Cleary’s used human waiters. A young woman brought more coffee, and some orange juice.

“So what did you actually want to talk to me about?” he asked.

She told him about the report from Broadside that a cloud was changing course. Heading insystem.

His eyes dropped to the table. “That’s unsettling.” He picked up his spoon, fiddled with it, put it back down, gazed out at the Potomac. “Well,” he said finally, “with any kind of luck, it’ll be a false alarm.”

She looked at him.

“Priscilla,” he said, “it doesn’t matter. Whatever it turns out to be, there’ll be nothing you can do.”

“There might be somebody out there.”

“—In its path. I understand that.” He tasted his coffee, patted his lips with a napkin, shrugged. “If there is someone there, they’ll have to look out for themselves.”

He was trying to be detached, but she heard the resignation in his voice. “To be honest, Hutch,” he continued, “it’s not worth worrying about. Not if we can’t intervene. Anyway, at most it will probably turn out to be more ruins. That’s all they ever find out there anyhow.” The waitress was back. “Bacon and eggs,” he said. “Home fries and toast.”

She’d heard that he was supposed to be on a diet, egg whites and bran flakes, that sort of thing. But she said nothing, and ordered French toast. What the hell.

When the waitress was gone, he sat back and made himself comfortable. She liked Harold. He got the job done, never complained, and on Family Day had made a big fuss over Maureen. “Is that why you asked me here?” he said. “The omega?”

Hutch nodded. “Assume the worst happens. Somebody’s in the way. Is there really nothing we can do to disable this thing? Blow it up? Scatter it? Something?”

It was a lovely morning, crisp and clear. The Potomac, which had risen considerably during the last century, and was still rising, was not unlike a small inland sea. The Capitol, the White House, most of the monuments, were islands now. Hutch had been around long enough to remember when Rock Creek Park could be reached on foot, when you didn’t need a boat to get to the Washington Monument. You could stand out there now on one of the piers, and watch the river, and look out toward Sagitta, which was where the local cloud was, the one with Arlington’s number on it, and you got a sense that despite everything, despite the extended life spans and the superluminals and the virtual disappearance of organized violence on the planet, civilization was still losing ground.

“If it had a physical core of some sort,” Harold was saying, “a vital part, then yes. We could go after it. Take a hammer to it. But it seems to be holistic. Throw as many nukes at it as we like and it simply seems to pull itself back together.”

“We don’t know how it does that?”

His jaws worked. “It’s not my field. But no, as far as I’m aware, we have no idea. The technology is well beyond anything we know about. It uses nanos, but we haven’t been able to figure out how they work, what they do, even how they guide the cloud.” He took a long sip of orange juice. “I look at what those things can do, and I look at the fact they seem to be only dust and hydrogen, and I feel as if I should be sitting off somewhere beating a drum. It’s a whole new level of technology.”

Their food came. Harold dumped a substantial amount of catsup on his potatoes.

“Of course,” he continued, “the real problem is that we can’t seem to penetrate the cloud. Ships don’t come back. Probes disappear. Even scans and sensors don’t give us much.” He sampled the eggs, smiled with satisfaction, covered his toast with strawberry jam, and bit off a piece. “Good stuff,” he said. “This where you normally eat?”

“Usually at home,” she said.

“Yes.” He studied her. “You survived one of those things, Hutch,” he continued. “You were actually inside it, weren’t you? When it came down on Delta?”

Hutch had been with Frank Carson that day. Thirty years ago—my God, had it really been that long? — when they’d deliberately baited a cloud, had structured some plateaus to look artificial, and had watched with horror as the monster came after them. “Yes,” she said. “I was there.”

“You survived it.”

“Heaviest weather I’ve ever seen. Lightning. Tornado winds. Meteors. Not the way you’d want to spend a weekend.”

He used his toast and a fork to finish off the eggs. “Well, I can understand you might be worried. Where did you say this thing is?”

“Out near the Dumbbell.”

“My God. It’s really over in the next county, isn’t it? Well, look, your role, it seems to me, is simple. These things attack cities. If it turns out there are actually inhabitants, you just sail in, tell them what’s coming, and they can head for the hills. Or maybe they could build themselves some underground shelters.”

Out along the pier a gaggle of kids were trying to get a kite in the air and not having much luck. Beyond, a few sails drifted on the river.

The kite was red, and it had a dragon on it.

She needed a dragon.

