Seventeen minutes later the capsule slid down to land beside a pad in Riasi's spaceport. Aaron and Corrie-Lyn climbed out and looked up at the chrome-purple ovoid that stood on five bulbous legs.

She whistled in admiration. 'That looks deliciously expensive. Is it really yours?

'Yeah.

'Odd name, she said as she walked under the curving underbelly of the fuselage. 'What's the reference?

'I've no idea. His u-shadow opened a link to the Artful Dodgers smartcore, confirming his identity with a DNA verification along with a code he abruptly remembered. The smartcore acknowledged his command authority.

'Hang on, Aaron told Corrie-Lyn, and grabbed her hand. The base of the starship bulged inwards, stretching into a dark tube. Gravity altered around them and they slid up inside the opening.

Sholapur was one of those Commonwealth planets that didn't quite work. All the ingredients for success and normality were there; a standard H-congruous biosphere, G-type star, oceans, big continents with great landscapes of deserts, mountains, plains, jungles, and vast deciduous forests, handsome coastlines and long meandering archipelagos. The local flora had several plants humans could eat; while the wildlife wasn't wild enough to pose much of a threat. Tectonically it was benign. The twin moons were small, orbiting seven hundred thousand kilometres out to produce the kind of tides and waves that satisfied every kind of marine sports enthusiast.

So physically, there was nothing wrong with it. That just left the people.

Settlement began in 3120, the year ANA officially became Earth's government. It was the kind of incentive which flushed a lot of the remaining political, cultural, and religious malcontents out of the Central Worlds. The greatest machine ever built was obviously taking over, and Higher culture was now so dominant it could never be revoked. They left in their millions to settle the then furthest External Worlds. At 470 lightyears from Earth, Sholapur was an attractive proposition for anyone looking for a distant haven. To begin with, everything went smoothly. There was commercial investment, the immigrants were experienced professionals; cities and industrial parks sprang up, farms were established. But the groups who arrived from the Central Worlds weren't just dissatisfied with Higher culture, they tended to be insular, intolerant of other ideologies and lifestyles. Petty local disputes had a way of swelling to encompass entire ethnic or ideological communities. Internal migration accelerated, transforming urban areas into miniature city states; all with massively different laws and creeds. Cooperation between them was minimal. The planetary parliament was 'suspended' in 3180, after yet another debate ended in personal violence between Senators. And that more or less marked the end of Sholapur's economic and cultural development. It was regarded as hermitic by the rest of the Commonwealth. Even the External Worlds with all their attitude of forthright independence viewed it like a kind of embarrassing drop-out cousin. The nearest settled worlds called it Planet of the Hotheads, and had little contact. Despite that, a great many starships continued to visit. Some of the micro-nations had laws (or a lack of laws) which could be advantageous to certain types of merchant.

Five thousand kilometres above the planetary surface, the starship Mellanie's Redemption fell out of hyperspace amid a collapsing bubble of violet Cherenkov radiation. There was no single planetary traffic control Troblum could contact; instead he filed an approach request with Ikeo City, and received permission to land.

The Mellanie's Redemption measured thirty metres long, a sleek flared cone shape, with forward-curving tailfins that looked functionally aerodynamic. In fact they were thermal radiators added to handle the extensively customized power system. The cabin layout was a central circular lounge ringed by ten sleeping cubicles and a washroom. Hyperdrive ships didn't come much bigger, they simply weren't cost effective to build. Starline companies used them almost exclusively for passengers wealthy enough to pay for fast transport. Most starships used a continuous wormhole drive; they were slower but could be built to any size required, and carried the bulk of interstellar trade around the External Worlds. Originally, Mellanie's Redemption had been a specialist craft, built to carry priority cargo or passengers between the External Worlds. A risky proposition at the best of times. The company who commissioned her had lurched from one financial crisis to another until Troblum made them an offer for their superfast lame duck. He claimed she would be refitted as a big personal yacht, which was a white lie. It was her three large cargo holds which made her perfect for him; their volume was ideal for carrying the equipment he was working on to recreate the Anomine 'one shot' wormhole. Marius had agreed to the acquisition, and the additional EMAs materialized in Trob-lum's account. Although the ship was supposed to remain on Arevalo until Troblum was ready to move the project to its test stage he found it indispensable for some of the transactions he was involved in. The addition of a Navy-grade stealth field was especially beneficial when it came to slipping away from Arevalo without Marius being aware of anything untoward.

City was a somewhat overzealous description for Ikeo which comprised a fifty-mile stretch of rugged sub-tropical coastline with a small town in the middle and a lot of mansions spread along the cliff tops on either side. The province's ideology could best be described as a free trade area, with several individuals specializing in artefact salvage. It did have a resident-funded police force, which its poorer neighbouring states referred to as a strategic defence system.

Mellanie's Redemption descended at the focal point of several ground-based tracking sensors. She landed on pad 23 at the city's spaceport, a two kilometre circle of mown grass with twenty-four concrete pads, a couple of black dome-shaped maintenance hangars, and a warehouse owned by an Intersolar service supply company. There were no arrival formalities. A capsule drew up beside the starship as Troblum walked down the short airstair, puffing heavily from the rush of heat and humidity that hit him as soon as the airlock opened.

The capsule took him several miles out of town to a Romanesque villa atop a low cliff. Three sides of the single-storey building surrounded an elaborate pool and patio area festooned with colourful plants. Several waterfalls spilled down large strategically positioned boulders to splash into the pool. The view down on to the white beach was spectacular, with a needle-profile glide-boat anchored just offshore.

Stubsy Florae was waiting for him by the bar at the side of the pool. Not that anyone called him 'Stubsy' to his face; Florae was sensitive about his height. Sensitive to a degree that he didn't get it changed during rejuvenation therapy because to do that would be to admit that he was a head shorter than most adults and that it bothered him enough to do something about it. He wore knee-length sports trousers and a simple pale-blue shirt open to the waist to reveal a chest covered in hair and a stomach that was starting to bulge. When Troblum appeared he smiled broadly and pushed his oversize sunglasses on to his forehead. His hairline was a lot higher and thinner than Troblum was used to seeing even on External World citizens.

'Hey! My man, Florae exclaimed loudly. He held his arms out and shifted his hips from side to side. 'You been dieting, or what? He laughed loudly again at his own joke. All his companions smiled.

There were seven of them visible in the pool area, either lying on sunloungers, or sitting at the table in the shallow end of the pool sipping drinks that were mostly fruit and ice. Troblum was always slightly uncomfortable about the girls Stubsy kept at the villa. Not quite clones, but there were standard requirements. For a start they were all a lot taller than their boss, two were even taller than Troblum; naturally they were beautiful, with long silken hair, bodies toned as if they were part of some ancient Olympic athlete squad, and wearing tight bikinis — dressing for dinner here was putting on a pair of shorts and sandals. A low-level field scan revealed them to be enriched with several advanced weapons systems; half of the muscle ridges etched beneath their taut skin was actually force field webbing. If they ganged up on Troblum they could probably overwhelm his biononic defences. They acted like a hybrid of floozies and executive assistants. Troblum knew the image which the whole stable arrangement was supposed to convey, but just didn't understand why. Stubsy must have a lot more insecurities than just his height.