Cash fired a broadside of flechettes, discharged chaff to confuse the drones' targeting systems, triggered the power cycle of the gamma-ray laser, activated the systems that would bring the ship's fusion motor back up to full power. All this in less than a second, as he kicked into hyper-reflexive mode. Everything seemed spaced and deliberate: the ship's systems were frustratingly slow to react to his commands. Flashes when flechettes struck five of the drones; more flashes when flechettes struck the ice. The rest sped on, would continue to fall forever in long, eccentric orbits around Saturn. The surviving drones were accelerating towards Cash, cutting through the random radio chatter, flashing lights, infrared sources and explosively inflated radar-reflective bubbles of the chaff. His gamma-ray laser fired and took out a drone, expelled the one-shot power source, cycled a fresh one into place, and fired again and took out another drone. It cycled once every tenth of a second, but in Cash's accelerated state it seemed way slower than his father's old pump-action shotgun and the drones were closing fast, too many of them for the gamma-ray laser to take out before they hit the ship.

Cash had just enough time to feel a fat wave of horror and anger. It was like being a pilot in a plane a moment before it struck the ground, or the driver of a car just before it crashed. A sick realisation that he'd screwed the pooch, that this wasn't meant to happen - he was supposed to be a hero, not a casualty.

There was only one thing left to do and he did it. Even though he knew it probably wouldn't save him, he had to try. He flipped on the singleship's motor, full power, but the incoming drones blew up as he shot past them. An intense flash of electromagnetic radiation seared the singleship's hardened sensor systems; the outer edge of an expanding cloud of hot diamond shrapnel slammed into its stern.

Most fragments buried themselves harmlessly in layers of frangible armour, but a few penetrated to the hull, where expended kinetic energy turned them to plasma that burnt through the composite skin and sent secondary particles showering into substructures around the motor and its fuel tanks. The shock of the multiple impacts and surges from overloaded optical systems and damaged control ganglia and processor arrays flooded through the ship's control interface with a white flash and a sudden roar. The battle AI performed an emergency disconnect and pumped eight milligrams of sevofluorane into Cash's oxygen supply and put him out before feedback could fry his motor and sensory synapses.

When he came back, a shade over fourteen minutes had elapsed since the strike. The damage in the stern of the singleship was a numb tingling in his calves and feet. He had a bad headache and he was blind and a taste like burnt plastic filled his nose and mouth, very like the taste he'd had for days after all his teeth had been pulled and replaced with contoured plastic ridges at the beginning of the J-2 programme. After a moment of disorientation, his training kicked in. He'd been through simulations of multiple malfunctions of the ship's systems hundreds of times. He tried and failed to access the ship's visual and radar displays, then pulled down status reports, stepping on his dismay when he saw the huge blocks of red scattered across system readouts. The motor was damaged but still burning at about four per cent maximum thrust; the battle AI was doing its best to carry out the last order he'd given before he'd been put under. Cash overrode the AI and shut down the motor carefully, then completed his survey of the singleship's status. One of the three fuel cells that provided backup power was down and one of the tanks that supplied the attitude jets with propellant was dry, most likely holed. He'd lost every kind of optical display, too. Most of the cameras were intact, but overload had burned out the main bus and all the processors. Radar was more or less working, aside from a hole of about thirty degrees; when he used it, Cash discovered that he was already more than two thousand kilometres beyond Phoebe. No sign of the ice, or of the other two singleships, but hell, the singleships were stealthed, and maybe the H-bomb had taken care of the ice . . .

He tried to raise Luiz and Vera, and that was when he discovered that the communication package was crippled by fatal faults in both the antenna of the microwave transmitter and the ganglia that controlled the aim of the modulated laser. Shit. He was dumb, half-blind, and running on minimum power, with a severely reduced supply of propellant for his attitude jets and a damaged motor that he didn't want to fire up again until he knew exactly what was wrong with it; he'd been lucky that it hadn't flamed on him when he'd been hit, leaked plasma through a warp in the containment fields and scorched the ship hollow. The singleship's repair mites were already beginning to clean up the gross damage, but it would take them a long time to diagnose the faults in the fusion motor, and even longer to fix them.

