'Well, Director Kosac is about to get a spiked boot up his a.s.s that's going to bounce him all the way out of Ascension and into a job someplace that's going to make his time here look like a f.u.c.king holiday.' Willis smiled broadly. 'And if you don't do exactly what I tell you, and I mean to the f.u.c.king letter, to the f.u.c.king letter, I'll make sure you're there to keep him company. Now,' he added, gesturing to Ty, 'since you've already seen our credentials, how about you do precisely what we tell you to, before you make things worse than they already are?' I'll make sure you're there to keep him company. Now,' he added, gesturing to Ty, 'since you've already seen our credentials, how about you do precisely what we tell you to, before you make things worse than they already are?'

Ty felt the grip on his shoulders tighten for a few seconds, then relax.

'Sir,' said one of his guards, before letting go of him altogether.

'This way,' said Willis, taking Ty's elbow and leading him towards the waiting vehicle.

Ty followed in a daze, as the machine-head moved up on his other side.

'Mr Whitecloud,' said the machine-head, leaning down a little to speak to him, 'My name is Ted Lamoureaux and you are a very, very lucky man. I hope you'll be grateful enough to be as cooperative as we're going to need you to be.'

Lamoureaux touched a panel on the side of the transport and a door slid open, warm air wafting out from within. Ty drew in the smell of oiled leather and cheap plastic, and felt tears p.r.i.c.kling the corners of his eyes.

Lamoureaux gestured inside.

'My hands,' said Ty. 'Please.'

's.h.i.t,' he heard Willis mutter behind him, and a moment later he felt the plastic ties fall away from his wrists. He brought his arms back around, wincing at the pain in his shoulders, and climbed inside the vehicle.

The interior was cramped, and the air felt hot and close to him, after being out in the freezing cold. There were two rows of seats facing each other, and Lamoureaux and Willis sat down opposite Ty. The transport started to move a moment later.

'Where are you taking me?' Ty asked.

'Well, that depends on exactly how cooperative you're feeling,' Lamoureaux replied.

'Kosac told me someone was coming for me, but he wasn't going to let me escape.'

He watched the two men exchange glances.

'Well, that's it,' Willis muttered. 'I'm going to get a kick out of burying that little s.h.i.t up to his neck in trouble.'

'Mr Whitecloud,' said Lamoureaux, his tone dry, 'can you tell me if the term "Mos Hadroch" means anything to you?'

Ty nodded slowly. 'It's an Atn term: a transliteration based on an a.n.a.lysis of ancient Atn sound recordings. It means a machine for pa.s.sing judgement.'

'And you've been living under the "Nathan Driscoll" ident.i.ty for some years now, isn't that correct?' Lamoureaux prompted.

Ty nodded slowly, unsure what to admit to just yet.

'We'll stick with the Driscoll ident.i.ty for now,' said Willis. 'Seems you've had quite the varied career, haven't you, Ty?'

Ty shrugged uneasily and still said nothing.

Lamoureaux's eyes became momentarily unfocused. He's accessing data from somewhere, He's accessing data from somewhere, Ty realized. Ty realized.

Lamoureaux blinked and looked at Ty. 'You have an implant,' he remarked.

'You can tell?' Ty asked.

Lamoureaux shook his head. 'No, not that it stopped me trying to detect one. But it's noted in your records. Is it still active?'

'No,' Ty replied. 'The Uchidan authorities disabled its higher-level functions before I was to be handed over to the Legislate. You should know that Uchidan implants aren't programmed like the machine-head variety. Spontaneous networking isn't what they're designed for.'

'I'm aware of that, Mr Whitecloud.'

'Why are you asking me questions about the Atn? n.o.body cares about them except a few underfunded university departments.'

Lamoureaux responded by pulling a case out from under the seat beside him. He opened it and extracted a bundle of printouts and handed them to Ty.

'Can you identify these?' he asked.

