When she told him as much, he sneered and said that he knew what she had done to get here. 'I was captured by the Outers and held prisoner, and I used my wits to escape them, and I fought against them in the fall of Paris. I did my duty. You, on the other hand, assassinated your mentor and stole a ship. All to further your crazy ambition. So with all due respect, Professor Doctor, I hardly think that you are in a position to judge me.'

'We'll see about that,' Sri said.

Loc Ifrahim met her angry gaze with calm insolence. He was no longer the sly, obsequious young man she'd first met at Rainbow Bridge. He wasn't afraid to let his ambition show now, or his contempt. Saying, 'We're both servants, Professor Doctor. The difference is that my star is rising, and yours is diminishing.'

'I advise you not to underestimate me,' Sri said, and pushed out of his little cabin before her anger got the better of her.

He followed her to the hatchway, called after her. 'They'll say I'm a hero, Professor Doctor! What will they say about you, I wonder?'

Sri put in a call to Arvam Peixoto, who was still down on the surface, in Paris, supervising mopping-up operations and securing and making airtight the building where he planned to set up his headquarters. She told him that she believed that Loc Ifrahim was withholding vital information, said, 'We should put him to the question.'

'We will do no such thing. If only because he is a member of the diplomatic service,' Arvam said.

'And also because he's been working for you,' Sri said, amazing and shocking herself. Although she'd always been certain that Arvam had commissioned Speller Twain and Loc Ifrahim to sabotage the biome project, she'd never dared ask him about it because she'd been scared that he would punish her for her temerity, end their uneasy alliance, and probably end her career, too. So she'd kept quiet. She'd taken the hit and moved on. Until now, when she'd blurted out the blunt accusation because she was angry and tired and frustrated. But it didn't matter, she realised. Their alliance, if that was what it had ever been, was ended. She was completely in his power, and it freed her to be absolutely honest with him. No more pretence. No dissembling.

Arvam was smiling. 'You're angry because you do not want to believe that your creature may have failed in his mission,' he said.

'The agent is as much mine as yours. I'm angry because this so-called servant of the government and the families is clearly lying to make himself seem like a hero. Let my man put him to the question. We'll soon get the truth.'

'Leave Mr Ifrahim to me,' Arvam said. 'As for his story, I'll send a platoon to check out the research facility where he claims to have been held prisoner along with Avernus and Miz Minnot.'

'You should send some of your marines to check out the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff habitat, too. That's where Macy Minnot has made her home.'

'Then it will be the last place she'll run to because it will be the first place we'll look for her. No. We will check out the research facility, and take things from there.'

'Let me help,' Sri said, and after some to and fro won the general's permission to access surveillance data accumulated by the Glory of Gala's combat-management system.

It didn't take long to find what she was looking for. Although there were thousands of hours of video showing the assault on the city from dozens of viewpoints, shot by transports, battle drones, and cameras worn by marines, coverage of the rest of Romulus Crater was patchy and intermittent. Luckily, a transport passing overhead had captured a few seconds of footage that showed figures in orange pressure suits scattering away from the research facility, and although it was impossible to tell who was escaping or where they were going, Sri could use the footage to set parameters for a global search of everything in the archive.

After a few minutes the AI presented her with dozens of images of people in orange pressure suits, some captured or killed by marines, others heading away from the city, towards various small shelters or the crater's rim. Sri was especially interested in two short videos patched together from spy-satellite imagery. The first showed a rolligon driving out of a pass in the northwest quadrant of the crater's rim. The orange pressure suit worn by its driver was clearly visible through its transparent blister, and it was heading in the direction of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff habitat. The second video, shot a couple of hours later, showed the same rolligon, still driven by someone in an orange pressure suit, moving away from one of the stations on the equatorial railway. It passed a railcar that was slowing as it approached the station, turned north, driving off the road and heading out across the empty moonscape, and then the video ended because the satellite's orbit had taken it over the horizon. The Outers had destroyed some of the satellites and compromised most of the rest; coverage of the area didn't resume until seventy-one minutes later, and by then there was no sign of the rolligon.

Sri wondered if the rolligon had stopped at the station, if it had dropped off a passenger or passengers who might have caught that railcar, but the intelligence officer who answered her call said that they hadn't yet hacked into the railway's control system. It was highly distributed, and their demons had met with considerable resistance.