WHEN SHE GOT back to her office, she called the Lunar Weapons Lab, which had been founded twenty years earlier for the express purpose of developing something that could be used against the omega clouds. The weapons lab was under the control of the Science Advisory Commission, which was a quasi-independent group overseen by the World Council. Like the Academy, it was underfunded.

Arky Chan, the assistant director, was an old friend. He greeted her with a cheery good morning. “We hear,” he said, “you’re taking over permanently up there.”

“They don’t tell me anything, Arky.” Thirty-three years ago, on her first flight beyond the solar system, Arky had been one of her passengers. His black hair had grayed only slightly since then, and his smile was as infectious as ever.

“What can I do for you, Hutch?” he asked.

“Find me the key.” It was code for a way to neutralize the clouds.

He nodded. “Anything else while I’m at it? Maybe produce the universal solvent? Or a time machine?”

“I’m serious. What’s on the table?”

“Why? What’s happening?”

“One of the damned things changed course.”

“I heard. You have anything yet on what’s in its path?”

“A G-class sun. Presumably a planetary system to go with it. We’re still waiting. I’m hoping it just picked up some natural formations and got confused.” That had happened once. A group of remarkably straight stress fractures on a satellite had been attacked. Whatever else the damned things were, they were not bright.

“I hope so too. But no, Hutch, I’m sorry to say we haven’t really made any progress.”

“Nothing at all?”

“They don’t give us any money, love. And the Academy doesn’t give us any ships.” That was pointed at her.

“You have one.”

“The Rajah spends more time in the garage than it does in the field.”

“That’ll change,” said Hutch. She’d been trying to free up some money for more than a year.

“Well, I’m glad to hear it, but to tell you the truth, I’ll believe it when I see it. What we need is for the cloud to be sitting up over the Capitol. Put a couple of bolts down the pants of the Congress. Then they’d damn soon get serious.”

“You have anything at all we can use, if it becomes necessary?”

“Not really.”

“How about nukes?”

“We tried that at Moonlight.”

“How about something bigger? A supernuke? Or maybe we shovel a load of antimatter into it?”

“The problem we keep having is that the thing seems always able to reconstitute itself. Somewhere it has a heart, a control pod, an AI, probably. But we don’t know where it is, we can’t probe it, we’re blind—” He held out his hands. “If you have an idea, I’d love to hear it.”

“Arky, if that thing’s bearing down on somebody, I don’t want to be in the position of having to just sit here and watch.”

“I understand completely.”

“Find me something. Just in case.”

“Look.” His voice got cold. “It’s easy enough for you to demand a miracle. But you people are the ones who keep saying there’s plenty of time, don’t worry about it, we have other priorities right now.”

SHE HAD LUNCH with Tom Callan, her number two guy. Tom was assistant director of operations for special projects. He’d been, in her opinion, the most capable of the applicants for the D.O.’s job, except herself, of course. Tom was young, ambitious, energetic, and if he hung around long enough, would undoubtedly succeed her. That would be as high as he could go in the Academy, however. The commissioner was a political appointment, and the position never went to anybody in-house.

Tom held a license to pilot superluminals, he could work under pressure, and he didn’t mind making decisions. He was about average size, with clean-cut good looks, but without the intensity one usually found in able young people who’d already climbed pretty high. Probably because he knew he was good. “I was thinking maybe,” he said, “if we had to, we could decoy the damned thing.”

“How would you go about it? A projection?”

“That’s what I had in mind.”

“Throw a big cube out there for it to chase.”

“Yes.” He bit into a turkey sandwich. “It might work. We’ve never experimented with it, so we don’t really know. It would help if we knew what kind of sensory system it uses.”

If it were strictly visual, then a big picture of a box might be enough. “Let’s look into it,” she said. “Check the literature. See if you can find anything that either supports the idea or negates it.”

“Okay.”

“And, Tom. Priority. If there’s a problem, we won’t have much time.”

“Consider it done.” He took a long pull at his iced tea and went after the sandwich again. The kid had an appetite. “There is a good chance it wouldn’t be fooled by a holocast.”

“I know.”

“We might try a backup.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Be ready to put a real box out there.”

THAT BROUGHT HER back to the kite with the dragon. Her first afternoon call went to Rheal Fabrics. Rheal specialized in producing a range of plastics, films, and textiles for industry. (They also had a division that operated a chain of ice-cream outlets.) Hutch had, on a number of occasions, taken their executives out to Serenity, and she had kept in contact with several over the years.

One of them was Shannon McKay, who had something to do with R&D. Shannon was tall, redheaded, and very much in charge.