'I'm accompanying Colonel Angel Garcia. Perhaps you've heard of him? A very eminent scientist. I'm sure that you and Mr Bakaleinikoff would enjoy meeting him. And I have no doubt that he would be delighted to hear all about your telescope.'

'You friend is free to talk with anyone and everyone,' Macy Minnot said. 'That's why we're all here.'

'I'll tell him that. I can see that you are eager to go about your business, but before I go, perhaps you can tell me,' Loc said, struck by sudden inspiration, 'if there's any truth in the rumour that Avernus will be attending this conference?'

'What rumour would that be?' Macy Minnot said, her expression suddenly guarded.

Her companion, Pete Bakaleinikoff, said, 'She's only ever been to one of the conferences. The first.'

'Confidentially, we're most anxious to establish contact with her,' Loc said. A complete lie, of course, but Macy Minnot couldn't possibly know that, that was the beauty of the thing. Oh, the fun he was going to have, messing with her head. 'As you have talked with her publicly and at length, perhaps you might know of a way of reaching out to her-'

A hand fell on his shoulder, bore down. Loc turned, looked up at a skinny young man whose pale angular face and disordered crest of black hair was familiar from intel reports, and said, 'Mr Jones. A pleasure to meet you at last.'

Newton Jones ignored him, saying to Macy Minnot, 'Is this scunner who I think he is?'

'He wants me to help him get in touch with Avernus.'

'Did you tell him that if he hops on a railcar and runs over to Paris, he'll probably find her there?'

'I was about to tell him that you don't reach out to her; she reaches out to you,' Macy Minnot said.

She looked a trifle piqued. Some trouble there, between the maiden and her white knight.

'I have good and important reasons to contact Avernus,' Loc told her, but the moment was gone, and so was his enjoyment. 'Unfortunately, Marisa Bassi has made it very clear that Brazilians and Europeans are not welcome in Paris, which is why I was hoping she might be here.'

'I'm surprised, Mr Ifrahim. I thought you'd be all for war.'

'It won't be the first time you've been mistaken about my motives, Miz Minnot,' Loc said and sketched a bow. 'I do hope we can talk later.'

And maybe he could try to fake her out without Mr Newton Jones interfering.

Macy Minnot waited until he had gone past before she called to him.

'I hope you don't have a problem with rats, Mr Ifrahim. They do all the gardening here, and generally keep the habitat ticking over. They're pretty hard to avoid.'

Loc couldn't let her have the last word. 'I'm quite able to rise above all kinds of minor annoyance, Miz Minnot.'

The thing was, he really did have a problem with rats. He hated them because they reminded him of his childhood in the shanty town at the edge of the ruins of Caracas. The dingy two-room apartment whose front door opened straight onto the congested street. The ripe smoky stink of the recycling heaps that rose above the crumbling buildings, and the flies that swarmed everywhere in the sticky summer heat, big green flies walking over food and people's faces, swarms of tiny black flies that got in your hair and eyes and nose.

Like all the other kids in the neighbourhood, Loc had earned pocket money by salvaging scraps of rebar and wiring from the heaps, scrambling amongst the monstrous trucks that brought in rubble from the old city, destroyed in an earthquake twenty years ago and now being turned into parkland. Loc had escaped it all after he'd passed the civil-service examinations, had hauled himself up the endless rungs of the diplomatic service by hard work and relentless ambition. But no matter how far he'd risen the smell of burning garbage or the sight of a fly or cockroach or rat could bring memories of his wretched childhood crowding back. Rats had infested the recycling heaps. There had been a bounty on them, a couple of cents for every corpse. Some of the older boys had organised themselves into gangs that hunted them down, but Loc had never taken part. He'd hated rats then, and hated them even more now, and he had plenty of time to reacquaint himself with that visceral revulsion here. The organisers of the convention had stashed him and Colonel Angel Garcia in the worst level of the habitat, just above the hothouse basement that was the engine room of the habitat's ecosystem, where giant banyan trees knitted a dense maze of glossy leaves and branches above a floor of deep, rich mulch, and provided a home for a small army of rats.

