Sitting cross-legged by the transparent wall of the capsule, silhouetted against strings of lights wrapped around clustered towers, Yuli said, 'I've collated the first rolling polls. Do you want to know what people are saying about you?'

8.

Sri's parting with Alder was awkward and oddly formal. For his sake, she tried her best to appear cool and calm and businesslike, and he was quiet and withdrawn, clearly anxious about what lay ahead. The dangers of the immediate future, and the treacherous reefs of power and politics that he would have to navigate on his own in the weeks and months to come.

As soon as Sri left for her meeting with Oscar Finnegan Ramos, Alder would be driven to a business meeting at the offices of Sri's lawyers, where two men were waiting to smuggle him out of the building and take him to a safe house. His appearance would be altered by minor plastic surgery and a couple of simple tweaks that would darken his skin and change the colour of his eyes and then, travelling under a carefully faked identity, he would make his way by road and rail to Buenos Aires, where he would rendezvous with a chartered plane that would fly him to Antarctica. This subterfuge was necessary not only because of the security order that prevented him from travelling anywhere outside Brasilia, but also because in a few hours Euclides Peixoto's men would almost certainly want to arrest and question him.

Sri had been gifted the site of the Antarctic research facility by the government of Greater Brazil many years ago, she had spent much of her modest fortune developing it, and last night she had signed everything over to her eldest son. Her legal team had assured her that any challenge in the civil courts to the transfer of title would be thrown out. It was possible that Euclides Peixoto and his friends and allies might attempt to confiscate the facility by adding a rider to some bill passing through the Senate, or try to take control of it by main force. But even if they could find enough allies to win a vote, legal challenges would drag on for years, and it was highly unlikely that they would risk exposing their hand and damaging their reputation by staging an armed assault on private property.

So Alder would be as safe there as anywhere else, and would take charge of the research facility and preserve and protect Sri's work. She planned to return in triumph as soon as possible, of course, but that didn't make it any easier to say goodbye.

'I wish I could take Berry with me,' Alder said.

'He'll be much safer with me.'

Last night, Berry had been put to sleep and packed into a hibernation coffin that had left the apartment complex in the truck that each evening hauled away trash for recycling.

'I'll miss him,' Alder said. 'And I'll miss you.'

Sri felt a yearning tenderness deep as hunger, wanted to sweep her brave and beautiful son up, crush him to her and never let him go, but she could not allow herself to show any weakness or doubt.

'We will survive this,' she said. 'We will survive, and we will go on to do great things together.'

'I won't let you down.'

'I know you won't.'

Sri flew directly to Baja California in a helicopter piloted by Yamil Cho. They landed near the control point and Sri followed the path through the dunes to Oscar Finnegan Ramos's hermitage.

A wolf squatted at the point where the path funnelled between steep sand ridges. The nervous systems of the wolves had been Sri's first successful synthetic design. She'd based them on the long, quick-firing fibres of mantid shrimps and the visual information-processing of turkey vultures, and in a tradition several centuries old she'd built a back door, accessed through the olfactory system. Before leaving the helicopter, she'd dabbed onto the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger a spot of oil containing a tailored indole. Now she placed her hand in the slot of the wolf's ID system and indole molecules latched onto tailored receptors in the machine's olfactory bulb, deactivated its internal checksum system, and opened a secret pathway that gave direct access to task priorities. When she touched the signet ring on her little finger to one of the wolf's motion-detecting lenses, the patterned flash of light from the LED in the ring instantly reprogrammed its targeting system.

The wolf rose on strong multi-jointed limbs and shot its weapons systems from their sheaths. Baring its fangs. Sri knew that the machine was under her command, but the display of firepower was still unsettling. She told it to stand down the security system to which it was linked, and then walked on towards the beach, floating on her cold resolve.

Seated on a tree trunk salt-whitened and stripped of bark, Oscar Finnegan Ramos was using a short-bladed horn-handled knife to whittle a whistle from a finger of wood. As usual, he wore only a pair of shorts. He looked up as Sri and the wolf approached, his dark eyes blank as windows in an empty house.

'I thought it would be you,' he said. 'At least you had the decency to come here yourself. You didn't send one of those psychotic creatures that you keep on the Moon.'

'I always wondered if you knew about them.'

'Whose idea is this? Yours or my nephew's?'

'It's all mine.'

'Once upon a time you were able to take the long view. But you've grown so very impatient in the past few years. It will be your undoing sooner or later.'

'This is my only chance to save my life and the lives of my sons.'

'You should never take chances in a game as deep and dangerous as this. You should always know exactly what you are doing, why you are doing it, and what the consequences will be. And, forgive me, but you seem very uncertain about what you think you need to do. Are you sure that you have thought it through?'

'I know exactly what I must do. Don't make this hard.'