'You have people on the ground, don't you? I want someone down mere to look at the transport records as quickly as possible. I want them to find out if anyone boarded the railcar that arrived at Double Rim Station at 0510 UST. They can start by searching for local video footage from the station itself.'

The young officer was clearly intimidated by Sri, but he stood his ground. 'I'm afraid I don't have the authority to action that, ma'am.'

'Who does?'

'Commander Vaduva or General Peixoto, ma'am.'

Sri tried and failed to contact either of them, left messages, returned to her analysis of the spy-satellite footage. Say the vehicle had gone to ground somewhere. Sri knew its speed and its general direction, and that it must have reached its destination at some point within the seventy-one-minute gap in coverage. A simple calculation drew a circle that included no less than seven oases. It would take time to search them all, but it was doable. Sri was about to call Arvam Peixoto and tell him to send marines to check out the oases when she had a thought, and asked the AI a question.

After a few seconds, it confirmed that a ship had left Dione two hours after the last sighting of the rolligon; its trajectory indicated that it had taken off from the area where the rolligon had vanished. Like all the refugee ships, it was being tracked by deep radar. Most were already heading away from the system, but this one, one of the last to leave, was heading towards Saturn, presumably because it intended to increase its velocity with a slingshot manoeuvre.

Sri thought hard about this, then told Yamil Cho, who all this time had been waiting outside the cubicle she'd been assigned, what she wanted him to do.

'I know that won't be a problem for someone as resourceful as you.'

'Of course not.' Yamil Cho paused, then added, 'You do remember, ma'am, that your son's hibernation coffin is on board the Glory of Gaia. It will be very difficult to move it without detection.'

'Of course I remember. It is never out of my mind. But we will have to leave him. Not only because we can't move him, but also because he will be a token of my intention to return.'

Berry would be safer here, she told herself. And anyway, he'd been a hostage all along. It didn't change anything.

Yamil Cho shot off down the companionway to scout the territory, came back fifteen minutes later and led Sri to an airlock in the ship's keel. Its narrow antechamber was dimly lit, with zero-gravity tools racked on one wall and a file of pressure suits standing along the other. They helped each other into two of the suits. Yamil Cho selected several items from the tool racks and fastened them to his utility belt, and clipped one end of a tether to a D-ring on his belt and clipped the other end to Sri's belt. Then they cycled through the lock, out onto the hull of the ship.

Dione's cratered icescape slowly and steadily unravelled below. The Glory of Gaia was presently swinging around the anti-saturnian hemisphere, travelling from east to west, and the gas giant loomed beyond the arc of the moon's horizon, its salmon and umber globe printed with the parallel shadow-lines of the rings. Yamil Cho fired his reaction pistol and Sri was gently spun away from the stupendous view and towed across the belly of the Glory of Gaia towards the delta-winged shuttle that she and Yamil Cho had stolen when they had escaped from Earth, and now had to steal again.

There had been no room for the Uakti in the Glory of Gala's hangars, so it had been fastened to the flagship with docking clamps used by shuttles that had brought men and materiel up from Earth when the flagship had been preparing for its mission. Sri had to wait for twenty minutes, clinging to a strut and expecting an armed party to erupt onto the hull at any moment, while Yamil Cho manually activated each of the motors that opened the jaws of the clamps.

At last the shuttle was floating free. Yamil Cho towed Sri to its airlock. As soon as they were inside and strapped into the acceleration couches, he woke up its systems, initiated the preignition sequence of its main motor, and fired the attitude jets that pushed it away from the Glory of Gaia. Traffic control started squawking at them as the main motor fired and they began to accelerate away from the flagship and Dione, towards Saturn. Sri identified herself and told the officer that she would speak only with General Peixoto. When he came online two minutes later, she told him at once that she was chasing after Avernus, and sent him a file containing the results of her search of the surveillance data.

Arvam bounced the file to an aide and told Sri that she might at least have asked his permission. 'I'm disappointed. It seems that we still haven't established a full degree of trust.'

He didn't look disappointed; he looked faintly amused, as if he knew something she didn't.

