“That’s better, baby,” Jezzibella said as she stroked his shoulders. “I hate it when you’re all uptight.”

Al grinned languidly at her. She’d changed back into the teen-kitten again, all worshipful concern crowned by a frizz of golden curls. “No way, lady. No way are you human.”

She kissed his nose. “About the antimatter,” she said. “You need it, Al. If there’s any chance at all, then grab it.”

“I don’t follow,” he mumbled. “Lovegrove says it’s just a different kind of bomb. And we got ourselves plenty of the atom explosives already.”

“It’s not just a better kind of bomb, Al; you can use it to power combat wasps and starships, too, bump up their performance by an order of magnitude. If you like, it’s the difference between a rifle and a machine gun. They both fire bullets, but which would you prefer in a rumble?”

“Good point.”

“Thanks. Now even with the asteroid campaign going well, we haven’t got anything like numerical parity with the Confederation’s conventional forces. However, antimatter is a superb force multiplier. If you’ve got some, they’re going to think twice before launching any sort of offensive.”

“Jeeze, you are a fucking marvel. I gotta get this organized with the boys.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed, and started to reconstitute his clothes out of the magic realm where they’d been banished.

“Wait.” She pressed up against his back, arms sliding around to hug. “Don’t go rushing into this half-cocked, Al. We’ve got to think this through. You’re going to have problems with antimatter, it’s vicious stuff. And you don’t help.”

“What do you mean?” he bridled.

“The way your energistic ability gronks out electronics and power circuits, you just can’t afford that with antimatter. Put a possessed anywhere near a confinement system and we’re all going to be watching the last half of the explosion from the beyond. So . . . it will have to be the non-possessed who work with the stuff.”

“Sheesh.” Al scratched his mussed hair, desperately uncertain. His Organization was built along the principle of keeping the non-possessed in line, under his thumb. You had to have some group at the bottom who needed to be watched on a permanent basis, it kept the Organization soldiers busy, gave them a purpose. Made them take orders. But give the non-possessed antimatter . . . that would screw up the balance something chronic. “I ain’t so sure, Jez.”

“It’s not that big a problem. You just have to make sure you’ve got a secure hold over anyone you assign to handle the stuff. Harwood and Leroy can fix that; they can arrange for you to hold their families hostage.”

Al considered it. Hostages might just work. It would take a lot of effort to arrange, and the Organization soldiers would really have to be on the ball. Risky.

“Okay, we’ll give it a shot.”

“Al!” Jezzibella squealed girlishly and started kissing his throat exuberantly.

Al’s half-materialized clothes vanished again.

The chiefs of staff’s office was as extravagant as only senior government figures could get away with; its expensive, handcrafted furniture arranged around a long hardwood table running down the centre. One wall could be made transparent, giving the occupants a view out over the SD tactical operations centre.

Al sat himself down at the head of the table and acknowledged his senior lieutenants with a wave of his hand. There was no smile on his face, a warning that this was strictly business.

“Okay,” he said. “So what’s been happening? Leroy?”

The corpulent manager glanced along the table, a confident expression in place. “I’ve more or less kept to the original pacification schedule we drew up. Eighty-five per cent of the planet is now under our control. There are no industrial or military centres left outside our influence. The administrative structure Harwood has been building up seems to be effective. Nearly twenty per cent of the population is non-possessed, and they’re doing what they’re told.”

“Do we need them?” Silvano Richmann asked Al, not even looking at Leroy.

“Leroy?” Al asked.

“For large urban areas, almost certainly,” Leroy said. “The smaller towns and villages can be kept going with their possessed inhabitants providing a combined energistic operation. But cities still require their utilities to function, you just can’t wish that much shit and general rubbish away. Apparently the possessed cannot create viable food out of inorganic compounds, so the transport network has to be maintained to keep edible supplies flowing in. At the moment that’s just stock from the warehouses. Which means we’ll have to come up with a basic economy of some sort to persuade the farms to keep supplying the cities. The problem with that is, the possessed who are living out in the rural areas aren’t inclined to do too much work, and in any case I haven’t got a clue what we could use for money—counterfeiting is too damn easy for you. We may just have to resort to barter. Another problem is that the possessed cannot manufacture items which have any permanence; once outside the energistic influence they simply revert to their component architecture. So a lot of factories are going to have to be restarted. As for the military arena, non-possessed are unquestionably necessary, but that’s Mickey’s field.”

“Okay, you done good, Leroy,” Al said. “How long before I’m in charge of everything down there?”

“You’re in charge of everything that counts right now. But that last fifteen per cent is going to be a hard slog. A lot of the resistance is coming from the hinterland areas, farm country where they’re pretty individual characters. Tough, too. A lot of them are holed up in the landscape with their hunting weapons. Silvano and I have been putting together hunter teams, but from what we’ve experienced so far it’s going to be a long dirty campaign, on both sides. They know the terrain, our teams don’t; it’s an advantage which almost cancels out the energistic ability.”

Al grunted sardonically. “You mean we gotta fight fair?”

“It’s a level playing field,” Leroy acknowledged. “But we’ll win in the end, that’s inevitable. Just don’t ask me for a timetable.”

“Fine. I want you to keep plugging away at that economy idea. We gotta maintain some kind of functioning society down there.”

“Will do, Al.”

“So, Mickey, how are you holding out?”

Mickey Pileggi scrambled to his feet, sweat glinting on his forehead. “Pretty good, Al. We broke forty-five asteroids with that first action. They’re the big ones, with the most important industrial stations. So now we’ve got three times as many warships as when we started. The rest of the settlements are just going to be a mopping-up operation. There’s nothing out there which can threaten us anymore.”

“You got crews for all these new ships?”

“We’re working on it, Al. It isn’t as easy as the planet. There’s a lot of distance involved here, our communications lines aren’t so hot.”

“Any reaction from the Edenists?”

“Not really. There were some skirmishes with armed voidhawks at three asteroids, we took losses. But no big retaliation attacks.”

“Probably conserving their strength,” Silvano Richmann said. “It’s what I would do.”

Al fixed Mickey with the look (God, the hours he’d spent practising that back in Brooklyn). And he hadn’t lost it, poor old Mickey’s tic started up like he’d thrown a switch. “When we’ve taken over all the ships docked at the asteroids, are we gonna be strong enough to bust the Edenists?”

Mickey’s eyes performed a desperate search for allies. “Maybe.”

“It’s a question of how you want them, Al,” Emmet Mordden said. “I doubt we could ever subdue them, not make them submit to possession, or hand the habitats over to the Organization’s control. You’ll just have to trust me on this, they’re completely different from any kind of people you have ever met before. All of them, even the kids. You might be able to kill them, destroy their habitats. But conquest? I don’t think so.”