“All right! Damn it. But fusion drive authority only. You’re not jumping us anywhere.”

“Fine.” And the dream finally happened, just as he’d always known it would. Lady Mac ’s flight computer opened to him, and all the systems were on-line, filling his mind with glorious wing-sweeps of colour. They fitted just perfectly.

He designated the procedure menus he needed, bringing the thrusters and drive tubes up to active flight status. Beaulieu and Sarha were working smoothly together, activating the remaining on board systems. Umbilicals retracted from the fuselage, and the cradle started to elevate them out of the shallow docking bay. The viewfield which the flight computer was datavising at him expanded as more of Lady Mac ’s sensor clusters lifted above the rim. Three bright, expanding stars were ringed in antagonistic red as they crept up over the curvature of the brilliant blue horizon.

Liol fired the verniers to take them off the cradle, not caring if the other two could see the stupid smile on his face. For a moment, all the envy and bitterness returned, the irrational pique he’d felt when he first learned that Joshua existed, a usurper brother who was captaining the ship which was rightfully his. This was the rush that belonged to him. The power to traverse the galaxy.

One day, he and Joshua were going to have to settle this.

But not today. Today was when he proved himself to his brother and the crew. Today was when he started living the life he knew belonged to him.

When they were a hundred metres above the docking bay, Liol fired the secondary drive, selecting a third of a gee acceleration. Lady Mac immediately veered off the vector he’d plotted. He pumped a fast correction order into the flight computer, deflecting the exhaust angle. Overcompensating. “Wowshit!” The acceleration couch webbing gripped him tighter.

“The spaceplane hangar is empty,” Sarha said witheringly. “That means our mass distribution is off centre. Perhaps you’d care to bring the level seven balance calibration programs on-line?”

“Sorry.” He searched desperately around the flight control menus and found the right program. Lady Mac juddered back onto her original vector.

“Joshua is going to throw me out of the airlock,” Sarha decided.

It had taken some time for Lodi to get used to having Omain sitting in the hotel suite with him. A possessed for Mary’s sake! But Omain turned out to be quiet and polite (a little sad, to be honest), keeping out of the way. Lodi slowly managed to relax, though this must surely be the strangest episode in his life. Nothing was ever going to out-weird this.

At first he had jumped every time Omain even spoke. Now, he was relatively cool about the whole scene. His processor blocks were spread out over one of the tables, enabling him to cast trawl programs into the net streams, fishing out relevant information. It was what he did best, so Voi had left him to it while she, Mzu, and Eriba went to the Opia company. His main concern at the moment was monitoring the civil situation now the government had closed the borders. Voi wanted to make sure they would be allowed to get back into orbit. So far, it looked as if they could. There had even been one piece of good luck, the first since they arrived at Nyvan. A starship called Lady Macbeth had docked at the Spirit of Freedom , and it was exactly the type of ship Mzu wanted.

“They are asking for her,” Omain said.

“Huh?” Lodi cancelled the datavised displays, blinking away the afterimage the graphics left in his mind.

“Capone’s people are in orbit,” Omain said. “They know Mzu is here. They are asking for her.”

“You mean you can tell what’s going on in orbit? Mary! I can’t, not with all the interference from the SD platforms.”

“Not tell, exactly. This is whispered gossip, distorted by the many souls it has passed through. I have only the vaguest notion of the facts.”

Lodi was fascinated. Once he began talking, Omain knew some seriously interesting facts. He’d lived on Garissa, and was quite willing to share his impressions. (Lodi had never summoned the courage to ask Mzu what their old world was like.) From Omain’s melancholic descriptions it sounded like a good place to live. The Garissans, Lodi was sure, had lost more than their world by the sound of it; their whole culture was different now, too tight-arsed and Western-ethnic orientated.

One of the processor blocks datavised a warning into Lodi’s neural nanonics. “Oh, bollocks!”

“What is it?”

They had to speak in raised voices, almost shouting at each other. Omain was sitting in the corner of the living room furthest from Lodi, it was the only way the blocks would remain functional.

“Someone has accessed the hotel’s central processor. They’ve loaded a search program for the three of us, and it’s got a visual reference for Mzu, too.”

“It cannot be the possessed, surely?” Omain said. “Neural nanonics don’t function for us.”

“Might be the Organization ships. No. They’d never be able to access Tonala’s net from orbit, not with the platforms still going at it. Hang on, I’ll see what I can find out.” He felt almost happy as he started retrieving tracker programs from the memory fleks he’d brought. The net dons in this city probably had ten times the experience he’d got from snooping around Ayacucho’s communications circuits, but his programs were still able to flash back through the junctions, tracing the origin of the searchers.

The answer sprang into his mind just as the hotel’s central processor crashed. “Wow, that was some guardian program. But I got them. You know anything about a local firm called Kilmartin and Elgant?”

“No. But I haven’t been here long, not in this incarnation.”

“Right.” Lodi twitched a smile. “I’ll see what . . . that’s odd.”

Omain had risen from his chair. He was frowning at the suite’s double door. “What is?”

“The suite’s net processor is down.”

The door chimed.

“Did you . . .” Lodi began.

Something very heavy smashed into the door. Its panels bulged inwards. Splintering sounds were spitting out of the frame.

“Run!” Omain shouted. He stood before the door, both arms held towards it, palms outwards. His face was clenched with effort. The air twisted frantically in front of him, whipping up a small gale.

Another blow hammered the door, and Omain was sent staggering backwards. Lodi turned to run for the bedroom. He was just in time to see a fat three-metre-long serpent slither vertically up the outside of the window. Its huge head reared back, levelling out to stare straight at him. The jaws parted to display fangs as big as fingers. Then it lunged forwards, shattering the glass.

From his elevated position in the command post, Shemilt studied the ops table below him. One of the girls leaned over and pushed a red-flagged marker closer to the deserted asteroid.

“In range, sir,” she reported.

Shemilt nodded, trying not to show too much dismay. All three of the inter-orbit ships were in range of New Georgia’s SD network now. And Quinn had not returned to change his orders. His very specific orders.

If only we weren’t so bloody terrified of him, Shemilt thought. He still felt sick every time he remembered the zero-tau pod containing Captain Gurtan Mauer. Quinn had opened it up during two of the black mass ceremonies.

If we all grouped together—But of course, death was no longer the end. Throwing the dark messiah into the beyond would solve nothing.

There was a single red telephone in his command post. He picked up the handset. “Fire,” he ordered.

Two of the three inter-orbit ships on their way to find out what the teams from Jesup were doing in the deserted asteroids were struck by X-ray lasers. The beams shone clean through the life support capsules and the fusion drive casings. Both crews died instantly. Electronics flash evaporated. Drive systems ruptured. Two wrecks tumbled through space, their hulls glowing a dull orange, vapour squirting from split tanks.