Junko said.

'Although most would prefer to talk to them in a sensible fashion rather than antagonise them,' Junpei said.

'It was a keen manoeuvre,' Newt said, his enthusiasm undented. 'The Brazilians must have taken notice of that. They know now that we may not have big ships and the latest in fusion-motor technology, but we definitely know something about flying.'

'By "we" I hope you mean Outers in a general sense,' Pete said. 'I hope you don't plan to take credit for any part of this.'

Newt laughed. 'You're worried I might be involved in some way? I wasn't involved.'

'I'm glad to hear it.'

'It was the Ghosts' mission from first to last. If I had been in charge of it,' Newt said, 'I would have made sure that I had back-up. I wouldn't have missed the opportunity to claim salvage on those singleships after they ran out of fuel.'

'Luckily, we have only to explain to the Brazilians why they were buzzed by a bunch of kids who believe that they are obeying instructions from their own future selves,' Pete said.

'At least they did something,' Newt said.

'You bet,' Pete said. 'They hooted and howled. They threatened a peaceful scientific mission.'

'Help me out here,' Newt said to Macy. 'You should be happy that someone showed those guys what's what.'

Macy said, 'You really want my opinion?'

'Didn't I just ask?'

'Last week you told me that my opinion didn't count because I hadn't lived here long enough to understand how things really worked.'

'I said that?'

'Words to that effect.'

'Well, I'm sure that you must have some idea about whether or not the Brazilians are going to mind their manners from now on.'

'Brazilians and Europeans,' Macy said. 'It's a joint expedition.'

Newt shrugged.

'I'm sure they'll see this thing just as I do. That it was a silly stunt and no real threat at all,' Macy said.

'No real threat? Is that why the singleships turned tail and ran?'

'Maybe they did run away. Or maybe they escaped from an ambush without firing a shot. Reacted to a threat in a peaceable and sensible manner.'

Newt stared at her, then shook his head slowly. 'These are the people who tried to kill you once upon a time. And you're taking their side?'

'You asked me for my opinion,' Macy said. 'I gave it.'

'You think that we should just let them roam around the system at will, doing whatever they want?'

'That's a different question. You want my opinion on that, too? I think we can't even ask them to stop roaming around. We can tell them that they need our permission to go into orbit around Dione, or land here. It's the same deal if they want to land anywhere there are people. But as far as I understand it, no one has the right to tell anyone where they can or can't go anywhere else in the system.'

'In fact, the Ghosts broke the rule of free passage when they endangered the Brazilian ships by flying so close to them,' Junko said.

'It put the Ghosts in the wrong and the Brazilians in the right,' Junpei said. 'It was not helpful.'

'I can see that I'm in a minority,' Newt said. He didn't seem displeased by the idea. 'Well, maybe that will change soon enough. There are a couple of other bits of news I came out here to tell you, seeing as you're off the net, thinking about science. One is that Marisa Bassi will be visiting the day after tomorrow. He's going to talk about Dione's response to the arrival of the new ships from Earth.'

'If he's hoping for support, he'd looking in the wrong place,' Pete said.

'Paris can do what it wants. That's its right. But we agreed to maintain a position of neutrality. And that's our right.'

'The other thing I have to tell you,' Newt said. 'Some people think that we shouldn't remain neutral, given that the situation will change once those new ships arrive. They think that we should consider supporting Paris. They petitioned for a poll - had enough signatures to get one, too.'

'You youngsters, you're as bad as Marisa Bassi,' Pete said. 'Stirring up trouble when there's no need. I don't suppose your mother is too pleased about this.'

'I haven't asked her,' Newt said, bouncing to his feet. 'One thing I do know. Whether or not we support Marisa Bassi, staying neutral isn't a luxury we can afford any more.'

After he'd gone, Junko smiled fondly at Macy and said, 'The way you two bicker. Anyone would think you're in love with each other.'

'I don't think Newt cares for anything but his own reputation,' Macy said.

