Five.

Freehold Democratic State Redstone Colony, 82 Eridani

Lucas Corso blinked, trying to stay alert, and focused again on the bleak landscape beyond the windscreen. He was getting tired after the long drive, the snowy vastness merging into an unending pale void as he aimed the tractor transport at a point midway between two distant volcanic peaks from which thin trails of smoke dribbled.

Fire Lake was visible to the east, spreading beyond the horizon, its icy foam-topped water crashing against a desolate sh.o.r.e. Canopy trees towered in the near distance, like black umbrellas sprouting from the corpses of buried giants. The largest and oldest of them easily reached fifty or sixty metres into the air. One-wings circled around the high, veined shrouds of the trees, their organic photovoltaic upper-wing surfaces sparkling as they circled in the fading light.

Corso checked the co-ordinates they'd been given: almost there now.

Sal was asleep beside him in the pa.s.senger seat, arms folded over his chest, head back, occasionally blinking awake and peering around for a few moments as they trundled across the frozen landscape. He'd long since given up arguing with Corso, of trying to prevent him -as Sal put it-from committing suicide.

'Nothing you do will bring Cara back or get your father out of jail,' Sal had repeated for the hundredth time. 'Not even murdering Bull Northcutt. G.o.d knows I'd like to see the psychotic son of a b.i.t.c.h dead and skewered, but the fact is, if either one of you is going to wind up in a coffin, it's probably not going to be him.'

Corso had slammed the wheel with the heel of his hand, angry at Sal, but also with himself for letting Bull manipulate him so transparently. Bull had murdered his fiancee, knowing Lucas would inevitably call him out on a challenge. Lucas Corso, the son of a liberal Senator who'd renounced the whole system of challenges, before expediency and war had forced the Senate to outlaw them anyway.

Cara had disappeared on her way back from the medical facility in a small mining community south of Fontaine, where she'd been working on loan. A few weeks later, her remains had been found in the burned-out wreck of a short-haul landhopper on the road to Carndyne Valley. Her teeth had been pulled out and her fingers cut off-the trademark of Senator Gregor Arbenz's death squads. Her face had been so badly mutilated they'd had to identify her from DNA records.

It was all Corso had been able to think of for a month now, that same floating image imposed between his eyes and the rest of the world: his Cara, not smiling but mutilated, torn, destroyed.

He couldn't prove that Bull Northcutt had done it, but Bull liked to boast. And Senator Northcutt's son was widely known to be in charge of one of the death squads.

Then one day a few weeks before, Corso had been on his way back from the research library in Carndyne Valley's East Tent and come across Bull Northcutt lounging outside the hydro farm with several other off-duty police, standing around a couple of tractor vans, getting drunk.

Corso kept walking, and tried to ignore the leering, grinning faces that turned to follow his progress. There was no one else around. They were here solely because they knew he came this way, every day. They fell silent, while watching him pa.s.s.

'By the time it was my turn to stick my d.i.c.k in her,' Corso heard Bull say loud and clear, 'she was pretty good and loose. I don't think she'd ever been f.u.c.ked properly in her life. What do you think, Corso?'

Corso had stopped, fists clenching at his sides, any last remaining sc.r.a.p of doubt concerning the ident.i.ty of Cara's murderer suddenly vanished. That was when he had challenged Bull. They could have easily arrested him there and then: since the Freehold had found a real enemy to fight in the Uchidans, the challenges had been outlawed. Too many soldiers were dying in duels when they were needed on the front.

But Bull had just kept grinning, and accepted.

Sal snapped awake as the tractor rolled down and then back up the banks of a stream, before Corso finally hit the brakes.

'Oh s.h.i.t, I'm still here,' Sal yawned, blinking sleepily and staring around. 'Guess that means you're still going to get yourself killed, huh?'

Corso shot him a sharp glance, and Sal shrugged, turning to look out at the lakesh.o.r.e, falling silent again.

Senator Northcutt, Bull's father, was in charge of the Senate investigation against Lucas's father, Senator Corso. Murdering Cara was Senator Northcutt's way of sending a violent message, not just to Lucas but also to his old man. Witnesses had already been bribed or coerced into claiming Senator Corso had organized secret meetings with the Uchidans; that he'd supplied them with vital military information and worked against the Freehold in order to destroy it; that he'd kidnapped Freehold children, handing them over to the Uchidans for mind-control experiments.

Men and women, friends and confidants, all frightened, all bruised and bloodied from long, violent hours in Kieran Mansell's police cells. All had testified against Senator Corso and his supporters, before the a.s.sembled Senate.

