Lawrence took only a second to work out that the truck had gone runaway, bursting through the door to ram into the wall. Exactly when Foran was standing in the alley on the other side.

That was quite extraordinary bad timing.

He didn't believe any of it. Instinct hardened and sharpened by the last twenty years was flashing up warning icons of a kind more potent than any AS symbology.

Skins swarmed over the massive pile of debris. They flung body-sized lumps of concrete and stone through the air as if they were made of feathers, digging out a wide crater above their fallen comrade. They possessed the desperate stop-go motions of hive insects synchronized for maximum productivity.

"Let's get to it," Lawrence told Hal and Dennis curtly. They joined the other Skins, prizing big chunks of masonry free. Grit and powdery fragments spewed off each piece like a dry liquid. The filthy deluge of dust made visibility difficult even with Skin sensors. Infrared helmet beams were turned up to full intensity, creating swirling crimson auras as if vanquished stars were expiring in the cloud.

It took nearly fifty minutes to excavate the rubble. At the end there was only enough room for two Skins to work in the bottom, carefully picking up lumps of stone and handing them to a chain of Skins to be carried clear. The crater walls were so unsteady it would take very little to trigger a further collapse. Foran's Skin was slowly exposed. Dust around him was clotted into mud with glistening scarlet blood. Bloodpak reserves and stored oxygen had kept him alive, though nearly half of his medical telemetry was in the amber, with several organ functions flatlined red. He was unconscious, too, when he was finally lifted clear.

All the paramedics did was hook his Skin umbilicals up to fresh bloodpaks. The Skin was providing the most stable physiological environment possible until they could get him into trauma surgery. They rushed him away to the medevac helicopter that had landed in the middle of the street at the end of the alley.

"I didn't think anything could get through our Skin," Hal said lamely as they milled around at the foot of the rubble.

The dust was settling now that the digging had stopped, cloaking the immediate vicinity in pallid gray.

"Believe it," Dennis said. "A hundred tons of sharp rock falling on top of you is going to puncture your Skin."

"Poor bastard. Is he going to be okay?"

"His brain's still alive, and oxygenated. So they'll be able to bring him up to full consciousness without any trouble. The rest of him... I don't know. He'll need a lot of replacement work."

"But we bring prosthetics with us, right?"

"Yeah, kid, we've got a whole bunch of biomech spares. I guess at least he'll be independently mobile at any rate. Whether he'll ever rejoin the platoon is another matter. You know how top-rate we have to be."

Even with Skin muscles augmenting every move, Lawrence felt distinctly non-top-rate right now. His own muscles ached from the effort of digging. For a moment, the mantle of cloying dust brought up an image of Amethi during the Wakening, when the slush stuck to everything, imprisoning the world in a decrepit winter. He looked around the narrow alley. The piles of rubbish were as wide here as they were at the end. Foran would have had to walk right next to the wall.

Lawrence slowly moved across the lower part of the rubble until he could see back into the ruined building. The traffic on the main road in front was moving again. Skins stood guard beside the wrecked door. A couple of techs were examining the truck, shifting the concrete slabs so they could get into the engine compartment. Captain Bryant was standing behind them.

"What happened to it, sir?" Lawrence asked over the secure command link.

"They don't know yet," Bryant replied. He sounded annoyed. "Damn, I really don't need accidents like this messing up my command."

"This wasn't an accident, sir."

"Of course it was, Sergeant The track went out of control and crashed."

"It crashed into one of us."

"Your concern for our personnel is commendable, but in this case it's misplaced. This is a traffic accident. A tragic one, I accept, but an accident."

"What did the traffic regulator AS log as the fault?"

"It didn't log anything, Sergeant. That's the problem. The track's electronics crashed."

"The software or hardware?"

"Sergeant, you'll be able to read the report for yourself as soon as it's been made. We haven't even accessed the track's memory block yet."

"But what about the fail-safes?"

"Newton, what the hell are you doing? What's the matter with you? He will recover, you know, he'll get the best possible treatment."

"Sir, I just don't see how this could be an accident."

"That's enough, Sergeant. It's unfortunate, but it happened."

"Not one fail-safe cuts in when the electronics crash. Sir, not even Thallspring technology is that shoddy. Then it veers off the road to hit a door square in the center."

"Sergeant!"

"And after that it demolishes a wall while one of our men is standing directly behind it. One of the few things that can damage a Skin suit. I don't buy it, sir. That's not one coincidence, that's about a thousand falling into line."

"Enough, Sergeant. It was an accident for exactly those reasons. Nobody could organize anything like this, nobody knew when Foran was about to walk down this alley. That is, nobody else knew. Of course, I was supervising this morning's deployment. Are you saying I was at fault in some way?"

"No, sir."

"I'm glad to hear that. The matter is closed." The command link went dead. Lawrence shook his head. A fairly pointless gesture in Skin. The trouble was, he could understand why Bryant was reacting in this way. The captain was too weak to acknowledge an opponent who could organize such a beautifully elaborate trap. Accepting the fact that someone did have the knowledge and skill to bring it off was massively unnerving.

* * *

"If the Wilfrien were alive today, you'd think you were looking at an angel. They were the golden ones; to be in their presence was to adore them. At its height, the kingdom of the Wilfrien was among the most powerful members of the Ring Empire. Indeed it was one of the founders. Its people helped to explore the thick wreath of stars around the galactic core. They made contact with hundreds of different races, and brought them together. Their technology was among the best in existence. Wilfrien scientists developed fast stardrives that everyone else copied; they worked out how to create patternform sequencers that could reshape raw matter into machines or buildings or even living organisms. And they gave all this knowledge freely to the peoples they encountered, helping them to incorporate it into their societies, extinguishing poverty and the conflict that such disparity always brings with it. They were a wise and gentle race that were admired and respected by everyone else in the Ring Empire. They set a standard of civilization to which most aspired and that few ever really achieved. Every story of the Ring Empire includes them, for they were the shining example of what it's possible for sentient life to become. Whenever we say Ring Empire, more often than not we're thinking of the Wilfrien society." Denise smiled round at the children. They were out in the school's garden, relaxing on the lawn with glasses of cool orange juice and lemonade. Big white canvas parasols had been opened, throwing wide shadows across the grass. The children all sat in the shade, out of the burning morning sun. As always, they watched Denise with worshipful eyes as she invoked their sense of wonder.