“Je-zus, what is going down here? Silvano?”

“Don’t you remember me, Al?” the stranger asked. The tone was dangerously mocking. His clothes began to change, flowing into the full dress uniform for a lieutenant commander in the Confederation Navy. His face changed as well, stirring Al’s memory.

Jezzibella gave Al a nervous flicker of a smile. “Kingsley Pryor’s back,” she said.

“Hey, Kingsley!” Al smiled broadly. “Man, is it good to see you. Shit, you’re a fucking hero around these parts. You did it, man, you actually fucking did it. You wiped out the whole Confederation Navy single-handed. Can you believe this shit?”

Kingsley Pryor produced the kind of wide-eyed smile that troubled even Al. He wondered if the two soldiers were enough to keep the Navy man down.

“You just go right ahead believing that shit,” Kingsley said. “That’s fine by me. In the meantime, I killed fifteen thousand people for you. Now it’s time for you to keep your end of the bargain. I want my wife, my child, and I’ve decided I want a starship, too. That’s a little bonus you’re going to award me for completing my mission.”

Al spread his arms wide, his thoughts the epitome of reasonableness. “Well, hell, Kingsley, the agreement was you blow up Trafalgar from the inside.”

“GIVE ME CLARISSA AND WEBSTER.”

Al swayed back a pace. Kingsley was actually glowing: a light deep inside his body had flicked on, illuminating his face and uniform. Except for the eyes, they sucked light down. Both soldiers nervously tightened their grip on the Thompson machine guns they were holding.

“All right,” Al said, attempting to calm things down. “Jezus, Kingsley, we’re all on the same side here.” He conjured up a Havana and held it out, smiling.

“Wrong.” Kingsley stuck a rigid finger in the air, preacher-style, and slowly levelled it at Al. “Don’t talk to me about taking sides, you piece of shit. I have died because of you. I have slaughtered my comrades because of you. So don’t you ever ever think you can tell me anything about faith, or trust, or loyalty. Now you either give me my wife and my son, or we settle this right here and now.”

“Hey, I ain’t holding nothing back. What you want, you got. Al Capone don’t break his word. You understand that? We had an agreement. That’s like solid greenback currency around here these days. And I don’t never welsh. Never! You understand? All I got here is my name, that is all I am worth. So you don’t go questioning that. I appreciate how fucked off you are. Okay, you got that right after what’s happened. But you don’t ever say to no one I went back on my promise.”

“Give me my wife and son.”

Al couldn’t understand how Kingsley’s teeth didn’t shatter, the man was crunching his jaw so hard. “No problem. Silvano, take Lieutenant-commander Pryor here to his wife and kid.”

Silvano nodded, and gestured Pryor to the door.

“And nobody laid a finger on them while you were gone,” Al said. “You remember that.”

Pryor turned at the door. “Don’t worry, Mr Capone, I won’t forget anything that’s happened here.”

Al sank down into the nearest chair when he’d gone. His arm curved round Jez for comfort, only to find she was trembling. “Je-zus H Christ fucking wept,” Al wheezed.

“Al,” Jez said firmly. “You have got to get rid of him. He frightened the bejezus out of me. Maybe sending him to Trafalgar wasn’t one of my better ideas.”

“Too fucking true. Leroy, for Christ’s sake tell me you found that kid of his.”

Leroy was running a finger round his collar. He looked scared. “We didn’t, Al. I don’t know where the little brat’s gone. We looked everywhere. He just vanished.”

“Fuck-a-doodle. Kingsley’s going to blow when he finds out. It’ll be a bloodbath. Leroy, you’d better start calling in some of the guys. And no fucking marshmallows, either. It’s going to take a lot of us to pound him.”

“And then he can come straight back into another body,” Jez said. “It just starts over again.”

“I’ll start another search for Webster,” Leroy said. “The kid’s got to be somewhere, for heaven’s sake.”

“Kiera,” Jezzibella said. “If you really did look everywhere for him before, then he’s got to be with Kiera.”

Al shook his head in amazed admiration. “Goddamn, I can’t believe I was dumb enough to let that woman into this rock. She doesn’t miss a single trick.”

Etchells emerged from his wormhole terminus ten thousand kilometres out from Monterey. The asteroid was a small grey disk traversing one of New California’s sunlit turquoise oceans. Drab, but enormously welcoming. He could almost hear his stomach growling from hunger.

New California’s defence network locked on to his hull, and he identified himself to the control centre in Monterey. They cleared him for a five-gee approach. His energy patterning cells couldn’t quite manage that.

Clear a pedestal for me,he told the hellhawks on the docking ledge. I need nutrient fluid.

We all do,pran soo replied tartly. There’s a rota, remember?

Don’t fuck with me, bitch. I’ve been away longer than I expected. I’m exhausted.

And I’m heartbroken.

Pran Soo’s attitude surprised him. Sure, the hellhawks grumbled and quarrelled; and none of them liked him. But this casual superior taunting was something new. He’d have to get to the reason eventually. But that would have to wait. He was genuinely concerned for his condition.

Where the hell have you been?hudson proctor asked.

Hesperi-LN, if you must know.

Where?there was a good deal of puzzlement in hudson’s mind.

Never mind. Just get a pedestal ready for me. And tell Kiera I’m back. There’s a lot she needs to hear.

One of the feeding hellhawks was ordered to disengage from the pedestal it was using, freeing the metal mushroom for Etchells. He swung in over the ledge with little grace as the affinity band filled with gibes and derision about his flight path. Service crews stood well back as the big bitek starship wobbled uncertainly over the docking pedestal. It settled after a laboured descent, and the feed tubules rose up to insert themselves into its reception orifices. He started to gulp down the nutrient fluid as fast as it could be pumped in.

His on-board bitek processors datavised the section of the habitat Kiera had claimed as her own. She was in a lounge overlooking the docking ledge, sitting on one of its long sofas. Her dress was bright scarlet with a tight bodice fastened by cloth buttons. The skirt was loose enough for her to fold her legs up on the sofa, presenting a feline posture to the camera.

Etchells hesitated for a second, enjoying the small sexual thrill that came from so much young, beautifully shaped female skin on show for his benefit. It was a rare thing for him to wish he hadn’t possessed a blackhawk. Kiera could do that. Not many others.

“I was worried about you,” she said. “You are my principal hellhawk, after all. So what happened at the antimatter station?”

“Something odd. I think we’ve got real trouble. This goes way beyond everyone’s little power plays. We’re going to need help.”

Rocio accessed Almaden’s net to watch the repair operation. Deebank had kept his part of the bargain, co-opting all the non-possessed technicians left in the asteroid to work on the nutrient fluid refinery. They had replaced the damaged heat exchanger out on the ledge, resealed the chamber Etchells’s laser had breached, stripped down the machinery and rebuilt it using new components manufactured in their own industrial stations. That just left the electronics.

As soon as the Mindori ’s bulk had settled on one of the asteroid’s three docking pedestals, a team had unloaded the packages from its cargo bay. Integrating the new processors and circuits into the refurbished refinery had taken over a day. Operating programs had to be modified. Then start-up proved an arduous task. There were synthesis tests, integral analysis calibration runs, mechanical inspections, performance examinations, fluid quality reviews. Eventually, the first batch was pumped along the pipes to Mindori ’s pedestal. The hellhawk’s internal bitek taste filters took a sample, evaluating the protein structures suspended within the fluid.