'You want us to win the war, don't you? You can help, in a small way, by reminding people about their enemy. By stiffening their resolve.'

'By spouting propaganda.'

'Only our enemies would look it at that way.'

'You want me to lie,' Macy said. 'I say what you want me to say - what Marisa Bassi wants me to say - and you'll let me go. Is that the deal?'

'He told me to tell you that he loves his city. That he'll do anything to save it. That if he had to, if he thought it would boost people's morale, he'd give you a show trial and execute you as a spy. Instead, he's giving you this one last chance to help the city, and to help yourself.'

'Ask Mr Bassi this,' Macy said. 'He'll lie, overturn the law, lock up people who don't agree with him, kill them . . . What exactly is he trying to save?'

'As far as we're concerned? It's the future of the human race,' Sada said. 'Little things like freedom, change, diversity. The kind of things you enjoyed while you were living with Newton Jones and the rest of his clan. Please, Macy. I want you to think very hard about cooperating because this really is your last chance.'

'Yes or no, right now?'

'Right now.'

'Something has happened, hasn't it? First questions about sabotage, and now this . . . Has the war begun?'

'Not yet. But it will, very soon. And when it does, no one will want to hear what you have to say. Think about that. Take your time. I'll leave you alone for a little while if you like. But I need your answer before I leave, and you won't be asked again.'

'No,' Macy said.

'No?'

'Tell him I've already told the truth and if he doesn't like it too bad. Tell him I won't lie for the greater good. Because how can it be good if it needs lies to support it?'

'This is your answer?'

'There can't be any other as far as I'm concerned.'

'I'm sorry it has to be this way,' Sada said, and flipped the knife through the air and caught it and sheathed it at her belt and swung up from the sling chair in one flowing movement.

The two guards stepped up behind Macy and hoisted her to her feet. She said, 'I'm sorry, too. Because I shouldn't have let you get caught up in this.'

'It is what it is because it is how it should be,' Sada said. 'You don't understand that now, but you will.'

Macy and Loc Ifrahim were being held with several other high-profile prisoners in what had been until very recently a research facility some twelve kilometres northeast of Paris: a single-storey blockhouse under a small dome set amongst fields of vacuum organisms pieced across the dusty plain inside Romulus Crater. Apart from the interrogation sessions she'd been kept in her cell, but now she was taken outside and saw that a big cage of fullerene struts strung with razor-wire mesh had been erected where plots had been planted out with tweaked fruit bushes and bean plants. At least fifty people were crowded inside. Like Macy, they were all wearing bright orange coveralls. Some sat at low tables or stood in little groups; others lay in hammocks or on the ground, arms over their faces to blot out the glare of the floodlights. Two drones hung at different levels in the air in front of the mesh, fans whirring in their delta wings, tasers and dart guns slung under their bellies, camera eyes gleaming red as flecks of blood.

The guards told Macy that they needed her cell for a new prisoner and unceremoniously thrust her through the gate and locked it behind her. As Macy looked around, a woman with wild white hair stepped up and struck her across the mouth and shoved her backward, pinning her by her shoulders against a wall of the toilet block and screaming into her face that this was all her fault, all her fault, her voice a rising shriek, her spittle spraying Macy's cheeks. Macy reared back and thumped her forehead into the bridge of the woman's nose as hard as she could. The woman squealed and let go of Macy, and Macy braced against the wall and kicked her square in the belly. The woman reeled backward and sat down hard. Sat with her hands flat on the ground on either side of her and her head bowed, blood running slow and thick from her broken nose, fat drops dripping onto the front of her orange coveralls. Someone told Macy enough, it was over; someone else put a hand on her arm. Macy ignored them and stepped forward. She was breathing hard. The side of her face was hot and swollen. Everyone in the cage had turned to watch her. The woman glared up at her through a curtain of white hair.

'Hate me if you want,' Macy told her. 'But we're both stuck in this thing together. It'll be easier if we try to get along.'

'They took me from my children,' the woman said. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. Bubbles of blood and mucus clung to her nostrils.

'They took me right in front of my children . . .'