'I have trusted you with the life of my youngest son,' Sri said, and explained that Berry's hibernation coffin was still aboard the Glory of Gaia.

'I'll keep him safe until you return from this quixotic mission of yours,'

Arvam said.

'If Loc Ifrahim was telling the truth, Avernus and Macy Minnot were being kept as prisoners in the same place. I believe that they are now aboard that tug, attempting to escape your jurisdiction together.'

'Let's assume that they are on the tug. What will you do if you catch up with them? You aren't carrying any weapons.'

'They don't know that.'

'Mmm. Still, I think I ought to send a singleship after you, just in case. Don't worry. The nearest will take several hours to catch up with you, and by then you should have had your shot at glory.'

Sri didn't say anything. She wasn't going to thank him for his interference.

'You might want to know that the platoon of marines I sent to the research facility found your creature,' Arvam said. 'He's alive, but only just. He'd been knocked out with a dose of tranquilliser and suffered a bad reaction to it. So we don't yet have his side of the story, but the marines also retrieved a good deal of surveillance footage. It shows that more than fifty people were being held prisoner there. Including Mr Ifrahim and Macy Minnot. Also Avernus and her daughter.'

'So Loc Ifrahim didn't lie about that, at least.'

'Footage from cameras inside the facility's single building suggests that Mr Ifrahim also told the truth about a fight between two factions of the guards,' Arvam said. 'Unfortunately, the surveillance system fell over shortly after one faction killed or subdued the other. It seems that your creature sabotaged it as part of his plan to take custody of his targets. We'll know more when he recovers consciousness.'

'It's obvious that Ifrahim tried to kill him,' Sri said. 'He wanted the glory of capturing Avernus and Macy Minnot all for himself, but they managed to escape him. Put him to the question again. And your marines should try to locate the other prisoners. If nothing else, they will be witnesses to Ifrahim's perfidy.'

'My people have more important things to do. We have the city more or less under control, but we have several thousand prisoners to deal with, and we are still looking for Marisa Bassi. Either he is dead, and we have not yet found or identified his body, or he has escaped.' Arvam paused and spoke briefly with someone off-camera, then told Sri, 'Traffic control has picked up the tug you are chasing, but there's a problem. A singleship has altered course to intercept it.'

'Tell it that it must not attack the tug under any circumstances. Tell it to stand off until I get there.'

'We have already tried,' Arvam said. 'But so far we haven't been able to contact the pilot on any of the encrypted channels. It appears to be the ship that was badly damaged during the mission to alter the course of the rock that those fanatics threw at Phoebe. We held off on retrieval because we were about to go to war, and because we thought both the pilot and his ship were dead. Apparently not.'

'Use civilian channels,' Sri said, a wire tightening in her chest. 'Use anything you like. I'm certain that Avernus is aboard that tug. You must do everything in your power to make sure that your pilot doesn't attack it.'

10.

Cash Baker's singleship took its own sweet time to heal itself. Its battle AI spent hours rebooting control functions and rerouting them around terminally damaged circuits, checking and rechecking virtual simulations of every stage of the repairs; the punctures in its multilayered skin knitted together with infinitesimal slowness; it had reached the apex of its orbit, some fifteen million kilometres from Saturn, by the time its busy mites had cannibalised shards of broken ceramic insulation around the motor's fusion chamber and reforged them into temporary patches. As he swung back towards Saturn, Cash began to regain control of the drive and navigation systems. It was as if his legs had been numbed by some terrible blow, and now he could wiggle his toes, feel the bruises on his shins, flex his knees . .

Some damage couldn't be fixed. Cash was unable to plug back into the battle net or contact any friendly ship because his encryption engine had suffered a fatal logic flaw; the only way to fix it was to upload a patch, and that required use of the device which the fault had shut down. And there were glitches in the navigation system too, persistent rastering in the optical systems, false echoes on the deep radar and a permanent problem with the antennae array's tracking system . . . But he was at last fully engaged with the ship and its senses again, with a godlike view pitched about thirty degrees above the equatorial plane of Saturn and its rings and its retinue of moons.