Ty studied the doc.u.ments for a good minute or two before looking up again. 'These are the spiral forms of the wall-glyphs found inside almost every Atn clade-world,' he said. One set of glyphs a crescent placed next to a full circle, both of them at the centre of a tight spiral of lines and squiggles was immediately familiar. 'If all you wanted to do was identify the Atn clade-family concerned, I could have told you as soon as you said the words "Mos Hadroch".' He tapped the crescent and circle. 'This is the identifier for Crescent-over-Moon. They're the only clade with which that term is a.s.sociated.'

Willis leaned forward. 'What exactly is a "clade"?'

'The Atn have clans, or clades, distinguishable by small differences in their written languages. They appear to be quite distinct from each other, and rarely interacting.'

Lamoureaux fixed him with an intense stare. 'What we want to know, Ty, is whether the Mos Hadroch is a tangible artefact. Can you tell us that?'

A tide of fatigue threatened to swamp Ty. Living in a state of perpetual terror, he had found, required a great deal of constant energy. 'Look, Mr . . .'

'Lamoureaux.'

'Mr Lamoureaux, I can't tell you how grateful I am for what you did back there, but what happens if I answer your questions? Are you going to take me back to be executed, once you've got what you need?'

'No,' Willis replied. 'You're under our jurisdiction now, but we're going to have to get you out of Ascension before Kosac or someone like him figures out a way to change that. But in return we expect your full and unhesitating cooperation. If we think you're holding out on us, or being less than honest for one second, then, yes, you go straight back where we found you.'

'Why,' asked Ty, 'is it so important that you know about the Mos Hadroch?'

'Tell us exactly what you think it might be, for a start.'

The transport took a series of fast turns, slinging the three men from side to side. Whoever was in the driver's seat a.s.suming the vehicle wasn't automated was in a hurry to get to their destination.

'I said it referred to a machine for pa.s.sing judgement, but the modifier "Mos" could mean "weapon" equally as much as it does "machine". The Atn are a notoriously uncommunicative species, and that fact unfortunately means that sometimes all we have to go on is educated guesswork.'

'There are academic papers that seem to suggest the Mos Hadroch is some kind of G.o.d,' said Lamoureaux.

Ty made a dismissive noise. 'Laroque's idea. The man's an idiot. There's nothing to suggest the Atn share our concept of deities. I'm not sure they're even really sentient, at least not in any way we ourselves can understand. Where I do agree with Laroque is that they're an artificial species of some kind, but if there was ever a purpose behind their creation, it's either been lost to time or they just don't want to tell us. All the evidence suggests they haven't evolved or changed in any significant way in millions of years. They're more akin to intelligent s.p.a.ce-going termites than anything else.'

The transport came to a sudden stop, and Ty nearly slid out of his seat. The hatch clanged open and Lamoureaux climbed out first, while Willis gestured for Ty to follow the machine-head into the bustling noise beyond.

He saw they were at an airfield, where the cold hit him like a wall. Helicopters were parked in ranks, and guarded by rover-units whose electronic eyes constantly scanned the nearest rooftops. A world-pillar rose in the near distance, dwarfing the buildings cl.u.s.tered around its base. Near the helicopters were several heavy air-transports, from whose open bellies packages and crates were being lowered to waiting trucks. There were even a few dropships nearby, the concrete beneath them blackened and cracked.

The driver turned out to be a guard wearing a Legislate trooper's uniform. He exited the front cabin and took hold of Ty's right arm.

Willis led the way, and it was soon clear they were heading for one of the dropships.

Lamoureaux kept pace with Ty and his guard. 'Remember, as far as anyone's concerned, your name is still Nathan Driscoll.'

'I'll need a change of clothes,' said Ty. He could hardly speak for his teeth chattering.

Lamoureaux and Willis exchanged a glance. 'Should have thought of that,' Willis muttered, as if it were the machine-head's own fault.

'Okay,' said Lamoureaux, looking annoyed. 'There's probably spare engineering jumpsuits on board the dropship. If I can find one, you can use it.'

