Something moved in the hallway. Large. Silent. She turned. “What—”

The killer fired a nervejam pulse from his customized pistol. Every muscle in Tara’s body locked solid for a second. The pulse overloaded most of the neural connections in her brain, making death instantaneous. She never felt a thing. Her muscles unlocked, and the corpse crumpled to the floor.

He walked over to her, and spent a moment looking down. Then he pulled out an em pulser and placed it on the back of her head, where the memory-cell insert was. The gadget discharged. He triggered it another three times, making absolutely sure the insert would be scrambled beyond recovery. No matter how good a clone body the re-life procedure produced for her, the most recent section of Tara Jennifer Shaheef’s life was now lost for ever.

The killer’s e-butler sent an instruction to the apartment’s array, which turned the lights back on. He sat in the big sofa, facing the door, and waited.

Wyobie Cotal arrived forty-six minutes later. There was a somewhat smug and anticipatory smile on the young first-lifer’s face as he walked into the room. It turned to an expression of total shock as he saw the naked corpse on the floor. He’d barely registered the man sitting on the sofa opposite before the nervejam pistol fired again.

The killer repeated the procedure with the em pulser, erasing the carefully stored duplicate memories of the last few months of Wyobie Cotal’s life from his memorycell insert. After that, he moved into the spare bedroom, pulling three large suitcases and a big trunk out from their storage closet. By the time he’d got them into the master bedroom, three robot trolleys had arrived from the tower’s delivery bay, carrying several plastic packing crates.

His first job was shoving the bodies into the two largest crates and sealing them tight. He then spent the next two and a half hours collecting every item of Tara’s in the apartment, gradually filling the remaining crates with them. Her clothes went into the cases and trunk.

When he was finished, the trolleys loaded up the crates again, and took them back down the service elevator to the delivery bay, where two hired trucks were waiting. The crates containing the bodies went into one truck, while everything else went into the second.

Upstairs the killer drained the bath, then ordered the maidbots to give the apartment a class-one cleaning. He left the little machines busy at work scouring the floors and walls for dust and dirt, conscientiously switching off the lights as he went.

FOUR

So here she was, in the bleak small hours of the morning, strapped tightly into the confined cockpit of a hyperglider that was tethered to the barren rock floor of Stakeout Canyon waiting for the storm to arrive with its two hundred kilometers per hour winds. At her age, and with her family heritage behind her, there were probably a great many better things for Justine Burnelli to be doing. Most of the ones she could think of right now involved beds with silk sheets (preferably shared with a man), or spa baths, or extremely expensive restaurants, or plush nightclubs. But the only luxuries within about a thousand kilometers were currently racing away from her as fast as the support crews could drive the convoy’s mobile homes over this god-awful terrain. And it was all thanks to her newest best friend: Estella Fenton.

They’d met in the day lounge of the exclusive Washington rejuvenation clinic she always used, both of them just out of the tank and undergoing physiotherapy, hydrotherapy, massage, and herbal aromatherapy, among other remedies to bring some life back to limbs and muscles that hadn’t been used for fourteen months. They moved like old-time geriatrics, an irony made worse by their apparently adolescent bodies.

All anyone did in the lounge was sit in the deep jellcushion chairs and stare out at the wooded parkland beyond the picture windows. A hardy few used handheld arrays to do some work, reading the screens and talking to the programs. None of them had retained the ability to interface directly with the cybersphere. Their bodies had all been purged of most of their inserts, like processors and OCtattoos, during the rejuvenation process, and they hadn’t received their new ones yet. Estella had been led into the airy lounge by two nurses, one holding each arm as the gorgeous young redhead wobbled unsteadily between them. She sank into the chair with a grateful sigh.

“We’ll be back for your hydro session at three o’clock,” the senior nurse said.

“Thank you so much,” Estella said with a forced smile. It blanked out as soon as the nurses left the lounge. “Bloody hell.”

“Just out?” Justine asked.

“Two days.”

“Three, myself.”

“God! Another ten days of this.”

“Worth it, though.” Justine held up the paperscreen she’d been reading; it was still running through the articles and pictures of the fashion magazine she’d accessed. “I haven’t been able to wear anything this good for the last ten years.” Although plenty of her female friends underwent rejuvenation religiously every twenty years (or less), Justine tended to wait until her body age was around fifty before going through the whole process again. You could carry vanity too far.

“I’m not even at the stage where I’m thinking of clothes yet,” Estella said. She ran a hand through her disheveled hair, which was an all-over bonnet five centimeters long. “I need to get styled first. And I hate having hair this short, I normally wear it down to my waist, and that always takes a couple of years to grow,” she grouched.

“That must look lovely.”

“I don’t have any trouble catching men.” She glanced around the lounge. “God, I don’t even feel like that right now.” The clinic was strictly single sex, although that didn’t always stop clients who were nearing the end of their physical therapy period from indulging in a bit of illicit hanky-panky in their rooms. It wasn’t just youth’s appearance they reclaimed after rejuve; their newly adolescent bodies were flush with hormones and vitality. Sex was at the top of just about everybody’s agenda when they left a rejuvenation clinic, and tended to stay there for quite a while.

Justine grinned. “Won’t be long. You’ll be heading for the nearest Silent World full speed ahead.”

“Been there, done that, a hundred times over. Not to say that I won’t make a stop off on the way, but I’ve got something more exhilarating planned for this time.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

Thathad turned out to be a two-month-long safari across Far Away. Justine had almost outright rejected the notion of joining her. But the more Estella talked about it—and she talked about very little else—the more it began to lodge in her mind.

After all, Far Away was the only true “wild world” within the Commonwealth, where civilization’s grip on the inhabitants was a loose one. It was difficult and expensive to reach, the climate and environment were odd, the enigmatic alien ship Marie Celeste was still there puzzling researchers as much as it had on the day of its discovery. And then there was the ultimate geological challenge, the Grand Triad, the three largest volcanoes in the known galaxy, arranged in a tight triangle.

Justine’s hyperglider was tethered just inside the wide opening of Stakeout Canyon, so the nose was pointing east, which put Mount Zeus to her left. In the daytime when the ground crew was rigging the hyperglider, all she could see of that colossus was its rocky lower slope, which formed one side of the huge funnel-shaped canyon. The crater peak could never be seen from the base; it was seventeen kilometers high.

To her right was Mount Titan, the only currently active volcano of the three, its crater rim standing outside the atmosphere at twenty-three kilometers high. Sometimes, at night, and if the eruption was particularly violent, the rose-gold corona shimmering above the glowing lava could be seen from the pampas lands away to the south, as if a red dwarf had just set behind the horizon. Directly ahead of her, forming the impossibly blunt and massive end of the canyon, was Mount Herculaneum. Measuring seven hundred eleven kilometers wide across its base, the volcano was roughly conical, with its twin-caldera summit leveling out at thirty-two kilometers above sea level, putting it a long way above Far Away’s troposphere. Thankfully, the geologists had classed it as semiactive; it had never erupted in the hundred eighty odd years since human settlement had begun, though it had produced a few spectacular shudders in that time.