As for the conference, the colonel was tedious company, Macy Minnot was avoiding him, and the discussion groups were dismayingly chaotic. No chairman, no formal presentations, no panels of distinguished scholars, just unruly mobs sparring and squabbling around memo spaces. Someone might spin out an idea for a few minutes, then someone else would interrupt and embellish it or demolish it, or start up an entirely new line of argument. More often than not, two or three people would be talking at once, trying to shout each other down. No consensus ever seemed to be reached on anything, everything was in flux, and in any case most of the business of the conference seemed to take place outside the timetabled discussions and workshops; it was not only a talking shop, but also a social event where delegates could meet old friends and make new ones, hike trails laid out in the extensive ice gardens on the surface, get drunk or stoned, get laid. There seemed to be an awful lot of semi-clandestine sex. And because Loc was excluded from the social and sexual ronde, he was having a hard time trying to understand just how seriously the Outers took their crackbrained schemes to launch robot probes or even manned ships to various stars, to create new kinds of human beings, to find ways of living for ever.

On top of all this, the small contingent of Ghosts attending the conference seemed to have decided to spend most of their time harassing him. Following him about and making loud and provocative remarks about his appearance, jostling him when he stood at the back of one of the discussions, interrupting Colonel Garcia whenever the man tried to speak. Loc was certain that they were responsible for the crude attempt at bugging the room that he and the colonel shared, but when he'd made a complaint to the organisers of the conference he'd been told that they didn't have to power to intervene, and besides, hadn't he heard of a little thing called freedom of expression?

On the third day of the conference, a couple of hours after the Pacific Community ship went into orbit around Phoebe, the Ghosts cornered Loc and started to tell him exactly how they were going to kick everyone from Earth out of the Saturn System. He managed to keep his temper, stalked out of the discussion with the Ghosts jeering at his back, and spent the rest of the day in the squalid little room that he shared with Colonel Garcia, surfing news sites. Here was a fuzzy video of the ship landing, snatched by an Outer tug passing within twenty million kilometres of the little moon. Here was a much sharper picture of the ship sitting in a big basin under a towering cirque of cliffs, taken by one of the telescope arrays that monitored traffic. Small smudges a few pixels in size were circled - people in pressure suits, apparently. As yet there was no comment from the government of the Pacific Community, but there was plenty of chatter across the Outers' news boards. Predictably, Marisa Bassi, the mayor of Paris, Dione, had denounced the landing, and the usual hotheads and firebrands were making a lot of noise, too. Early polls reported a ninety-eight per cent disapproval rating.

It wasn't one of the worst scenarios - the Pacific Community hadn't gone into orbit around an inhabited moon, or attacked one of the Outers'

cities or settlements, or shot up or captured one of their ships -but it was still pretty damned serious. Yet when Loc placed a call to the embassy in Camelot, Mimas and requested that they charter a ship to take him and Colonel Garcia off Dione, he was told to stay where he was. He was to protect the colonel from any blowback and talk to friendly delegates, reassure them, tell them that the Brazilian and European joint expedition strongly disapproved of the seizure of Phoebe, contrast its good intentions with the Pacific Community's naked aggression.

Loc had no intention whatsoever of putting himself in harm's way. Colonel Garcia could look after himself, and there was no point talking to any Outers, no matter how friendly, until this clusterfuck of a situation had cooled down. So he stayed in the room, following developments on Phoebe and across the Saturn System, until hunger drove him out early in the evening.

He was almost immediately ambushed by one of the Ghosts, a tall leathery woman named Janejean Blanquet, who got right in his face and told him that if Earth thought that it could take over one of their moons, it could fucking well think again.

'Maybe no one happens to be living on that rock, but it's still our rock. We'll take it back, little man. You wait and see.'

She'd cornered him near the bottom of the ramp that spiralled through the habitat's core, bamboos and a wall of black stone on one side, a drop to the banyan jungle at the base of the habitat on the other. No one else was about, no one Loc could appeal to, no one to witness this latest assault on his dignity. He tried to reason with the woman, smiling his nicest smile, saying that she was threatening the wrong person, that he had nothing to do with the Pacific Community, its ship, or its plans, but she was drunk or stoned, and out for blood.

'We'll kick their asses off that rock and maybe we'll kick your ass right here and now if you dare to stick around,' the woman said, leaning in to poke a bony finger at Loc's chest. Her pupils were shrunken to pinpricks in her jittery blue eyes; her breath was foully metallic. 'You get off of our moons and out of our sky before we blow you away.'

Loc tried to slide around her, but she was as quick as a snake, stepping right up to him, poking at him again. He grabbed her wrist and twisted it, she howled and clawed at his eyes, and he drove her backward through a thicket of bamboo, pinned her against the wall. For a moment, caged by rustling stems of bamboo, they stared at each other. Then the woman spat in Loc's face and raked his face from cheek to chin with her filthy nails, and he grabbed hold of her lacquered crest of snow-white hair and slammed her head against the stone wall and did it again and again, until her eyes rolled back and she went limp in his arms.