Macy had long ago realised that Newton Jones's nonchalant, devil-may-care attitude only lightly masked a deep and abiding desire to escape from the shadow of his mother's fame. It was no easy task. When she'd been a year younger than Newt was now, Abbie Jones's mother and father had been killed in a blowout and she had inherited sole use of a ship, which she'd equipped for long-range voyages. She'd explored the moons of Uranus. She had been the first person to set foot on Enka's nitrogen snows. And she'd embarked on a solo expedition that took her through the Kuiper Belt to the edge of the cometary zone and set a record for the furthest distance any person had ever travelled from the sun - more than seventy trillion kilometres - that had yet to be broken. Journeying out beyond the heliopause, into the outer dark where comets more widely separated than planets travelled in long, lonely orbits, Abbie Jones was gone for more than four years, was believed by most to have long since died when her ship at last limped back to Saturn. It was her last expedition. She married, and with her husband and two dozen other pioneers founded a commune on Uranus's largest moon, Titania. She lived there for six years, until the little commune imploded because quarrels and personal differences between its founding members had been magnified by isolation and hardship. And then she and her husband and children had returned to Dione, and had helped to build what was now the garden habitat of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan.

She was the senior member of the clan now. A powerful matriarch, remote and forbidding. Newt, the youngest of her four children, was defined not by what he could do but by whose son he was: everything he did was measured against the yardstick of his mother's achievements and usually found wanting. That was what he was struggling against, in what he cheerfully and knowingly admitted was a classic example of filial rebellion, driven not by malice but by a kind of sweet, rakish desperation. His sisters and his brother had come to an accommodation with their heritage, but Newt had cast himself as the rebel, the outsider. Living a restless, marginal life piloting the clan's tug, hauling cargo to any and every destination in the Jupiter and Saturn Systems, falling in and out of love, dreaming up all kinds of hare-brained, semilegal or illegal schemes to make credit or gain kudos. He'd had numerous brushes with the law and always refused his mother's offers of help: every narrow escape or fine or short spell of community labour added incrementally to his small reputation as a daredevil pilot and smuggler. And then he'd helped Macy Minnot and the young refusenik, Sada, escape from East of Eden.

Although this adventure had won him considerable kudos, although he believed himself to be a rebel's rebel, Newt had brought Macy and Sada directly to his clan's home. He'd pretended that he wanted to introduce Macy and the refusenik girl, Sada, trophies of his daring escapade, to his mother and the rest of his family, but in fact he had nowhere else to take them. The clan owned the tug he piloted; the clan's garden habitat was his only home amongst all the cities and settlements of the Saturn System; he had needed his mother's influence to cancel the warrants that East of Eden had issued for his arrest and for the arrest of the two refugees he'd liberated. Sada had soon moved to Paris, Dione, where she had taken up with the Ghosts, the gang who'd just attempted to wreck the Brazilian and European mission into the depths of Saturn's atmosphere. Macy had stayed on at the garden habitat, working for Newt's father, Strom Bakaleinikoff, who supervised the regulation and gardening of the habitat's ecosystem.

Macy liked Strom, who was not only as sweet-natured as Newt but was also unambitious and unassuming, content with his lot and possessed of a profound knowledge of ecosystem engineering. She had learned much from him, and he had encouraged her collaboration with his brother, Pete. As for Newt, he seemed more or less indifferent to Macy once the excitement and fuss surrounding her escape had died down. It was insulting, really, especially as he had a reputation for having a woman in every port. She understood why he hadn't tried to make a move on her during the long voyage from Jupiter to Saturn, Sada right there with them in the close confines of Elephant, everyone in everyone else's pocket. But he'd shown no real interest in her afterwards, either; it was as if she was a trophy he'd brought back and left to gather dust on some high and half-forgotten shelf.

She wouldn't have minded so much if she hadn't found him, his frank good humour, boyish charm, and helpless vulnerability, so damnably attractive. They'd settled into a combative relationship, quarrelling and sparring, their banter teetering between teasing and flirtation, but sometimes Macy would feel a raw unrequited ache at the back of her throat when she looked at him, and then she'd get angry because of his friendly indifference. She'd had a couple of flings while working on the ecosystems of new oases, nothing serious as far as she was concerned, nothing at all to do with getting back at Newt for the affairs he'd had since he'd brought her to Dione. But although she'd made a kind of life for herself with the clan, it had about as much direction as Newt's, and she still felt that she was an outsider. Felt that she could see more clearly than most, with her outsider's viewpoint, the tensions growing within and between the cities and settlements of her new home.

