'Yes, sir. I am Ken Shintaro.'

'Ken Shintaro is your cover identity,' Colonel Arrees said. 'Ken Shintaro, from Rainbow Bridge, Callisto. You will learn everything about him in the final part of your training. You will learn to live as him, but more importantly you will learn everything you need to know so that you can do the work we need you to do. Your work, your mission - that's what really defines you. You won't ever forget that, will you?'

'No, sir.'

Dave #8 briefly wondered what his new face looked like, but it wasn't important. All that mattered was that the flaws that Father Solomon had detected would be hidden now, by the mask they had given him.

'I know you won't let us down,' Colonel Arrees said, and stood up and told him that he had a lot to do before he was ready, but for now he should rest, and heal. At the door, the colonel paused and added, 'I expect you want to know where you will be going.'

'I am Ken Shintaro, from Rainbow Bridge, Callisto.'

'Yes, you are. But you're going to Paris. Paris, Dione.'

2.

The engineers prepping the two singleships broke into a storm of applause when the pilots, a man and a woman dressed in close-fitting acceleration suits, were escorted into the hangar pod by a swarm of medics and briefing officers. The anthems of Greater Brazil and the European Union played one after the other and everyone stood to attention as best they could in the absence of gravity. An avatar wearing the face of the President of Greater Brazil delivered a brief prerecorded speech that touched on great moments of exploration and the questing and indomitable nature of the human spirit. Commander Gabriel Vaduva shook hands with the pilots in front of the roundel of Operation Deep Sounding while engineers and technicians applauded again, cheers and whistles and war-whoops, their enthusiasm genuine even though it was choreographed for the news channels. Then the security officer announced that the cameras were offline, the engineers resumed their work, and medics and technicians closed around the pilots for the final pre-flight checks.

The sleek black daggers of the two J-2 singleships lay nose to tail in their launch cradles. Engineers swarmed around them like ants grooming alletes about to fly the nest, making final checks and adjustments, loading the clandestine-op packages into weapons bays. The single-ships were fully powered up, vibrating eagerly, each infusing the frigid air with crackling ozone and its own particular song. Cash Baker could feel the familiar music of his ship thrilling in his blood like a celestial choir. A complex harmonic resolving somewhere just above E flat, braided from servo-motors and flywheels, turbines, and the huge currents circulating in the superconducting magnets of its fusion torus.

Cash was spreadeagled in a dressing frame while a tech checked his acceleration suit for microscopic flaws that could cause pressure sores or haematomas. Woven from several hundred differently doped species of fullerene thread, quasi-living, self-regulating, the suit fitted as closely as a second skin from the soles of Cash's feet to the crown of his shaven head, leaving only his face exposed. At last, the tech signed off the suit and Cash was fitted with his face mask and the frame was elevated and rotated on its long axis and guided towards the holster of the lifesystem, a slot narrower than a grave that gaped behind the singleship's everted equipment pods. He glimpsed the other pilot, Vera Flamilion Jackson, suspended in her frame over her ship, and then his uplink came alive and he blanked out for a moment, came back with the comforting presence of his ship sinking through him and its control menu laid across the view of the crowded and busy hangar.

'Oh man,' he said. 'Let's get this thing on!'

'Ready when you are,' Vera Jackson said.

The link cut out as the flight medics began their work, making sure that the alchemical marriage between the ship's control interface and Cash's nervous system was robust and there was no echo or leakage, running through the familiar series of tests on his visual, auditory, and proprioceptive systems, finally telling him that he was good to go.

He entered the lifesystem head first, like a breech birth in reverse. Smart gel flowed around him. The lifesystem connected lines that fed air and water and liquid nutrient, the hose that piped away wastes. A long smooth push gripped him from head to toe and then he was all the way in, cocooned in a thin layer of gel, and the ship's senses were fully meshed with his own, giving him a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the final spurt of activity in the hangar. The equipment pods were closed away, the wings folded and retracted like an exercise in origami, and the ship sank further into its cradle, smoothly everting into vacuum.

