heads might wind up on the block as well.' thought Corso, but said, 'f.u.c.k them. I also want all of their representatives' a.s.sets, financial and otherwise, frozen pending an immediate investigation. Have the office put together a general press release after the fact, nothing too specific. But I want it worded in such a way that it's clear we intend to take a stand. Even if Midgarth isn't involved, maybe some of the others will think twice if they think their heads might wind up on the block as well.'

'Yes, Senator.'

The chime sounded again, indicating that the link had been broken.

Corso took a deep breath, and pulled a small vial out of his jacket pocket. He shook a couple of pills out of it and swallowed them dry. How many hours a night of sleep was he getting these days? Four, maybe five?

The medication helped, but he knew he was overdoing it.

Corso exited the gym and met the half-dozen heavily armed men and women that comprised his personal security detail in the building's lobby. From there it was a short walk across an open plaza to the domed building that housed Eugenia's government offices. His guards surrounded him, their weapons discreetly tucked into pockets or within easy reach inside jackets. Tiny security devices whirred in the air around them like mechanical insects, scanning for anything that might be missed by ordinary human eyes.

Eugenia had started life as an asteroid and, like so many of the larger bodies scattered throughout the Sol system following first contact with the Shoal, had been transformed by using the Shoal's own technology. A gravity engine had been buried at the asteroid's core, while shaped fields completely surrounding it retained a pressurized atmosphere and protected it from radiation. Fusion torches suspended from poles that pushed through the shaped fields like pins through soap bubbles shone heat and light down on the tiny world.

It was the first boosted world Corso had ever found himself on, and he couldn't say for sure if he was enjoying the experience. His stomach lurched every time he caught sight of the impossibly close horizon.

For all that, Eugenia was one of the largest of the Main Belt boosted worlds, and a little over two hundred kilometres in diameter. It had started out larger, but its original rough, potato-like shape had been less than ideal, so it had been blasted and sculpted into something more approximating a sphere. It had even been allowed to retain Pet.i.t-Prince, one of its two small moons. An iron sculpture of Saint-Exupery's Little Prince stood near the centre of the plaza, gazing up at a point where his namesake would pa.s.s overhead every five days.

But before very long, the asteroid and its moons were going to become eternally separated. The Little Prince was going to have to make his own way through s.p.a.ce.

Yugo Stankovic, one of Corso's aides, was waiting for him in the foyer of the government building.

'All right, Yugo, Nisha already gave me an outline of what's happened. Is there anything else I should know?' Corso asked, as Stankovic matched pace with him. The security detail made their way elsewhere while Corso and his aide headed for a bank of elevators.

'What she told you, she got from me. We managed to disable the cargo platform remotely without any further incident, but it was pretty close.'

'How bad could it have been?'

'It could have wiped us out. The Consortium's own intelligence services are working hard at stopping any word of this getting out to the media, and Eugenia's prime minister took the chair of an emergency session about five minutes ago.' Stankovic smiled and shrugged. 'We're not invited, of course.'

An elevator arrived and they stepped inside. 'Who's in charge of figuring out who's responsible?'

'Lieutenant Nazarro of our own Authority security is working on it with the local security heads in a separate meeting,' Stankovic replied. 'I should have an initial report from him within the hour.'

Corso flexed his hands, and found himself wishing for a more tangible enemy. All the careful manoeuvring of the last few years was coming to nothing. Whoever was responsible for these acts of sabotage was doing a good job of remaining eternally elusive, leaving him with the near-certainty that the only ones capable of covering their tracks so thoroughly were precisely those governments that coveted the Peacekeeper Authority's power the most. As far as most of them were concerned, he was the one thing standing between them and the stars.

The elevator doors hissed open and they stepped into a suite of offices. Ted Lamoureaux was already there, sprawled on a couch.

'Ted,' said Corso, stepping forward and shaking Lamoureaux's hand, after the other man stood up to greet him. 'Good to see you. We'll talk through here.'

The starship navigator was a slight, pale-featured man in his thirties, with a perpetually worried look. He was also in common with Dakota Merrick and every other Magi-enabled navigator within the Consortium a machine-head, his skull filled with consciousness-altering technology that made him uniquely suited to interfacing with the starships that Dakota had summoned to Ocean's Deep.

