Carloon sighed. He himself was only just beginning to understand the possibilities and limitations inherent in the new science. Phasing matter and matter displacement he did understand, but such things as temporal inertia, short-circuit paradoxes, and the vorpal energy generated by life, were a little beyond him. ‘As I understand it, time travel is easiest on Earth and becomes increasingly difficult the further you get from that centre of… vorpal generation. We can use it within a limited sphere, which encompasses most of the solar system surrounding Earth; beyond that the energy levels required climb exponentially.’

‘But you are using an offshoot of that technology here?’

‘Yes. We’re using spatial displacement to shift the probe back to its launch point as it accelerates on its antigravity engines, while feeding it the energy to accelerate—which we couldn’t do if it was heading out of the solar system. If we complete twenty successful displacements, the probe will be travelling at ninety-three per cent light speed when we finally let it go. We could have used temporal displacement between the rings as well, but that would only have reduced the mission time by less than one-hundredth, and would have used over four-fifths of the Earthgrid energy output.’

‘That mission time being?’

Carloon repressed his irritation: Maxell knew all this. Rather than reply, he observed, ‘The probe is launching.’

They both turned their attention to the geostationary platform, where the fuelling towers were rolling back under a haze of heavy-water vapour. Then the fug was lit by the bright burn of fusion engines igniting and the probe began to rise towards them on two spears of white flame. Behind it, on the platform, structures glowed and flared in the back-blast. This was a one-off launch. Carloon found his body tensing and his mouth going dry as the probe accelerated rapidly. In a minute it was close, then it passed through the displacement ring, travelling at five thousand kph, in eerie silence. He watched it rise high, accelerating for the next ring. When it was almost invisible, the fusion flames flicked out.

After taking a drink from the pipe by his mouth, he said, ‘It now accelerates on AG only.’

‘How long until the first displacement?’ Maxell asked.

‘Minutes, but we won’t see much.’

‘And how long before it arrives at its destination?’

‘Sixteen years years before it reaches Proxima Centauri. But before we get any results…’ Carloon shrugged.

Minutes later the probe reached the second displacement ring a thousand kilometres out. Space distorted in that ring and the probe just disappeared. Instantaneously it reappeared inside the first ring and continued to accelerate—its AG motors working against the gravity of Earth. Again and again it ran that course, energy being fed into it by microwave transmitters in the displacement rings themselves, enough energy to power a solar civilization for years. Finally that civilization let it go. The probe headed out into darkness, to confirm or deny a theory about the existence of life on Earth.

Astolere:

It was a move of desperation to attempt a ground assault on the Callisto facility, and one for which the Umbrathane have paid dearly. But we have yet to learn the full extent of the payment we might make in using this infant technology. My brother Saphothere’s venture into the past, using one of the bioconstructs, we knew would have unforeseen consequences in itself. That he took with him an atomic weapon to place at the point of the assault force’s arrival, we knew could only make things worse. Eight thousand of those ground troops died in the conflagration—and as for the rest of us? We now all have memories of two parallel events, while living in the future of only one. And we all now know that such manipulation of events, so close to us on the timeline, has pushed us down off the main line, and that we are one step closer to oblivion.

Tack was inherently immoral. He had been grown for immorality and trained for it. He knew the rules, all of them, and he knew how to break them with a thoroughness that was frightening. The rule he knew how to break most efficiently was ‘Thou shalt not kill’ or any legalese derivation of such.

Tack did not have a mother or father in the usual sense. He had been cloned from a particularly efficient CIA killer, and vat-grown two hundred years after that same killer had paid a visit to a crematorium furnace without the benefit of being dead. The burned killer’s genetic tissue had been taken from him years before as part of one of the top-secret loony projects of that time. Tack’s accelerated upbringing had consisted of, during daytime, an enforced training that had killed off many of his classmates — all surprisingly similar in appearance to himself—and at nights being hooked up to a semi-AI computer via the surgically installed interface plug in the base of his skull. At the age of ten he was physically an adult, mentally an adult, but mentally something else as well. His intensive knowledge of both Eastern martial arts and modern weaponry blended into a coherent whole that made him the supreme killer. His understanding of the world at large came not from personal experience but via uploading. In him his makers and masters had achieved their goal: they had both soldier and secret agent, and did not have to worry about whether or not he would obey orders, for he was programmable.

Glancing back now at the little whore, he wondered what Nandru Jurgens hoped to achieve with her, for it was evident to Tack that she was as dispensable to the Task Force soldier as she was to Tack himself. Some time soon the sale would have to be made and in any such transaction there was always a point where one party must, however briefly, be prepared to trust the other party. And it was in such brief intervals that Tack operated most efficiently. He expected some kind of threat and some kind of double-cross, but was confident of his own and his comrades’ ability to circumvent this; confident that by the end of this day he would be in possession of both the item itself and the money, and that Jurgens and this little whore would be dead.

‘Where to?’ he asked.

‘Head for the Anglia Reforest and put down by the old thermal generating tower,’ Polly replied.

As the driver changed course, Tack faced forward again and briefly scanned the console on the side of his seeker gun. Since first pointing it at the whore it had, by laser and ultrasound scanning, recorded her recognition pattern and now it literally contained bullets with her name on them, though they were not the ones he had it presently set to use. Right now the gun was programmed to track the one whom Tack considered the greater danger: Nandru Jurgens himself. Tack would probably not need to use the gun on her anyway, since he intended to keep her close, and for close work he preferred the seven inches of kris flick knife in his pocket.

Soon they were heading out beyond the residential areas and passing over the old wall that had held back the sea before the U-gov-sponsored land-reclamation project—one that, like all such projects, had spiralled out of control costwise and was now on the brink of failure. Below lay the plain of the Anglia Reforest, seeded with nettle elms, binding grass, and endless brambles, thistles and stinging nettles. The Green contention that the place would become overrun with GM rape and maize had been fallacious—man’s small tinkerings with code were yet to prove effective enough to counter billions of years of evolution.

Tack pointed to the tower rising like a giant iron tulip out of a copse of small oaks. ‘The clearing. Down by those ruins,’ he told the driver.

The man nodded and brought the Macrojet spiralling down towards a clearing that had probably in the past been a farmyard.