Cash no longer had any sense of his body. It was a lump of meat in the sealed can of the lifesystem, sedated with muscle relaxants, fed by a drip, blood passing through a cascade filter to remove wastes, breathing and heartbeat and metabolic rate controlled by a bridge plugged into his autonomic nervous system. Its sole function was to sustain his brain. His mind. And as far as he was concerned, he wasn't inhabiting his skull right now. He had become one with his bird, his nervous system meshed with hers and extending into every part of her, her senses his own.

Launch was a little love pat from the cradle's electromagnetic catapult, a brief burp of attitude jets. Then Cash was falling away behind Vera Jackson's singleship, both of them swinging around the sharply curved shoulder of Mimas's heavily cratered globe. Saturn's fat crescent dawned, looking close enough to touch. Its rings, seen edge-on, were a dark line slashed across equatorial bands with delicate tints of butterscotch and peach, and cast a shadow grooved like a tyre track across the turquoise and pale blue bands of the northern hemisphere.

There was another tremor as the singleship adjusted its trim. Cash watched the countdown flip back towards zero, yelled, 'Geronimo!' and ignited the main engine, a long hard burn that would deliver him to Saturn, and to history.

The two singleships fell across the plane of the ring system, a little under half the distance between Earth and the Moon. Skating just a hundred kilometres above the broad bright arc of the A Ring and the narrow, eccentric braid of Huygen's Ringlet, soaring through sunlight across the wide gap of the Cassini Division, passing above the opaque and intricately braided B Ring, where ringlets of icy rubble backlit by the sun and divided by fine gaps dwindled away into shadow in one direction and in the other seemed to rise and converge in a narrowing arc or bridge that whipped around Saturn's hazy crescent. All this glory created from the rubble of a moon torn apart millions of years ago, ground fine and graded and ground again by gravity and simple Newtonian mechanics.

As Cash Baker and Vera Jackson passed the faint, narrow bands of the inner ringlets and rings, mission control transmitted a short burst of encrypted data that unpacked into the optical image of a ship some fifteen thousand kilometres behind the singleships but catching up fast - a fuzzy blob riding a bright spear of fusion fire that burned like a gypsy star against Saturn's nightside. One sidebar identified it as a shuttle, the SV Happy Trails, registered to a collective operating out of Paris, Dione; another tracked its orbital path back to Atlas, a tiny moon at the outer edge of the A Ring.

'Atlas was on the far side of Saturn when you guys set out,' mission control said. 'We think the ship was parked there - it must have kicked off when you did. It seems to have made its initial burn while it was hidden behind Saturn. It cut a chord across the rings, and we only spotted it when it lit up again.'

'You make it sound as if it was waiting for us,' Vera Jackson said.

'It's possible. The mission profile is public knowledge.'

'Are they talking?' Vera said.

'We haven't been able to raise the ship. According to chatter on the system's net, it's crewed by Ghosts.'

Cash said, 'A spook ship?'

Vera said, 'Don't you ever read briefings? Ghosts are some kind of gang or cult whose members think they're guided by their future selves.'

She was ten years older than Cash, ice-cool and fearsomely competent. When she and the other two European pilots had joined the singleship wing, Bo Nash had taken bets on who would get to fuck her first, and Cash had told him that it was more a question of who she would fuck first. Her hard-shell attitude made it difficult for anyone to like or get close to her, but Cash sure as hell respected her, one pilot to another.

'They're definitely connected to the government of Paris,' mission control said. 'We're right now sending its mayor some tough questions.'

'Check out its beacon,' Vera said.

She'd caught it on the broadband scanner, passed it through three increasingly paranoid filters to check for viruses, and copied it to Cash and mission control. A yellow circle with two dots and a curved line making a happy face; a rippling banner superimposed above it. We Come In Peace For All Mankind chasing All These Worlds Belong To Us around and around.

'Very cute,' Cash said.

'Don't worry about it,' mission control said. 'They'll pass close to you but they can't follow you down into Saturn. Their ship is strictly for vacuum. You'll lose it just after you hit the edge of the atmosphere. Our thinking is that they're making a political point. It's just a fly-by. A stunt. So if they try to make contact with you by radio or line-of-sight laser, ignore them but bounce the message straight to me. Don't reply. Don't give them anything they can use. Is that clear? Now, let's get down to the final checks.'