Reaction to the renewed interest of Earth in the affairs of the Outer System roughly split down generational lines. Older Outers, including almost all the surviving members of the original exodus, argued that it would be in everyone's interest to reach an accommodation with Earth. Despite the failure of the biome project at Rainbow Bridge, they still hoped for some kind of reconciliation. For the sake of peace, for the exchange of ideas and goods that would benefit both parties.

Outers in their teens and twenties and thirties were more suspicious. They dismissed the promises made by Greater Brazil and the European Union, were enraged by the imminent arrival of a ship from the Pacific Community, whose mission and intent were completely unknown, and believed that the aims of Earth and the Outer System were so different from each other that war was inevitable, and that Outers should make a stand before Earth was able to strengthen its presence by falsely seducing foolish peaceniks, as they had already seduced the city of Camelot, Mimas. A significant proportion called for preemptive strikes against the warship in orbit around Mimas, and the Pacific Community ship and a Brazilian resupply ship that were approaching the Saturn system.

A third group also believed that war was inevitable, but that it would be impossible to fight off or defeat an invasion force without causing massive damage and loss of life in the cities and settlements of the Outer System, which were peculiarly vulnerable to attack. A single strike by a simple kinetic weapon would wreck the integrity of any city, cause explosive loss of pressure, kill thousands. Rather than directly confront Earth, this third group believed that it would be better to make control of the Outer System as difficult as possible. To practise nonviolent resistance, and move as much infrastructure and as many people as possible to oases scattered across or tunnelled into the surfaces of most of Saturn's moons.

So far the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan had remained neutral, cleaving more or less to the middle way, but now a significant minority of its younger members had forced a new poll on whether or not the clan should support Paris's protests against Earth's presence in the Saturn System, scheduled to take place after Marisa Bassi's visit. The mayor of Paris had a private meeting with Abbie Jones and other senior members of the clan, then gave a short, informal address to everyone else, saying that they were in the midst of a grave situation that would grow graver still unless immediate action was taken. He urged the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan to add its voice to those asking for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Earth's so-called scientific expedition from the Saturn System, and asked it to volunteer one of its members for service on a panel, drawn from every city and major settlement, that could negotiate with Earth on behalf of everyone in the Saturn System. In his opinion, only a united front could win a favourable outcome, for otherwise Earth would contrive a series of unilateral deals like those it had already made with Camelot, Mimas and several small settlements, split the Saturn System into a patchwork of quarrelling factions, and take them over one by one.

It was a modest, conciliatory performance that was rewarded with polite but tepid applause. Most of the young members of the clan looked disappointed; they'd been expecting a stirring call to arms. Afterwards, at the reception on the lawn in front of the sprawling Great House, Macy Minnot floated past knots of people and clumps of flower-starred mimosa bushes towards Marisa Bassi, who was holding court near one of the buffet tables. She'd been told that the mayor wanted to meet her, and had decided to confront him directly.

Marisa Bassi was much shorter than the Outers around him but he had a powerful, vital presence and was as broad-shouldered and thick-necked as a street tough. When Macy reached him he grabbed her right hand with his, fastened his left hand on her right elbow, and said with loud and apparently unforced enthusiasm, 'The famous refugee from Earth!

I'm so pleased to meet you at last! You and I, you know, we have something in common. You defected to the Outer System, and so did my father. I see you didn't know that, but it's true. It was forty years ago, when the European Union first attempted to reach out to us. My father was one of the civil servants sent from Earth to attempt to draw up an agreement. That didn't work out, but he fell in love with my mother and he defected so that he could be with her. A true Romeo and Juliet story, but with a happy ending! So I am only one generation removed from Earth, and here you are, having defected just as my father defected. A historic occasion, don't you think?'

Macy managed to pull free from his grip, saying, 'I think that of the two of us your father might have had the better deal.'

'But surely you have a much better life here than in Greater Brazil. After all, you have been able to join one of our most distinguished clans. You are free to do what you choose. You are no longer a chattel, but a citizen.'

'I meant that your father chose to defect. I was kind of railroaded into it.'

'My father defected because he fell in love with my mother. And when it comes to falling in love, does anyone really have a choice?' Marisa Bassi said, smiling at the aides and well-wishers and hangers-on gathered around him. 'Perhaps your defection was not as romantic as my father's, Macy, but it was most certainly heroic. That's why I would very much value your opinion about my modest little proposal. Please, don't be afraid to tell me exactly what you think.'

