“There really is nothing weird on Mars, is there?” he said in a distracted voice.

“ ‘Fraid not, Chief. We’ve had experts go through the whole data profile. If there’s any hidden encryption in there, it’s beyond the best we’ve got to find it.”

“Damnit, I hate leaving files like that open-ended.” He shook his head, and looked up from the screens. “What can I do for you?”

“I’d like a warrant issued for Isabella Halgarth.”

“Who’s she, and why?”

“She was one of Trisha Halgarth’s apartment mates. She seems to have vanished.”

Alic Hogan sat back in his chair, looking unhappy. “All right, what’s going on?”

“I’ve just reviewed the forensic data we got back from the shotgun case, the one where the Guardians claimed our President was an alien agent.”

Alic managed a slight smile. “Oh, yeah, I remember that one. The President’s aides were knocking down the Admiral’s door inside thirty seconds of that one hitting the unisphere. So what’s the problem?”

“No direct problem. I was concerned about our total lack of progress on the whole shotgun issue.”

“Okay, commendable enough,” Alic said, with only mild suspicion. “Although I’m not sure about your priorities here.”

“Any approach which can get us into the Guardians is viable as far as I’m concerned.”

He held his hands up in defeat. “Good point. Go on.”

“I wanted to reinterview the shotgun victims, see if there was anything they remembered now that they didn’t directly after the event. A lot of crime victims do, after the initial shock and confusion has been overcome, and they have time to think about what happened.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m familiar with the procedure.”

“Trisha Halgarth has gone back to Solidade, the Halgarth Dynasty’s private planet. I need permission to go there. It’s never been legally accepted that the Dynasty planets are part of the Commonwealth, and they certainly won’t let me through if I turn up at the gateway unannounced and wave my navy ID around. So I called Christabel Agatha Halgarth, the head of the Halgarth family security.”

Alic winced. “You should clear anything like that with me first.”

“I know, Chief, and I apologize. I didn’t think it was a big deal. Anyway, Christabel gave me permission to travel to Solidade.”

“She did?”

“Yes.”

“You must be the first government official for some time.”

“Whatever. I also wanted to talk to Catriona Saleeb; she’s still on Arevalo, in the same apartment, so that’s not a problem. But Isabella discontinued her unisphere address code a week after the shotgun. We don’t know where she is. I asked Christabel, and she didn’t know either. They’re looking into it for me.”

“And you want to arrest her for that?”

“A warrant is the best way to make planetary police forces pay attention. A simple alert for a missing girl isn’t going to get any attention, not right now.”

“Renne, I’m really not sure I can issue a warrant on this basis.”

“I checked on Isabella, not just the official files, but the unisphere gossip show records as well. You know they love reporting on Dynasty members. Before she moved to Arevalo and set up house with the other girls, Isabella used to be Patricia Kantil’s girlfriend.”

Alic Hogan gave her a startled look. “Doi’s chief of staff?”

Renne smiled waspishly and nodded. “She never told us. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

“How can Kantil be involved in this?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she’s not. But you have to admit, this is worth a warrant. I need to ask Isabella some serious questions.”

Alic let out a long breath, clearly reluctant. “I can really do without complications like this.”

“Trust me, Chief. I’ll be discreet. If she’s just shacked up with someone she shouldn’t be, some senator or a three-hundred-year-old Grand Family heir, whatever, I’m not going to cause a fuss. I don’t want to get the Dynasties or the Executive pissed with this office. I’ll just ask her the questions, and leave quietly.”

“Damnit, all right. But if she’s found, I want to know immediately. We keep this as quiet as we can.”

Renne got out of the chair. “You got it.”

“Are you off to Solidade?”

“Yeah. The express to EdenBurg leaves in forty minutes.”

“Okay, good luck. And I want to know what the planet looks like when you get back.”

There was a limousine waiting for Renne when she arrived at EdenBurg’s CST station in Rialto, the planet’s megacity. A young man dressed in a smart dark gray business suit introduced himself as Warren Yves Halgarth, a member of the Halgarth family security force, and her assigned escort. They drove out of the station and into the midday sunlight.

Renne had visited all of the Big15 at one time or another. She was always hard-pressed to tell the megacities apart. Rialto was a slight exception in that it was sited in a temperate zone, while most of the others favored tropical locations. Apparently it was an accounting thing. A city that had summers and winters needed different types of civic services to cope with the individual seasons, and Rialto had an impressive snowfall in winter, averaging out at two meters each four-hundred-day year. Keeping the citywide grid of five-lane expressways open and the all-embracing network of rail tracks clear and functional for those three icy months of the year required thousands of snowplows and ancillary fleets of GPbots. The cost of all that bad weather machinery was considerable, and the city council had to charge the companies and residents to cover the expense.

It was a factor that was countered by the cost of power on EdenBurg, which was among the lowest in the Commonwealth. One of the principal reasons Heather Antonia Halgarth had chosen EdenBurg as her family’s Big15 world was the planet’s massive oceans. None of the three continents had deserts—precipitation was too high for that; instead, they were covered in rivers, with vast coastal plains subject to continual flooding. Instead of the fission plants the other Big15 used, Heather went in for hydropower on a colossal scale, damming two-thirds of the watercourses on the Sybraska continent where Rialto was situated. Electricity was delivered to the megacity via superconductor, and Sybraska’s plains drained, then irrigated to provide nation-sized tracts of highly productive farmland.

Because of the cold months, Rialto favored monolith apartment blocks rather than the vast sprawls of individual homes and strip malls found on worlds like StLincoln, Wessex, and Augusta. Each district had its core of Manhattan-like skyscrapers and bulky concrete tenements, which were encircled by huge swathes of factories and refineries.

The CST station was on the edge of the Saratov district, which was the megacity’s financial and administrative heart, giving it the largest nest of skyscrapers, and also the tallest. The industrial estates radiating outward tended toward the smaller, more sophisticated manufacturing facilities. Accommodation blocks were gigantic, fifty to seventy stories of sturdy stone façades, with large apartments overlooking broad well-maintained public parks. There were fewer rail lines and more elevated roads, reflecting the population density and its relative wealth.

Renne couldn’t help staring at Saratov’s central area as they swept toward it along the expressway. Some of the skyscrapers were so high she thought they must touch cloud level; they couldn’t be economical to build, even with today’s materials and robotics. It was all about corporate prestige.

Right in the middle were five tapering towers housing the Halgarth Dynasty’s headquarters. They were all identical in size and architecture with crown spires producing a bristling apex. But the reflective glass windows on each one had a different color.

Renne’s car drove down into the basement of the green tower, and into a secure parking zone. The Halgarth family security force occupied several floors halfway up the tower. Renne wasn’t told how many. The elevator they used didn’t have an indicator. She was ushered into Christabel Agatha Halgarth’s office. Curving walls of tinted glass looked out toward the ocean, thirty kilometers away. Three more skyscraper districts stood between Saratov and the coast, brief pinnacles of color and style with their moats of parkland. The terrain between them was a dark synthetic desert of rectangular factories and warehouse cubes with black solar collector roofs. Thousands of spindly metal chimneys squirted gray-blue vapors up into the iron sky, misting the whole scene with a thin dreary smog.