After a few moments' thought, Cash launched one of the proxies. Now he could at least see again. Phoebe's flattened disc hung behind him; beyond it, barely visible at maximum magnification, were the two singleships, separated by several hundred kilometres and closing fast on the little moon. There were points of light twinkling between the singleships and Cash saw a brief pinpoint flare that had to be an explosion: it looked like Luiz had delivered the H-bomb to the ice and vaporized the son-of-a-bitch, and now he and Vera must be chasing down the biggest chunks still heading towards Phoebe, blowing them to gravel and steam or knocking them off course ... So they'd survived the drones, but even if they knew that Cash was alive they couldn't rescue him. Only the Glory of Gaia and its tugs were equipped for retrieval.

The Glory of Gaia was too far away, but maybe he could raise Luiz and Vera, appraise them of his situation. The proxy was equipped with more than a dozen analysis packages, including a laser spectrograph. He aimed it past Phoebe and started blinking it on and off, three long flashes, three short flashes, three long. The pilots had been taught Morse code for situations like this, and he was grateful for the foresight of the training team. Three long, three short, three long. SOS. Save Our Souls.

2.

Soon after news sites began to report that the Brazilian ships had quit Mimas and that someone had aimed a slab of ice at the Pacific Community squatters on Phoebe, rumours of a murder quickly spread through Paris. In the feverish atmosphere, it was like accelerant sprayed on a burning building. Within minutes, hundreds of citizens had converged on the scene.

A man had dragged a woman into his apartment, raped and killed her, then tried to kill himself by cutting his wrists. He'd staggered from the scene of the crime drenched in his own blood and the blood of his victim; his immediate neighbours and wardens from a nearby checkpoint had restrained him; he'd sobbingly confessed. The facts were plain enough, but wild stories quickly multiplied and spread through the angry crowd. The woman was a spy who had tried to seduce and murder the man, and he'd killed her in self-defence. The man was an assassin, and explosives had been found in his apartment. Someone shouted 'Traitor!' and the cry was taken up by the mob. When peace officers tried to take custody of the man, the crowd surged around them and beat them to the ground. The man was stripped naked, lashed to the trunk of a tree in a nearby park, and strangled by a cable looped round his neck and tightened by a dozen people hauling on it. More peace officers arrived and attempted to cut the body down, but the mob attacked them and they retreated.

The spy walked past the scene an hour later. The battered and bloody body was still tied to the tree in the middle of the trampled park, guarded by a party of men and women half-drunk and armed with staves and kitchen knives. It shocked and excited him. The air of grim hysteria was heady. He knew that it would not be long now. The Glory of Gaia was only a few hours from entering orbit around Dione. Everyone in the city knew that war was almost upon them.

He'd been out and about, making final preparations. Everything was in place. His little tricks and surprises were primed and ready. He'd encrypted a file containing dozens of hours of conversations recorded by the bug he'd planted in Avernus's compound and downloaded to his spex when he'd passed by every day, and had mailed it to a blind account maintained by the Brazilian embassy in Camelot, Mimas. Now all he had to do was wait, wear the mask of Ken Shintaro for just a few more hours. He went back to his apartment because it seemed safer than wandering the feverish city. Ward Zuniga was on duty at the checkpoint set up outside the entrance of the apartment building, and he forced Ken Shintaro to strip naked. Vindictive, prejudiced and petty, revelling in the opportunity to use his new powers to cow and bully those he disliked, he made it plain that unlike decent, dull AI Wilson he hadn't been fooled when the spy had given up Zi Lei.

'I'm on to you,' he said, flinging Ken Shintaro's clothes at him. 'I know you're up to something, mister.'

