Ombey’s rotation had carried the Xingu continent fully into the centre of the darkside as the Royal Navy flyer Ralph Hiltch was using passed over the outskirts of Pasto. The city was situated on the western coast, growing out from the Falling Jumbo seaport in a sustained hundred-year development spree. It was flat country, ideal for urbanization, placing minimal problems in the path of the ambitious civil engineers. Most of the level districts were laid out in geometric patterns, housing estates alternating with broad parks and elaborate commercial districts. Hills, such as they were, had been claimed by the richer residents for their chateaus and mansions.

Accessing the flyer’s sensor suite, Ralph could see them standing proud in their own lakes of illumination at the centre of large sable-black grounds. The narrow, brightly lit roads which wound around the hills were the only curves amid the vast grid of brilliant orange lines spread out below him. Pasto looked so beautifully crisp and functional, a grand symbol of the Kingdom’s economic prowess, like a merit badge pinned on the planet.

And somewhere down there, amid all that glittering regimented architecture and human dynamism, were people who could bring the whole edifice crashing down. Probably within a couple of days, certainly no more than a week.

Cathal Fitzgerald angled the flyer towards the big cube-shaped building which was the Xingu police force headquarters. They landed on a roof pad, at the end of a row of small arrowhead-planform hypersonic planes.

Two people were waiting for Ralph at the bottom of the airstairs. Landon McCullock, the police commissioner, was a hale seventy-year-old, almost two metres tall, with thick crew-cut ginger hair, dressed in a midnight-blue uniform with several silver stripes on his right arm. Beside him was Diana Tiernan, the police department’s technology division chief, a fragile, elderly woman dwarfed by her superior officer, a contrast which tended to emphasise her scholarly appearance.

“I appreciate you coming down,” Landon said as he shook hands with Ralph. “It can’t have been an easy choice for you to face this thing again. The datapackage briefing I’ve had from Admiral Farquar gave me a nasty jolt. My people aren’t exactly geared up to cope with this kind of incident.”

“Who is?” Ralph said, a shade too mordantly. “But we coped on Lalonde; and we aim to do a little better here.”

“Glad to hear it,” Landon said gruffly. He nodded crisply to the other three ESA agents coming down the airstairs; Will and Dean carrying their combat gear in a couple of bulky bags. His lips twitched in a memory-induced smile of admiration as he eyed the two G66 division troopers. “Been a while since I was at that end of an operation,” he murmured.

“Any update on the plane which was shot down?” Ralph asked as they all walked towards the waiting lift.

“Nobody survived, if that’s what you mean,” Diana Tiernan said. She gave Ralph a curious look. “Was that what you meant?”

“They’re tough bastards,” Will said curtly.

She shrugged. “I accessed a recording of Adkinson’s datavise. This energy manipulation ability Savion Kerwin demonstrated seemed quite extraordinary.”

“He didn’t show you a tenth of what he could do,” Ralph said.

The lift doors closed, and they descended to the command centre. It had been designed to handle every conceivable civil emergency, from a plane crash in the heart of the city to outright civil war, a windowless room which took up half of the floor. Twenty-four separate coordination hubs were arranged in three rows, circles of consoles with fifteen operators apiece. Their access authority to the continent’s net was absolute, providing them with unparalleled sensor coverage and communications linkages.

When Ralph walked in every seat was taken, the air seemed almost solid with the laserlight speckles thrown off by hundreds of individual AV projection pillars. He saw Leonard DeVille sitting at Hub One, a raised ring of consoles in the middle of the room. The Home Office minister’s welcoming handshake lacked the sincerity of McCullock’s.

Ralph was quickly introduced to the others at Hub One: Warren Aspinal, the Prime Minister of the Xingu continental parliament; Vicky Keogh, who was McCullock’s deputy; and Bernard Gibson, the police Armed Tactical Squad commander. One of the AV pillars was projecting an image of Admiral Farquar.

“All air traffic was shut down twenty minutes ago,” said Landon McCullock. “Even police patrol flights are down to a complete minimum.”

“And the crews of those that are still in the air have been required to datavise files from their neural nanonics to us here,” Diana said. “That way we can be reasonably certain that none of them have been infected by Tremarco or Gallagher.”

“There was an awful lot of traffic using the city roads when I flew over,” Ralph said. “I’d like to see that shut down now. I can’t emphasise enough that we must restrict the population’s movement.”

“It’s only ten o’clock in Pasto,” Leonard DeVille said. “People are still on their way home, others are out for the evening and will want to return later. If you shut down the city’s ground traffic now you will cause an astounding level of confusion, one which would be beyond the police force’s ability to resolve for hours. And we must have the police in reserve to deal with the embassy people when we detect them. We thought it made more sense to allow everyone to go home as normal, then introduce the curfew. That way, the vast majority will be confined to their houses come tomorrow morning. And if Tremarco and Gallagher have started infecting them, any outbreak will be localized, which means we should be able to isolate it relatively easily.”

Sit down and make an impact, why not? Ralph thought sourly. I’m supposed to listen and advise, not barge in and act like a loudmouth arsehole. Damn, but Kerwin and the plane has me hyped too hot.

Trying to hide how foolish he felt, he asked: “What time will you introduce the curfew?”

“One o’clock,” the Prime Minister said. “Only die-hard nightbirds will still be out and about then. Thank heavens it’s not Saturday night. We really would have been in trouble then.”

“Okay, I can live with that,” Ralph said. There was a quick victory smile on DeVille’s face, which Ralph chose to ignore. “What about the other cities and towns; and more importantly the motorways?”

“All Xingu’s urban areas are having their curfew enacted at one o’clock,” McCullock said. “The continent’s got three time zones, so it’ll be phased in from the east. As for the motorways, we’re already shutting down their traffic; so cities and major towns are going to be segregated. That wasn’t a problem, all motorway vehicles are supervised by the Transport Department route and flow management computers. It’s the vehicles on the minor roads which are giving us a headache; they’re all switched to autonomous control processors. And even worse are the farm vehicles out there in the countryside, half of those bloody things have manual steering.”

“We estimate it will take another three hours to completely shut down all ground traffic movement,” Diana said. “At the moment we’re setting up an interface between Strategic Defence Command and our police traffic division. That way when the low-orbit SD sensor satellites locate a vehicle moving on a minor road they’ll perform an identification sweep and catalogue it. Traffic division will then datavise the control processor to halt. For manually operated vehicles we’ll have to dispatch a patrol car.” A hand waved lamely in the air. “That’s the theory, anyway. A continent-wide detection and identification operation is going to tie up an awful lot of processing power, which we really can’t spare right now. If we’re not very careful we’ll wind up with a capacity shortfall.”