That’s why you talked about the past, so I can learn to face my memories without the fear, because that’s all they are, memories. Harmless in themselves.

Excellent. I will now make them available to you.

She steeled herself, foolish that it was, clenching her stomach muscles and fisting her hands.

Look at the owl,wing-tsit chong instructed. Tell me its name.

The owl blinked at her, and half extended its wings. She stared at the flecked pattern of ochre and hazel feathers. They were running like liquid, becoming midnight-blue and purple. “Oenone !” she shouted. Pernik island rushed towards her at a speed which made her grasp the balcony rail in fright.

Please don’t, Syrinx,Oenone asked. The deluge of misery and longing entwined with that simple request made her eyes brim with tears. Don’t leave me again.

Never. Never ever ever ever, beloved.her whole body was trembling in reaction to the years of memory yawning open in her mind. And right at the end, the last before stinking darkness had grasped at her, most vivid of all, the dungeon and its torturers.

Syrinx?

I’m here,she reassured the voidhawk unsteadily. It’s okay, I’m fine.

You saved me from them.

How could I not?

I love you.

And I you.

I was right,wing-tsit chong said.

When Syrinx raised her head she saw the old man’s face smiling softly, the multiplying wrinkles aging him another decade. Sir?

To do what I did all those centuries ago. To allow people to see the love and the sourness which lives in all of us. Only then can we come to terms with what we are. You are living proof of that, young Syrinx. I thank you for that. Now open your eyes.

They are open.

He sighed theatrically. So pedantic. Then close them.

Syrinx opened her eyes to look up at a sky-blue ceiling. The dark blobs around the edges of her vision field resolved into three terribly anxious faces bending over her.

“Hello, Mother,” she said. It was very difficult to talk, and her body felt as though it were wrapped in a shrunken ship-tunic.

Athene started crying.

•   •   •

There were fifteen holoscreens in the editing suite, arranged in a long line along one wall. All of them were switched on, and the variety of images they displayed was enormous, ranging from a thousand-kilometre altitude view of Amarisk with the red cloud bands mirroring the Juliffe tributary network, to the terrifyingly violent starship battle in orbit above Lalonde; and from Reza Malin’s mercenaries flattening the village of Pamiers, to a flock of overexcited young children charging out of a homestead cabin to greet the arrival of the hovercraft.

Out of the five people sitting at the editing suite’s table, four of them stared at the screens with the kind of nervous enthusiasm invariably suffered by voyeurs of suffering on a grand scale, where the sheer spectacle of events overcame the agony of any individual casualty. In the middle of her colleagues, Kelly regarded her work with a detachment which was mainly derived from a suppressor program her neural nanonics were running.

“We can’t cut anything else,” Kate Elvin, the senior news editor, protested.

“I don’t like it,” said Antonio Whitelocke. He was the head of Collins’s Tranquillity office, a sixty-year career staffer who had plodded his way to the top from the Politics and Economics division. An excellent choice for Tranquillity, but hardly empathic with young rover reporters like Kelly Tirrel. Her Lalonde report scared him shitless. “You just can’t have a three hour news item.”

“Grow some bollocks,” Kelly snapped. “Three hours is just dip-in highlights.”

“Lowlights,” Antonio muttered, glaring at his turbulent new megastar. Her skinhead hairstyle was devastatingly intimidating, and he’d heard all about poor Garfield Lunde. Marketing always complained about the use of non-mainstream image anchors. When he thought of that pretty, feminine young woman who used to present the breakfast round-up just last month he could only worry that one of the possessed had sneaked back from Lalonde after all.

“The balance is perfect,” Kate said. “We’ve incorporated the fundamentals of the doomed mission, and even managed to end on an upbeat note with the rescue. That was a stroke of sheer brilliance, Kelly.”

“Well, gee, thanks. I would never have gone with Horst and the mercs back to the homestead unless it made a better report.”

Kate sailed on serenely through the sarcasm; unlike Antonio she’d been a rover once, which had included a fair share of combat assignments. “This edit will satisfy both our corporate objectives, Antonio. First off, the rumour circuit has been overheating ever since Lady Macbeth came back; Marketing hasn’t even needed to advertise our evening news slot. Everybody in Tranquillity is going to access us tonight—I’ve heard the opposition are just going to run soap repeats while Kelly’s on. And once our audience access they aren’t going to stop. We’re not just giving them sensenviron impressions of a war, we’ve got a whole story to tell them here. That always hooks them. Our advertising premium for this is going to be half a million fuseodollars for a thirty-second slot.”

“For one show,” Antonio grumbled.

“More than one, that’s the beauty. Sure, everyone is going to make a flek of tonight. But Kelly brought back over thirty-six hours of her own fleks, and then we’ve got the recordings taken from Lady Macbeth ’s sensors from the moment they emerged in the Lalonde system. We can milk this for a month with specialist angle interviews, documentaries, and current affairs analysis panels. We’ve won the ratings war for the whole goddamn year, and we did it on the cheap.”

“Cheap! Do you know what we paid that bloody Lagrange Calvert for those sensor recordings?”

“Cheap,” Kate insisted. “Tonight alone is going to pay for those. And with universal distribution rights we’ll quadruple Collins group profits.”

“If we can ever get it distributed,” Antonio said.

“Sure we can. Have you accessed the civil starflight prohibition order? It just prevents docking, not departure. Blackhawks can simply stay inside a planet’s emergence zone and datavise a copy to our local office. We’ll have to pay the captains a little more, but not much, because they’re losing revenue sitting on the endcap ledges. This can work. It’ll be head office seats for us after this.”

“What, after this?” Kelly said.

“Come on, Kelly.” Kate squeezed her shoulder. “We know it was rough, we felt it for ourselves. But the quarantine is going to stop the possessed from spreading, and now we’re alert to the problem the security forces can contain them if there is an outbreak. They won on Lalonde because it’s so damn backwards.”

“Oh, sure.” Kelly was operating on stimulant programs alone now, fatigue toxin antidote humming melodically in her head. “Saving the galaxy is a breeze now we know. Hell, it’s only the dead we’re up against after all.”

“If you’re not up to this, Kelly, then say so,” Antonio said, then played his mastercard. “We can use another anchor. Kirstie McShane?”

“That bitch!”

“So we can go ahead as scheduled, can we?”

“I want to put in more of Pamiers, and Shaun Wallace. Those are the kind of events which will make people more aware of the situation.”

“Wallace is depressing, he spent that entire interview telling you that the possessed couldn’t be beaten.”

“Damn right. Shaun’s vital, he tells us what we really need to know, to face up to the real problem.”

“Which is?”

“Death. Everyone’s going to die, Antonio, even you.”

“No, Kelly, I can’t sanction this sort of slant. It’s as bad as that Tyrathca Sleeping God ceremony you recorded.”