Dakota's Ghost instantaneously flashed up the details of the pending financial transaction, and the arcane financial trickery that was meant to disguise where it had come from and who exactly was going to benefit from it. Half the money, for both Josef and Dakota, had already been deposited. But even with that first payment alone, she was already set to be very, very rich.

Gardner smiled. 'You can't deny it's generous.'

Dakota felt dizzy, and tried hard to keep her face impa.s.sive at the sheer number of zeroes she'd just seen marching across her mind's eye.

'And what about you, Mr Gardner? What do you get out of this? You're not part of the Freehold, are you?'

'No, but I represent outside investments that allow this expedition to happen at all. A business can make a great deal out of a successful colony, if it invests in it early.'

Good enough, Dakota decided. Good enough because there wasn't anywhere else to go.

'If you're s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g me over, Josef, I'd appreciate knowing just how much before I jump in the fire. What exactly did you tell him about me?'

Josef carefully placed a hand over Dakota's, where it had balled up around a fistful of his shirt just before shoving him up against a wall. Gardner had left them a few minutes before.

'Let go, Dakota,' Josef said, adopting a reasonable tone.

'You're asking me to stick myself inside a locked steel box for maybe several months, among a bunch of people with every reason to want to see someone like me dead. So if you're missing anything out, anything at all, I swear the last thing that pretty face of yours will ever see will be me pulling the trigger right before I blow your head off.'

Josef coughed out a horrified laugh, and Dakota released the pressure a little. 'Dakota, you came to me me, remember? You asked for my help. Or maybe'-his voice took on a more accusatory tone-'it's more convenient for you to forget that.'

'I didn't forget,' Dakota mumbled, and finally let him go. 'I just hate being in any situation where I don't feel in control.'

She slumped back on Josef's couch, and a few moments later felt him place a hand on her shoulder as he stepped up behind her. 'Once this is all over, you'll be right back on top. You'll have the money to do what you like-or even not do anything at all for the rest of your life.'

Dakota cast him a dubious look.

'This is a routine operation,' Josef insisted. 'I'm not saying Gardner's an angel, but the money's real enough, and I've dealt with him in the past. But, while we're at it, there is one other thing I wanted to bring up with you, and you're probably not going to like it.'

Dakota stroked her brow with one hand. 'Thanks for leaving it till last,' she deadpanned.

'You're going to have to leave your ship behind.'

Dakota's eyes snapped open, staring at Josef in disbelief. 'You mean in storage?'

He sighed and sat down next to her. 'Dakota, right now that ship of yours is like a big glowing arrow pointing at your head saying "dangerous criminal here". Anyone who wants to find you just needs to look for your ship. Yourself you can disguise, but not the . . . what's it called?'

'The Piri Reis.' Piri Reis.'

'Yeah, that. I set tracer systems on the Piri, Piri, to keep an eye on it, and it responded by attacking our databases. Where the h.e.l.l did you get that ship?' to keep an eye on it, and it responded by attacking our databases. Where the h.e.l.l did you get that ship?'

'It's a very valuable piece of hardware, Josef, and that's all you need to know. That, and the fact there's absolutely no way I'm going to leave it in storage. I can stow it in the cargo hold of whatever ship I'm piloting to this Freehold system.'

'Uh-uh.' Josef shook his head. 'In case I wasn't sufficiently clear, I mean you have to destroy it, Dak.'

'f.u.c.k you.'

'And f.u.c.k you too,' Josef echoed back at her. 'You'll leave it here, and it's going straight to sc.r.a.p. Stop!' he yelled, as Dakota pulled herself up, her mouth open to argue. 'Just think for once in your life. Right now you're public enemy number one-and I mean that literally. Right now I'm the only bridge you haven't completely burned, and the Piri Reis Piri Reis is going to lead everyone straight to you. You take that ship along with you, when you'll be spending probably weeks on board a coreship, that's plenty of time for Bourdain is going to lead everyone straight to you. You take that ship along with you, when you'll be spending probably weeks on board a coreship, that's plenty of time for Bourdain and and the Consortium to set their bloodhounds on your trail. And believe me, every coreship leaving this system for months to come is going to be filled with agents looking for you.' the Consortium to set their bloodhounds on your trail. And believe me, every coreship leaving this system for months to come is going to be filled with agents looking for you.'