Lamoureaux followed them into an office with a wide picture window. Hundreds of newly installed drive-spines s.p.a.ced equidistant from each other all around Eugenia's surface were visible beyond the window. They were a recent addition, an essential part of the asteroid's slow transformation into a full-fledged starship. Each spine was hundreds of metres tall and gracefully curving, giving Eugenia the appearance from a distance of some enormous s.p.a.ce-going bacterium coated in metallic cilia.

Corso dropped on to a couch. 'Whatever it is you wanted to talk to me about is going to have to wait a few minutes. I need to know why Eugenia's new FTL drive still hasn't arrived.'

'It's all in my report.'

'Yeah, I know. Just humour me, Ted.'

Lamoureaux shrugged and slipped a ring from the finger of one hand, then dropped it on to the active plate of an imager unit set up near the window. He touched the machine's controls, and an image of an airless dwarf planet appeared above the plate, slowly rotating. A Maker cache had been found there little more than a year before, at Iota Horologii the Tierra system, as it was more commonly known. Other images appeared, cut-away schematics showing the cache's layout, a kilometres-deep shaft drilled deep into the planet's crust, with thousands of needle-like pa.s.sageways extending out from the shaft.

One of these pa.s.sageways, Corso knew, contained a machine called a drive-forge, a template-driven fabricator that could manufacture new superluminal engines for faster-than-light travel.

The Tierra system had briefly been home to a Uchidan colony before the Shoal Hegemony had reclaimed it without explanation. The uprooted colonists had been evacuated to a new home on Redstone, an ill-fated decision that left the Uchidans in a state of near-permanent war with the Freehold colony already long established there.

Much more recently, it had been discovered that the Shoal had been actively suppressing knowledge of the existence of these caches for a very, very long time. When they'd discovered this particular cache orbiting out in the very farthest reaches of the Tierra system, the Shoal had reneged on their existing contracts with the Uchidans.

But now the Shoal themselves were gone, and the cache had been quickly rediscovered, and subsequently placed under the control of the Peacekeeper Authority. Corso had been locked in a political battle with the Consortium Legislate ever since, desperate for the resources and personnel needed to exploit the cache, but forced to make more and more concessions in order to get them.

'All the latest research is right here on this data ring,' Lamoureaux explained. 'It can take up to a couple of weeks to produce a single superluminal drive, and as soon as one is finished half a dozen different colonial governments, with their own agendas, start threatening embargoes and worse if we don't give it to them. At the moment most of the drives are meant to go into ships intended for relief operations throughout the Consortium, but we've got no guarantees that's what they'll get used for. That and about a hundred other reasons are why there are so many delays, and why Eugenia doesn't have its drive yet. And that's before we even get to considering the increasing rate of neural burnout in our machine-head pilots. We've had to retire nearly a third of our longest-serving navigators in the past six months.'

'"Neural burnout"? Is that what they're calling it now?'

'That and the bends, but the neurologists prefer not to call it that. It's primarily affecting the ones who've been piloting Magi ships the longest.'

'Like yourself.'

'So far I've been fine, but it might only be a matter of time.'

'And we still don't know what's causing this?'

'Nope.'

Corso leaned back and stared up at the ceiling, suddenly feeling wearier despite the pills. 'In other words, we're even more f.u.c.ked than we already were.'

Lamoureaux spread his hands. 'Look . . . I don't want to be the one to have to say this, but if things keep on the way they are, we're going to wind up losing navigators faster than we can replace them. We might then be forced to give the Legislate at least some of what it wants.'

'Specifically?'

'Relaxing the rules governing the recruitment of new navigators. Allow the Legislate, and the governments it represents, to share the responsibility for finding and training them.'

'Which would leave the Peacekeeper Authority without any purpose. Or authority.'

Lamoureaux's expression was carefully non-committal.

'Yugo,' Corso asked, 'your thoughts?'

'If I can speak candidly?'

Corso nodded.

'I think Ted's right. If we don't make major concessions now, the Legislate might claim we're being unreasonable and merely blocking them. That might be just enough of an excuse for them to try and make a grab for the Tierra cache. The Allocation Treaty means a certain proportion of finished drives go to them, so if they then decided to carry out a military action against us, they'd have the means and resources to do it.'