'By which you mean, "Die quietly. Don't make a scene. Don't make it hard for me."'

'Will it be hard for the man who gave me the data needle? The man you sacrificed?'

'I must suppose that Euclides manoeuvred you into thinking that killing me was the only way you could save yourself. He has forced you to do what he wants you to do, and made you think that it is entirely your idea.' Oscar's smile was gentle and serene. 'If you have any doubts, then perhaps it is because you know this, but have not yet thought it through.'

'I've thought it all through, most carefully.'

Sri felt very calm, but she had to thrust her hands deep in the pockets of her blouson to hide the trembling that she couldn't bring under control. When Oscar pared a final few flakes from the whistle and put it to his lips and blew a long low note, she felt her scalp freezingly contract, wondered if he had just activated some kind of backup security system. But nothing happened. The hot wind still blew, bending the grass on top of the dunes; low waves still unrolled far down the beach, falling from left to right; out to sea, the corvette was silhouetted against the burning water like a cut-out. No doubt people aboard it were watching this encounter, but it didn't matter. The wolf had control of the local security net and the statite thousands of kilometres above, and it had deactivated the ship's weapon systems, too.

Oscar smiled at her. 'I have lived a very long time. And anyone who lives even half as long as I knows that you live every day with death. Death is your constant companion. Always just around the corner of your thoughts. Even on a beautiful day like this. I had thought that when it came, I might welcome it. I was wrong,' he said, and threw his little knife in a straight hard trajectory at Sri.

The wolf shot the knife out of the air with its chunker, and Oscar tumbled backward off the tree trunk and then he was up and running, weaving this way and that. The wolf went after him, but had trouble getting traction in the soft dry sand. When Oscar jinked around the fencing he'd erected to protect the latest batch of turtle eggs, the wolf ploughed straight into it, poles clattering off its shell, netting wrapping around two of its legs and bringing it to its knees.

'Kill him!' Sri yelled into the hot wind. Frightened and angry, her thoughts cut loose, tumbling. Oscar was swarming up a slope of sand on all fours. Wings of sand cascaded around him.

'Just do it! Kill him!'

The wolf reared up. There was a tremendous flash of light and Oscar was blown sideways out of a fountain of sand and smoke. He rolled down the slope in an untidy bundle and lay still on his back.

Sri called Yamil Cho, then walked up the beach and made sure that her mentor was dead. As she stood up, the helicopter stooped in low over the dunes in a roar of over-driven turbines, landing on the hard pan of sand at the edge of the water.

It took off as soon as Sri climbed inside. Beach and sparkling ocean tilted outside the cabin. The corvette was drawing a wide white wake in sparkling blue water as it turned towards the shore.

'The shuttle?' she said as she fell into the seat beside Yamil Cho.

'Prepped and ready,' Yamil Cho said.

'Berry?'

'Already aboard. We'll be there in twenty minutes.'

The helicopter was turning end for end as it rose. Sri saw the dunes stretched out along the shore, the dry brown flanks of the mountains. She saw the thin white line of the road, a thread of greasy black smoke rising where the control point had been. The sun shone with serene beneficence in a perfect blue sky. It occurred to her that it might be her last day on Earth.

PART FOUR.

1.

After Operation Deep Sounding, Cash Baker and the other singleship pilots were kept busy flying so-called science missions around Saturn's moons. They mapped variations in gravity and radio fields and overflew every major city and settlement, probing them with radar and sidescanning microwave arrays, shooting high-resolution videos. Much of the data could have been acquired remotely or by using drones, but the overflights were meant to be deliberately provocative, establishing the dominance of the Brazilian and European joint expedition, testing the capabilities of the Outers'

traffic-control and defence systems. According to the psy-ops officers, every overflight contributed to an ongoing hydra-headed programme aimed at promoting fear and hostility within the Outer community, destabilising its social and political structures, exacerbating divisions between belligerent factions and those still trying to prevent war, and panicking those communities as yet undecided into declaring neutrality. Most of the pilots were sceptical about the strategy. Luiz Schwarez said that it was like hitting a hornet's nest with a stick and hoping that at some point they would start stinging each other instead of you. 'When it comes down to it, Outers are Outers. They'll stick together against a common enemy despite their differences.'

'If you're gonna fight someone, there's no point tweaking his nose or throwing insults,' Colly Blanco said. 'You just go ahead and do it. Make sure you throw the first punch.'

'I'd volunteer for a first strike,' Cash said.

'We all would,' Luiz said. 'It's why we got cut. It's why we're here.'

'Instead of which, we're sitting here with targets painted on our asses while psy-ops dicks around with black propaganda and denial-of-service attacks,' Colly said. 'And if one of the tweaks decides to take a pop at us, we could be in trouble. All they need to do is throw a bunch of high-speed gravel at this damn hulk of a ship. Some of it is bound to get through, do to us like the Martians tried to do to Earth a hundred years ago with the goddamn comet.'