Lies, all lies.

A brief squall of icy rain spattered across the windscreen. Corso peered into the distance, and saw a couple of black dots standing around another tractor, a couple of flares driven into the hard icy soil, marking the site of the challenge by the sh.o.r.es of the lake.

'We're here,' Corso muttered, surprised at how calm he sounded.

Corso pulled on his winter gear before following Sal from the cabin, dropping several metres down the ladder to snow churned up by the tractor's tracks. He checked the seal around his breather mask one last time, then looked around. They stood on loose shale and rock dotted with tiny green and blue growths that pushed through the permafrost. The cold burned his skin wherever it was exposed, 82 Eridani's orange-red orb dropping towards the horizon as evening descended on Redstone.

Corso rubbed at the red fuzz of his beard where it was uncovered by his breather mask. Its protection was essential because the partial pressure of the nitrogen in the air was enough to cause a potentially fatal case of the bends after just a few moments of unaided respiration. It was possible to talk through the mask, which had built-in electronics that processed the voice, but what emerged sounded flat and metallic, like a robot speaking.

Harsh laughter, faint and distant, carried towards them from the other tractor. Corso clenched his fists tightly, anger rea.s.serting itself under a black tide of adrenalin.

'Lucas. Listen to me. Remember what I suggested? Just walk in there, accept the challenge, and surrender without fighting. Then you can walk away with honour-and with your life. According to the code of conduct he has to accept that or he loses his honour, right?'

'No, Sal, I need to kill him. If I don't, they don't get the message. They'll go on thinking we'll never fight back.'

Sal then lost his temper. 'For G.o.d's sake, even if you won, that doesn't make you a Citizen! Challenges are illegal.' illegal.'

'I'll present it to the Senate as a fait accompli. They'll arrest me, sure, but I'll go on fighting from inside prison until they take notice. Things have got to change here. Arbenz himself wants to re-legalize challenges. If I win and he still refuses to recognize me as a Citizen, he'd be committing political suicide.'

Sal snorted. 'Yeah, and either way, you're committing real real suicide.' suicide.'

The Freehold was based on ancient ideals. To become a Citizen-to enjoy certain privileges, to be able to vote -you had to be prepared to fight on its behalf. This inherently warlike philosophy had seen the Freehold forced out of colony after colony until the Consortium had relented and granted them a development contract for Redstone. With no actual enemies to fight, at least until the arrival of the Uchidans, and comfortably far from Sol and the bulk of the Consortium, the system of challenges had developed there.

But times were changing and, increasingly, only extremists like Arbenz and his gang of followers held up the old principles. The fact they were losing the war with the Uchidans, a constant t.i.t-for-tat exchange of guerrilla fighting along a constantly fluctuating border, made the ground on which the old guard stood even less sure.

Six bright flares shone around a circle demarcated by stones carefully selected from the nearby sh.o.r.e. In the flickering light, Corso noted the same faces he'd seen that day outside the hydro tents when he had issued his challenge. Drunken cheers went up as he and Sal approached the base of the two-storey transport Northcutt and his cronies had arrived in earlier.

'All right,' Sal said, exhaling long and slow, as if he'd just come to a momentous decision. 'So you're really doing this.'

Corso nodded, without even glancing at his friend. 'I'm doing this.'

Eduardo Jones was Bull's right-hand man, and the last of Northcutt's crew to swing himself down from the lofty transport's cabin, agilely stepping down the ladder with practised ease. From the lake, a warm breeze blew over them, tinged with sulphur from the hot springs a couple of kilometres further along the sh.o.r.e.

'Hey!' he shouted as Corso and Sal drew closer. Jones began playing the hard man, pushing his breather mask up on top of his head and briefly sucking in the raw, nitrogen-heavy air like there was no tomorrow. 'What's this s.h.i.t about you challenging a real man, Corso?' he yelled, after dropping his mask back down, so his voice emerged as a metallic rattle. 'Don't you know the rules-don't pee in your own bed, don't screw your sister, and don't get into a fight you know you can't win?'

One or two others chuckled. Bull Northcutt laughed the loudest. His face was twisted in an arrogant sneer above his powerful shoulders, eyes bright from heavy military-grade neurochem abuse.

'This is bulls.h.i.t,' Sal yelled back to Corso's amazement. 'This isn't a fair challenge. There's not one of you,' he shouted, anger emerging from him in waves as his voice rose, 'that doesn't know it.'