'It was definitely a clever speech. You want us to think that if we support you we'll be helping to bring about a peaceful end to the confrontation between the Outer System and Earth. But seeing as you've already made a bad situation worse by making heroes of the Ghosts who pulled that silly stunt, I can't help wondering what this is really about.'

'Would you rather I congratulated the Brazilians on their skill in evading a trap?' Marisa Bassi said, clearly amused by Macy's presumption.

'You didn't have to say anything.'

'And my silence would have given tacit support to the Brazilians. Everyone believes that I am obsessed with war. But war is not inevitable. Not if we present a united front and make sure that the people aboard the Glory of Gaia know that they are not welcome here and that they are not as free to move about our system as they might suppose. That doesn't mean that we can't reach an agreement with the Brazilians and the Europeans, or even with the Pacific Community for that matter. But we cannot - we will not - negotiate with anyone as long as there is a warship in our sky. We will not negotiate under duress. It is important that we make that very clear.' Marisa Bassi gripped Macy's hand and arm again, aiming his forceful gaze straight into her face. 'But listen - I did not come here to argue with you. I came to ask you a favour. It's nothing, really. All you would have to do is speak about Greater Brazil. I would like you to let the people here know about the tyranny endured by the people there. How the so-called great families accumulated wealth and power by acts of violent piracy. How ordinary people live like slaves, with every aspect of their lives controlled and no say in the political process.'

'It sounds to me like you think that you already know all about it,' Macy said.

'But you know the details. You are the authentic voice of the oppressed. You don't have to make any speeches. You can talk to a sympathetic interviewer. A simple friendly conversation. And people could ask you questions, and you could answer them in any way you liked. No restrictions, no censorship, none of the apparatus of control that you no doubt remember and fear. Don't answer straight away. Think about it. And I hope you will make the right decision, Macy.'

'You can have my answer right now, Mr Bassi. It's no. Because I don't want to be part of your propaganda machine.'

'I want you to tell the truth. Our people deserve to know it, so that they can make up their minds. That's how we do things here, Macy. People are given unconditional access to information, and they use that information to decide how to vote. Here, people are free. They are not owned like animals, as they are in Greater Brazil.'

'It isn't quite like that.'

'If you think that we have some wrong-headed ideas about Greater Brazil, don't you want to explain how things really are?'

'I guess I should be flattered that you think I could be useful to you,'

Macy said. 'And I don't have a problem with telling the truth. No, the problem is that people like you, the ones who want to cause trouble, have already made up their minds, and no amount of truth is going to change that.'

Marisa Bassi wasn't so easily put off, and told Macy to think it over. 'I will ask you again, and when I do I hope you will have changed your mind. Much is at stake,' he said, and turned his attention away from her and asked a new arrival to the group around him, Ismi Bakaleinikoff, what she thought of his modest little proposal, and Macy realised that she had been dismissed.

Yuldez Truex, the foppish leader of the little group of youngsters who wanted the clan to align itself with Paris, caught up with her as she drifted away, telling her that she had made a mistake by not accepting Marisa Bassi's offer there and then. 'This is a fine opportunity for you. If you do it, you'll not only gain some kudos; you'll prove that you actually have some loyalty to us, too. But if you don't, well, everyone will say that you can't bring yourself to tell the truth because at heart you're still loyal to Greater Brazil.'

Macy laughed. 'Since when does being loyal mean agreeing with you?'

'I'm trying to give you some good advice,' Yuldez said. 'When the fighting starts, anyone whose loyalty is in doubt could find themselves in a good deal of trouble.'

'Who are you loyal to, Yuldez? The clan, or Marisa Bassi?'

'I want us to do the right thing,' Yuldez said. 'And you should do the right thing, too.'

'As soon as I've figured out what that is, that's just what I aim to do,'

Macy said, and before Yuldez could reply Newt loped up and said, 'Is this kid troubling you again?'

'He's no trouble,' Macy said.

'At least I can count on your vote,' Yuldez said to Newt. 'I know that someone who was cheering on the Ghosts won't want us to surrender without a fight.'

'Macy and I need to have a private word, Yuldez, so why don't you run along? I'm sure you have plenty of other people you need to charm.'