'It was an asteroid,' Luiz said. 'The Chinese used the comet against the Martians. But you have a point.'

'Ice, rock, fucking cow flop, it don't make no difference when it's coming at you at ten thousand klicks per,' Colly said.

Three days later the resupply ship, the Getulio Dornelles Vargas, entered orbit around Mimas. The Pacific Community's ship wasn't far behind, and four more Brazilian ships had just left Earth orbit. Three were headed to Jupiter; the fourth, the Glory of Gaia's sister ship, the Flower of the Forest, was bringing General Arvam Peixoto to Saturn.

After the Getulio Dornelles Vargas laid up alongside the Glory of Gaia, Cash Baker was summoned to a meeting with two secret service agents who told him that he had been selected for a clandestine mission.

'You can't discuss or disclose anything about this with anyone else,'

one of the agents said.

'That includes the mapping specialist you're bunking with,' the other agent said. 'It also means that if you are captured we will deny all knowledge of you.'

Cash dealt them his best grin. 'Aren't we all friends here? Why don't you just tell me what you have in mind?'

A couple of hours later Cash was buttoned up inside his singleship, watching from several perspectives as a dropshell was loaded into the starboard slot in place of the weapon pod. The dropshell was about the size of a coffin, little more than an open cockpit set in front of an ion motor, with small but powerful solid-fuel boosters slung either side. It reminded Cash of the ancient sports car that his great uncle Jack had lovingly rebuilt, hand-machining replacements for rusted-out components, sculpting new bodywork from resin laminate and painting it with fifteen hand-rubbed coats of cherry-red lacquer. Uncle Jack had driven that old car at the head of every neighbourhood parade, Thanksgiving, Homecoming, and Earth Day, until one fine summer's day, exactly a year after his wife had died of rampaging lymphoma, he'd fuelled it up and taken it out, tried to take a bend at more than a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour, and smashed it to smithereens and killed himself.

The passenger arrived at the very last minute, while Cash and the techs were running through final preflight checks. He was already wearing a pressure suit, but the ship's microwave scanner saw right through it, revealing a tall, skinny young man, picking up the asynchronous pulses of micro-hearts in his femoral and subclavian arteries: he was an Outer. The secret service agents hadn't told Cash word one about his passenger, had told him that all he had to worry about was delivering him to the right spot. But there was no doubt in Cash's mind that he was some kind of turncoat. A spy maybe, or an assassin.

The passenger was zipped into the dropshell and the slot was sealed, Cash finished the checks, and without any ceremony the singleship sank into its cradle and was everted into vacuum. Cash used the attitude jets to get some distance from the Glory of Gaia and lit the singleship's fusion motor, quickly outpacing the Outer tug that tried to follow him as he headed inwards towards Saturn.

The mission had been scheduled to begin during the final approach of the Pacific Community's big ship; hopefully, Cash's singleship could slip through the system while everyone was distracted. At present, trailed by a little fleet of sightseers, including a Brazilian drone, it seemed to be heading into a wide orbit around Saturn, but a final burn could put it anywhere else; in the pool Colly Blanco had set up, Cash had his money on Titan. Meanwhile, his singleship fell across the ring system, and gained velocity and altered course as it hooked past the edge of Saturn's banded cloud oceans. As he headed outwards, Cash risked pulsing the sky with deep radar. There were only a couple of Outer ships crossing the ring system, and neither of them had a chance of intercepting him. But that didn't mean that there might not be a few nasty surprises lurking out there, like spooks in a pitch-black basement . . .

He sped past the C Ring, with its gaps and its narrow, broken and braided ringlets, past the opaque sheet of the B Ring, and on out across the wide, star-filled gap of the Cassini Division. The A Ring spread beyond, with his target, Atlas, just outside its sharp edge.

Cash prepped for the drop, ran a final set of checks, and opened the slot where the dropshell rested. Atlas grew from star to speck to lumpy dot. It was a peanut-shaped chunk of water ice with a semi-major axis just forty kilometres across, yet its faint gravity braided complex ripples and clumps and kinks at the edge of the A Ring and kept the Keeler Gap open. Despite its small size, a crew of construction robots had paid it a visit and built no less than three small habitats, powered up and pressurised, waiting for hardy settlers or hermits. Or refugees, if there was a war. There were enough untenanted habitats scattered across Saturn's seventy-odd moons (most of them, like Atlas, irregular chunks of water ice) to house the populations of the system's cities twice over.