People helped her up, led her away to another part of the cage. No one asked Macy if she was all right. She spotted a man she knew slightly - a construction engineer, Walt Hodder. A calm, competent man in his sixties, a solid and highly respected citizen, chair of the city's transport committee, he'd argued eloquently for caution in the city's public forum and had talked to Macy several times over the net after her interview with Avernus. When she went up to him, he told her that everyone here was associated with the peace and reconciliation movement - they'd all been arrested at more or less the same time. Give Marisa Bassi credit: he knew how to organise a coup. Paris's council had declared a state of emergency. Peace officers had closed off all airlocks and shut down the railway system. The city had been locked down. There had been nowhere to run. Avernus and her daughter and her crew had been arrested. So had two councillors prominent in the peace movement. 'For their own safety', according to Marisa Bassi. Gangs of people had made citizen's arrests and some had been pretty brutal, Walt Hodder said. The peace officers and wardens who had closed down the Permanent Peace Debate had run everyone inside through a gauntlet. Anyone who tried to resist had been beaten down. There were people here with broken arms and ribs, broken jaws and noses, concussions . . . No one knew what would happen next.

'I guess the right side lost the argument,' Macy said.

Outside the razor-wire perimeter, one of the drones had dropped down to aim its camera directly at her face. She turned away from it. She wished now that she had asked Sada what she'd been doing. Setting up some kind of stupid stunt, no doubt. But what?

'If Bassi gets his way, everyone will lose,' Walt Hodder said.

8.

Soon after the Uakti crossed Phoebe's orbit, some thirteen million kilometres out from Saturn, two singleships sharked in on it and precisely matched its delta vee, laying off ten kilometres on eiTHer side. A laser blink transmitted a message addressed to Sri Hong-Owen, ordering her to relinquish control so that she could be safely escorted to the Glory of Gala. A few seconds later a drone attached itself to an access port just forward of the shuttle's tail fin and spliced into the control bus. The shuttle's attitude jets swung through fifteen degrees on its horizontal axis and the main motor began to cycle through its preignition sequence.

'I believe we should prepare for a course change,' Yamil Cho told Sri.

Sri had been on edge ever since he'd spotted the singleships closing in on them. Now she felt the first flutters of real panic. 'They told us that they were escorting us to the Glory of Gaia. And that's exactly where we were headed. That's what I agreed to do. So why are we changing course?'

When she'd fled Earth, Sri's first and best hope had been to surrender to Arvam Peixoto. They'd had several full and frank exchanges as they headed out towards Saturn, Arvam aboard the Flower of the Forest, Sri following behind in the stolen shuttle. She had told him everything she knew about the plot fronted by Euclides, and what she'd had to do to escape it. He'd told her that he couldn't condone Oscar's assassination, but he admired the bold recklessness of her move: it would almost certainly expose the plotters, and in any case the old man's time would have soon come by one hand or another. At last they'd reached an agreement. Arvam would allow Sri to live in exile in the Saturn System and would do his best to protect Alder and the research station, and Sri would devote all of her skill and expertise to his service. She would unriddle Avernus's secrets, and make Arvam a very rich man. But now, at the moment of placing her life into his hands, giving herself whole and entire, she was scared that she had made a serious mistake.

Yamil Cho was unruffled. 'We were headed towards Mimas because the Glory of Gaia is in orbit around Mimas,' he said. 'If we are no longer headed towards Mimas, then something must have changed since we last checked the Glory of Gala's position.'

He conjured a long-range optical view in the memo space between their acceleration couches. The little moon was a small black spot centred on the pencil line of the rings, silhouetted against the umber bands that girdled Saturn's equator. A tiny spray of sparks was moving away from it. Yamil Cho zoomed in until the sparks resolved into clusters of blocky pixels. Registry tags popped up over each one, identifying the Glory of Gaia, the Flower of the Forest, the Getulio Dornelles Vargas, and half a dozen Outer ships that were trying to follow them.

'Where are they going?' Sri said. 'Where are we going?'

'It is too early to tell. But our three ships do appear to be heading in different directions.'

Sri studied the cluster of bright pixels under the Glory of Gaia tag.

'Dione,' she said at last. 'The mayor of Paris, Dione made his city the centre of the resistance to our presence. Arvam will want to deal with him personally. His vanity will demand no less.'

The main engine lit and acceleration pressed them into their couches.

'So this is war, then,' Yamil Cho said.

'War, or something very like it,' Sri said. 'It seems that we have arrived just in time.'

PART FIVE.

1.