Ken Shintaro endured this in silence, although the secret pressed hard at the back of the spy's throat, aching to be released. It would not be long now. At the rally that night the crowd was angry and restless, riven by crosscurrents of rumour. Videos floating above packed heads showed over and over again footage of the strike on Phoebe. Brazilian singleships had altered the ice-slab's trajectory and smashed it to fragments with a low-yield nuclear weapon, but a few chunks had reached their target. A sudden stutter of bright flashes stitched a line across the equator of the misshapen moon, lofting clouds of dust that quickly obscured the dimming glow of small fresh craters. The crowd cheered every time the impact was shown, cheered Marisa Bassi when he claimed that the strike had been organised by agents sponsored by the city. He showed them video clips of the crew of agents at work on tiny Ymir's sharply curved surface. A razor-edged line of explosions cutting away an oval chunk of rock. Pressure-suited figures manoeuvring a fusion motor into a floodlit pit, laying a rail-gun track across a pitted slope that angled to a sharp edge against a naked starscape. The ice riding a long spear of chemical flame, great sails shining on either side so that it looked like a close triplet of stars as it accelerated away towards Phoebe.

Cheers and screams and whoops, a tremendous baying rising under the high angles of the tent as five men and women dressed all in white joined Marisa Bassi on the stage: the heroes who had thrown the ice at Phoebe. The spy stood near the back of the crowd, buoyed by the press of bodies all around him yet feeling as if he was the only real person in a fantasy scene. A woman nearby was screaming wildly, all emotion and no meaning. A young man and an older woman were kissing passionately. One man said to another that the city was going crazy and a third thrust his face close to the face of the man who'd spoken and yelled that he was a traitor; there was a scuffle until the two men were pulled apart, shouting at each other, and all the while Marisa Bassi continued to speak and the crowd hooted and bayed.

No one wanted to go home after the rally ended. Public spaces were full of people arguing and laughing and carousing. Crowds spilled out of bars and cafes. A quartet of drummers filled a park with their beat as dozens of people danced around them, leaping high in the air. A circle gathered around a couple having sex, cheering and clapping. Wardens at checkpoints were passing around bottles and pipes, or accepting drinks and tokes from passers-by.

The spy observed all this with a cool, rational gaze, as if everything was part of an exhibition got up to illustrate every variety of human vice and folly. He was in an exalted state. He was very close to the culmination of his life. He had been trained and educated for this since birth. He had been made for this. And now it was about to happen. He would not fail because he could not allow himself to fail. As he drifted through the riotous city, he felt his brothers at his back. He quivered with the thrill of secret knowledge.

He was stopped at a checkpoint because one of the wardens recognised him and insisted that he give an account of his movements. The man was drunk or stoned, and another warden was aiming his pistol at passers-by and roaring with drunken laughter when they shrank away or shouted with indignation. The spy explained that he had been at the rally and like everyone else he could not sleep. The warden nodded and said we should all get some rest because we will soon be at war, but because we'll soon be at war none of us can. The spy smiled at this lame sally and was half-disappointed that the warden hadn't asked him what he had been doing earlier. Sabotaging the city, the spy would have said, and then he would have killed the warden and taken the pistol from the drunk and killed him and everyone else in range, and kept on killing until someone killed him.

The warden forced him to drink from a flask that was going around and told him to get lost. He got lost, and when he was out of sight spat the mouthful of liquor into a flower bed and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. The mask was still in place, but he could feel it dissolving into his own face. His smile was no longer the vague beneficent smile of Ken Shintaro but a feral grin that grew stronger when a woman noticed it and stared at him. He stared right back until she turned and hurried off, and he marked her haunch and stride like a hunter measuring his quarry for the kill.

Thirty minutes later, the city's net fell over. For a moment, there was an eerie silence as everyone stopped what they were doing and attended to the same message: a call from one of the spy's demons. Surrender now, it said, and then it popped out of existence along with everything else, from basic phone service to the newly grafted defence applications. For a few seconds people stood still, trying to get their spex to work, and then they began to realise that everyone else's spex weren't working either - that this wasn't a harmless prank but something awful and unprecedented - and there was a growing roar of shouts and shrieks, people arguing, people issuing orders that no one was ever going to obey.