The two singleships were moving above Saturn's nightside now. The gas giant's black bulk eclipsed half the sky. The arch of the rings gleamed high above. Dawn was coming fast. Cash and Vera worked through checklists, tested guidance and control systems, made microscopic attitude adjustments. If they didn't hit a very precise entry profile they would either skip out of the atmosphere or descend too steeply and too fast and be incinerated.

All the while, Cash kept an eye on the shuttle. It had completed its burn and was drawing closer; if it kept to its present course and velocity it would pass them at a distance of less than a hundred kilometres just as they reached the outer edge of Saturn's atmosphere. Cash and Vera could fire up their motors and quickly leave the shuttle behind, of course, but they'd also miss the critical window for safe entry, and would have to abort their mission. So all they could do was keep to their course and keep watch on the interloper as they completed their final approach.

Ahead, the sun's tiny disc lit the leading edge of the gas giant's tremendous curve, a bridge of pearly light that quickly broadened into a crescent in which details of a vast cloudscape began to resolve. The two singleships were aimed at a pale oval between two latitudinal bands north of the equator - one of the long-lived storms that, anchored over a hot spot deep in Saturn's atmosphere, swept a clear area in the cloud decks around it. Details exploded out of the cloudscape as the single-ships fell towards it, ripples and ruffles resolving along the boundary between the bands, intricate scrollworks formed by drag between opposing streams of atmosphere. Cash could see structures within the bands too, great ranges and banks of cloud. All this racing beneath the two singleships when the shuttle caught up with them, skimming past on a course that would cut a shallow chord through the uppermost fringe of the atmosphere before taking it out beyond Saturn. Cash glimpsed a flare as it shot past, cleaned up the video grab and replayed it, saw that it had dropped a heat-shielded pod strapped to a pair of solid-fuel retrorockets.

It was too late to do anything about it. He was already riding his ship through the beginnings of turbulence. Subtle vibrations, short sharp shudders as attitude jets fired to keep the singleship stable. It was travelling at hypersonic speed. Bands of cloud raced by far below and a high-pitched wail began to mount in volume and pitch and a pale glow brightened to a furnace intensity as friction transformed the kinetic energy of orbital motion into heat. Shock waves in the hot ionised hydrogen formed a stable shell in which the rainbow slicks of plasma streams flickered, the shock waves converging behind the singleship to a focal point like an incandescent diamond. Deceleration rose steadily: five g, ten, briefly peaking at just over fifteen. The light show slowly faded. Cash extended the singleship's wings. The atmosphere was thick enough now to use aerodynamic control surfaces rather than the attitude jets to maintain trim.

Cash was falling free through Saturn's vast skies at a steep angle, making slow S-turns to bleed off excess velocity. He eyeballed Vera Jackson's singleship falling ahead of him, about fifty kilometres to the east, looked for and failed to find any sign of the pod dropped by the shuttle, uploaded a status check to mission control and acknowledged the congratulations of the mission commander.

'On my mark,' Vera said, and counted down from ten.

Cash deployed his drogue parachutes at zero and there was a thump and a tremendous corkscrewing jerk as the parachutes swung him around and checked his forward momentum, and then he was falling nose down through a vast clear ocean of hydrogen and helium at just under a hundred kilometres an hour, in a prevailing air current that was taking him eastwards at about five times that speed. In about ten hours, if he kept falling at his present rate, he would reach the beginning of the amorphous boundary between the gaseous atmosphere and the deep ocean of hot metallic hydrogen that lay beneath, although long before then the singleship would have been crushed and scorched to a cinder by tremendous pressures and temperatures. Not even tough, heavily shielded robot probes had ever penetrated to more than half the depth of the gaseous phase of Saturn's atmosphere. The two singleships would fall for only three hours, dropping through the liquid-water zone before igniting their motors and departing.

If everything went well, they'd pass close to their target. And even if they missed it, the packages they planned to release contained autonomous drones that could ride the winds of Saturn for months while they tracked it down and searched for other anomalies.

Meanwhile, Cash had a few moments to enjoy the tremendous panorama wrapped around him. It was early morning. The sky was deep indigo and seemingly infinite, the sun a tiny flattened disc that glowered at the hazy horizon, the centre of concentric shells of bloody light that rose towards zenith. In every direction, the crystalline hydrogen atmosphere stretched for thousands of kilometres, broken only by a few wisps of cloud formed from frozen ammonia, looking just like ordinary cirrus cloud and tinged pink by dawn light. He felt like a king of this whole wide world, an emperor of air, and told Vera that this place was definitely made for flying.