Ty nodded in a daze, half-convinced some unbelievably cruel trick was being played on him.

Either that, or he really was about to finally leave Ascension behind for ever.

Chapter Five.

The dropship lifted from the concrete not long after they boarded, accelerating hard until it pa.s.sed through an open portal in the coreship's ceiling, more than a dozen kilometres overhead. A screen mapped the dropship's progress for the benefit of the three men, now strapped into couches in a s.p.a.ce not much larger than the rear of the transport that had brought them from the compound. Half an hour later the dropship rendezvoused with a cargo ship that had been commandeered by the Consortium for the relief effort.

Four men were waiting for them as they disembarked. They were all dressed in plain clothes, but their muscular physiques, air of watchful attentiveness, and the zippered jackets that failed to conceal the bulge of holstered weapons, all strongly implied a career in security. Ty himself had been given a jumpsuit three sizes too big for him.

'You're on your own for the next couple of days,' Lamoureaux told him. 'But there's some material I want you to look over in the meantime. You'll find it waiting for you in your berth.'

'Where are we are we going?' going?'

'Ocean's Deep.'

Ty was then quickly escorted through the vessel's narrow, claustrophobic pa.s.sageways. It had been some years since he'd last experienced zero gravity, and at first he sprawled about clumsily. By the time his body started to remember how to manoeuvre, he found himself deposited in his home for the next seventy-two hours: a single private berth containing only a heavily padded acceleration seat and a voice-controlled comms unit.

The berth was cramped and utilitarian by most standards, but after the deprivations of life in Ascension it felt almost decadent in its comfort. Ty wedged himself inside the awkwardly tiny toilet and pulled off his jumpsuit, quickly sponging the grime and urine from his skin.

The water was warm and, as he washed himself, he felt some of the tension and horror of the past few years the slow dying by cold and starvation begin to drop away like a second skin he could finally slough off.

He then pulled the oversized jumpsuit back on, and tested the door into the berth. He was far from surprised to find it had been locked from the outside.

After a few minutes' experimentation with the comms unit, he discovered that it was linked into both local as well as interstellar public tach-net relays. Before very long, he'd managed to navigate his way to a live feed that showed the coreship's surface.

He gazed down on a forest of shattered and twisted drive-spines. Other ships were visible closer at hand, scattered through the surrounding void, and most were clearly of human construction, but mixed in with them were a few quite unlike anything Ty had seen before.

These latter were equipped with drive-spines that curved out and then forward from a bulbous central hull. Ty realized, after a moment, that these must be the alien Magi ships, news of which had arrived with the first rescue and relief missions.

A heavy cargo lifter drifted in front of the nearest Magi vessel, giving Ty the perspective he needed to see how truly immense the alien craft were. A thrill of awe burned its way up his spine and into his brain. There was a sinuous, organic quality to them that made them look less like something manufactured and more like something that might have evolved in some limitless ocean.

After a while, he managed to drag his eyes away from this spectacle long enough to pull up whatever details he could find concerning the destruction of Night's End, and everything that had happened since. He absorbed the details with the ferocity of a man starved for knowledge, learning of the Fleet Authority based at Ocean's Deep, along with what little was known of the Magi starships and the rumour and conjecture surrounding those directly or peripherally involved with their discovery. Lamoureaux and Willis's names turned up frequently, though not nearly so often as those of a Dakota Merrick and a Senator Lucas Corso.

He checked the external view to see if anything had changed, and realized the nearest of the Magi ships was drawing closer. By the time it was almost abreast of the cargo ship, the stars were obscured by an energy field.

And then, in something less than the blink of an eye, the coreship was gone, along with its attendant fleet of human and Magi vessels. Instead there was only the broad sweep of the Milky Way, and the diamond sprinkle of stars both near and far away.

A data-file appeared on the display, with a confirmation request. Ty activated it and found himself looking at an up-to-date library of research into the Atn, including not only all of his own published work, but also a set of doc.u.ments marked 'cla.s.sified'.