And then the lights went out all at once. It was night out on the surface of Dione, so the darkness was sudden and absolute. Noise doubled and redoubled, a great shout of despair that was hardly checked when a few seconds later the city's secondary control system kicked in and the street lights came back on again at half-strength and everyone looked wildly around as if expecting the enemy to step out of the shadows that were now tangled everywhere.

The spy was standing at the edge of the park at the middle of the city. He drank in the sounds of dismay and confusion. Soon the panic would spread and grow as people realised that a series of small explosions had knocked out the railway that linked the city with the rest of Dione, crippled the main air-conditioning plant, and taken down key parts of the power grid and the water and sewerage system.

The first stage of his work was over. Everything had gone according to plan here, and he did not doubt that the work of his brothers had thrown sand in the infrastructure and civic mechanisms of other cities on other moons, damaged their food supplies, tainted their water, and ruined the recycling systems that kept their air fresh and clean. Most would quickly surrender because their populations would be too busy surviving to offer any resistance, but Greater Brazil and its allies wanted to make an example of Paris because it had been at the forefront of the resistance. Very soon the second stage in the fall of the city would begin, and the spy had to be ready for it.

He felt an electrical hyperclarity as he set off towards the airlock he'd been using to get in and out of the city, at the edge of the warren of industrial chambers excavated in the rock-hard water-ice beneath the northern edge of the city's main tent. The spy had chosen it because it was little used and close to his place of work, and he'd stashed his pressure suit there.

All he had to do was get outside and wait until the real attack began. He was halfway to the airlock when he saw Ward Zuniga.

This was at one of the barricades that had been strung across the city's grassy avenues. Set up between two apartment blocks, it was built from water-filled plastic blocks, and topped with tangles of smart wire. Ward Zuniga and another warden, both wearing pressure suits with helmets hooked to their belts, were standing at the narrow opening to one side of the barricade, stopping everyone who filed through, telling them to either report for duty or get to a place of safety as soon as possible.

There were two other avenues that ran straight through the city; it would have been easy to backtrack and take another route. Instead, the spy glided straight on, seeing Ward Zuniga's face brighten with recognition, hearing him tell the other warden that here was one of the strangers they needed to lock up out of harm's way.

'You're right,' the spy said loudly, stepping so close to Ward Zuniga that he could smell the stale alcohol on the man's breath. He felt ten metres tall, utterly invulnerable. 'You should lock me up. All of this, it was me. I did it.'

Ward Zuniga blinked as he tried to process this, and the spy snapped forward and plucked the man's pistol from his holster and stepped back. It took less than a second. Ward Zuniga was groping for the pistol that wasn't there, panicked and puzzled, trying to understand what had just happened. The other warden went for her shock stick, and the spy struck her with the grip of Ward Zuniga's pistol, a hard, fast blow to her temple that put her straight down.

'You were right about me all along,' the spy told Ward Zuniga and aimed the pistol straight into his face.

The man closed his eyes. He was trembling all over and his hands were half-raised, fingers spread wide as if trying to push something away, and the spy couldn't shoot him. It might have been different if this had been in the gymnasium where he had practised killing so many times in so many ways, or if Ward Zuniga had tried to run, like Father Solomon, or if he hadn't been dull, decent Ken Shintaro for too long. Whatever the reason, he couldn't kill the man in cold blood. He was aiming the pistol squarely and steadily at the bridge of Ward Zuniga's nose and his forefinger was curled around the trigger and he told himself to do it, do it now, but he couldn't.

'I'm going to spare your life because you're going to die anyway,' he said. 'In the moment of your death, remember that you could have stopped all this. You could have saved the city. Instead, you let me go.'

'Please,' Ward Zuniga whispered. 'Please.'