The Glory of Gaia was a big ship, one of the largest ever built, but it was crammed with equipment and supplies and was carrying more than twice its normal complement. Senior officers doubled up in cabins; junior officers hotbedded in life capsules; specialists and technicians slept and ate and spent their off-duty hours in little encampments in corridors or in their cubbyholes or weapon blisters and turrets. The specialists' wardroom doubled as the sickbay because the sickbay, which lay conveniently close to the ship's spine, had been converted into a self-contained fighting bridge containing a triumvirate of strategic AIs and immersion tanks for the ship's combat team, and the combat team slept in their tanks because there was no room for them anywhere else. Everyone breathed a common air filled with the stink of cooking and farts and unwashed bodies, and everyone knew everyone else's business because they all lived in each others'

pockets - no one except the highest-ranking officers and security officials was ever out of sight or sound of at least two other people.

And then the Flower of the Forest made its rendezvous with the Glory of Gaia and the Getulio Dornelles Vargas, and two detachments of marines who had been slumbering like fairy-tale knights in hibernation coffins in the Glory of Gaia's zero-gravity gymnasium were revived and had to be fitted somehow into the already overcrowded quarters. Security personnel, technicians and senior officers shuttled back and forth between the three ships. Everyone knew that they were getting ready for battle even before General Arvam Peixoto gave an address to all ranks, telling them to prepare for action and assuring them that everything was in place to guarantee complete and total victory.

'The enemy does not yet realise it, but we are already engaged in a small, quiet war of attrition and diplomacy, of propaganda and subtle sabotage. Their morale has been sapped. Their reserves of air, food, and power are depleted. Half of their cities have indicated that they will offer no resistance. Several more are close to surrender. The rest will try to give us a fight, but in every case we will prevail. Not because we have might on our side, although we do, but because our cause is right and just, and each of us carries the proud flame of righteousness and justice in our hearts.'

Watching this in the memo space in the pilot's mess, Cash Baker told Luiz Schwarez, 'I guess we can forget about being rotated back home.'

The Glory of Gaia had been orbiting Mimas ever since it had arrived in the Saturn System. Now it fired up its motors and broke away, heading towards Dione, some two hundred thousand kilometres outward. Paris, Dione was expected to put up the fiercest resistance; General Peixoto would direct the campaign against it personally. The Flower of the Forest broke orbit too, heading towards Rhea. The small caravan of local ships which had been dogging the Glory of Gaia, skimming as close to it as they dared at random intervals, firing off clouds of noble gases and using lasers to print in letters fifty metres high brightly glowing slogans, launching drones the size of beetles that tootled across hundreds of empty kilometres on whispers of gas and blew apart in harmless firework displays or attached themselves to sally ports and used them as loudspeakers to transmit the screams of babies or wailing sirens into the interior, fired up their motors too. Falling behind one by one into the starry black as the Glory of Gaia and the Flower of the Forest steadily accelerated. The last fired off a huge cloud of neon and printed a final farewell: SO LONG, SUCKERS.

Despite numerous housekeeping regulations about securing everything in zero gravity and strictly enforced disciplinary measures that punished anyone caught breaking them, when acceleration established a pull down the Glory of Gala's axis all kinds of junk came loose or dropped from where it had drifted to or had been carelessly left. Cash Baker, Luiz Schwarez and the other pilots were in the hangars, helping the techs police a litter of loose tools, bolts, snips of wire and plastic and metal shavings, wrappers, and blobs of coolant and grease, when Vera Jackson came in and announced that there was going to be a special briefing in five minutes.

'Is it on?' Luiz said, voicing everyone else's thoughts.

'Not yet,' Vera Jackson said. She was grinning, though, so something was definitely afoot. 'Not exactly. You and Cash leave that crap to your crews and come with me.'

Arvam Peixoto and several aides were waiting for them in the briefing room. The general laid out the mission in his customary blunt manner. The Pacific Community's base on Phoebe had just received an anonymous warning that they had six hours to evacuate their position; someone had aimed a chunk of ice at them from Ymir, one of the most distant of Saturn's small, irregular moons.

The general pulled up photographs in the room's memo space, fuzzy long-range views of a pitted slab, and said that the Pacific Community had fired a missile at it, but the missile had been shredded by kinetic weapons as it made its final approach.

