The stream of information enveloping Simon shifted as the last of the Third Fleet starships reached its six-hundred-kilometer orbit. Its new pattern was close to the optimum he had envisaged. Needless to say, Thallspring had deployed no exo-orbit weapons against the starships during their approach. They had, though, endured a constant bombardment of communication traffic during the flight into orbit. Several tapevirals had been hidden in the packages, some of them quite sophisticated—for an isolated world. The Koribu's AS had recognized and isolated them immediately. None of them had come even close to the Barbarian Sentience subversives that the antiglobalizers had used back on Earth.

Simon shifted his attention to the images building up from the small squadron of observation satellites that the Third Fleet had released into low-Thallspring orbit. It was a world that had moved ahead in a steady pedestrian fashion since Z-B's last asset realization. Infrared mapping showed the settlements had expanded roughly as predicted, although Durrell was certainly larger than expected. Worst case, it gave them a hundred thousand more people, which the ground forces could certainly handle. Fortunately, that corresponded to an increase in industrial output. After all, those extra people had to be housed, clothed, fed and provided with jobs.

Several blank zones on the planetary simulation caused him a flicker of dissatisfaction. His personal AS noted the direction of his ire and informed him that three observation satellites and one geostationary communications relay had failed. The successfully deployed systems were being reprogrammed to fill the gaps.

He sent the planetary data into peripheral mode and established a link to Captain Krojen. The officer's sullen face appeared on a hologram pane. "I'd like you to begin the gamma soak, please," Simon said.

"I wasn't aware our reviews were complete," Krojen said. "There could be people down there."

"The primary scans haven't found any artificial structures in the location we selected. That's good enough for me. Begin the soak." He canceled the link before there was an argument, and expanded the Koribu's schematics out of the grid.

Just behind the starship's compression drive section, their gamma projector began to unfurl. The mechanism had been included on all of Z-B's colonist carrier starships as fundamental to establishing a settlement. Basically a vast gamma ray generator and focusing array, it was a cylinder fifteen meters in diameter, and twenty long, riding on the end of a telescopic robot arm. Once it was clear of the drive section, the cylinder's outer segments peeled open like a mechanical flower. On the inside, the petals were studded with hundreds of black-and-silver hexagonal irradiator nozzles. A second set of segments hinged open around the first, followed by a third. At full extension, it formed a circular disk sixty meters across.

Thallspring's second-largest ocean was rolling past underneath the Koribu, with the coastline sliding into view over the horizon. Durrell was directly ahead of the starship, a gray smear amid the emerald crescent of land that was the settlement's enclave of terrestrial vegetation. Outside that, Thallspring's native aquamarine plants embraced the rest of the land.

Koribu's gamma projection array swung around on the end of its arm until it was pointing toward the settlement Small azimuth actuators tweaked its alignment and began tracking. Tokamaks inside the starship's compression drive section started to power up, feeding their colossal energy output straight into the projector array. The amount of energy demanded by a starship to fly faster than light sliced down through the atmosphere in a beam that was no more than a hundred meters wide when it struck the surface.

The impact was centered on a patch of ground at the western perimeter of the settlement, just overlapping the border of the earth plants. No living cell of any type could survive such a concentration of radiation. Thallspring's plants, animals, insects and bacteria died instantly beneath the beam, a huge zone of vegetation that immediately turned bruise-brown and began to wither. Branches and leaves bowed down and curled up beneath the relentless invisible onslaught; fissures split open along tree trunks, hissing out steam from ruptured osmotic capillaries. Animals thudded to the ground, skins shriveled to black parchment and innards cooked, spitting out little wisps of smoke as they ossified in seconds. Even below ground, nothing was spared. The gamma rays penetrated deep into the soil, eradicating bacteria and burrowing insects.

Then the beam began to move, scanning back and forth across the ground in slow kilometer-wide swaths.

Simon shifted the soak data into peripheral. He used the Third Fleet geostationary relays to open a connection into Thallspring's datapool and requested a link to the president.

The man whose image appeared on his holographic pane was in his late fifties, heavy features roughened by lack of sleep. But there was enough anger burning in his eyes to compensate for any insomnia lethargy.

"Stop your bombardment," President Edgar Strauss growled. "For fuck's sake we're not any kind of military threat."

Simon's eyebrow twitched at the obscenity. If only Earth's politicians were as forthright. "Good day, Mr. President. I thought it best if I introduced myself first. I'm Simon Roderick, representing the Zantiu-Braun Board."

"Switch your goddamn death ray off."

"I'm not aware of any bombardment, Mr. President."

"Your starship is firing on us."

Simon tented his fingers, giving the pane and its reply camera a thoughtful look. "No, Mr. President; Zantiu-Braun is continuing to upgrade its investment. We are preparing a fresh section of land for the Durrell settlement to expand into. Surely that's beneficial to you."

"Take your investment and stuff it where the sun doesn't shine, you little tit."

"Is there an election coming up, Mr. President? Is that why you're talking tough?"

"What would the likes of you know about democracy?"

"Please, Mr. President, it's best not to annoy me. I do have to monitor our beam guidance program very closely. Neither of us would want it to move out of alignment at this crucial moment, now, would we?"

The president glanced at someone out of camera range, listening for a moment as his expression soured further. "All right, Roderick, what do you bastards want this time?"

"We're here to collect our dividend, Mr. President. As I'm sure you know."

"Why the hell can't you just say it? Too frightened of what we'll do? You're pirates who'll slaughter all of us if we don't comply."

"Nobody is going to slaughter people, Mr. President. As well as being a crime against humanity with a mandatory death penalty in the World Justice Court, it would be stupidly counterproductive. Zantiu-Braun has a great deal of money tied up in Thallspring. We don't want to jeopardize that"