“Shit! I meant the Deadnight kids.”

“Ah. Monica, please take care. Our . . . examination of the Dorados has shown up several cadres of possessed. They’re here, and they are expanding. I do not advise you return to Mapire. Our estimation is that it will fall within another three days, probably less.”

“Did you tell the governing council?”

“No. We decided it would cause too much panic and disorder. The council would institute quite draconian measures, and be completely unable to enforce them, which would only worsen the situation. The Dorados do not have the usual civil government structure; for all their size and economic importance, they remain company towns, without adequate law enforcement personnel. In short, the possessed will take over here anyway. We need time to search in peace before they do. I’m afraid Mzu comes before everything, including alerting the population.”

“Oh. Thanks for the warning.”

“My pleasure. Have your assets located Daphine Kigano yet?”

Monica crinkled her face up in distaste. I shouldn’t be discussing this, not with him. Standard agency doctrine. But the universe wasn’t exactly standard anymore. And the ESA didn’t have too many resources here. “No. But we know it’s her.”

“Yes. That’s what we concluded.”

“A chartered starship carrying one passenger was rather unsubtle. Our station accessed the Department of Immigration’s file on the Samaku ’s docking: one hundred per cent visual confirmation. God knows what she was doing in the Narok system, though.”

“Just trading ships, we hope. An interdiction order has gone out for the Samaku , all voidhawks and Confederation Navy ships are alert for it.”

“Good. Look, Samuel, I don’t know what your orders are—”

“Originally: find Mzu, prevent her from handing over the Alchemist to the Garissan partizan movement, retrieve the Alchemist. That’s the soft option. If we can’t do that, then I was instructed to terminate her and destroy her neural nanonics. If we don’t get the Alchemist, no one else must have it.”

“Yeah. Pretty much the same as mine. Personally I think the second option would be best all round.”

“Possibly. I must admit that even after seventy-five years in the job I am reluctant to kill in cold blood. A life is a life.”

“For the greater good, my friend.”

Samuel smiled sadly. “I know both the arguments and the stakes involved. However, there is also a new factor to consider. We absolutely cannot allow her or it to fall into the hands of the possessed.”

“God, I know that. Capone with antimatter is bad enough; give him the Alchemist and the Confederation Navy might not be able to contain him.”

“Which means, we really don’t want to expedite option two, do we?”

Facing him was the same as receiving a stern glance from a loving grandfather who was dispensing homely wisdom. How infuriating that she had to have the obvious pointed out to her in such a fashion. “How can I argue against that?” She grunted miserably.

“Just as long as you appreciate all the factors.”

“Sure. Consider my wrist firmly smacked. What have your lot got planned for her, then?”

“Following acquisition, Consensus recommended placing her in zero-tau. At the very least until the possessed situation is resolved. Possibly longer.”

“How long?” Monica almost didn’t want to ask, or know.

“Consensus thought it prudent that she remains there until we have a requirement for the Alchemist. It is a large galaxy, after all; there may be other, more hostile xenocs than the Kiint and Tyrathca out there.”

“I was wrong, you’re not an evangelist, you’re a paranoid.”

“A pragmatist, I sincerely hope; as are all Edenists.”

“Okay, Samuel, so pragmatically, what do you want to do next? And please bear in mind that I am a loyal subject of my King.”

“Concentrate on finding her first, then get her away from the Dorados. The argument over custody can come later.”

“Nine-tenths of the law,” she muttered. “Are you offering me a joint operation?”

“Yes, if you’re willing. We have more resources here, I think, which gives us the greater chance of launching a successful extraction mission. But neither of us can afford to dismiss any avenue which will locate her. I am sure your Duke of Salion would approve of any action which guaranteed her removal from the scene right now. You can accompany her on our evacuation flight; and afterwards we would allow a joint custody to satisfy the Kingdom we have not acquired Alchemist technology. Is that reasonable?”

“Yeah, very. We have a deal.”

They touched bottles.

“The local partizan leadership has been called to a meeting here tonight,” she said. “Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly where that is in the asteroid. I’m waiting for our asset to get in touch as soon as it’s over.”

“Thank you, Monica. We don’t know where it is, either. But we’re assuming she will be there.”

“Can you track any of the partizans?”

“It is not easy. But we’ll certainly make every effort.”

For three days the rented office suite which had become the new Edenist intelligence service headquarters in Ayacucho had been the centre of a remarkable breeding program. When the agents of the “defence delegation” team arrived they brought with them seventy thousand geneered spider eggs. Every arachnid was affinity-capable, and small enough to clamber through grilles and scurry through the vast mechanical plexus of lift shafts, maintenance passages, environmental ducts, cable conduits, and waste disposal pipes which knitted the asteroid’s rooms and public halls together into a functional whole.

For over seventy hours the tiny infiltrators were coaxed and manipulated along black pipes and through chinks in the rock, slipping around cracks in badly fitted composite panels. Thousands never made it to their required destination. Victims of more predatory creatures, of working insect grids, of security barriers (most common in the corporate areas), sluices of strange liquids, smears of sticky fluids, and the most common failing of all: being lost.

But for every one which didn’t make it, five did. At the end of the deployment period the Edenists had visual coverage of sixty-seven per cent of Ayacucho’s interior (which was how Samuel found Monica Foulkes so easily). The three voidhawks perched on Ayacucho’s docking ledges, along with the ten armed voidhawks holding station inside Tunja’s particle disk, and the agents reviewed the spiders on a snapshot rotor, managing a complete sweep every four hours. As a method of locating one individual it was horribly inefficient. Samuel knew that it would only be pure chance if Mzu was spotted during one of the sweeps. It was up to the agents on the ground to lower the odds by procedural work; their dull routine of researching public files, bullying assets, bribing officialdom, and on occasion outright blackmail.

For thirty years the Garissan partizan movement had pursued a course of consistently lacklustre activity. It funded several anti-Omuta propaganda campaigns to keep the hatred alive among the first of a new generation born to the refugees. Mercenaries and ex-Garissan navy marines were recruited and sent on sabotage missions against any surviving Omutan interests. There were even a couple of attempts to fly into the Omuta system and attack asteroid settlements, both of which were snuffed by CNIS before the starships ever left dock. But for the last decade the leadership had done little except talk. Membership had dropped away steadily, as had funding, along with any real enthusiasm.

With such shoddy organization and defunct motivation it was inevitable that any intelligence agency which had ever shown an interest in the partizans had collated files on every person who had been a member, or even attended a fringe meeting. Their leadership was perfectly documented, long since consigned to the semi-crank category and downgraded to intermittent monitoring. A status which was now abruptly reversed.