His eyes were still squeezed shut when the spy brushed past him and broke into a run on the far side of the barricade, leaping along in huge bounds. He went past two men who turned and stared, heard one of them shout something. The whipcrack of a shot parted the air close to his head and he saw a warden standing in the middle of a cross street, one hand bracing the other, staring at the spy over the sight of his pistol.

The spy bounced high on his next stride and the warden's shot punched his left shoulder and sent him tumbling. He pushed to his feet, his whole shoulder and arm numb from the tremendous blow, hot blood running down his arm. He'd dropped Ward Zuniga's pistol when he'd been shot. It lay on the clipped grass of the avenue a few metres away. Behind him, people were shouting, telling him to surrender as they advanced slowly and cautiously towards him. Kneeling in the gap of the barricade. Flattened against the walls of the apartment blocks on either side. Darting from shadow to shadow. Shots began to snap and crack through the air. A round struck a long gouge in the turf centimetres from the spy's feet and he ran forward and scooped up the pistol and kept running.

The numbness in his shoulder thawed and fire spread through the nerves and veins that laced the joint of his arm and his neck. He hardly noticed it. His every cell sang with a thrilling exhilaration, a reckless glee. There was another barricade ahead, in front of the place where the grassy avenue divided around the root of a soaring buttress. He pushed with all the strength in his legs, bounding higher with each stride, soaring headlong above intricate coils of smart wire that unwound with startling speed and snapped at his heels. He struck the safety rail of a maintenance walkway that jutted from a corner of the buttress and grabbed it with his one good hand and used his momentum to vault the walkway and land on the far side of the barricade, in the middle of three wardens so startled by his sudden appearance that they didn't try to stop him as he dodged around them and ran on.

After that, it was a straight chase to the airlock. He slammed the door on his pursuers and leaned against it for a moment, breathing hard and grinning like the devil. Something hammered on the far side of the door and there was movement behind the little inspection window set in it, but the AI was stupidly loyal to him and wouldn't let anyone in, and he knew it would take several minutes to cut through the door.

His wounded shoulder throbbed and burned; his left arm hung limp. He could open and close his fingers but they had no strength. He pulled off the loose shirt he wore over his suit-liner, ripped a seam with his teeth, and tore off two strips of cloth. He used one to plug the wound and wrapped the second around his shoulder and neck to hold the pad in place, feeling broken bone scrape under bruised skin as he tightened and tied it off using his teeth and right hand.

Someone outside fired two shots at the little window in the door; the slugs left black smears on the diamond pane.

He pulled the pressure suit from the locker and stepped into it, howling to let out the pain as he threaded his left arm into the sleeve. He zipped himself up and locked down his helmet, his breath harsh in the aquarium calm and smell of warm plastic behind the faceplate, and told the airlock to open its outer doors and stepped out onto a broad apron at the base of the tent's coping wall.

A warren of trenches and bunkers, part of the city's defence system, stretched away west and east across the floor of Romulus Crater. The sun was an hour from rising. Saturn's big crescent spread saffron light over the platforms of the spaceport, industrial tents and blockhouses, fields of vacuum organisms.

He used the suit's comms package to ping the capsule that he'd made Zi Lei swallow, but received no reply. It should have immediately bonded with her stomach wall, so he doubted that she'd eliminated it. Either she was being held in a place that blocked transmission, or she wasn't in or close to the city but somewhere below the horizon.

After a moment's thought, he asked the comms package to send a ping once a second, and cut to the west and began to climb alongside a cogged railway that ascended the shallow slope of the crater's rim, parallel to the slant of the city's tent. He hadn't climbed very far when the ping was answered. Simple triangulation, multiplying his height above the crater floor by the radius of Dione and taking the square root, gave him the distance to the horizon. A little over twelve kilometres. He pulled down a map. There was a small research facility exactly that distance from the city, to the northeast. He looked out across the vacuum-organism fields, used the faceplate's zoom feature, and saw the facility's tiny, luminous bead gleaming against the black sky at the dark curve of the horizon. He walked a few steps down the slope, and the transmitter's signal cut off when he lost sight of the facility.