'The ice has a defence system mounted on it, which makes it a hard target,' the general said. 'The Pacific Community ships can't do anything other than a fast fly-by because it is coming right down their throats and they don't have the advantage of the new fusion motor. So we are going to help them out by intercepting and destroying it as soon as possible. It will show that Greater Brazil and the European Union are good friends of the Pacific Community, it will demonstrate our technological superiority, and it is an excellent opportunity to find out what the Outers are capable of. One of you will carry one of our last-resort H-bombs; the other two will deal with the defence systems mounted on the ice. We're still gathering data on it. As soon as we know what we need to know we will devise and send you a detailed plan of action. Meanwhile, you will launch immediately. The sooner you get there, the better the chance of destroying this thing, or significantly altering its trajectory. Do you all understand? Good. If you have questions, ask them now.'

Luiz asked if anyone knew who had fired off the ice.

'I'm sure they will make themselves known soon enough,' the general said. 'Anyone else? No? Then go with God and Gaia, and go swiftly.'

Within ten minutes, Cash was in the hangar, purged and plugged, fitted into his acceleration suit. He shook hands with Luiz Schwarez, Vera Jackson, and his tech team, and then he was zipped into his bird and jacked in. Just like any other routine run, except for the flutter of excitement in his chest, the way he'd felt as a kid whenever he'd set off with his two cousins into the sewers to hunt rats or possums.

As soon as his bird had dropped from its launch cradle, falling away from the Glory of Gaia at twenty metres per second, it began to pitch and roll, hunting for the point where it would catch up with its target. All Cash had was a set of coordinates: the chunk of ice was so far out and so small that it was beyond the detection limit of his radar and optical systems; even Phoebe was no more than a smudge of pixels. Luiz's and Vera's singleships hung close by to starboard, turning in unison. To port, the massive, bristling bulk of the Glory of Gaia occluded a large portion of the sky. Behind it were the few Outer ships still in pursuit, and beyond them was the misty bulk of Saturn.

Cash had a few seconds to take all this in, and then the singleship's motor fired up. He was on his way.

Phoebe was an unmodified primitive object that had been captured by Saturn when it had wandered in from the outer reaches of the Solar System. Its wide orbit, with a semi-major axis of some thirteen million kilometres, more than thirty times the distance between Earth and the Moon, was not only inclined to the gas giant's equatorial plane but was also retrograde. The rock fast approaching it had fallen at a slant across the entire system and the three singleships were catching up with it from behind, climbing above Saturn's equatorial plane and aiming at a point where their path would intersect with their target. Luiz said that this was the opening salvo of the long-awaited war, but Vera reckoned that it was a shot across the bows aimed by a bunch of hotheads.

'The tweaks don't have a consensus about anything,' she said.

'There's no central control, just a bunch of small groups with different agendas. And that's how we'll defeat them. After we move in on one or two hostile cities and show what we can do, the rest will surrender on any terms we care to make.'

'If this thing hits where it's aimed,' Luiz said, 'it won't matter who was responsible for it. It'll be war. Everyone who wants to fight will try to get in their shots right away. There won't be time for your domino theory to take hold.'

'It isn't going to hit where it's aimed because we're going to make sure it doesn't. Jettison any thoughts to the contrary, mister.'

'Permission to make another point, Colonel?' Luiz said.

'Don't be a smart-mouth, Schwarez,' Vera said. 'You know you can say anything you like to me as long as it isn't seditious. Since I'm in a good mood, you can even insult my mother.'

'I was thinking that they could have fired off any number of missiles at Phoebe, and told us about just this one.'

'It's possible,' Vera said. 'But so far Phoebe hasn't spotted anything else, and neither have we. Best leave speculation to the tactical crew, Schwarez. They do the thinking, we do the doing. You want to be less like them and more like me and Baker. You still awake, Baker?'

'Aye aye,' Cash said.

'Bullshit. You were daydreaming about the girl you left behind. Well as far as you're concerned she's long gone, fucking someone else and making babies. You're out here on the finest and most important mission you've ever flown, and you will stay frosty unless I tell you otherwise.'

'Aye aye.'

But it was hard not to zone out. Cash's radar and microwave and optical sensors were sweeping a vast bubble of space with the regularity of a ticking clock, but there was nothing in any direction for fifty thousand kilometres except for the other two singleships. The traffic moving between Saturn's moons and the chatter on the Outers' communications network was dwindling behind them, remote as the lazy drone of a beehive on a summer's day. So he fell through empty space with nothing to do but run system checks and stargaze until the Glory of Gala's tactical crew sent a brief, heavily encrypted package that contained a detailed survey of the target.