'I hear that,' Vera said. 'Check out the storm. We're right in the pipe.'

Below, halfway to the eastern horizon, a creamy ocean of cloud rifted apart around the storm's great oval eye. With interrupted arcs of cloud and clear air curved around it, it looked much like a hurricane back on Earth. In fact, everything seemed eerily familiar. Blue sky, white clouds, the sun gaining a golden hue as it lifted above the horizon. It took an effort to remember that the distance to the horizon was more than ten times that on Earth. That the storm was two thousand kilometres across. That the sky was hydrogen and helium a thousand kilometres deep, with cloud layers of ammonium ice above and decks of ammonium hydrosulphide and ammonium-rich water-ice and water-droplet clouds below, endlessly blowing around this vast world.

Cash and Vera dropped slantwise towards the continent-sized storm. The parachute of Vera's ship was blazoned with the flag of the European Union. A blue rectangle vivid and alien against the muted creams of the cloudscape they were fast approaching. Vera caught a pinpoint signal on deep radar, too far away to resolve any detail but exactly where their target was supposed to be. A few moments later, Cash picked up another signal, about five hundred kilometres aft. Two small echoes. The singleship's guidance system tagged the dots with vectors. They were moving faster than the prevailing wind and they were moving under guidance, catching up with the singleships.

'We see them too,' mission control said. 'Stand by for advice.'

Vera transmitted a snatched high-magnification shot of a drone riding atop a propellant tank. It reminded Cash of a photograph of an ancient space shuttle he'd once seen in a history text. Mission control came back, told them to stick to the mission profile, said that a formal protest had been lodged with the government of Paris, Dione.

'Imagine how grateful we are,' Cash said, and proposed that they wait until the drones got close, then light up their motors and burn the fuckers out of the sky.

'We'd have to drop the parachutes first,' Vera said. 'And that would mean we couldn't complete the mission.'

'So we sit here and hope these drones are tourists, just like we're pretending to be,' Cash said. 'I think not.'

'Matter of fact, we do need you to sit tight,' mission control said, and told them that everyone was working hard to construct workable solutions to a variety of scenarios.

'Just sit here and let them make the first move?' Cash said. 'You have to be kidding.'

'You heard the man,' Vera said. 'Hang tough.'

Cash called up the navigation subsystem of his singleship and started to make his own calculations. The drones were still closing, and the two singleships were falling towards the edge of the volume influenced by the storm now, past a curving archipelago of plume clouds ten kilometres tall from their fluffy white tops to their trailing dark roots. There was a moment of bone-shaking turbulence as Cash passed through a fierce updraught before settling in a steady current circulating east and north, clockwise around the outer edge of the storm. A few dark clouds with the anvil shape of thunderclouds on Earth drifted ahead, caught in a slightly faster current.

The ambient temperature was -10 Centigrade and steadily climbing. Pressure was rising too, already more than four atmospheres. Clear air stretched down to a reddish haze above a deck of dark brown clouds more than a hundred kilometres below. The target was less than a thousand kilometres ahead, its radar image beginning to resolve into separate signals. The sky above was almost exactly the blue of a summer's sky on Earth, and the small swift sun was considerably higher: daylight on Saturn lasted just five hours.

The singleships fell past the roots of the plume clouds and continued to fall towards the reddish-brown floor. Slowing now, because the parachutes were working more effectively as the atmospheric pressure increased, but still falling. In less than thirty minutes they would fall past the target; an hour after that, they would have fallen within a couple of kilometres of the top of the cloud deck below, breaking the manned descent record. Then they could lose their parachutes and light their motors and fly right out of there. Cash was looking forward to that part - the flying. But the two Outer drones were closing fast now, close enough to see that each was targeting one of the singleships.

Cash fired up the ship-to-ship laser and explained how they could escape and still make the rendezvous.

'We don't have enough fuel,' Vera said.

'We won't be able to beat the record,' Cash said, 'but we'll be able to drop our packages and fly past the target and get back into some kind of orbit. The Glory of Gaia will have to come pick us up.'

