Kole gave her an astonished look. “What’s the matter?”

Shea shook her head, lips sealed together.

“I’m sorry,” Joshua said, earnestly sympathetic. “What did I do?”

Shea smiled bravely. “It’s not you. It’s just . . . my boyfriend left this afternoon. He’s captaining a starship, too, and that reminded me. I don’t know when I’m going to see him again. He wouldn’t say.”

Intuition was starting a major-league riot in Joshua’s skull. The first MF band was strolling onstage. He put a protective arm around Shea’s shoulders, ignoring Kole’s flash of ire. “Come on, I’ll buy you a drink. You can tell me about it. You never know, I might be able to help. Stranger things happen in space.”

He signalled the two serjeants frantically, and turned away from the stage just as the AV projectors burst into life. A thick haze of coherent light filled the Terminal Terminus. Even though he was looking away, sensations spirited down his nerves; fragmented signals saturated with crude activant sequences. He felt good. He felt hot. He felt randy. He felt slippery.

A glance back over his shoulder had him sitting on a saddle astride a giant penis, urging it forwards.

Honestly, kids today. When he was younger MF was about the giddy pursuit, how it felt when your partner adored you in return, or spurned you without reason. Making up and breaking up. The infinite states of the heart, not the dick.

The kids around him were laughing and giggling, joyous expressions on their incredulous faces as the AV dazzle poured down their irises. They all swayed from side to side in unison.

“Joshua, four Edenists are coming this way,” a serjeant warned.

Joshua could see them in the sparkling light cloud which pervaded the audience. Taller than everyone else, some kind of visor over their eyes, moving intently through the swinging throng.

He grabbed Shea’s hand tightly. “This way,” he hissed urgently, and veered off towards the mock wormhole in the centre of the club. One of the serjeants cleared a path, forcing people aside. Frowns and snarls lined his route.

“Dahybi,” he datavised. “Get the rest of the serjeants out of zero-tau, fast. Secure a route through the spaceport from the axial chamber to Lady Mac . I might be needing it.”

“It’s being done, Captain. Parts of the asteroid’s net are crashing.”

“Jesus. Okay, we’ve got the serjeants’ affinity to keep communications open if it goes completely. You’d better keep one in the bridge with you.”

He reached the writhing black column and looked back. Shea was breathless and confused, but not protesting. The Edenists weren’t chasing after him. “What . . . ?” Some sort of struggle had broken out over where he’d left Kole’s friends. Two of the tall agents were pulling an inert body between them. It was Adok Dala, unconscious and shaking, victim of a nervejam shot. The other pair of agents and someone else were holding back some irate kids. A nervejam stick was raised and fired.

Joshua turned his head a little too far, and he was tasting nipple while he slid over dark pigmentation as if he were snowboard slaloming, leaving a huge trail of glistening saliva behind him. His neck muscles flicked back a couple of degrees, and the Edenists were retreating, completely unnoticed by the entranced euphoric audience they were shoving their way through. Behind them, Kole’s friends clung together; those still standing wept uncomprehendingly over those felled by the violence which had stabbed so unexpectedly into their moment of erotic rapture.

Shea gasped at the scene and made to rush over.

“No,” Joshua shouted. He pulled her back, and she recoiled, as frightened by him as the agents. “Listen to me, we have to get out of here. It’s only going to get worse.”

“Is it the possessed?”

“Yeah. Now come on.”

Still keeping hold of her hand he slid around the wormhole. It felt like dry rubber against his side, flexing in queasy movements.

“Nearest exit,” he told the serjeant in front of him. “Go.” It began to plough through tightly packed bodies at an alarming speed. Blissfully unaware people were sent tumbling. Joshua followed on grimly. The Edenists must have wanted Adok Dala for the same reason he wanted Shea. Had he got the wrong friend? Oh, hell.

The cavern wall was only ten metres ahead of him now, a red circle shining above an exit. His electronic warfare block datavised an alarm.

Jesus! “Ione.”

“I know,” the lead serjeant shouted. It drew its machine gun.

“No,” he cried. “You can’t, not in here.”

“I’m not inhuman, Joshua,” the burly figure retorted.

They reached the wall and hurried along to the exit. That was when he realized Kole was still with them.

“Stay here,” he told her. “You’ll be safe with all these people.”

“You can’t leave me here,” she gasped imploringly. “Joshua! I know what’s happening. You can’t. I don’t want that to happen to me. You can’t let them. Take me with you, for Mary’s sake!”

And she was just a stricken young girl whose broken hair was flapping wildly.

The first serjeant slammed the door open and went through. “I’ll stay here,” the second said. The machine gun was held ready in one hand. It took out an automatic pistol and held it in the other. “That’s a bonus, these things are ambidextrous. Don’t worry, Joshua. They’ll suffer if they try and get past me.”

“Thanks, Ione.” Then he was out in the corridor, urging the two girls along. “Dahybi,” he datavised. His neural nanonics reported they couldn’t acquire a net processor. “Bugger.”

“The other serjeants are securing the spaceport,” the serjeant told him. “And the Lady Mac is flight prepped. Everything is ready.”

“Great.” His electronic warfare block was still datavising its alarm. He took his own nine-millimetre pistol out of its holster. Its operating procedure program went primary.

They came to a crossroads in the corridor. And Joshua wasted a second querying the net on the direction he wanted. Cursing, he requested the Ayacucho layout he’d stored in a memory cell. There would be too much risk using a lift now; power supplies were dubious, transport management processors more so. His neural nanonics devised the shortest route to the axial chamber, it seemed depressingly far.

“This way.” He pointed down the left hand corridor.

“Excuse me,” someone said.

Joshua’s electronic warfare block gave out one final warning, then shut down. He whirled around. Standing ten metres down the other corridor were a man and a woman, dressed in heavy black leather jackets and trousers with an improbable number of shiny zips and buckles.

“Run,” the serjeant ordered. It stepped squarely into the middle of the corridor and levelled its compact machine gun.

Joshua didn’t hesitate. Shoving at the girls, he started running. He heard a few heated words being shouted behind him. Then the machine gun fired.

He took the first turning, desperate to escape from the line of sight. His neural nanonics immediately revised his route. The corridors were all identical, three metres high, three metres wide, and apparently endless. Joshua hated that, trapped in a maze and utterly reliant on a guidance program susceptible to the possessed. He wanted to know exactly where he was, and be able to prove it. Being unaware of his exact location was an alien experience. Human doubt was superseding technological prowess.

He was looking over his shoulder as he took the next turning, making sure the girls were keeping up and there was no sign of any pursuit. His peripheral vision monitor program indexed the figure striding down the corridor towards him milliseconds before his neural nanonics crashed.

It was a man in white Arab robes. He smiled in simple gratitude as Joshua and the girls stumbled to a halt in front of him.

Joshua swung his pistol around, but the lack of any procedural program meant he misjudged its weight. The arc was too great. Before he could bring it back to line up on the target, a ball of white fire struck his hand.