Jones clenched his buttocks as if he were going for Olympic gold. "I'll tell you anything. Just... don't."

"I'm sorry. You're not here for questioning. I already know more about the universe than you ever dreamed existed."

He stared at her, coldly shocked by the realization that she was no revolutionary, she was simply insane. Bug-eyed, dancing-in-the-moonlight crazy. It was one of the universe's most heinous crimes that a creature so beautiful should possess such a demented soul.

"People will die," he cried. "Your people, the ones you're supposed to be fighting for. Is that what you want?"

"Nobody will die. Zantiu-Braun will never know for certain if you are alive or not. It is a dilemma that will eat at their souls. That is what I want."

She brought the end of the tube up to his neck. With absolute horror, he saw the end was shaped exactly like a Skin circulatory nozzle. It clicked neatly into his carotid valve.

"It won't work," he said hoarsely. "If you want me dead, you'll have to do it the hard way. It's not that easy, bitch!"

"Good-bye, Mr. Johnson." She glanced at her ring.

Jones laughed in her face. Stupid bitch didn't know the valves were e-alpha protected. His laugh burbled away to a terminal scream as he saw his precious scarlet blood race down the tube and splatter into the container.

He actually saw her flinch. There were tears in her eyes, revealing shame. "Know this," she said. "Your essence will go forward to flourish in a world free of sorrow. I promise you." Then she turned away.

He cursed her to hell and beyond. He screamed. Pleaded. Wept.

All the while his blood flowed along the tube.

Fight it, he told himself. The boys will find me. Don't lose consciousness. They'll rescue me. They will. My friends. There's time. There's always time.

One of the containers was completely full. And still the tube was red as his heart pumped away faithfully.

Blood and world began their final fade into gray.

CHAPTER NINE

Lawrence's flight to Earth lasted several weeks. He didn't have any of the claustrophobic cabin restrictions and mind-rot routines that were the norm throughout his every subsequent flight. Passengers traveling from Amethi were a rarity; there were only eight on board the Eilean when it activated its compression drive. It meant only one life support wheel was active. But even then he had a whole family cabin to himself, and the rest of the place to roam through. The crew tended to ignore him, assuming he was some rich brat whose overindulgent Board family had paid for the flight and a tour around Earth. He never even registered with the other passengers, McArthur ultraexecutives who spent the whole time interfaced with their personal AS. He got to spend as much time as he wanted in the gym, while the rest of his waking hours were taken up accessing the ship's extensive multimedia library.

It should have been, he decided later, golden-age space travel, slow and leisured. The only possible equivalent was a voyage in a 1930s-vintage airship, although those would probably have better food. And a decent view.

Perfect, if he could just have forgotten about her. But the loneliness and relative isolation contrived to tweak every tiny memory into a full-on reverie. The color of a graphic display reminded him of a certain dress she wore, exactly that shade of turquoise. Food was a meal they had shared once. Menus on the multimedia library brought back the hours they spent accessing together, curled up in each other's arms on the couch in his den.

Starflight, the desire of his life, was made wretched by the love of his life. Ironies didn't come much worse.

Earth, however, did not disappoint. During the orbital transit flight from Glencoe Star, McArthur's Lagrange point base, he spent almost the whole time pressed up against one of the ship's four viewports watching the planet grow larger—blissfully unaware of the radiation threat. He'd thought his departing view of Amethi to be the most wondrous sight of his life, with its surface features of ocher, ash and white, and Nizana's dusky radiance reflected from Barclay's Glacier. But Earth with its vibrant montage of living colors made his heart ache as it grew closer and brighter. He landed in a Xianti, bitter at the spaceplane's lack of windows.

McArthur's principal spaceport was Gibraltar, the Rock's inhabitants still stubbornly clinging to their independence from Spain, if not the European Federation. Their government council had negotiated a deal with McArthur, involving liberal taxes in exchange for infrastructure investment and a mutual noninvolvement/liability clause.

The politics went clean over Lawrence's head. Once he was out of the spaceplane and through the arrivals hall (where he generated a brief flurry of interest from security— uneasy at allowing a Board family member to wander around unaccompanied), all he wanted to do was get outside and experience the romance of the Old World. He walked away from the terminal building that now occupied the site of the ancient RAF base and went down to the huge spaceplane runway that the company had built, a five-kilometer strip of concrete stabbing out into the Med. For hours, he simply stood in wonder on the boulders that skirted the concrete, looking out across the water. Spain was on one side, an unbroken swath of urbanization that ran along the shoreline right over the horizon, with the mottled brown slopes of low mountains rising up behind the tumbling sprawl of whitewashed buildings. Africa haunted the other side of the sea, a dark, featureless stripe highlighting the boundary between water and sky.

For some strange reason, given how he'd actually flown across half of Amethi, this planet seemed much larger. He simply couldn't get used to the scale of the elements. So much water, lapping and frothing around his feet. It gave off the most potent smell, hundreds of subtle scents blending together in a harsh salt zest. And the air... nothing had ever been so warm in his life, he was sure of it, not even the tropical domes. The heat and humidity made it hard to breathe.

It wasn't until the sun fell and the lights from the Costa twinkled over the swelling water that he turned around and made his way into Gibraltar town. Money wasn't too much of a problem; his Amethi credits were easily changed at the bank for EZ Dollars. With the resulting balance he'd be able to stay in any average hotel for several months before even thinking about getting a job. That wasn't what he wanted.

He remained in Gibraltar for several days, spending nearly all of the time accessing the global datapool, filling in significant gaps in his political education. The one thing Roselyn had been truthful about, he was relieved to discover, was Zantiu-Braun. Most companies were reducing their starflight operations to an essential minimum: keeping in contact with existing colonies and asset-realization missions on planets newly acquired from their struggling founder companies. While almost alone, Z-B maintained a small exploration fleet, and was still establishing colonies through their portals. Although even they weren't building any new starships. All the Lagrange shipyards had either been mothballed or turned into service and maintenance bays.