After Yuldez had moved off, Newt told Macy that the kid had been born with a sharp tongue. 'He used to tease kids younger than he was, liked nothing better than to make them cry. I keep hoping that he'll grow out of it, but I'm not sure that he ever will.'

'So you think I'm some little kid who needs protecting?'

'That's not exactly what I meant. And you don't have to say what you're going to say next. The bit about learning how to stand on your own two feet and how taking a tumble now and then is all part of the learning process. Because you always say it when you get pissed off because someone tries to help you out.'

'There's pretty much no point in saying it because you never take any notice of what I say,' Macy said. 'But I really don't need any help dealing with pissant hotheads like Yuldez.'

Newt grinned. 'I guess you think you can deal with Marisa Bassi on your own too.'

'I thought I already did. He asked me to do him a favour-'

'And you told him you didn't want to be part of his propaganda machine. One of his aides streamed the whole conversation straight to the net. About thirty seconds into it people started phoning me, and I watched the rest,' Newt said, and pulled a pair of spex from his shirt pocket, swung them to and fro. 'You can watch too, if you want.'

'The son of a bitch ambushed me,' Macy said. She felt as if all the air had been knocked out of her.

'If you ask me, you're already part of his propaganda machine,' Newt said. 'What are you going to do about it? Not that I'm offering to help, of course. Let's say I'm mildly curious.'

'I don't know. But I guess trying to stay outside of this mess isn't an option any more.'

4.

After the ambush that very nearly wrecked Operation Deep Sounding, the volume of diplomatic bluster grew louder on both sides. The Brazilian ambassador at Camelot, Mimas dispatched to every city and settlement in the Saturn System a clip in which he protested the reckless action of the crew of the SV Happy Trails and warned that any further attempt to interfere with the lawful passage of Brazilian ships anywhere in the system would be met with appropriate force. The mayors, senators, selectmen, and prefects of those cities and settlements that had voted to adopt a neutral stance responded with a variety of emollient messages that all made a point of noting that the Ghosts were outside their jurisdiction. The mayor of Paris, Dione made a long and impassioned speech in which he claimed that any activity by the so-called joint expedition was a legitimate target for peaceful protest, boasted that he had authorised the installation of various defence systems around his city, including gamma-ray lasers and rail guns capable of firing canisters of smart gravel, and said that he would not hesitate to take action if the Brazilians and Europeans made any move that might be perceived as a threat to his city's safety and sovereignty. Pundits on both sides were still analysing the implications of this challenge when, in her first public appearance for more than a year, the gene wizard Avernus released a short address to the net.

She spoke with straightforward directness to a locked camera that framed her head and shoulders. A brown-skinned, white-haired old woman wearing no make-up or jewellery, lacking any cosmetic cuts. And yet she radiated charisma. She was as famous as any scientist living or dead, and older than almost anyone else on Earth or in the Outer System. She had been born on Earth at the beginning of the twenty-first century. She had survived the oil wars and the water wars and the general chaos of the first great round of climate change, and after the Overturn had been one of the leaders of the rebellion that had led to the great exodus to Mars and to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. She had created the first vacuum organisms, designed a variety of ecosystem packages adopted by most of the Outer System's cities, settlements and habitats, redesigned the human body for life in low gravity, developed the first longevity treatments, and much more. Her fame had survived the decades when she had more or less withdrawn from the public eye, and had transmuted to rich and strange rumours and legends. So this breach of her famous reclusiveness instantly captured the attention of everyone in the Outer System and everyone of any importance on Earth, although analysts, commentators, and psycholinguists who afterwards took it apart word by word agreed that, while she spoke with admirable clarity, the content of her address was mundane and platitudinous.

Avernus spoke of the different paths that the nations of Earth and the colonies of the Outer System had taken after the Overturn, each driven in a different direction by the different problems that they had had to overcome. But despite these differences, she said, the recent histories of the peoples of Earth and of the Outer System were underlain by the same indomitable human spirit, often reckless yet also often admirable, that drove heroic attempts to understand and improve the human condition and fix its imprint on the future through endeavours that were staggering in scale and ambition.