All right, then.

He doubled back, swinging north along a contour-line road to skirt around the defences. He passed several parking lots and hangars, all of them empty; every vehicle must have been commandeered by the citizen volunteers of the defence force. So he had to travel on foot, loping along in balletic bounds. He was moving towards the first of the vacuum-organism fields when his suit's motion detector beeped. He swung left and right, saw two rolligons speeding towards him along a mesh roadway. The city's GPS was as dead as the rest of the net, so they must have spotted him visually. He told himself that it might have happened even if he hadn't provoked a chase through the city, and cut straight into the field of vacuum organisms.

It was planted with things like giant sunflowers, thousands of them in long straight rows, fat stalks twice his height each bearing a kind of silvery dish, every dish aimed in the same direction, east, in anticipation of the rising sun. He crossed the field in less than five minutes and climbed the low wrinkle ridge beyond the far edge, saw two rolligons ploughing parallel paths through the rows of vacuum organisms as they sped towards him, and raised his pistol and took aim.

It wouldn't fire. Out here, just before dawn, the temperature was -200 Centigrade. Some vital part had frozen.

He stowed the pistol and bounded down the far side of the ridge, picking his way through a debris field flung from a small impact crater, pausing in the black shadow of a big block balanced near the crater's rim, leaning out to take a quick peek.

The two rolligons glittered at the top of the ridge. A line of figures stretched out on either side, moving slowly downslope towards him.

He was neither afraid nor particularly worried. He believed that he could sneak from shadow to shadow, out of sight of anyone watching from the rolligons, cut around the end of the line of searchers and head out east across the crater floor. He pulled up a map of the immediate area, was plotting a new route to the research facility when he saw a flash in the black sky to the west of Saturn's crescent, and for a moment his fierce confidence faded. If the people searching for him had put up a platform or flitter so that they could scan the area from above he could be pinned down and shot like a stray animal. But the suit's radar told him that the object was more than thirty kilometres away, moving across the sky at more than three hundred klicks an hour and braking hard - the flash he'd seen must have been the flare of a jet. He used the faceplate's zoom facility and saw a vehicle shaped like a broom shoot past high overhead, glittering in the light of the sun that was still minutes from rising. A moment later, the vehicle's bristling head broke apart into two dozen space-suited figures: marines, jetting away from their transport in a spreading wedge aimed roughly at the spaceport.

The spy's confidence kicked back in at once. He leaned around the edge of the block again, saw that the search party was bounding back up the ridge towards the rolligons, and set off in the opposite direction, skirting around the crater, clambering up the next wrinkle ridge. Its crest was higher than the first, and he could see the rolligons speeding away across the field of vacuum organisms back towards the city, could see flashes on the plain beyond.

War had come to Paris.

Sparks winked high in the black sky as kinetic weapons aimed from somewhere beyond the horizon used boosters to kick themselves towards their targets, plunging down and striking trenches and blockhouses and throwing up fountains of dust and white-hot debris. A tug dusted off from the far edge of the spaceport and was struck by a missile fired from the marines' position. Its upper part was blown away in a brief red flare; the remainder, motor still lit, rolled across the plain in a vast pinwheel of dust and flame. Lumpy shapes dropped straight out of the sky: battle drones inside protective impact bags. The machines tore open the bags even as they bounced and rolled through vacuum-organism fields, raising themselves up on tall tripod legs and running forward. Several were struck by missiles fired by the city's defence force and vanished in brief clouds of dust and machine parts. The rest raked the slope in front of the city with miniguns and heavy-calibre kinetic weapons and rockets as they galloped along. A phalanx of construction robots rumbled out towards the advancing drones, and the drones picked up speed, leaped onto the big machines, and ripped them apart with reckless savagery. Several of the construction robots erupted in huge explosions as bombs planted in them went off, but a second wave of battle drones was already arcing down, rolling across vacuum-organism fields and hatching out and running forward to reinforce the marines.

