“The use of it is what concerns me the most,” Ione said. “Once it’s been activated, governments will finally be able to see what it can actually do. From that, they’ll deduce the principles. It’ll be mass-produced, Joshua. We have to try and stop that. The Confederation has enough problems with antimatter, and now possession. We cannot allow another terror factor to be introduced.”

“We? Oh, Jesus.” He let his head flop back onto the cushions—if only there was a stone wall to thump his temple against instead. “Let me guess. You want me to chase after her. Right? Go up against every intelligence agency in the Confederation, not to mention the navy. Find her, tap her on the shoulder, and say nicely: All is forgiven, and the Lord of Ruin would really like you to come home, oh, and by the way, whatever your thirty-year plan—your obsession —was to screw up Omuta we’d like you to forget it as well. Jesus fucking Christ, Ione!”

She gave him an unflustered sideways glance. “Do you want to live in a universe where a super-doomsday weapon is available to every nutcase with a grudge?”

“Try not to weight your questions so much, you might drown.”

“The only chance we have, Joshua, is to bring her back here. That or kill her. Now who are you going to trust to do that? More to the point, who can I trust? There’s nobody, Joshua. Except you.”

“Walk into Harkey’s Bar any night of the week, there’s a hundred veterans of covert operations who’ll take your money and do exactly what you ask without a single question.”

“No, it has to be you. One, because I trust you, and I mean really trust you. Especially after what you did back at Lalonde. Two, you’ve got what it takes to do the job, the ship and the contacts in the industry necessary to trace her. Three, you’ve got the motivation.”

“Oh, yeah? You haven’t said how much you’ll pay me yet.”

“As much as you want, I am the national treasurer after all. That is, until young Marcus takes over from me. Did you want to bequeath our son this problem, Joshua?”

“Shit, Ione, that’s really—”

“Below the belt even for me? Sorry, Joshua, but it isn’t. We all have responsibilities. You’ve managed to duck out of yours for quite a while now. All I’m doing is reminding you of that.”

“Oh, great, now this is all my problem.”

“No one else in the galaxy can make it your problem, Joshua, only you. Like I said, all I’m doing is making the data available to you.”

“Nice cop-out. It’s me that’s going to be in at the shit end, not you.” When Joshua looked over at her he expected to see her usual defiant expression, the one she used when she was powering up to out-stubborn him. Instead all he saw was worry and a tinge of sorrow. On a face that beautiful it was heartbreaking. “Look, anyway, there’s a Confederation-wide quarantine in effect, I can’t take Lady Mac off in pursuit even if I wanted to.”

“It only applies to civil starflight. Lady Macbeth would be re-registered as an official Tranquillity government starship.”

“Shit.” He smiled up at the ceiling, a very dry reflex. “Ah well, worth a try.”

“You’ll do it?”

“I’ll ask questions in the appropriate places, that’s all, Ione. I’m not into heroics.”

“You don’t need to be, I can help.”

“Sure.”

“I can,” she insisted, piqued. “For a start, I can issue you with some decent combat wasps.”

“Great, no heroics please, but take a thousand megatonnes’ worth of nukes with you just in case.”

“Joshua . . . I don’t want you to be vulnerable, that’s all. There will be a lot of people looking for Mzu, and none of them are the type to ask questions first.”

“Wonderful.”

“I can send some serjeants with you as well. They’ll be useful as bodyguards when you’re docked.”

He tried to think up an argument against that, but couldn’t. “Fine. Unsubtle, but fine.”

Ione grinned. She knew that tone.

“Everyone will just think they’re cosmoniks,” she said.

“Okay, that just leaves us with one minor concern.”

“Which is?”

“Where the hell do I start looking? I mean, Jesus; Mzu’s smart, she’s not going to fly straight to the Garissa system to pick up the Alchemist. She could be anywhere , Ione; there are over eight hundred and sixty inhabited star systems out there.”

“She went to the Narok system, I think. That’s where the Udat ’s wormhole was aligned, anyway. It makes sense, Narok is Kenyan-ethnic; she may be contacting sympathisers.”

“How the hell do you know that? I thought only blackhawks and voidhawks could sense each other’s wormholes.”

“Our SD satellites have some pretty good sensors.”

She was lying; he knew it right away. What was worse than the lie, he thought, was the reason behind it. Because he couldn’t think of one, certainly not one that had to be kept from him, the only person she trusted to send on this job. She must be protecting something, a something more important than the Alchemist. Jesus. “You were right, you know that? The night we met at Dominique’s party, you said something to me. And you were right.”

“What was it?”

“I can’t say no to you.”

Joshua left an hour later to supervise the Lady Mac ’s refit, and round up his crew. It meant he missed Kelly’s report, which put him in a very small minority. Kate Elvin’s earlier optimism had been well founded; the other news companies didn’t even try to compete. Ninety per cent of Tranquillity’s population accessed the sensevises Kelly had recorded on Lalonde. The impact was as devastating as predicted—though not at once. The editing was too good for that, binding segments together in a fast-paced assault on the sensorium. Only afterwards, when they could duck the all-out assault on their immediate attention, did the implications of possession begin to sink in.

The effect acted like a mild depressant program or a communal virus. Yes, there truly was life after corporeal death. But it seemed to be perpetual misery. Nor was there any sighting of God, any God, even the Creator’s numerous prophets went curiously unseen; no pearly gates, no brimstone lakes, no judgement, no Jahannam, no salvation. There was apparently no reward for having lived a virtuous life. The best anybody now had to hope for after death was to come back and possess the living.

Having to come to terms with the concept of a universe besieged by lost souls was a wounding process. People reacted in different ways. Getting smashed, or stoned, or stimmed out was popular. Some found religion in a big way. Some became fervently agnostic. Some turned to their shrinks for reassurance. Some (the richer and smarter) quietly focused their attention (and funding) to zero-tau mausoleums.

One thing the psychiatrists did notice, this was a depression which drove nobody to suicide. The other constants were the slow decline in efficiency at work, increased lethargy, a rise in use of tranquilizer and stimulant programs. Pop psychology commentators took to calling it the rise of the why-bother psychosis.

The rest of the Confederation was swift to follow, and almost identical in its response no matter what ethnic culture base was exposed to the news. No ideology or religion offered much in the way of resistance. Only Edenism proved resilient, though even that culture was far from immune.

Antonio Whitelocke chartered twenty-five blackhawks and Adamist independent trader starships to distribute Kelly’s fleks to Collins offices across the Confederation. Saturation took three weeks, longer than optimum, but the quarantine alert made national navies highly nervous. Some of the more authoritarian governments, fearful of the effect Kelly’s recording would have on public confidence, tried to ban Collins from releasing it; an action which simply pushed the fleks underground whilst simultaneously boosting their credibility. It was an unfortunate outcome, because in many cases it clashed and interacted with two other information ripples expanding across the Confederation. Firstly there was the rapidly spreading bad news about Al Capone’s takeover of New California, and secondly the more clandestine distribution of Kiera Salter’s seductive recording.