He speed-read through the summaries of several of the cla.s.sified files, with a fascination that slowly gave way to anger mingled with envy. Clearly some of his fellow exo-anthropologists had been engaged in cla.s.sified research for the Legislate: work he'd had no inkling of during his long years of exile.

He read the papers in more detail, soon becoming lost in their minutiae, his struggle for survival on the streets of Ascension now slowly fading into a memory.

Three days later, the same four security personnel escorted Ty into an orbital station within the Ocean's Deep system. A central hub many kilometres long was surrounded by a series of pressurized rings that spun constantly to provide gravity, all of them connected to the hub by spokes that also served as part of the station's transport system. He stared around, goggle-eyed, as he was taken down one of the spokes and into the interior of a ring, which proved to be dominated by ancient, crumbling towers of Bandati design. The air smelled sour and damp, and slightly foul.

Enormous windows set into the ring's inner rim faced in towards the hub, the gas-giant around which the station orbited intermittently visible as the ring turned on its axis. Ty watched for a few moments as the planet slowly slid past.

A shadow pa.s.sed overhead, and he caught sight of a Bandati soaring from one tower-platform to another, with wings spread wide.

He found Lamoureaux and Willis waiting for him in a prefab admin building located in the shadow of one tower.

'First things first,' said Lamoureaux, once Ty's escorts had departed. 'You read the files I sent you?'

'Yes, yes I did.' Ty gave a little half-laugh. 'I had no idea Laroque was doing any kind of secret research, or that the Atn were involved in the smuggling of restricted technology. Why would they do that?'

'They needed things from us. Access to manufacturing facilities, certain processing technologies they could make use of. Sometimes it's easier for them to barter for what they need than build it from scratch way out there between the stars.'

'And in return?' asked Ty.

'In return,' Lamoureaux replied, 'they'd either give us information about whatever was out there in the greater galaxy that the Shoal didn't want us to know about, or they'd supply us with banned technologies.'

'All right, but Crescent-over-Moon never dealt directly with humanity. We only know they even existed because I found one of their clade-worlds, and that turned out to have been abandoned for tens of millennia. The reference to Mos Hadroch is incredibly incredibly obscure. I still don't understand why you care about it so much.' obscure. I still don't understand why you care about it so much.'

Willis spoke up. 'First things first, Mr Driscoll. Was there anything at all in the data we gave you that can help us figure out where the Mos Hadroch is, or what it can do?'

'Yes, there was. Particularly the set of stellar coordinates.'

'Coordinates?' Lamoureaux asked, his eyes taking on a faraway look as he accessed remote information being relayed to him.

'Laroque found them on one of the secret expeditions, and dismissed them. He believed Crescent-over-Moon were a dead end. If he'd even bothered just once to try and correlate his findings with my own, he might have been on to something. But he was too shortsighted.'

He paused for breath, aware of the way the two men were staring at him. He'd have to learn to control his outbursts.

'You're saying you might actually know where it is?' asked Lamoureaux.

'May I?' Ty asked, nodding towards a comms unit in one corner of the room. 'If you have a copy here of the same files you sent me, that is.'

Lamoureaux nodded to Willis, who shrugged and palmed the unit awake. Ty stepped past the two men and brought up a series of images of Atn glyphs arranged in tight spirals. Large pieces of these spirals were missing.

'You know the strangest thing about the Crescent-over-Moon?' Ty asked. 'You can sometimes tell you're on one of their clade-worlds just from the sheer destruction that's been visited on them. At first I thought they might be targets of some kind of pogrom from other clades, since that might also explain their relative isolation.'

Lamoureaux got that faraway look again for a moment. 'There's no reference to that in any of your work,' he pointed out a moment later.

'That's because it's unsupported speculation, not fact. It's possible some of their asteroids had merely suffered impacts with other stellar bodies long after they'd been abandoned.'

'But you don't believe that?'