All this in the utter silence and clarity of hard vacuum.

The spy turned and went on down the far side of the wrinkle ridge. Without ceremony, the shrunken disc of the sun appeared at the horizon to the east and flung a tangle of shadows across the cratered plain. A minute later, the spy saw movement ahead and sought shelter in the shadow inside the bowl of a small crater and peeked over its low rim as two rolligons sped along a road a kilometre away, heading towards the research facility. He scanned the empty landscape and pushed out of the crater, and was promptly knocked down when the ground bucked beneath him.

South, a pinpoint light flared and faded, for a moment brighter than the sun. Although the spy's faceplate turned into a mirror a microsecond after the light struck it, he had to spend a little time blinking away after-images swollen by fat tears before he could use the suit's map and figure out where the explosion had been and what had happened: something had hit or otherwise critically damaged one of the city's fusion plants and the pinch field had let go.

The two rolligons had stopped. One stood at a slant where it had braked hastily and the other had run off the road. The spy bounced to his feet and chased after them as they straightened up and set off again. The war was well under way now, but he still had to complete his mission. He still had to find Zi Lei, and take custody of Avernus and the traitor Macy Minnot.

3.

When the lights came on, burning raw and bright under the dome's polarised panes and angled truss work, most of the prisoners in the cage were asleep. It was a little after midnight. Men and women stood up or swung out of their hammocks, asked each other what was going on. A few started clapping in a slow steady rhythm, but it quickly petered out. Everyone was nervous and jittery. Several minutes later the ground shook, a brief sharp heave. Then it shook again. Everyone was on their feet now. One man was shouting that the guards were getting ready to kill everyone by evacuating the air; a woman was screaming the names of the children she'd left behind in the city; another woman stood in the centre of the cage and began to chant a mantra and a dozen or so people stepped up and joined in, their mingled voices rising under the dome of the tent. Other people stood along the perimeter of the cage that faced the blockhouse and began to shout in chorus, asking for their pressure suits.

Macy told Walt Hodder that they had the right idea. 'If the city or anywhere else in the crater is hit by missiles or kinetic weapons, debris could be lofted a long way. As I know from experience. So even if we're not a target, we need to get out of here. Or at least suit up.'

Dread and excitement burned low in her belly. She was convinced that the war had finally started. That everything was about to change. She wondered where Newt was, hoped that he was sitting safe in one of the storage basements of the clan's habitat. Because if he got it into his head to fly some crazy mission in Elephant, he'd almost certainly be killed.

Walt Hodder thought for a moment, then said, 'The gates are the weakest point in the perimeter. If we can organise some kind of lever-and-pivot system we could raise them up off their hinges.'

'You want to try to break out? What about the drones?'

Walt Hodder studied the two machines which hung in the air at different levels outside the razor-wire perimeter. 'Making noise doesn't seem to be getting the guards' attention, but I'm sure that an escape attempt will. Then we can try to talk to them.'

'If they don't use the drones against us. Or taser us or shoot us full of tranquilliser.'

'I doubt if they'll listen to reason, either. But we have to try. For a start, we can break up the plumbing. The pipes could make useful levers.'

'And I think those benches will supply the pivots,' Macy said. She felt a lot better now that she had something to do. 'Let's find some willing volunteers.'

The frames of the benches on either side of the tables were bolted to the cage's floor. A dozen people rocked one from side to side until they had loosened the bolts, giving enough play to insert a pipe ripped from a shower in the toilet block and pry the frame free. Walt Hodder reckoned that they'd need to use two benches as pivots for pipe-levers wielded by as many people as possible to lift one gate out of true. They were working on the second when someone shouted. It took Macy a moment to realise what had happened: the drones had fallen out of the air.

Someone wondered what it meant and Macy said that it meant they should work faster. They were prying at the second bench when two people in white pressure suits, helmets hooked to their waists, toting pulse rifles, came out of the square structure that housed the facility's garage and airlocks. One of them was Sada Selene. She and her companion galloped across the compound without looking at the prisoners and entered the blockhouse.