The AIs were patiently reconstructing data that had been lost when the encryption engine had fallen over, using the singleship's powerful optical system to log and tag the position and delta vee of every ship. It was clear that war had broken out. The Pacific Community ship was driving towards the inner system from Phoebe's high and lonely orbit, on track for Iapetus. The Brazilian flagship was in orbit around Dione; the Flower of the Forest was about to enter orbit around Rhea; the Getulio Dornelles Vargas had remained on station at Mimas. Single-ships, identified by the unique spectrographic signature of their fusion flames, were chasing down Outer ships or were engaged on strafing runs across the surfaces of the various moons. Using blink comparison of multiple scans, the AIs were also able to locate ships fatally damaged by singleships or EMP mines, cooling towards the ambient temperature of space as they fell along eccentric orbital padis.

The AIs tagged casualties red, friendly ships blue, and everything else white. There were at least thirty red-tagged ships inside Iapetus's orbit, but an equal number of white-tagged ships were fleeing unchallenged. Most of the action was confined to the half-million-kilometre radius defined by the orbit of Rhea. As he fell inwards, Cash watched blue specks chase down the last few white specks amongst the inner moons and ring system, stooping down in swift geodesic interceptions, altering their courses towards new targets by slingshot manoeuvres past moons large and small. A battle determined by Newtonian physics. By time and velocity and direction.

Cash was still locked out of it as he fell towards the orbit of Iapetus, four million kilometres out from Saturn. The repairs were almost complete, but much of it was temporary patching and he didn't know how long it would last. He was low on fuel and power and air, too, and the control system of his rail gun was still futzed, but his proxies and pumped-pulse laser and single-shot gamma-ray lasers were fully operational. He could still make a contribution to the war, but he was going have to choose just one target, and choose well.

He plugged into the navigation engine and studied the various options. His best bet was to do exactly what most of the fleeing Outer ships had done: swing in close around Saturn. That way he'd maximise his chances of acquiring a target by passing through the broad arc of possible trajectories that any ships leaving Dione and Tethys had to follow if they wanted to slingshot past the gas giant. The only problem was that it would mean making a course correction pretty soon, and the AIs advised against it. He'd use up more than half his remaining fuel, the burn would be at the limits of the damaged motor's capacity, and after he swung past Saturn he'd be stuck in an orbit tilted high above the equatorial plane, with a period of some two hundred and forty-eight hours and a semi-major axis of twenty-one million kilometres. He wouldn't have enough fuel to rendezvous with any of the moons, so he'd have to hope that someone would spot him and come to pick him up. If the worst came to the worst, he could always let the ship put him under. He could wait out a couple of years in hibernation, and someone was bound to retrieve him before then . . .

Fuck it. Cash overrode the AIs and thirty minutes later fired up the motor for the first time since the accident: a short, hard burn that peaked at 1.38 g. It was a little rough, and efficiency was down to somewhere below eighty per cent, but the repairs held. He had his ship back. He could commit to battle.

Most of the Outer ships that had survived or evaded attack by skill or chance were dwindling away into the outer dark beyond Saturn, but there were still a few laggards heading towards the gas giant. Cash studied them carefully before choosing his target, a recent departure from Dione. It was one of the ugly lopsided tugs they used for hauling cargo from moon to moon, and it had a disproportionately small radar profile; someone had attempted to stealth it, which had to mean something. He'd have a hair-thin window of opportunity as he crossed its path at high relative velocity, but it was the best pick of a bad bunch.

He finessed the parameters of a second course-correction to ensure that he'd pass as close as possible to the target, pushing close to the limits of the damaged motor, then throttled back to a steady 0.3 g acceleration and began to prep his weapon systems. He felt no remorse about attacking a civilian ship. Once war was declared, battle orders were to intercept and terminate or cripple all Outer ships inside the orbit of Iapetus, the outermost of the inhabited moons. And the Outers had definitely declared war by flinging that rock at the Pacific Community's base on Phoebe. Not to mention attacking his own ship. Besides, who knew what that tug might be packing, who it might be carrying? It was his duty to take it out. It was what he'd been trained for; why he was here. And it was also time for a little payback. Time to show the Outers that their sneaky little tricks couldn't keep a good man down. As he powered up his weapons and worked his way through endless checklists, Cash tried to keep his growing excitement at a distance. He had a job to do, and he wanted to do it as well as possible.