A wave of revulsion and panic surged through him and he shook her off and pushed backward. The woman fluttered bonelessly to the floor. Loc saw blood and bits of matter on a facet of black stone, blood on the tips of his fingers when he touched his stinging cheek.

All right. None of this was in any way his fault, but there was no way he could explain this, no way he could expect a fair hearing. The only thing he could do was get out, get as far away from here as quickly as possible.

He looked all around, leaned at the rail and squinted up past the thread of braided light-pipes strung through the axis of the shaft, listening for any sounds of alarm, then scooped up the Ghost's limp body. She was as light as a bird. The back of her head was slick with blood and looked dished. Blood soaked the neck of her white coveralls. Her eyes were half-closed and she was breathing with an irregular rattling snore. Hide her down amongst the roots of the banyans? No, the goddamned rats would find her at once. Loc staggered forward, shuffled up the spiral until he reached one of the little terraced gardens, and dumped her behind a stand of flowering bushes, then called Colonel Garcia and told him to meet him at the room. The man started to protest but Loc cut him off and told him that something had come up: they needed to discuss it privately, and at once.

As he pulled off his spex he caught the ghost of his reflection in a panel of wet black rock: his rakish profile, his wolfish grin. A fat surge of adrenalin was kicking in. Everything seemed a little brighter, more real. He hadn't felt so alive since Rainbow Bridge.

Loc was stuffing his possessions into his crash case when Colonel Garcia came into the room. 'This had better be important,' he said. 'I was in the middle of a very interesting discussion about recreating organisms from pure information.'

'I was attacked,' Loc said, and gave a quick precis of his version of what had happened. 'We can't stay here. They'll lynch us.'

'The woman who attacked you - she is dead?'

Colonel Garcia was a small, ugly man with a pot belly. He was staring, slightly pop-eyed, at the scratches on Loc's cheek.

'I don't know,' Loc said. 'She was still breathing when I left her.'

'You left her? Where? If she is badly hurt, we must see to her-'

'It doesn't matter if she lives or dies,' Loc said. 'They'll lynch us anyway. We have to get out of here. Then we can call for emergency retrieval.'

'No.'

'No?' Loc stared at the colonel. He couldn't believe what he'd just heard.

'No. Whatever it was that happened between you and this woman, this so-called Ghost, it is not grounds for emergency retrieval. We are guests,'

Colonel Garcia said primly. 'We are here thanks to the generosity of the government of Camelot, who supplied the ship that brought us here, and the organisers of this conference, who invited us. This is what we will do, Mr Ifrahim. First, you will take me to where you left this poor woman and we will summon medical aid. Then we will inform our hosts about what happened.'

Loc laughed. He couldn't help it. It bubbled out of him, a kind of squeaking noise fuelled by disbelief and anger. 'You want me to give myself up to the Outers?'

'We must do the right thing. We must endeavour to make sure that this does not turn into a serious diplomatic incident. If you are innocent, you have nothing to fear,' Colonel Garcia said.

Loc laughed again, and swung his crash case in a wide arc and smashed its hard edge into Colonel Garcia's face. The man squeaked in shock and reeled backward, clutching at his broken nose, and Loc swung the case again, a solid blow to the side of his head. The colonel slid loose-limbed to the floor, blood bubbling in his nostrils, blood running from the triangular gash above his ear. Eyelids fluttering as he tried to focus on Loc.

'You brought this on yourself, you stupid sanctimonious son of a bitch,' Loc said. 'You were going to get me killed.'

'Don't,' the colonel said weakly, and tried to raise his hand as Loc slammed the crash case down again.

3.

Cash Baker was about a million kilometres out from Mimas and the Glory of Gaia when he spotted a brief flare of fusion exhaust dead ahead: a transport moving off at a fast clip. He raised mission control and asked for an update, but although the laser line was tightly focused and strongly encrypted they refused to tell him who was piloting the tug or where it was going. One thing was sure. It wasn't heading out towards Phoebe and the Pacific Community ship: it was heading inwards, around Saturn.

One of the Outer ships trailing above and behind the Glory of Gaia sidled towards Cash as he approached. A squat tug, lit up with slogans from stem to stern, it launched several waves of tiny drones that fanned out across Cash's trajectory and flared in random bursts of hard white light and radio noise. Cash was in no mood for games. He punched straight past the fireworks display, flipped the singleship end for end and decelerated with pinpoint precision, gliding beneath the great curve of the Glory of Gaia's hull at a little under 0.1 metres per second, lining up with the cradle that slid out like a drawer in a morgue's rack and settling into it with a couple of brisk squirts from his attitude jets.