Macy and the others redoubled their efforts. They'd just managed to rip the bolts loose from one side of the bench's frame when several muffled shots sounded one after the other from somewhere inside the blockhouse. A moment later someone ran out, a young man with a neatly trimmed beard, one of the people who had interrogated Macy. He made it halfway across the compound when two shots cracked out and he collapsed face down, blood darkening the back of his green shirt. The woman who had shot him, one of the Ghosts, skinny and absurdly tall in a white suit-liner, walked over to the cage, stood beside one of the drones, pointed her pistol at the people who were trying to pry up the bench, and told them to stop what they were doing. Macy and everyone else backed away and the woman raised her voice and told everyone in the cage to sit down.

Someone dared to ask if the war had started and the woman gave him a contemptuous look. 'What do you think? Sit down. All of you.'

Avernus and her daughter, the five members of her crew, and Loc Ifrahim came out of the blockhouse, all of them with their wrists plasticuffed in front of them, followed by Sada and her companion, and two men in white suit-liners. The party halted in the middle of the compound while Sada walked over to join the woman with the pistol.

'They were breaking up the furniture,' the woman said.

'They're trying to escape,' Sada said, and slung her fat-barrelled pulse rifle over the shoulder of her pressure suit and called out Macy's name.

Macy stood up and walked to the wire, aware that everyone in the cage was watching.

'This is your last chance,' Sada said. 'I can take you to a place of safety.'

'What about everyone else?'

'They'll be safe enough here. We already have enough hostages, as you can see, but I'm making this offer as a friend.'

'I'll come with you if you let the others go.'

'No. They might get it into their heads to cause trouble.'

'Then I'll stay here. With my friends.'

'The war has started, Macy. And for the moment, the Brazilians are winning. They've just about overrun the city's ground defences, and they'll be here pretty soon. Your only chance of escaping them is to come with us.'

'So you're running out on Marisa Bassi. And taking hostages to negotiate favourable terms of surrender.'

'We don't plan to surrender,' the woman with the pistol said.

Sada laughed. 'You don't know what we did, do you? All of you were locked up in here when it happened, and I suppose the guards didn't bother to tell you. How the war started, Macy, we threw a chunk of ice at the squatters on Phoebe. The Brazilians blew it up with an H-bomb, but some of the fragments got through. They made a beautiful string of craters when they hit.'

'They won't stop chasing you, Sada. It doesn't matter how many hostages you have, they won't forgive you for that.'

'They should thank us. They wanted an excuse to start the war and we gave it to them. And we'll win it, too. If not now, then in the long run. How else will we reach the stars and send messages back to ourselves unless we win?'

'I'd wish you luck,' Macy said. 'But I don't think there's enough luck in the universe to help you.'

'Well, I don't mind wishing you a little luck,' Sada said. 'Maybe it'll help you escape ahead of the Brazilians. If you do, I'm sure we'll meet again.'

When Sada and the woman with the pistol turned away, everyone in the cage stood up and began to shout. The Ghosts ignored them and chivvied their prisoners towards the garage. And all at once the two drones rose from the ground and swooped after them. One of the men collapsed, clutching at the dart that had suddenly sprouted from his neck, and there was a brief milling confusion as the Ghosts ran and rolled and tried to shoot the drones down, and the drones shot at the Ghosts with tranquilliser darts. Very few missed their targets. The prisoners screamed and howled in horror and triumph. Sada ran for the airlock and a dart struck her just above the neck ring of her pressure suit and she took a faltering step and fell flat. Avernus's crew tried to shield the old gene wizard and her daughter, and were struck by darts and swooned to the ground. The woman in the pressure suit hit one of the drones with a shot from her pistol and as it spun down out of the air its companion fired a dart into the woman's chest-plate and fired another into her cheek. She pawed at it and fell to her knees and tried to raise her pistol, then keeled sideways and lay still.