The singleship drove past the orbit of Mimas, hurtled on towards the ring system. Cash had flown many missions around Saturn, but he'd never before had such an elevated view of the rings. An arch or bridge braided from a million luminous strands and interrupted here and there by wide or narrow carbon-black gaps, sweeping up to a sharp peak and falling back to girdle Saturn's fat globe . . .

For a little while, he was transfixed by an oceanic feeling of enlargement. He remembered how he used to lie out on the block roof on clear summer nights when he was a kid, remembered feeling that he might fall for ever into the rigid patterns of the stars that bestrode the black bowl of the sky, knowing that he was linked to them by photons forged in their thermonuclear fires that had travelled for hundreds or thousands of years across interstellar space to fall into his eyes.

The same physics that determined the behaviour of starlight and Saturn's rings constrained the way in which he could fight his particular corner of the wider war.

Cash slanted in above the eccentric clumps and kinks of the F Ring, bearing down on the tug now, closing in fast as it scooted towards the Keeler Gap. A ticker in one corner of his vision started flashing red as it ran back to zero and the cannon launched the proxies and they eagerly accelerated towards their target. Cash was looped into their control systems: it was like trying to hold on to fierce hounds straining at ever-lengthening leashes. The tug began to yaw and zag, evasive manoeuvres that would do it no good at all, and at the same moment Cash's comms link beeped. An incoming message in plain text sent, according to the ID tag, by General Arvam Peixoto. Ordering him to defuse the proxies and cease all hostilities against the tug at once.

It appeared to have originated from the Glory of Gaia, but without use of the encryption engine Cash had no way of knowing that it was genuine or a spoof got up by the Outers as distraction or defence. After half a second's thought, he texted verify authority.

Far across the rings, the tug was making a course adjustment: the predictive element of the singleship's AIs suggested that it was planning to skim through the plane of the rings in an attempt to confuse the proxies. Cash adjusted the singleship's attitude and initiated his own course change. The burn was ragged and tooth-rattling as it peaked, but it put him back on course for interception.

Another message arrived. Details of his service record and an order to disengage.

The hell he would. Sending his service record proved nothing because the Outers knew all about him thanks to the foofaraw surrounding Operation Deep Sounding, and Cash wanted payback so badly he could taste it, and he was closing rapidly on the tug now, right on the tails of the proxies. He began to power up the gamma-ray laser . . . and something inside the ship's control system rose up at him. A demon. His first wild thought was that it had ridden one of the messages and punched through the firewalls. Then he realised that it was far too complex, something huge and remorseless that must have been waiting inside the control system all along, a fail-safe wakened by some encrypted signal.

He kicked into hyper-reflexive mode, but it was too late, he'd already lost control of the drive and navigation systems. The ship was rolling on its long axis, attitude jets punching on and off. He tried to find a way back in but couldn't stop the motor climbing to maximum thrust, angling him away from the tug.

Well, fuck 'em. He still had control of the proxies and they were almost on the tug now. He wouldn't let it go. This was the apex of his career, and in his fury and pride he would not let it be taken from him. All he had to do was hold on, but the demon was rushing towards him as remorselessly as a tidal wave, smashing through buffers and firewalls. He was like a man standing on his tiptoes in a sealed chamber that was rapidly filling with water, trying to keep his head in a shrinking bubble of air. The demon snatched at weapon control, and although the proxies were still too far from the tug he triggered them before the demon could shut them down. Saw their bright blinks far ahead of him, and then the demon was on him and he lost the last vestiges of control, and every sensory input.

Cash was aware only of his body, swaddled tight as a mummy in his acceleration suit. Absolute blackness and silence pressed in. It was like being buried alive. He forced himself to relax back into ordinary mode - it would be intolerable to be trapped like this with heightened awareness stretching every second ten times over - and a few heart beats later the ship's sensory inputs came back. Whether because one of the AIs had found a way to run around the demon, or because the demon had relaxed its grip as soon as its job was done, he neither knew nor cared.

The motor had cut out, and he was locked out of drive and communications and weapons systems. But at least he could see again, right across the electromagnetic spectrum.