Dakota stood up and pulled on her coat. 'I don't like it,' she protested weakly.

Josef shrugged and spread his hands. 'I'm open to alternative suggestions.'

Dakota responded with silence.

Several hours later, when she found herself back on board the Piri Reis, Piri Reis, it felt like attending a wake. it felt like attending a wake.

She had Piri Piri knock together something warm and alcoholic for her in the kitchenette, something loaded with the kind of neuro-adjusters she normally derived from her implants. As the shaking she had felt build up in her hands edged off, she began to feel better. knock together something warm and alcoholic for her in the kitchenette, something loaded with the kind of neuro-adjusters she normally derived from her implants. As the shaking she had felt build up in her hands edged off, she began to feel better.

Here's to you, Piri, she toasted. she toasted.

The possibility that she might have to ditch her ship after the destruction of Bourdain's Rock had always been there in her mind. But she felt like a hermit forced to leave her cave after a lifetime of solitude-and ever since Port Gabriel, the Piri Reis Piri Reis had been a pretty good subst.i.tute for a hermit's cave. had been a pretty good subst.i.tute for a hermit's cave.

She curled up against the warm fur inlay that coated the interior of her ship and felt like an agoraphobic who'd just woken to find someone had strapped a parachute to her back and thrown her out of an aircraft.

'Dakota?' She heard the effigy calling her name softly. She stood up and walked through into the welcome darkness of her sleeping quarters, and let the effigy slide its warm, flesh-like arms around her. Its fingers pried at her clothes, gently peeling them away before tugging her downwards and planting soft, dry kisses on her belly and b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

She stroked the smooth, hairless dome of its head as it pulled itself up and slid her arms around its shoulders, feeling its weight press down on her. All the while she couldn't help thinking that there had to be a way to get around Josef's demands.

It was her they were hunting for, not the Piri Reis. Piri Reis.

When the solution finally came to her, she had to wonder why it took her so long to think of it.

Nine.

Redstone Colony Consortium Standard Date: 01.06.2538 3 Days to Port Gabriel Incident

An arrhythmic thump beat a tattoo inside Dakota's head, and she closed her eyes until its migraine-like effect pa.s.sed. It was still the middle of the night, but the street lighting beyond the window projected dappled stripes through the blinds of her quarters, painting them across the wall opposite.

Chris Severn shifted beside her. 'What's up?' he asked sleepily, shifting naked beside her in the narrow cot. She watched fascinated as the tattoos covering his back twisted like something alive, animated by the shifting of the muscles beneath. Along with a lot of the other machine-heads, they had been put up in a building originally intended to house the maintenance staff for the skyhook. 'Headache again?'

Dakota nodded, unwilling to speak in case it brought back the pain. It felt like a bad hangover, except she hadn't been drinking.

It was obvious from the pained look on his face that Severn was suffering in precisely the same way. This worried her, even though that kind of synchronicity between machine-heads wasn't so unusual: get enough machine-heads together in one room, and it was like being stuck in the middle of an electronic shouting match. Their Ghosts remained in continuous intercommunication, even when they themselves were asleep. This constant sharing of information and data sometimes manifested as shared minor tics or physical reactions amongst machine-heads in close proximity.

But one advantage lay in the fact that whatever one of them learned, pretty much all the rest would know, or could be granted access to. It was the development of technologies such as these that had helped make Bellhaven-and a man like Howard Banville-so very essential to the Consortium.

And if Severn was suffering in the same way as she was, it was reasonable to conjecture that everyone else in the building would be too.

Dakota was about to slide back down alongside his lithe nakedness when she heard voices from somewhere outside. So instead she slid out of the cot and stepped over to the window, whereupon Severn grunted in annoyance and twisted around until he faced the wall, burying his head in a pillow.

From the outside their building was an unremarkable grey concrete block set in a radial street a kilometre or so from the skyhook's main base. Peering out, she saw two groups of men standing together at the junction with a side street about fifty metres away. Something about their gestures made it clear they were involved in some kind of argument with each other.