'And while we were waiting we would be sitting targets for any Outers who might want to take a shot at us.'

'We're sitting targets right now,' Cash said.

After a moment of silence, Vera said, 'We'll have to clear it with mission control.'

'I don't think we have time,' Cash said. 'This is a combat situation. Which means that as mission commander it's your decision.'

He was watching the drone that had targeted his ship. It was shaped a little like a squid, its black body shell etched with a white skull grinning above crossed white bones, five blunt tentacles extended from beneath a hooded sensor cluster. He had a very clear picture of those tentacles splayed against the hull of his singleship in a fierce embrace . . .

'Let's do it,' Vera said. 'Link up - I'll push the button. Otherwise we might end up all over the sky.'

'You got it,' Cash said, and surrendered control. Vera started to count backward from ten, and Cash saw the drone detach from its booster, saw the spark of its motor, and told Vera to do it now.

She did it.

Cash's singleship bucked violently as the parachute detached and blew away like a leaf. For a brief moment he was in free fall. The drone skimmed past, attitude jets flaring as it tried to hook around, and then the singleship's fusion motor fired up with its characteristic double crack and the singleship flared downwards, its nose gradually pitching up as Vera's ship pulled the same manoeuvre directly ahead.

His own bird juddered as it passed through the sound barrier, and control came back. He was flying, burning precious fuel as he chased after Vera, both of them drawing contrails through the clear air as they plunged eastwards, accelerating through thickening atmosphere. The target was dead ahead, resolving on the radar into distinct signals. A ghostly signal shaped like a plumb-bob, a handful of rectangles sending back strongly, and a fuzzy cloud of activity around them.

'Drop the packages,' Vera sang out, and Cash triggered the sequence, felt the shudder as black cylinders sprang loose on either side, tumbling end for end, sprouting parachutes and jerking away and vanishing into the vast sky.

They were almost on the target now. Cash glimpsed a scatter of foreshortened rectangles silhouetted against the vast white curve of the storm, and then Vera's ship began to pull up and he followed, continuing to gain speed, hooking upward, jolting through layers of cross-winds. The cloudscape directly below flattened out as he rose above it, becoming two-dimensional, darker bands on either side coming into view. The sky ahead darkened from blue to indigo to black. A few bright stars came out. It was so much like flying on Earth, although he was flying faster than anything had ever flown in Earth's atmosphere, and was still accelerating . . .

Cash whooped, pulled a barrel roll. The spark of the sun sank behind the planet's bulk and night flooded the cloudscapes below and stars came out everywhere else, with two moons standing one above the other directly ahead as the singleships cleared the outer edge of the atmosphere, reaching escape velocity of thirty-six kilometres per second and continuing to accelerate for more than five minutes, until their tanks were almost dry.

They were in orbit, falling in a long ellipse that would take them around Saturn once every two hours.

After the fusion motors cut off, Vera contacted mission control and ran through what had happened. Commander Vaduva came online and told them that they had done well, but must maintain absolute vigilance until they were picked up. Meaning that if any Outer ship attempted to rendezvous with them, they were to blow themselves up rather than be captured or taken as salvage. They began to transmit encrypted data, everything from second-by-second status reports during the mission to optical and radar images of the target. There was a long hour of checks and updates. The security officer played them a clip of the mayor of Paris, Dione making a bland statement that refused to take any responsibility for the actions of a few exuberant individuals, and told Cash and Vera that very serious diplomatic representations were being made at that very moment.

'I know what kind of representations I'd like to make,' Vera said. 'You and me, Cash, in a room with those Ghosts, we'd show them a thing or two about exuberance.'

'I hear that,' Cash said.

It had been a lot of fun, going toe to toe with the Ghosts, even though the encounter had ended in a kind of draw. Next time, he was determined to come out on top.

3.

Highland cattle no bigger than Saint Bernard dogs, perfect miniatures with shaggy auburn coats and flexed horns, looked up from their grazing as Newton Jones came into the broad meadow. A few ambled out of his way; the rest stood and watched, jaws milling sideways, as Newt bounded towards the four people sitting around the hearth-glow of a memo space under a big sweet-chestnut tree, an outlier of the narrow belt of forest that girdled the outer zone of the garden habitat of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan. He dropped down beside Macy Minnot and said, 'The warship picked up the singleships. It's heading back to Mimas.'