The tug was slicing neatly through the Keeler Gap, close to the edge of the A Ring's lustrous arc. It did not seem to be in any way crippled. And he was falling towards the plane of the rings, too. Travelling so fast that he'd acquired a faint shell of ionised plasma as he ploughed through the sparse atmosphere of molecular oxygen produced by the action of the sun's ultraviolet light on the rings' water ice. Flying above the Keeler Gap on a course that would plough a long chord through the A Ring beyond. It came up at him with blinding speed, resolving into points of light all racing away in the same direction, a vast churning swarm ordered into lanes. The ring was more than a quarter of a million kilometres across but just ten metres thick, the height of a two-storey building: Cash told himself that even though he was going to pass through at a shallow angle, there was a good chance that his ship wouldn't suffer any significant damage.

And then with a flash the broad plane of the rings collapsed into a line of brilliant light. And a speck of basalt, a sphere less than a millimetre in diameter, polished and eroded by billions of years of microscopic collisions, smashed into the nose of the singleship and shattered into dozens of white-hot fragments. Most were stopped in their tracks by temperfoam that filled every nook and cranny of the interior, but two shot through the lifesystem. One expended its energy in the impact gel that cased Cash's body, but the second smashed through his virtual-reality visor and left a charred track through his skull and brain. He didn't even have time to realise that he'd been hit.

11.

The singleship abruptly veered away and its proxies exploded incontinently more than a thousand kilometres to the starboard of Elephant. Some unknown and unguessable accident or agency had reached out and saved them. But as Elephant drove across the inner part of the ring system towards the point where it would slingshot around Saturn and head out towards Uranus, Newt spotted a Brazilian ship powering away from Dione and heading inwards. It was the modified surface-to-orbit shuttle, the Uakti, that had slipped into the system a couple of days after the Flower of the Forest, and it was definitely chasing them. It was presently some three hundred thousand kilometres away, way beyond the outer edge of the rings, but it was accelerating hard.

'It's trying to make contact,' Newt said. 'Aiming a laser at us and sending a looped message from someone calling themselves Sri Hong-Owen. Want to hear it?'

Macy waited for Avernus to say something. When she didn't, Macy said, 'I think I can guess what she wants.'

Macy and Avernus were lying side by side on couches in the cramped lifesystem. Newt was up in the command blister. They were all wearing their pressure suits, helmets locked tight, and were laced in crash harnesses. The steady rumble of the fusion motor inhabited their spines and skulls.

'If you drink she wants us to prepare to stand to and surrender, you're right,' Newt said.

'Can she catch up with us?'

'She will if we stay on our present course.'

The widescreen view in the memo space was replaced by a 3-D flight diagram: two bright arrowpoints that swung in tight curves around Saturn and rose through the ring system one after the other, the second point moving much faster than the first and catching up with it between the orbits of Titan and Hyperion, some thirteen million kilometres out from Saturn.

'This is what will happen if we stay on track for Uranus,' Macy said.

'Yeah. But we have other choices.'

The flight diagram ran again, this time freezing when Elephant passed close to Saturn, the view zooming in on it before spinning around to show that the Brazilian shuttle was hidden by the gas giant's bulk.

'A small course correction before we steal velocity from Saturn will result in a much larger change in our final vector,' Newt said. 'And if I do it after our friend drops below Saturn's horizon, we'll gain a little time before she realises what's happened. Just enough, maybe, to find a hiding place.'

The diagram rotated and pulled out to give a plan view of the entire system, curves scrolling out from Saturn to intersect four of the moons, each curve tagged with delta vee, required reaction mass, and time of transit.

'Titan,' Avernus said.

'Titan's definitely doable,' Newt said. 'Depending on how quickly our friend can match our course change, we'll reach orbit around Titan between forty-eight and two hundred and fourteen minutes ahead of her. That leaves us with a couple of problems. As I'm sure you've noticed, Elephant is a good little ship, but she wasn't built for entry into any kind of atmosphere. So we'll need to hitch a ride down to the surface in one of the Tank Towners' aeroshells. And I should remind you that we're being chased by a surface-to-orbit shuttle. If we do go down to the surface, she'll be able to follow us.'

Macy thought that he sounded dangerously high-spirited. Happy to be hung out at the edge, to be given a chance to prove what he could do.