'Not to mention,' Lamoureaux added, 'a lot of ships are being retro-fitted to make it harder for them to be remotely grabbed by machine-heads. That means we might not be able to stop them, even with the help of the Magi ships. Unless we threaten to blow up their suns.'

'Not even remotely funny,' Corso muttered. Clearly he was going to have to intervene directly over the business of Eugenia's drive. 'Whatever else it is you came here to tell me, I really hope it's good news.'

'We received a transmission from Dakota Merrick.'

Corso tried not to look too startled. 'It's been, what, more than a year? I was beginning to . . .' To wonder if she was even still alive, To wonder if she was even still alive, he almost said. he almost said.

'She's rendezvoused with the Maker,' Lamoureaux continued. 'We received a targeted burst from her several hours ago. According to what she sent us, the Maker is really a swarm of s.p.a.ce-going machines, quite vast in number. The evidence points to a single, unified intelligence, even though its individual components are apparently spread out across a number of light-years.'

Lamoureaux reached out to the imager once more, and the Tierra cache was replaced by something that looked more like a metal sculpture created by a psychotic than it suggested a s.p.a.ce-going vessel.

There's something evil-looking about it, Corso thought, even though he knew it was pointless to attribute human qualities to something so very clearly alien. Corso thought, even though he knew it was pointless to attribute human qualities to something so very clearly alien.

'The swarm possessed data relating to something called the "Mos Hadroch", which it apparently regards as a serious threat,' Lamoureaux explained. 'According to the Magi's own records, it's some kind of weapon of phenomenal power, but until now there was never any evidence that it even existed.'

Corso stared at the image of the swarm-component. 'And this means it does?'

'Dakota came up against a blank wall, and asked us to see if we could find any correlation with anything known to us. Imagine our surprise when we did. Now, look at this.'

The swarm-component was replaced by an image of a lumpy-looking asteroid. 'This is an Atn clade-world,' Lamoureaux explained. 'You can find them out on the edge of many systems in the Consortium.'

'I know something about them,' observed Corso. 'I studied some of their machine-languages. They travel everywhere at sublight speeds.'

'And they usually stick to the very remotest part of a system. If Dakota's findings are anything to go by, the depths of interstellar s.p.a.ce are even more densely infested with them than we thought.'

An image of an Atn now appeared next to the hollowed-out asteroid. A large, rectangular metal body, covered in a curious alien calligraphy, sat on top of four stumpy legs. At the end of each leg, thick, splayed metal claws gripped the ground, while a ma.s.s of mechanical manipulators extended from a slot just below the brick-shaped head.

'Since they can visit parts of the galaxy we ourselves couldn't until recently, there was always the chance we might learn something from them,' Lamoureaux continued. 'Which is why we've been studying them carefully ever since we came into contact with them.'

Corso nodded. 'And?'

'Imagine our surprise when we stumbled across references to a "Mos Hadroch" in some research papers written just a couple of decades ago by a specialist who's still around. The term crops up in relation to one specific Atn clade called "Eclipse-over-Moon".'

'So what do we know about them?'

'Practically nothing, and the term shows up only once, and in an oblique reference at that. But the man who actually wrote the papers knows more about this particular clade-family than anyone else alive.'

Corso nodded. 'Then we need to track him down.'

There was a look on Lamoureaux's face as if he was trying to make up his mind whether or not to tell Corso something. 'Already on it, and . . . I'd like your permission to get him to Ocean's Deep as soon as possible.'

'Granted. Who is he?'

'His name is Ty Whitecloud, Senator.'

Corso sat stock-still for a moment, then stood up carefully. 'No,' he said, very simply, and turned towards the door.

'Senator, there isn't anyone else who knows as much about the Atn as he does.'

'Perhaps you didn't hear me the first time, Ted. I said no. There are other people who could-'

'With the greatest respect, Senator, but there aren't,' said Stankovic. 'It's a pretty rarefied field.'

'I know a little about Atn machine-languages, Yugo. I've even read one or two of Whitecloud's papers. But there are others we could try.' He thought for a moment. Anton Laroque and Sophie Sprau, for a start. They're leaders in the field.'