The proximity alarm sounded and Cash kicked into hyper-reflexive mode, made a microscopic adjustment to the singleship's trim as Atlas rolled towards him. He glimpsed a string of craters along one edge, the largest containing the emerald glint of a habitat, and the counter rolled back to zero and he fired the rail gun. Atlas flew past beneath the singleship's keel and at the same instant, with the tiny moon shielding the singleship from optical or radar observation, the dropshell shot away with a brief flare of its boosters. It was thoroughly stealthed, and Cash soon lost radar and optical contact as it angled away from the singleship. His best guess was that it was heading on out towards rendezvous with Dione.

Cash turned his bird end for end and began the long burn that would take him back around Saturn to Mimas. A quick check of the telescope showed that, some fourteen million kilometres away, the Pacific Community ship had made its own course correction. It looked as if he was going to be out ten bucks. It wasn't headed for Titan or any of the other inner moons. No, it was rising above Saturn's equatorial plane towards Pheobe, the largest of the flock of tiny, eccentric outer moons.

2.

When news about the Pacific Community ship's destination broke across the Saturn System's net, Loc Ifrahim was stuck in a small, rat-infested habitat on Dione, attending the Eighteenth Conference on the Great Leap Up And Out. Delegates had travelled from every inhabited moon of Saturn and Jupiter to talk about interstellar travel, from practical discussions of closed ecosystems, long-term hibernation, and mapping of extrasolar planets by deep-space telescope arrays, to esoteric raps about teleportation, downloading of minds into data storage, and all kinds of theoretical ways to beat the light-speed barrier. Loc was babysitting a scientist from the Air Defence Force, and had orders to reach out to delegates from those cities and settlements still hoping for some kind of reconciliation between Earth and the Outer System, and to do his best to put the fear of God into the rest. As far as he was concerned, things had started badly and had gone rapidly downhill from there.

The habitat was a fat shaft cored out of Dione's icy regolith east of Ilia Crater, adjacent to the railway that ran all the way around the moon's equator. A broad ramp with chambers and rooms set off it spiralled from top to bottom of the shaft, and its walls were landscaped with grottos, terraces, and cascades of ferns and mosses, waterfalls of lianas and flowering vines. Constructed as a venue for meetings and conferences, the place had no permanent inhabitants; its environmental systems were controlled and maintained by an AI and a crew of robots, and its hanging gardens were groomed by rats cut for intelligence and dexterity.

Loc had been extensively briefed about the people attending the conference, but no one had bothered to warn him about the rats. At the meet-and-greet reception on the first day, he'd been standing off to one side of the crowd, watching the complex social interplay with professional interest, when something had scuttled out from beneath a citrus bush. A black rat fully half a metre from nose to tail and wearing some kind of harness, running straight past his slippers. Loc recoiled, instinctively aimed a kick at the thing, missed, and swung right around in the vestigial gravity and stumbled off-balance into the railing at the edge of the terrace. He would have pitched over and plunged more than a hundred metres to the treetops that filled the bottom of the shaft if one of the Outers hadn't caught hold of his tunic and hauled him back.

It was a loathsome humiliation made worse when Loc saw Macy Minnot amongst the onlookers.

He'd already spotted her name on the list of delegates, had been planning to have a quiet word with her at some point. One on one. Setting the record straight. But now he had to make the best of a bad situation, so he straightened his tunic and ankled over to her and gave her his best smile, saying, 'Miz Minnot. How strange that we should meet again like this.'

'This is Loc Ifrahim,' Macy Minnot told the man standing beside her.

'Mr Ifrahim, my friend here is Pete Bakaleinikoff.'

Loc widened his smile by a notch. 'The designer of the telescopic array. And the uncle, I believe, of Newton Jones.'

'You've been keeping track of me,' Macy Minnot said. 'Should I be flattered or frightened?'

'I don't think you should be flattered or frightened,' Loc said. 'If I may be frank, I am not especially interested in you.'

'I'm glad to hear it,' Macy Minnot said.

Her auburn hair was clipped short, she was wearing a loose white T-shirt printed with a butterfly projection map of a planet with continents and oceans that was not Earth, and she seemed completely at home amongst the Outers, lifting her chin to give Loc that level, defiant look he remembered all too well. No doubt she was relishing his discomfort and was planning to tell everyone that he'd always been a clown, just look at the way she'd managed to get the better of him at Rainbow Bridge ... He hadn't realised until that moment quite how much he hated her, and decided then and there to put her in her place.

'Still, if you have a moment to spare,' he said, 'I would of course love to catch up. Perhaps over a drink or two, to show there are no hard feelings.'

'I'm not sure if I should be seen talking with you right now, let alone in private,' Macy Minnot said, returning his smile. 'People might think I'm consorting with the enemy.'

Loc told her that he was fostering trade and cultural links and promoting peace and reconciliation, a thankless task perhaps, but an essential one. He mentioned some of the many new friends he'd made on Mimas, explained that he had come here in the hope of making many more.