'They're crazy, you know,' muttered Severn from somewhere behind her, his voice m.u.f.fled by the pillow. 'Totally f.u.c.king nuts.'

'How do you know it's Freeholders out there?'

'Who the f.u.c.k else is it going to be?' he mumbled.

Dakota scanned the network of active Ghost circuits throughout the town and noted that the Consortium security services were already aware of the gathering. She'd been initially worried about Uchidan infiltrators, and had immediately glanced round to locate her side-arm, but it looked like this disturbance was something relatively innocuous.

She watched as one man from each group stepped forward, until the pair of them stood face to face. They gesticulated wildly, faces distorted with fury. Their compatriots meanwhile stood in a loose circle around them under the street lights, wearing the heavy gear essential to surviving the freezing cold.

Dakota watched as one of the two men at the heart of the exchange slapped the other hard across the face, dislodging his breather mask. The sound of mocking laughter reached her ears.

Severn finally got up out of the cot. With an exaggerated sigh, he leant his chin on her shoulder, following her gaze. 'You can see why Commander Marados doesn't want the Freehold involved in this operation at all, can't you?'

Dakota nodded, only half-listening to him. She'd heard about the death-matches the Freehold favoured. The whole notion was simultaneously barbaric and ludicrous, and it was a reminder of just why their bizarre society had been shuffled from port to port before finding its way here.

'What's the point in all this fighting?' she asked. 'They've already got an enemy to contend with.'

Severn pressed himself up behind her, his hands sliding around her waist and up towards her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, making her smile. But, despite what she thought were her better instincts, she wanted to see what might happen outside. If this was more than some minor street brawl-if this really was a challenge, as she suspected (hoped?), what would happen?

Dakota was shocked to discover her throat was dry with the antic.i.p.ation of bloodshed.

Severn's fingers began to drift downwards, but Dakota failed to respond. After a few more seconds he finally got the message and pulled back with another sigh.

'Bloodthirsty, ain'tcha?' he said, patting her on the shoulder.

Her skin p.r.i.c.kled with the cold. Everywhere on Redstone was cold. She suspected that in some warped way it was a reason why the Freeholders wanted to live here. They didn't seem the kind of people who would thrive in a tropical, sunny environment.

'Hey, not bloodthirsty. Just curious.'

The Freehold was scheduled to lead an a.s.sault on Cardinal Point, a highly fortified Uchidan settlement about two thousand kilometres north-west of the skyhook, where it was believed Banville was currently being held captive. The Consortium were technically present here in a purely advisory role, but the Freeholder troops would be flown in aboard Consortium craft, piloted by Consortium military staff, with orbital reconnaissance and support from the Consortium also.

Less than three days from now, Dakota would be piloting one of a dozen dropships in towards Cardinal Point for the rescue attempt.

Over the past several days they'd received an intensive briefing on the nature of the conflict. Because Dakota came from the same world as Banville, a lot of it was old news to her but, even so, she hadn't been aware of much of the historical background.

Koti Uchida, more than two centuries before, had been a planetary genetics specialist on a research team evaluating a likely terraforming candidate in the Onada 125 system, thirty-seven light years from Earth. When a relief crew from Mann-Kolbert Geophysical Evaluations had arrived at the planet six months later, they'd found their predecessors wiped out by a crudely altered virus originally intended to modify carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

Near catatonic with shock, Uchida was the only survivor, holed up alone in an airtight hut with its own air supply while the corpses of his fellow researchers rotted nearby.

They got him transported back out on the next crew rotation, and the subsequent investigation turned up evidence of latent psychosis that Uchida had somehow kept hidden throughout the standard psych-evaluation tests. There was even the suspicion Uchida had been responsible for altering the virus that then wiped out his compatriots, but that could never be proved.

Uchida was subsequently removed from his position, and disappeared off the general radar for a while.

He resurfaced three years later, claiming he'd spent most of this time in his lonely hut taking dictation from a disembodied alien spirit that preached salvation through technology. Only once every human being could see the universe as G.o.d saw it, Uchida claimed, would a new age of peace and understanding come about. He began preaching his peculiar new gospel on the streets of the Mound, a city on the world of Fullstop, long famous for its surfeit of wild-eyed prophets.