Time and again we fail, she said. And each time we fail, we rise up again and continue, determined this time to fail better. We do this because we have the great gift of being able to see farther than the compass of our little lives, and it is because we want to preserve what is best from those lives that human beings, whether from Earth or from any of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, must put aside all differences and unite in common cause. In this spirit, she asked the Outers to refrain from antagonising the expedition currently in orbit around Mimas, reminded her audience about the importance of developing trade links, and alluded to the great things that the two branches of humanity could achieve through cooperation: a truly Utopian future in which Earth was finally and fully healed, and the entire Solar System was colonised by a peaceful and harmonious plurality of city-states. As for the immediate future, she called for the establishment of an entity similar to the United Nations of old, where representatives from every inhabited moon in the Jupiter and Saturn Systems, and every nation of Earth, could discuss their differences. Finally, she announced that for the duration of the present crisis she would take up residence in Paris, Dione, where she hoped to make a contribution to the process of peace and reconciliation.

The speeches of Avernus and Marisa Bassi defined the polarisation of the Outer System. On the one hand there were those who wanted to bridge the historical divide between the Outer System and Earth through cultural exchange, trade in goods and intellectual property, diplomacy, and cooperation in projects that would benefit everyone. On the other, there were many who not only distrusted the motives of the three great political powers of Earth but also felt that Earth itself was irrelevant, a spent force whose show of military strength was a futile reflex. Who boasted that the future belonged only to the Outer System, which was at the brink of a cultural and scientific revolution that would drive the next stage in human evolution.

As in the Outer System, so on Earth. In the Brazilian Senate, supporters of the green saint Oscar Finnegan Ramos argued with great passion for a continuation of the efforts to establish trade links. But the majority believed that the Operation Deep Sounding incident proved that the Outers were a growing threat to the people of Earth, and there was a major setback for those arguing for peace when, in secret session, the head of national security presented evidence that various cities on the moons of Saturn were stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, including genetically engineered plagues and a variety of nuclear weapons, and that Marisa Bassi had commissioned a feasibility study on the possibility of perturbing the orbits of certain short-period comets, echoing the infamous plan by Martian colonists to target Earth with a Trojan asteroid. When portions of this evidence were leaked to public forums, there were riotous demonstrations against the Outers in every major city in Greater Brazil and the European Union, and the government of the Pacific Community announced that its expeditionary force to the Saturn System would ensure that the tragic mistakes of past history were not repeated.

'The plain fact is that the opponents of peace have already made up their minds, and will use anything to buttress their claims,' Oscar Finnegan Ramos told Sri Hong-Owen. 'And so they stir up fear and hatred. Unreasoning prejudice. As long as people fear their enemy they will believe that he is capable of any atrocity. These rumours about plagues and planet-killers are rumours only, but in the present climate they are a very effective way of demonising the Outers. And we are disadvantaged because we cannot stoop to the level of our opponents by spreading false counter-rumours. We must cleave to the truth because otherwise we will become like our enemies, and traduce our own cause. At the same time there is no point being right, logically, morally, historically . . . Being right in every sense, but losing.'

Sri had come to the green saint's hermitage in Baja California at his request. He had been receiving so many visitors because of the growing crisis that a temporary runway had been constructed outside the little town of Carrizalito. Sri and her two sons had flown there directly from the Antarctic, and then she'd had to wait at a control point while Oscar finished talking with a delegation of scientists from the European Union. Someone had tried to poison his water supply a month ago, and the level of his security was higher than Sri had ever known it. Armoured vehicles and soldiers at the airport. Checkpoints along the road from Carrizalito. A trim, deadly corvette cutting back and forth a couple of kilometres out at sea. And despite having been thoroughly searched at the control point, she'd had to submit to the attentions of a wolf patrolling at the edge of the dunes before it allowed her to walk the rest of the way to Oscar's hut.

Now, as Sri and Oscar strolled along the beach in the warm whip of the wind, the wolf followed them at a discreet distance, salt-white sunlight glittering off its mirror-finish hide as it stalked through combed stands of dry grass along the crests of the dunes. Sri had once seen one of the combat machines chase down a deer in the grounds of the factory where they were constructed. The executives who had laid on the demonstration had made bets about how long the deer would last as the wolf hazed it back and forth, playing with it as a matador plays a bull until at last the deer could run no more and stood splay-legged and trembling, foam dripping from its muzzle, and the wolf took it down with a single flechette that struck it just below the base of its skull and severed its spinal column.