'Let's hope this is the end of the stupid affair,' Pete Bakaleinikoff said.

'Everything went perfectly,' Newt said. 'The Ghosts showed the Brazilians that they can't go wherever they want without being challenged. They scared them off, and they cleaned up the so-called science packages they dumped, too.'

'Pure unevolved primate behaviour is nothing to be proud of,' Pete Bakaleinikoff said.

'It was a silly stunt,' Junko Asai said.

'Now it's over we should do our best to forget about it,' Junpei Asai said.

Husband and wife leaned against each other with fond familiarity, dressed alike in collarless white tunics and white trousers. Junpei wore plum-coloured lipstick and layers of bead necklaces; Junko had a carefully trimmed strip of white beard under his lower lip and many rings on his fingers. They had been married for almost fifty years, had six children, fifteen grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren, a casual fecundity that Macy, from a country where only the rich, lottery winners, and criminals had more than one child, thought amazing. They were also two of the smartest people she had ever met. In partnership with Pete Bakaleinikoff, they operated a cloud of optical telescopes more than twenty thousand kilometres across that sat in a stable orbit at Saturn's trailing Trojan point. Junko and Junpei had designed the elements of the telescope cloud and the AI that coordinated its operation; Pete Bakaleinikoff had underwritten its cost and supervised analysis of the data that it collected. For the past five years they had been studying Tierra, a rocky terrestrial planet about one and a half times the diameter of Earth that orbited inside the life zone of the star Delta Pavonis, mapping its single supercontinent and sprawling ice caps, its Mars-sized moon. There was life on Tierra: oxygen, water vapour and methane in its atmosphere; seasonal colour changes along the shoreline of the supercontinent. Currently, the telescope cloud's best resolution yielded about a hundred kilometres to a single pixel, but its owners were continually refining and tweaking their instruments and analytical programmes.

Newt flew missions that maintained and updated the cloud; Macy had become involved through Pete Bakaleinikoff, Newt's uncle. Pete was also interested in long-term closed ecosystems of the type that would be required by a multi-generation starship that might take two or three hundred years to complete its journey, in which everything would have to be continually recycled with as close to one hundred per cent efficiency as possible. It was the kind of problem that was meat and drink to Macy, and Pete had enlisted her help in constructing and running a variety of robust experimental systems.

Macy was fascinated and amused by the trio's enthusiastic accumulation of pointless data. Tierra wasn't the first Earth-like extrasolar planet to have been discovered; it wasn't even the tenth. And even if the telescope gang could finesse their instruments to the point where they could resolve more than fuzzy blotches that might or might not be the Tierran equivalent of lakes, forests, grasslands and deserts, it wasn't likely that anyone would ever visit the planet in their lifetime. The best they could hope for would be a fast fly-by by some microprobe, but even if one could be constructed at whatever unimaginable cost and effort, it wouldn't reach Delta Pavonis for more than fifty years. Still, Macy often felt an undeniable frisson while studying pictures of the distant world, and her work on closed-cycle ecosystems was about to give her kudos rating its first big boost. With Pete Bakaleinikoff and Junko and Junpei Asai, she was going to attend a conference on research into extrasolar planets and interstellar flight. Newt had interrupted a discussion about how best to present their data.

He told Junko, 'We shouldn't forget about it; we should build on it. After all, they're still here. They haven't gone away. Their warship is right now headed back to orbit around Mimas, and there are more ships on the way. We can't pretend that their presence doesn't matter, that we can carry on as if they don't exist. Ignoring them isn't an option.'

'It is a serious situation,' Pete said. 'And a stunt like this, the equivalent of beating our chests like gorillas, hooting and howling, it is not to me a sensible way of dealing with it.'

'So what if it was like a stunt?' Newt said. When he became excited about something, a tender blush crept across his cheeks and his gestures became extravagant. He was blushing now, and flinging his hands about as if trying to conjure something from the air by sheer force of will. 'You have to admit that it did something useful. It defined a limit. It told the Brazilians that they can't move around with impunity. That they can't do what they want. That there are people prepared to stand up to them.'

'It is hardly a secret that many of us are opposed to their presence,'