Everyone turned as Al strode forward. There were grins, smiles, whoops, sharp whistles. He did the rounds, pressing the flesh, joking, laughing, thanking, offering encouragement.

Jezzibella followed a pace behind him. She and Leroy quirked an eyebrow at each other.

“So how’s it going?” Al asked a scrum of his senior lieutenants when he’d finished his processional.

“We’re more or less sticking to the timetable,” Mickey Pileggi said. “Some places put up a fight. Others just roll onto their backs and stick their legs in the air for us. We got no way of knowing in advance. Word’s getting out that we aren’t possessing everyone. It helps. Causes a shitload of confusion.”

“Fine from my angle, too, Al,” Emmet Mordden said. “Our sensor satellites have been monitoring some of the deep space message traffic. It’s not easy, because most of it is directional tight beam. But it looks like the rest of the system knows we’re here, and what we’re doing.”

“Is that going to be a problem?” Al asked.

“No, sir. We caught nearly forty per cent of New California’s navy ships in dock when we took over the orbiting asteroids. They’re still there, and another twenty per cent is on permanent assignment to the Confederation Navy fleets. That just leaves a maximum of about fifty ships left in the system who could cause us any grief. But I’ve got every SD platform on situation-A readiness. Even if the admirals out there get their act together, they know it would be suicide to attack us.”

Al lit a cigar, and blew a stream of smoke towards the screen. The near-orbit tactical display, Emmet had called it yesterday. It looked pretty calm at the moment. “Sounds like you’re handling your slice of the action, Emmet. I’m impressed.”

“Thanks, Al.” The nervous man bobbed in appreciation. “As you can see, there’s no spacecraft activity within a million kilometres of the planetary surface, except for five voidhawks. They’re holding themselves stable over the poles, seven hundred thousand kilometres out. My guess is they’re just watching us to see what’s happening.”

“Spies?” Al inquired.

“Yes.”

“We should blow them all to shit,” Bernhard Allsop said loudly. “Ain’t that right, Al? That’ll give the rest of those frigging Commie Edenists the message: Don’t spy on us, don’t fuck with us or it’s your ass.”

“Shut up,” Al said mildly.

Bernhard twitched apprehensively. “Sure, Al. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

“Can you hit the voidhawks?” Jezzibella asked.

Emmet glanced from her to Al, and licked his suddenly sweaty lips. “It’s difficult, you know? They chose those polar positions carefully. I mean, they’re out of range of our energy weapons. And if we launch a combat wasp salvo at them, they’ll just dive down a wormhole. But, hey . . . they can’t hurt us, either.”

“Not this time,” Al said. He chewed his cigar from the left side of his mouth to the right. “But they can see what we’re about, and it’ll frighten them. Pretty soon the whole goddamn Confederation is going to know what’s happened here.”

“I told you they’d be trouble, Al baby,” Jezzibella said, on cue. Her voice had shunted down to a tart’s whinny.

“Sure you did, doll,” he said, not taking his eyes off the tactical display. “We’re gonna have to do something about them,” Al announced to the room at large.

“Well, hell, Al,” Emmet said. “I’ll give it a go, but I don’t think . . .”

“No, Emmet,” Al said generously. “I ain’t talking about five crappy little ships. I’m talking about what’s lining up behind them.”

“The Edenists?” Bernhard asked, hopefully.

“Partly, yeah. But they ain’t the whole picture, are they, boy? You gotta think big , here. You’re in a big universe now.” He had their complete attention. Damn, but Jez had been right. Typical.

“The Edenists are gonna broadcast what we’ve done here to the whole Confederation. Then what do you think is gonna happen, huh?” He turned a full circle, arms held out theatrically. “Any takers? No? Seems pretty goddamn obvious to me, guys. They’re gonna come here with every fucking battleship they got, and grab the planet back off us.”

“We can fight,” Bernhard said.

“We’ll lose,” Al purred. “But that don’t matter. Does it? Because I know what you’re thinking. Every goddamned dumb-ass one of you. You’re thinking: We won’t be here. We’re gonna be out of this stinking joint any day now, safe on the other side of the red cloud where there ain’t no sky and there ain’t no space, and nobody dies anymore. Ain’t that right? Ain’t that what’s brewing inside those thick skulls of yours?”

Shuffled feet and downcast eyes was the only response he was offered. “Mickey, ain’t that right?”

Mickey Pileggi developed an urgent wish to be somewhere else. He couldn’t meet his boss’s interrogatory stare. “Well, you know how it is, Al. That’s a last resort, sure. But shit, we can do like Bernhard says and fight some first. I ain’t afraid of fighting.”

“Sure you ain’t afraid. I didn’t say you were afraid. I didn’t insult you, Mickey, you rube goof. I’m saying you ain’t thinking level. The Confederation Navy, they’re gonna turn up here with a thousand, ten thousand starships, and you’re gonna do the smartest thing you can do, and hide. Right? I would if they came at me with all pieces shooting.”

The left side of Mickey’s face began to tic alarmingly. “Sure, boss,” he said numbly.

“So you think that’s gonna make them give up?” Al asked. “Come on, all of you. I want to know. Who in this room believes the big government boys are just gonna give up if you make New California disappear? Huh? Tell me. They lose a planet with eight hundred million people on it, and the admiral in charge, he’s just gonna shrug and say: Well fuck it, you can’t win them all. And go home.” Al stabbed a finger at the little purple stars of light representing the voidhawks on the tactical display screen. A slim bolt of white fire lashed out, striking the glass. Glowing droplets sprinkled out. A crater bowed inwards, distorting and magnifying the graphics below. “Is he FUCK,” Al bellowed. “Open your goddamn eyes, shitheads! These people can fly among the stars for Christ’s sake. They know everything there is to know about how energy works, they know all about quantum dimensions, hell they can even switch off time if they feel like it. And what they don’t know, they can find out pretty fucking quick. They’ll see what you’ve done, they’ll follow where you take the planet. And they’ll bring it back. Those cruddy longhairs will look at what happened, and they’ll work on it, and they’ll work on it. And they ain’t never going to stop until they’ve solved the problem. I know the feds, the governments. Believe me, of all people, I fucking know. You ain’t never safe from them. They don’t ever fucking stop. Never! And it won’t matter diddly how much you scream, and how much you cuss and rage. They’ll bring you back. Oh, yeah, right back here under the stars and emptiness where you started from. Staring death and beyond in the face.” He had them now, he could see the doubt blossoming, the concern. And the fear. Always the fear. The way right into a man’s heart. The way a general jerked his soldiers’ strings.

Al Capone grinned like the devil himself into the daunted silence. “There’s only one fucking way to stop that from ever happening. Any of you cretins figured that out yet? No? Big surprise. Well, it’s simple, assholes. You stop running scared like you have been all your life. You stop, you turn around to face what’s scaring you, and you bite its fucking dick off.”

•   •   •

For five centuries after the first successful ZTT jump, governments, universities, companies, and military laboratories throughout the Confederation had been researching methods of direct supralight communication. And for all the billions of fuseodollars poured into the various projects, no one had ever produced a valid theory let alone a practical system to surmount the problem. Starships remained the only method of carrying data between star systems.