The book Uchida claimed to have taken down during his long solitude became known as the Oratory. In time, he gained followers. Only sixty years after his death, Oratory temples could be found on a dozen worlds throughout Consortium s.p.a.ce. They all offered the same route to instant karma: a skull implant-a primitive forerunner of Ghost technology-that tapped directly into the temporal lobes of the human brain, long a.s.sociated with religious epiphany, thereby generating a supposedly unending neurological state of transcendent consciousness.

Follow Uchida, potential converts were told, and you will experience G.o.d for ever.

There was no lack of takers for Uchida's instant salvation. But then came the accusations that these implants had been placed inside the heads of less than willing converts. Eventually, the notorious debacle involving Belle Trevois pushed the Uchidans into even harder times.

The riots breaking out on half a dozen Consortium worlds, after Belle's death, helped push through approval for a long-standing application by the Uchidans for a colonial charter. They wanted to set up their own world-and, in order to get rid of them, the Consortium was more than happy to grant their request.

The Uchidans were given a desolate, near-uninhabitable ball of rock with a thin veil of poisonous atmosphere, located in a system on the furthest edge of Consortium s.p.a.ce. There they dug in, pressurizing caverns and boring tunnels for miles beneath the surface.

Fifteen years pa.s.sed before the Shoal suddenly invoked Clause Six in the Uchidans' contract, and reclaimed the entire system without explanation.

The Shoal Hegemony controlled a constantly shifting web of trade routes plied by their coreships, and they reserved the right to reoccupy any colonized system for their own purposes, so long as the colony in question had been in existence for less than twenty standard years. It proved the single most contentious item in the ongoing relationship between humanity and the Shoal. Concessions had been made in other areas, but on this one issue the Hegemony remained resolute.

No one had seriously antic.i.p.ated that the Shoal might ever actually invoke Clause Six and, as the centuries pa.s.sed, it had looked less and less likely they ever would.

Everyone, however, was proved wrong.

Slews of civil servants and politicians, all the way up to the highest ranks of the Consortium, fell by the wayside in the ensuing chaos. Fledgling colonies within a three hundred light year radius of Earth hurriedly reexamined their own charters in a panic.

Over the next several years, the Uchidans were rescued from their failed colony and shipped instead to Redstone. But that planet was already home to the Freehold, who were no strangers to controversy themselves. Extreme libertarians with a bent for violence, the Consortium had been equally happy to see the Freehold occupying their own inhospitable ball of mud somewhere far away from the centre of human affairs.

On Redstone, the Uchidans had occupied the deserted continent of Agrona, a token Consortium military force remaining in orbit for a couple of decades in order to maintain peace between the two groups now inhabiting the planet.

Eventually they left, and such co-existence might even have proved ultimately acceptable if the Uchidans had not then begun work on altering Redstone's biosphere-with potentially disastrous consequences for the Freehold colony.

The ensuing war had remained in a state of detente for decades, a constant t.i.t-for-tat struggle along fluctuating borders, until the Consortium uncovered evidence that the Uchidans had meanwhile smuggled Howard Banville to Redstone on board one of the Shoal Hegemony's coreships. As a result, the Freehold were suddenly granted Consortium military support.

And that was why Dakota and Severn and all the rest were now here on this desolate world, so far from home.

Below, the Freeholder whose breather mask had been displaced snapped it back into place, then pulled out some kind of weapon. It was a short, nasty-looking blade which he began to wave in the face of his a.s.sailant, who retreated quickly. There was something showy about the motions: as if he were playing to an audience, and Dakota felt she was witnessing some secret ritual.

'See, most Freeholders tend to stay right here,' Severn explained. 'Redstone's a fair distance away from all the normal coreship routes, so you'll get one coming through here only once or twice a year. But every now and then some of these people find their way in among the human communities on the coreships, and put on a show for them, fighting to the death for a paying audience. There's big money in it, from what I hear-for the survivor, anyway.'