He rubbed his arms. "It's cold here. I'd forgotten what real mountain air could be like."

"You English are wimps. It's too hot, it's too cold, it's too wet. Never satisfied."

"Yeah, right," Greg turned back to Vassili. "At least we're allowed to complain."

Vassili made a farting sound. "Now we've found the glories of democracy, when do Russians ever do anything else?"

Greg glanced at the four young officers standing blank-faced behind Vassili. "I need to talk with you, Vassili."

"Bah, one phone call telling me you're coming. Then another from the Defence Ministry itself telling me to be vigilant this morning, there are to be no unaccountable accidents in my airspace. So I ask myself, all this for my old orange farmer friend?"

"I'm not farming right now. It's the middle of the bloody picking season, and I've been dragged away."

"They never leave us alone, do they, Gregory?" Vassili said soberly.

"This isn't the Army, the English government, Vassili. I'm doing this for another friend of mine."

Vassili's bushy eyebrows rose. "This must be a tremendous friendship you have."

Greg jerked a thumb back at the Pegasus. "Julia Evans, the owner of Event Horizon."

"The Queen of Peterborough herself? What circles we two poor footsore soldiers move in these days, Gregory. Come then, come and tell me how a simple Russian general can be of help to the richest woman in the world."

Vassili's office was on the second floor of the airport building, taking up the entire western end, which gave him three glass walls looking out over Nova Kirov, the embryonic farms, and the glacier. There was a desk and high-back chairs, several bookcases, a long table for staff officer briefings. All the furniture was made from hard Siberian pine, with simple geometric carvings; it was old looking, cracked and worn, polished a thousand times. A battered samovar bubbled away on a table in the corner, its charcoal glowing rose-gold, filling the air with wisps of arid smoke. Polished artillery shells were lined up on bookcases and the desk. One wall had a row of framed pictures, beribboned generals Greg didn't recognize, Yeltsin, Defence Minister Evgeniy Schitov. One frame held a metre length of helicopter blade; there was a chunk missing, as though some animal had taken a bite out of it. It was from a Mi-24 Hind K. Greg had been in it, liaising with Vassili's troops, when it was hit by AA fire from the Jihad Legion. Thankfully, the pilot's autorotation technique had been flawless.

Vassili poured two cups of tea from his samovar as Greg sat at the long table. The tap squeaked each time he turned it. "It's been in my family since before the Bolshevik Revolution," he explained. "I get the Air Force boys to fly my charcoal in. A general has some privileges." He put the cup down in front of Greg. "Have you cut yourself shaving, Gregory?"

Greg's hand went to the scar by his eye. The dermal seal membrane had peeled off during the night, but the new flesh was pink and tender. "Did you hear about the Colonel Maitland crash?"

Vassili sat opposite him, frowning. "The airship? Certainly, it was on the news channels last night. It caught fire somewhere over the Atlantic. Most of the crew got out. You were on board?"

"Yeah. Tell you, it didn't catch fire, by accident."

"Gregory, my friend, you are too old and too slow to be thinking of combat. Leave it to the stalwarts like that fine young man accompanying you. Please."

"Christ, don't you start."

Vassili chuckled, and blew on the top of his cup. "So, what is it that Julia Evans wishes to know?"

"Is the Russian government mounting a covert deal against Event Horizon? And if so, she'd like to negotiate a peaceful solution."

Vassili put his cup down without drinking any of the tea. "Are you serious?"

"Yeah." Greg didn't like the way Vassili was looking at him, almost hurt. He hadn't liked asking, either. Maybe coming here hadn't been such a good idea.

"You seriously think my government would do such a thing?"

"I don't think you would, Vassili. But someone inside the republic is going balls out against her. I need to know who."

"Tell me, Gregory. Start at the beginning, and tell me all of it."

Greg took a sip of tea, and started to talk.

Vassili's rounded face was thoughtful when he finished. "No, it is not the Russian government that is doing this," he said. "I would know. I have been informed of this atomic structuring science. This Clifford Jepson you talk of approached Mikoyan two days ago with his development sharing proposition. Naturally as good Russians, Mikoyan informed the Defence Ministry. You'll see that I'm telling the truth, Gregory."

Greg pushed his empty cup over the table to Vassili, meeting the general's eyes. "I don't need to use my gland on you, Vassili."

"Bah, so morbid and serious you sound, Gregory. I have been of some help to you, have I not? Would you not do the same for me?"

"You have my address, and I'm on the phone. I can't offer you air defence cover, though."

Vassili slapped the table, laughing. "So, we now need to know who is dragging my country's good name through the mud. Yes?"

"Yeah." He thought for a moment. "You said it was Mikoyan who informed your government. Didn't Mutizen approach the Russian Defence Ministry with its generator data?"

"No. I did not realize we owned a kombinate."

"Only thirty-two per cent. But, yeah, it's as good as outright ownership."

"If the government has a controlling stake, they would have made sure the generator data was used to their advantage. It would never be offered to Event Horizon." Vassili stood up and took the cups back to the samovar. "I don't like this, Gregory. The briefing officer they sent over explained some of the possible defence applications of atomic structuring. There will be a terrible scramble to acquire it. All or nothing, Gregory. What country could afford to be without it? A shield which can protect whole cities against nuclear weapons and electron compression warheads. The citizens of the world would demand nothing less from their leaders. And I would venture that offensive capabilities will soon follow. People are so very good at that kind of thing. And now you tell me there are unknown players on the field seeking a monopoly. No, this is not good, and not just for Julia Evans."

Greg ran a hand across his forehead. Last night he had been too exhausted to give atomic structuring much thought. But Vassili's comments were opening his mind up to possibilities, few of them good. "You think it'll mean a new arms race?"

Vassili refilled the cups and returned to the table. "Arms race, economic upheaval." He gave Greg a sad smile. "And just when we were getting over the worse of the Warming."

"Yeah. England's a good place to live in again, Vassili. You wouldn't know it was the same country that suffered under the PSP."

"Do you have the names of the Russian export companies Jason Whitehurst was trading with?"

"Sure." Greg pulled his cybofax out, and called up the data. He handed it over to Vassili. "Mean anything to you?"

"Perhaps." Vassili walked over to his desk and activated his terminal. Greg saw him squirt the export companies' profiles into the key.

"I have a scrambled link with the military intelligence cores in Moscow," Vassili said. "And through that I can access the Federal Crime Directorate memory cores. This won't take a minute." He sat behind the desk.

The shiny artillery shells prevented Greg from seeing what data was in the cubes. He drank some tea.

Vassili suddenly let out a contemptuous grunt.

"What?" Greg asked.

"I'm surprised at you, Gregory. Mindstar gave you intelligence data-correlation training, did they not?"

"Three months of lectures and exercises, yeah. Why?"