The two secret-service agents were waiting in the hangar and escorted him straight to a cubicle as soon as he'd been unhooked from his bird. They assured him that the status of the mission hadn't changed after the Pacific Community had seized control of Phoebe, but they wouldn't or couldn't tell him anything about the transport. Fizzing with impatience, stinking and itchy in his acceleration suit, Cash spent one of the longest hours of his life going through the flight record line by line, and as soon as the debriefing was over he headed straight to the pilots' mess.

Luiz Schwarez and Caetano Cavalcanti were playing chess. Cash sat athwart them and said, 'Maybe you can tell me about the transport that just now ran off full tilt. Did I miss the outbreak of war?'

Luiz moved a pawn one space and said, 'You didn't hear?'

'I've been out,' Cash said. 'Didn't you miss me?'

'There's been an incident,' Caetano said.

'On Dione,' Luiz said. 'Some trouble with a diplomat and the scientist he was escorting.'

'Bunch of bullshit,' Caetano said as he studied the board.

'The Outers killed the scientist, the diplomat got away, and the transport is going to pick him up,' Luiz said.

'I thought we couldn't land on Dione,' Cash said. 'In case the mad mayor tries to take us out with his famous defence network.'

'The guy that needs rescuing is on the run from the Outers,' Luiz said.

'The only way he can get off Dione is if someone goes in to fetch him off. The transport is carrying a squad of marines in case there's trouble on the ground.'

'It's going in without any support?'

'Of course,' Luiz said. 'We don't want to rile up the Outers any more than we have to. Are you sure you want to do that, C?'

'You bet,' Caetano said, and let go of the knight he'd just moved.

'Then you won't mind if I do this,' Luiz said, and moved a rook straight down the left-hand side of the board and took a pawn.

'Shit,' Caetano said.

'Sounds like a hairy mission,' Cash said.

'It's pretty bad,' Luiz said. 'Before it goes in, the transport is going to have to hang at least one orbit so it can locate and confirm the pick-up point. And if the Outers don't take a pop at it then, you can bet they'll be scrambling to get on its tail when it goes in. It's definitely going to have to throw some fancy evasive moves on the way out.'

'Who's flying it?'

'That would be Colly.'

'The little son of a bitch,' Cash said. 'How did he get to be so lucky?'

4.

Macy was eating dinner with Newt when two Ghosts walked into the refectory. A man and a woman, both dressed in white, faces hardened by grim and determined expressions, they looked around at the tables scattered amongst stands of greenery. Then the woman touched the man's arm, pointed at Macy. Newt started to rise as they came across the room and Macy told him to sit down, she'd handle them.

'If they've come to give you a hard time because of that ship landing on Phoebe, you tell them to go to hell,' Newt said.

'I tell you what, I'm going to hear what they have to say for themselves before I decide what to do,' Macy said, irritated by his presumption.

The two Ghosts loomed at the table. 'Macy Minnot,' the man said. 'We are here to arrest you for the murders of our friend and colleague Janejean Blanquet, and of Colonel Angel Garcia. Stand up. You are coming with us.'

'You have to be kidding,' Macy said.

She was too astonished to be afraid or angry, but Newt was giving the man a look of naked aggression.

'On what grounds?' he said. 'And more to the point, by what authority?'

'By the authority vested in us by the mayor of Paris, for the defence of Dione and the rest of the Saturn System,' the woman said.

'As for the grounds,' the man said, raising his voice, speaking loudly for the benefit of everyone in the refectory, 'Janejean was left to die after her skull was fractured in a brutal assault. Colonel Garcia was found dead in his room, also brutally assaulted. The diplomat Loc Ifrahim has fled from this habitat. We believe that Macy Minnot aided and abetted him. She will come with us, for questioning.'

Macy said as calmly as she could, 'If Loc Ifrahim killed these people, I want you to know that I hope that he answers for it. I really do. But you should also know that you're making a bad mistake by thinking that I have anything to do with this, just because of who I am.'

'I've been with her all day,' Newt said, getting to his feet. 'And I can round up at least twenty people who can say the same.'

The woman reached behind herself and in a fluid movement pulled out a taser and shot him. He went down at once, twitching and jerking. The man produced a pistol and raised it above his head and shot out a chunk of the ceiling, the noise loud and hard. People dived for cover or sat frozen as a cloud of dust rolled down over them.

'You can walk out with us or we can knock you down and carry you,'

the man told Macy. 'Your choice.'