“Yeah, and not just any kind — he wanted the fun tertiary version where your bones begin to melt, your face falls off, and you suffer from dementia and wild rages. None of the intervening decades of oozing pus from the genitals for our man Idi.”

“He’s mad.” Rachel shook her head.

“I’ve been telling you that, yes. What I want to know is, can you take him?”

“Hmm.” She took stock. “He’s big. Is he as hard as he looks?”

“No.” This from Schwartz. “I could myself have easily taken him, without armor. Only he had a gun. He is ill, an autosickie.”

“Well then.” Rachel reached a decision. “We’ve got, what? Forty-four minutes? When you’ve got everybody out, I think I’m going to have to go in and talk to him face-to-face. Keep the guns out of sight but if you can get a shot straight down through the ceiling that—”

“No bullets,” said MacDougal. “We don’t know how he’s wired the dead man’s handle, and we can’t afford to take chances. We’ve got these, though.” She held up a small case: “Robowasps loaded with sleepy-juice, remotely guided. One sting, and he’ll be turned off in ten seconds. The hairy time is between him realizing he’s going down and the lights going out. Someone’s got to stop him yelling a detonation command, tripping the dead man’s handle, or otherwise making the weasel go pop.”

“Okay.” Rachel nodded thoughtfully, trying to ignore the churning in her gut and the instinctive urge to jump up and run — anywhere, as long as it was away from the diseased loony with the Osama complex and the atom bomb upstairs. “So you hook into me for a full sensory feed, I go in, I talk, I play it by ear. We’ll need two code words. ‘I’m going to sneeze’ means I’m going to try to punch him out myself. And, uh, ‘That’s a funny smell’ means I want you to come in with everything you’ve got. If you can plant a lobotomy shot on him, do it, even if you have to shoot through me. Just try to miss my brain stem if it comes down to it. That’s how we play this game. Wasps would be better, though. I’ll try not to call you unless I’m sure I can immobilize him, or I’m sure he’s about to push the button.” She shivered, feeling a familiar rush of nervous energy.

“Are you about that certain?” Schwartz asked, sounding dubious.

Rachel stared at him. “This fuckwit is going to maybe kill dozens, maybe hundreds of people if we don’t nail him right now,” she said. “What do you think?”

Schwartz swallowed. MacDougal shook her head. “What is it you do for a living, again?” she asked.

“I reach the parts ordinary disarmament inspectors don’t touch.” Rachel grinned, baring her teeth at her own fear. She stood up. “Let’s go sort him out.”

Earth, seen from orbit in the twenty-fourth century, was a planet harrowed by technological civilization, bearing the scars left by a hatchling transcendence. Nearly 10 percent of its surface had been concreted over at one time or another. Whole swaths of it bore the suture marks of incomplete reterraforming operations. From the jungles of the Sahara to the fragile grassland of the Amazon basin it was hard to find any part of the planetary surface that hadn’t been touched by the hand of technology.

Earth’s human civilization, originally restricted to a single planet, had spread throughout the solar system. Gas giants in the outer reaches grew strange new industrial rings, while the heights of Kilimanjaro and central Panama sweated threads of diamond wire into geosynchronous orbit. Earth, they had called it once; now it was Old Earth, birth-world of humanity and cradle of civilization. But there was a curious dynamic to this old home world, an uncharacteristically youthful outlook. Old Earth in the twenty-fourth century wasn’t home to the oldest human civilizations. Not even close.

For this paradoxical fact, most people blamed the Eschaton. The Eschaton — the strongly superhuman AI product of a technological singularity that rippled through the quantum computing networks of the late twenty-first century — didn’t like sharing a planet with ten billion future-shocked primates. When it bootstrapped itself to weakly godlike intelligence it deported most of them to other planets, through wormholes generated by means human scientists still could not fathom even centuries later. Not that they’d had much time to analyze its methods in the immediate aftermath — most people had been too busy trying to survive the rigors of the depopulation-induced economic crash. It wasn’t until well over a hundred years later, when the first FTL starships from Earth reached the nearer stars, that they discovered the weirdest aspect of the process. The holes the Eschaton had opened up in space led back in time as well, leading a year into the past for every light year out. And some of the worm-hole tunnels went a very great distance indeed. From the moment of the singularity onward, SETI receivers began picking up strong signals; hitherto silent reaches of space echoed with the chatter and hum of human voices.

By the third century after the immense event, the polities of Earth had largely recovered. The fragmented coalitions and defensive microeconomies left behind by the collapsing wake of the twenty-first century’s global free-trade empire re-formed as a decentralized network able to support an advanced economy. They even managed to sustain the massive burden of the reterraforming projects. Some industries were booming; Earth was rapidly gaining a reputation as the biggest, most open trading hub within a hundred light years. The UN — even more of a deafening echo chamber talking shop than the first organization to bear that name — also included nontribal entities. Restructured to run on profit-making lines, it was amassing a formidable reputation for mercantile diplomacy. Even the most pressing problem of the twenty-second century, the population crash that followed in the wake of the singularity, had been largely averted. Cheap anti-aging hacks and an enlightened emigration policy had stabilized the population at mid-twentieth-century levels, well within the carrying capacity of the planet and in the numbers required to support advanced scientific research again. It was, in short, a time of optimism and expansion: a young, energetic, pluralistic planetary patchwork civilization exploding out into the stellar neighborhood and rediscovering its long-lost children.

None of which made for a bed of roses, as Rachel Mansour — who had been born on this same planet more than a hundred years previously — probably appreciated more than most.

“I’m ready to go in,” she said quietly, leaning against the wall next to the cheap gray aerogel doorslab. She glanced up and down the empty corridor. It smelled damp. The thin carpet was grimy, burdened by more dirt than its self-cleaning system could cope with, and many of the lighting panels were cracked. “Is everyone in position?”

“We’ve got some heavy items still assembling. Try not to call a strike for at least the first ten seconds. After that, we’ll be ready when you need us.”

“Okay. Here goes.” For some reason she found herself wishing she’d brought Madam Chairman along to see the sort of jobs her diplomatic entertainment account got spent on. Rachel shook herself, took a deep breath, and knocked on the door. Madam Chairman could read all about it in the comfort of her committee room when the freelance media caught on. At the moment, it was Rachel’s job, and she needed to keep her attention 101 percent locked on to it.

“Who is that?” boomed a voice from the other side of the partition.

“Police negotiator. You wanted to talk to someone?”

“Why are you waiting then? You better not be armed! Come in and listen to me. Did you bring cameras?”

Uh-oh. “Schwartz is right,” Rachel muttered to her audio monitor. “You going to take off now?”