Northcutt burst out laughing. 'You've got to be kidding me,' he spat, in a voice filled with ugly derision. 'Corso, right after you're dead, I've got a date with that sister of yours. Figure she could entertain me, and all my friends here, yeah? How'd you like that, you f.u.c.king piece of s.h.i.t!'

A few of Northcutt's crew cheered, pa.s.sing a bottle around and yanking their masks down to take quick pulls like they were celebrating a winning bet. Corso had no doubt every one of them had partic.i.p.ated in Cara's murder. And, before Cara, others too.

And now they were gathered to watch him die.

Sal, as Corso had realized some time earlier, was deep in denial. He believed he could appeal to Northcutt's basic humanity, but Corso had seen Cara's body lying in the morgue and wasn't under any illusion he was dealing with normal human beings here.

If he was going to die, he'd rather go out fighting and do his d.a.m.nedest to take Northcutt with him. Northcutt, who stood waiting, his eyes bright with enhancement drugs that ate away at his brain and nervous system, year after year after year.

Corso noticed the way Bull Northcutt's hands trembled uncontrollably, the fingers jerking slightly, the slight tremble in the muscles under his chin. Fighting Bull would be dangerous, very dangerous, but Corso's opponent wasn't as young as he had been.

Men like Bull rarely survived to grow old, because they got called out again and again, till they made mistakes, got slow.

Feeling momentarily light-headed, Corso closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he stared out over the sh.o.r.es of the lake, thinking, If this is the day I die, then fine. If this is the day I die, then fine.

Two long, double-edged knives with carbon steel blades already lay crossed in the centre of the circle where the challenge would take place. Corso watched as Senator Northcutt's son began to strip off his outer layers of protective gear, revealing a physique that was tall, lean and muscled. He stared slack-jawed as Northcutt continued to strip right down until he was bare-chested, though his skin was slathered in some kind of insulating grease. One of his crew threw a heated blanket around his shoulders, holding it in place.

'He's trying to psych you out,' Sal whispered, one arm resting on Corso's shoulder. 'It's his way of saying the fight's going to be over long before he'll freeze to death.'

Which would usually take no more than a minute or two, so if Corso could draw things out, Bull would get dramatically weaker. But clearly Bull was a.s.suming his opponent would be an easy kill.

Corso had kept his inner insulating layers on, suddenly aware how much they restricted his mobility compared to that of his opponent. He kept himself in shape, but Northcutt resembled some kind of barely human predator, sleek, wiry and feral.

Jones stood in the centre of the combat circle and gestured for them to take their positions. 'Time's here,' he announced, and Northcutt's crew cheered, while Bull himself paused on the edge of the circle of stones, staring, unblinking, at Corso.

'Last chance to back out,' Jones taunted Lucas, with a grin.

'f.u.c.k you,' Corso shouted back at him.

Jones turned in a slow circle. How long are they going to delay this? How long are they going to delay this? Corso wondered. With Northcutt half-naked, if they waited much longer, there wouldn't be any challenge to fight. Corso wondered. With Northcutt half-naked, if they waited much longer, there wouldn't be any challenge to fight.

'Whoever wins will either attain or retain their citizenship, and as such he can then in turn be challenged by any non-Citizen who chooses. This is ordained under the eyes of the Most Holy, our Lord and Saviour, current f.u.c.king legalities regardless. Amen.' Jones then trotted out of the circle.

Corso had only half-listened, surprised and shocked by the sense of keen excitement welling in him, a surge of fire that spread through his chest, making every breath deeper and harder. Blood pounded in his skull like the roar of an ocean.

They stepped into the circle from opposite sides. Northcutt made the first move, darting like lightning towards the crossed knives.

Corso was big enough and strong enough to take Northcutt on, but Northcutt moved with an unnerving, fluid grace. Corso got to the knives a fraction of a moment after the other man, in his haste slamming into Northcutt's shoulder as they each grabbed a weapon. He felt something hot flash against his upper arm, followed by the splash of his own blood on the frosty ground.

Corso scrambled out of reach, quickly pulling himself upright just inside the circle, but now feeling the rea.s.suring weight of the steel knife with its rubber grip in his right hand. They prowled around opposite extremes of the challenge perimeter, waiting to see who moved first.

'f.u.c.ker,' Corso swore under his breath, and kept swapping his knife from hand to hand, in an attempt to confuse his opponent.

With a shriek, Northcutt came running straight at him, his blade weaving patterns in front of his naked chest. He kept shifting from side to side so Corso couldn't be sure which way to head in order to evade him.

