The call ended, leaving a new communication icon gleaming in the Delivery Man’s exovision. “Take it over,” he said to himself. “Okay, then.”

He started to walk back down the length of the arrival hall. His u-shadow extracted information from the registry and produced a short list. There were some navy ships, including a couple of scouts, which were almost tempting, but that would require a little too much bravado, and he didn’t want to have to bodyloss anyone. Especially not now, when the navy was going to need every asset it had. Instead he picked a private yacht called Lady Rasfay.

It was cool outside, with high clouds stretching across the early-morning sky. Dew slicked the spaceport’s concrete roadways and the red-tinged grass analogue. It even deposited a layer of condensation on the taxi capsule the Delivery Man took out to pad F37, a couple of miles away from the main passenger terminal. He climbed out, shivering against the chilly air. The Lady Rasfay was ten meters in front of him, a blue-white cone with an oval cross section, like some kind of ancient missile lying on its side. He never did get why so many people wanted their starships to look streamlined, as if they were capable of aerodynamic flight. But the owner, Duaro, was clearly one who favored image.

The Delivery Man’s u-shadow had already performed a low-level infiltration of the ship’s network. Nobody was on board, and the primary systems were all in powerdown mode. A quick scan of the drive performance figures backed up what he’d guessed from the physical profile. Duaro had invested a lot of energy and mass allocations (EMAs) and time on the hyperdrive, which could now push the ship along at a fraction over fifteen light-years an hour, as good as a hyperdrive could get.

His u-shadow put a civil spaceworthiness authority code into the ship’s network, and the airlock opened. A metal stair slid out. The Delivery Man walked up it, not bothering to scan around, an act that might betray him as a guilty party. That was the beauty of a Higher world: No one really thought in terms of theft; if you saw someone entering a starship, you just assumed it was legitimate. Thanks to EMAs and replicator technology, material items were available to all; certainly a starship was hardly a possession to envy.

Not that Duaro was completely guileless. The network had several safeguards built in. After several milliseconds analyzing them, the Delivery Man’s u-shadow presented him with eight options for circumventing the restrictions and gaining direct control over the smartcore.

Dim red lighting cast a strange glow along the narrow central companionway. The yacht had a simple layout, almost old-fashioned in nature, with the flight cabin at the front, a lounge behind that in the midsection, and two sleeping cabins aft. Once he was inside, the Delivery Man’s biononics performed a short-range field scan to find a suitable point where he could physically access the network’s nodes. That was the same time he heard passionate groaning from the portside sleeping cabin.

The door flowed aside silently. Inside, the sleeping cabin’s decor was ancient teak, carved to cover every curve and angle of the bulkhead walls and lovingly polished. Two figures were in flagrante on the narrow cot.

“Duaro, I presume?” the Delivery Man said loudly.

The man squirmed about in alarm. The woman squealed and scrabbled frantically at the silk sheets to cover herself. She was exceptionally beautiful, the Delivery Man acknowledged, with a mane of flame-red hair and a face covered in freckles. She was also very young; a Firstlife if the Delivery Man was any judge.

“Did Mirain send you?” Duaro asked urgently. “Look, we can conclude this in a civilized fashion.”

“Mirain?” the Delivery Man mused out loud. His u-shadow ran a fast cross-reference on Duaro’s profile. “You mean your wife, Mirain?”

The woman on the bed cringed, giving Duaro a sulky glance.

“I can’t believe she went to this much trouble,” Duaro groused. “This is just a harmless little fling.”

“Oh, thank you,” the woman snapped.

“Sneaking on board and keeping the lights off and the smartcore dumb,” the Delivery Man mused. “Doesn’t appear that harmless.”

“Look, let’s be reasonable about this …”

The Delivery Man gave a huge smile at the magnificent, timeless cliche. “Yes, let’s. Shall I tell you what I want?”

“Of course,” Duaro said with an air of cautious relief.

“The yacht’s smartcore access codes.”

“What?”

“Non-negotiable,” the Delivery Man said, and powered up several weapons enrichments.

Paula Myo couldn’t remember being so shocked before, not ever. The emotional trauma had become physical in nature, with her heart racing and her hands trembling as if she were some kind of Natural human. She had to sit down hard on the Alexis Denken’s cabin floor before her legs gave way. The only thing her exovision revealed was a vast blank plain, which was what the Capital-class ship Kabul was seeing as it scanned the outside of the Sol barrier. Her link came directly from Pentagon II on the secure channel her status entitled her to. But there was nothing she could do, no help she could offer. She was a simple passive observer of the greatest disaster to befall the Commonwealth since the barrier around Dyson Alpha came down. That memory stirred a possibility.

“Do you have the spatial coordinates of the Swarm components when they materialized?” she asked Admiral Juliaca, who was Kazimir’s deputy and now de facto commander of the Commonwealth Navy. “The original Dark Fortress had an opening on the outside, which is how it was turned off.”

“Nice try,” Juliaca said. “That was the first thing the Kabul attempted. There is no bulge in the Sol barrier as far as we can detect, and I’ve got eleven ships out there searching now, as well as several civilian craft. It’s perfectly smooth, certainly in the areas around the swarm components we’ve scanned.”

“Of course,” Paula muttered. No fool like an old one; it was never going to be that easy. She shook herself and ordered her biononics to stabilize her wayward body. Her thoughts, though, were still sluggish, as if they were moving through ice. I thought I got rid of this nonsense when I resequenced. Even as she thought it, some small part of her mind was chiding her for being too hard on herself. But for Accelerators to bring this off successfully was a monumental failure of intelligence gathering and analysis on ANA’s part, for which she bore some considerable responsibility. Any kind of human would be perturbed by the enormity of the coup, which was what this was.

“And we’re certain the deterrence fleet is caught inside?” Paula asked.

“I’m afraid so,” Juliaca said. “There is no response whatsoever from Kazimir. If he could get in touch with us, he would. He was commanding the fleet, so logically the fleet is inside the Sol barrier.”

Paula, who had been monitoring what she could of the ANA judicial conclave, knew the Admiral was right. But … “The whole fleet? That seems unlikely. Surely there’s some craft held in reserve.”

“One moment,” the Admiral said.

A new communication icon appeared in Paula’s exovision. She welcomed the color it brought to the numbing image of the Sol barrier. As she acknowledged the call, she pushed the Kabul’s imagery into a peripheral mode. “Mr. President,” she said formally.

“Investigator Myo,” President Alcamo replied. “I’m glad you are still available. Frankly, I’m looking for some meaningful advice right now. Without ANA we’re woefully short of relevant information.”

“Whatever I can do, of course,” Paula said. “I was going to suggest to the Admiral that the remainder of the deterrence fleet be deployed to Sol to see if they can break in.”