But that had certainly changed today, Finnuala O’Meara thought jubilantly as the desktop processor finished decrypting the level two security datavise from Landon McCullock to Neville Latham. She’d spent a solid ten hours fishing the net streams today, digesting every rumour since yesterday’s Guyana alert. Thanks to the trivia and paranoid nightmares which every bulletin site geek on the planet had contributed she’d felt completely stimmed out and ready to pack it in. Then an hour ago things got interesting.

AT Squads had seen action in Pasto. Violent action by all accounts—and still no official media release on that from the police. The motorways were being shut down clean across the continent. Reports of SD fire on vehicles abounded, including a clear account of a runaway bus being vaporized not a hundred and fifty kilometres south of Exnall. And now, Xingu’s police commissioner, in person, informing Neville Latham that an unknown, but probably xenoc, sequestration virus was loose in Exnall.

Finnuala O’Meara datavised a shutdown order into the desktop processor block and opened her eyes. “Bloody hell,” she grunted.

Finnuala was in her early twenties, eleven months out of university in Atherstone. Her initial delight at landing a job within two days of qualifying, had, during the first quarter of an hour at the agency, turned into dismay. The Exnall agency didn’t deal in news, it churned out anti-insomnia treatments. Dismay had slumped to surly anger. Exnall was everything which was rotten with small towns. It was run by a clique, a small elite group of councillors and businessmen and the richer local farmers, who made the decisions which counted at their dinner parties and out on their golf course.

It was no different from her own hometown, the one over on the Esparta continent where her parents never quite made the leap to real money contracts because they lacked the connections. Excluded, by class, by money.

She did nothing for half a minute after the decrypted datavise slipped from her mind, sitting staring at the desktop processor. Accessing the net’s police architecture was illegal enough, owning a level two decryption program was grounds for deportation. But she couldn’t ignore this. Couldn’t. It was everything she’d become a reporter for.

“Hugh?” she called.

The communications technician sharing the graveyard shift with her cancelled the Jezzibella album he was running and gave her a disapproving look. “What?”

“How would the authorities announce a curfew to the general public, one where everyone is confined to their house? Specifically, a curfew here in Exnall.”

“Are you having me on?”

“No.”

He blinked away the figments of the flek and accessed a civil procedures file in his neural nanonics. “Okay, I’ve found it; it’s a pretty simple procedure. The chief inspector will use his code rating to load a universal order into the town’s net for every general household processor. The message will play as soon as the processor is accessed, no matter what function you asked for—you tell it to cook your breakfast or vacuum the floor, the first thing it will do is tell you about the curfew.”

Finnuala patted her hands together, charting out options. “So people won’t know about the curfew until tomorrow morning after they wake up.”

“That’s right.”

“Unless we tell them first.”

“Now you really are winding me up.”

“No way.” The smile on her face was carnivorous. “I know what that prat Latham is going to do next. He’ll warn his friends before anyone else, he’ll make sure they’re ready to be evacuated first. It’s his style, this whole bloody town’s style.”

“Don’t be so paranoid,” Hugh Rosler said edgily. “If the evacuation is under McCullock’s command, nobody will be able to pull a fast one from this end.”

Finnuala smiled sweetly and datavised an order into the desktop processor block. It accessed the net’s police architecture again, and the monitor programs she designated went into primary mode.

The results simmered into Hugh’s mind as a cluster of grey, dimensionless icons. Someone at the police station was datavising a number of houses in the town and outlying areas. They were personal calls, and the households they were being directed at were all depressingly familiar.

“He already is,” Finnuala said. “I know these people as well as you do, Hugh. Nothing changes, not even when our planet is under threat.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“What this agency is supposed to do: inform people. I’ll assemble a package warning everyone about the sequestration, but instead of just releasing it on the media circuit I want you to program the agency processor to datavise it to everyone in Exnall right away, coded as a personal priority message. That way we’ll all have an equal chance to get clear when the military transports arrive.”

“I don’t know about this, Finnuala. Maybe we ought to check with the editor first . . .”

“Bugger the editor,” she snapped. “He already knows. Look who was seventh on Latham’s list. Do you think his priority is to call us? Do you? Right now he’s getting his fat wife and their backwards brat dressed ready to take off for the landing site. Are your wife and kids being told, Hugh? Are they being made safe?”

Hugh Rosler did what he always did and offered no resistance. “All right, Finnuala, I’ll modify the processor’s program. But by Christ, you’d better be right about this.”

“I am.” She stood up and pulled her jacket off the back of the chair. “I’m going down to the police station, see if I can get a personal comment from that good man Chief Inspector Latham on the crisis facing his little fiefdom.”

“You’re pushing it,” Hugh warned.

“I know.” She grinned sadistically. “Great, isn’t it.”

Ralph knew he didn’t have anything to prove anymore. The AT Squads were alert to the terrible danger, they’d been fully blooded. So there was no practical reason for him to take a police hypersonic out to Mortonridge. Yet here he was with Cathal, Will, and Dean heading south at Mach five. His justification . . . well, the marine brigade coming down from the orbital bases would need to be brought up to speed. And he might have some advice invaluable to those on the ground.

In reality, he needed to see those towns cordoned off for himself. The threat contained, pinned down ready for extermination.

“It looks like your idea about zero-tau was on the ball,” Roche Skark datavised. “All six prisoners we captured at Moyce’s have now been placed in the pods shipped down from Guyana. Four of them fought like lunatics before the AT Squads could force them in. The other two were apparently cured before they went in. In both cases the possessors just gave up and left the bodies rather than undergo exposure to temporal stasis.”

“That’s about the best news I’ve had for ten hours,” Ralph replied. “They can be beaten, squeezed out without killing the body they’re possessing. It means we’re not just fighting a holding action.”

“Yes. Well, full credit to you for that one, Ralph. We still don’t know why the possessed can’t tolerate zero-tau, but no doubt the reason will turn up in debrief at some time.”

“Are you shoving the cured prisoners into personality debrief?”

“We haven’t decided. Although I think it’s inevitable eventually. We must not get sidetracked from neutralizing the Mortonridge towns. Frankly, the science of it all can wait.”

“What sort of state are the prisoners in?”

“Generally similar to Gerald Skibbow, disorientated and withdrawn, but their symptoms are nothing like as severe as his. After all they were only possessed for a few hours. Skibbow had been under Kingston Garrigan’s control for several weeks. Certainly they’re not classed as dangerous. But we’re placing them in secure isolation wards for the moment, just in case. It’s the first time I’ve agreed with Leonard DeVille all day.”