They slammed into each other, Corso grabbing the wrist of Northcutt's knife arm, feeling taut muscles tremble under the frozen skin. He twisted aside, attempting to slash up at his enemy's jugular, but Northcutt floored him with a single kick.

Northcutt moved in fast, intent on making his killing blow while Corso lay p.r.o.ne. Without any protective gear, he could move far faster than Corso could respond.

But Northcutt had clearly expected to make a faster job of it: Corso wasn't a trained killer like his opponent, but that didn't mean he was unable to defend himself. If the contest didn't end within the next few seconds, Northcutt was going to be in serious trouble from hypothermia. Corso could see how the other man was getting slower, even as he towered over him.

Without thinking, Corso brought his knee up, slamming it hard into Northcutt's t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. Northcutt lost his balance, sliding to one side . . .

. . . red flared across Corso's vision and he felt the hot flow of fresh blood across his cheek. He blinked, suddenly light-headed, then tried to lift himself up, but slipped on the ice.

There was a lot of blood on the ground nearby. His blood.

Northcutt straddled him, his blade held vertically over Corso's chest, while his free hand pressed down on Corso's ribcage.

'Time to-' Northcutt started to say, before bright lights suddenly flared across them, accompanied by the deafening whup-whup whup-whup of 'copter blades. of 'copter blades.

Two helicopters dropped down next to the combat circle, while Northcutt's crew looked around, stunned. Forgetting about Corso for the moment, Northcutt yanked himself upright and moved rapidly over to the perimeter.

Corso meanwhile rolled over and on to his knees. Panting wildly, he glanced over towards Sal, standing just beyond the circle with a hopeless expression on his face. Northcutt's crew began running around, shouting; rifles had magically appeared in the hands of most of them. Jones was already conversing with someone who had just stepped down from the nearest helicopter.

Corso looked over and recognized him as Kieran Mansell, Senator Arbenz's right-hand man.

'Hey!' Sal began shouting at Northcutt, who seemed just about to step out of the ring of stones. 'You can't leave the circle, Northcutt!' he yelled. 'That's quitting!'

s.h.i.t. Sal was right, Corso realized. Whatever the circ.u.mstances, leaving the circle amounted to surrender. Because challenges were illegal, Northcutt wouldn't actually forfeit his place in the lower Senate, but word of his shame would get around. Meanwhile his crew couldn't even toss him a blanket to keep warm, because outside help was strictly forbidden under the traditions of challenge. Sal was right, Corso realized. Whatever the circ.u.mstances, leaving the circle amounted to surrender. Because challenges were illegal, Northcutt wouldn't actually forfeit his place in the lower Senate, but word of his shame would get around. Meanwhile his crew couldn't even toss him a blanket to keep warm, because outside help was strictly forbidden under the traditions of challenge.

Corso pulled himself upright and gasped as he felt the deep wound. It made him feel sick and weak to touch it, but he was pretty sure it wouldn't be enough to kill him.

Another couple of minutes spent out here in the freezing cold would do that just fine.

Mansell was escorted by heavily armed military clad in white and grey camouflage gear. Northcutt's crew began to raise angry voices. Mansell strode on straight past Bull Northcutt and into the centre of the combat circle, sparing Corso himself only the most cursory of glances.

Corso hauled himself into a sitting position, still clutching his chest. He noticed that Mansell was wearing body armour under his long overcoat, his hair like a stiff blond brush above the square-jawed face. There was something pitiless and inhuman about the man's eyes. Meanwhile the soldiers who had accompanied him began fanning out across the icy beach, their weapons lowered but at the ready.

'You all know who I am'-Mansell's voice was rough-edged and coa.r.s.e-'and I'm here on Senate authority. This challenge is illegal, and is over as of now. You'-he lifted one gloved hand to point at Northcutt-'need to get inside. Now.'

'I'll kill you,' snarled Northcutt, simply but clearly. 'You're inside the circle, and that means you're taking up the challenge yourself. First I'll kill you-and then I'll kill him,' he added, with a brief nod towards Corso.

Mansell glanced back at him with a derisive expression, while Northcutt's crew remained silent. Corso saw that Bull was now becoming irrational from whatever warrior drugs he'd been taking. For a moment he thought Mansell's security team might intervene, then he saw the man make a hand gesture, and the soldiers remained where they were.

'I'll forget you said that, son,' Mansell replied finally. 'Go join your crew. Normally I wouldn't want to interfere, but I'm here on government business, and that makes all the difference. Got that?'