The optical image wasn't much of an improvement over the ones the general had shown them, but radar scans showed that the chunk of ice was roughly oval, one hundred and twenty metres long and thirty metres in diameter. Grooves cut down one side suggested that it had been sheared away from a bigger mass. A one-shot chemical motor was buried in a pit in the trailing end, and the tactical crew aboard the Glory of Gaia claimed that two faintly radar-reflective spots on either side of the midpoint were most likely attachment points for a pair of lightsails. The motor would have contributed most of the ice's delta vee, with a modest contribution from laser beams aimed at the sails, which would have made final course corrections after launch.

'Amazing that no one spotted it,' Vera said. 'With the fusion motor burning and lightsails reflecting gigawatts of laser light it must have been quite a sight when it got under way.'

'A tiny speck of light in a very big ocean of dark,' Luiz said. 'The volume inside Phoebe's orbit is something like one point seven times ten to the power twenty-one cubic kilometres. And this came from much farther away.'

If there had been lightsails they were long gone, ejected after the rock had achieved its final velocity. And so far the tactical crew hadn't been able to identify the defence system that had taken out the Pacific Community's missile; Cash and Vera would have to probe the ice very carefully before Luiz delivered the H-bomb. And they'd have to do it quickly. By the time they matched delta vee with the ice, they would be less than an hour out from Phoebe.

Cash, Vera and Luiz discussed tactics until turnover, when they flipped their ships end for end and began to decelerate. They had been travelling much faster than the ice to catch up with it, and now they had to shed a substantial portion of their velocity, a hard burn that peaked at three g and was followed by small course corrections to make sure that the three singleships were flying in precise formation, Cash and Vera about twenty kilometres apart, Luiz trailing several hundred kilometres behind. Their target grew dead ahead, a giant bullet slowly rotating, showing pits and craters across its surface. Still no sign of the defence system. Phoebe hung way beyond it, a faint sliver that in telescopic views resolved into a craggy globe with bright-floored craters, long linear grooves and scablands of loose material that had drifted to the bottom of slopes. One tremendous impact had created a basin more than forty-five kilometres in diameter, its rim a broken cirque more than four kilometres high, half the height of Everest; a gigantic bite out of the little moon that gave it a lopsided, flattened profile. The Pacific Community had built its base in a secondary crater near the huge cliffs of the basin's cirque; Luiz said that the chunk of ice would strike Phoebe close to the basin or even inside it.

'The people who sent it on its way knew exactly what they were doing.'

'We also know a thing or two,' Vera said. 'Ready with your proxy, Cash?'

'Aye aye.'

'On my mark.'

The two proxies shot ahead of Cash and Vera's singleships, closing on the ice. Cash was flying his by wire, plugged into its sensorium. Watching the ice's foreshortened bullet-shape grow, radar overlaying and giving depth to optical and infrared images. He could see the pit at the trailing end where the motor was buried, make out hollow spheres that had to be fuel tanks ringing it. The putative anchor points for the lightsails were sharp spikes on either side, and there was a faint image of a pair of broad hoops or girdles running from stem to stern . . .

The proxy was slowing, less than ten kilometres from the ice, when Cash lost contact with it. No warning, just like that. Vera's proxy was dead too. Both of them riddled by some kind of kinetic weapon, falling blindly past the ice now. Luiz, hung way back, transmitted to Cash and Vera a single video frame that showed two specks blurring away from the ice's trailing end, said that the hoops must be rail guns. 'They can fire forward or aft, and their ends are flexible so they can cover large arcs of sky. And they must be made out of some kind of superconducting fullerene, which would explain why it is so hard to spot on radar.'

Vera said it didn't matter what they were was made of because she was going to cook them right now, and she and Cash brought their X-ray lasers online and raked the ice port and starboard, burning long shallow troughs into the hoops, curtains of vaporised material exploding away. Then they fired dumb missiles at the trailing end of the ice and the missiles sped in unhindered and blew out the motor in a blink of hot light. Although the ice appeared to lie defenceless before them, Cash and Vera hung back and sent in another pair of proxies, and as the proxies snarked in there was a stutter of activity across the surface of the ice, sharp plumes of dust flying up from craters as a swarm of tiny drones hurled themselves at the proxies and the singleships.