He walked across the lip to the top seating tier. His u-shadow was maintaining secure links to the emergency taxis and the coliseum’s civic sensor net, assuring him that everything was running smoothly. As agreed with Asom, he was the first to arrive. There were no nasty surprises waiting for him.

A steep glidepath took him down the inner slope to the arena field. He kept looking around the huge concrete crater for any sign of movement. Apart from a few bots working their way slowly along the seating rows, there was nothing.

Once he reached the bottom, he expanded his field scan function again. No anomalies and no unusual chunks of technology within five hundred meters. It looked like Asom was obeying his ground rules. Laril smiled in satisfaction; things were going to be just fine.

A slightly odd motion on the opposite side of the field caught his eye. Someone was walking out of the cavernous performers’ tunnel. She was naked, not that such a state was in any way erotic, not for her. Her body was like a skeleton clad in a toga-suit haze. She walked purposefully over the grass toward him; two long ribbons of scarlet fabric wove sinuously in her wake.

“Asom?” Laril asked uncertainly. Suddenly this whole meeting seemed like a bad idea. It got worse. His connection to the unisphere dropped out without warning, which was theoretically impossible. Laril’s force field snapped up to its highest rating. He took a couple of shaky paces backward before turning to run. Files in his storage lacuna were already displaying escape routes to the emergency taxis he’d mapped out earlier. It was fifteen paces to a service hatch, which led to a maze of utility tunnels. The skeletal woman-thing would never be able to track him in there.

Three men appeared in the seating tiers ahead of him; they just shimmered into existence as their one-piece suits discarded their stealth camouflage effect.

Laril froze. “Ozziecrapit,” he groaned. His field scan showed that each of them was enriched with sophisticated weapons. Their force fields were a lot stronger than his. They advanced toward him.

His exovision displays abruptly spiked with incomprehensible quantum fluctuations. He didn’t even have time to open his mouth to scream before the whole universe turned black.

Arranging an entrapment had never been so easy. Valean was almost ashamed by the simplicity. Even before she landed at Darklake City, Accelerator agents had secreted subversion software into the Bayview Tower net. Incredibly, Laril used his own apartment’s node to access the unisphere. She wondered if all his calls to various old colleagues were some kind of subtle misdirection. Surely nobody was so inept. But it appeared to be real. He genuinely thought he was being smart.

So she replied personally to his final call, assuming the Ondra identity. Again, the suggestion of the coliseum as a meeting point was a shocking failure of basic procedure. Its thick walls provided a perfect screen from standard civic and police scrutiny. The Accelerator team members were laughing when they found his “escape” taxis parked suspiciously close to utility tunnel exits. And as for the antiquated monitor software he’d loaded into the coliseum’s network …

Valean waited in the darkness of the performers’ tunnel as he slid down the glidepath. His field function scan probed around, its rudimentary capability finally confirming how woefully naive he was. Her own biononics deflected it easily. As soon as three of her team were in place behind him, she walked out into the morning sunlight. Laril seemed so shocked, he didn’t even attempt any hostile activity. Lucky for him, she thought impassively.

The team closed in smoothly. Then Valean’s field scan showed her a sudden change manifesting in the quantum fields. Her integral force field hardened. Weapons enrichments powered up.

Laril vanished.

“What the fuck!” Digby exclaimed.

The Columbia505 was hanging two hundred kilometers above Darklake City to monitor the whole Jachal Coliseum affair. Digby’s u-shadow had kept him updated on the software shenanigans in the Oaktier cybersphere, how Valean had run electronic rings around poor old Laril. Given the nature of the people he had to watch during his professional career, Digby normally felt no sympathy for any of them. Laril, however, was in a class of his own when it came to ineptitude. Sympathy didn’t quite apply, but he was certainly starting to feel a degree of pity for the fool who’d been dragged into an event of which he had no true understanding.

Digby watched in growing disbelief as Laril’s taxi landed on the lip of the coliseum. The man had absolutely no idea what he was walking into. The Columbia505’s sensors could see the Accelerator agents from two hundred kilometers’ altitude. Yet Laril’s own field function scan was so elementary that he couldn’t spot them from two hundred meters.

Letting out a groan, Digby brought up the starship’s targeting systems. No doubt about it, he was going to have to intervene. Paula was absolutely right: Valean could not be allowed to snatch Laril. Precision neutron lasers locked on to Valean and her team.

He still wasn’t sure if he should take the Columbia505 down to retrieve Laril afterward or simply remove Valean’s subversive software from his “escape” taxis and steer them to a rendezvous. He was inclined to pick Laril up himself; the man was a disaster area and shouldn’t be allowed to wander around the Commonwealth by himself, not with his connection to Araminta.

Valean emerged from the tunnel and walked toward a startled Laril. Three of the eight Accelerator agents discarded their stealth. Digby designated the fire sequence.

Strange symbols shot up into his exovision. It was the last thing he’d expected. A T-sphere enveloped Darklake City.

Laril teleported out of Jachal Coliseum.

The T-sphere withdrew instantaneously.

Digby reviewed every sensor input he could think of. Valean and her team appeared equally surprised by Laril’s magic disappearing act, launching a barrage of questors into the city net. To Digby there was something even more disturbing than their reaction: The T-sphere hadn’t registered in any Oaktier security network.

That would take a level of ability that went way beyond a team of faction agents.

He called Paula. “We have a problem.”

“A T-sphere?” she said once he’d finished explaining. “That’s unusual. There’s no known project on Oaktier using a T-sphere, so that implies it’s covert. And given that no official sensor could detect it, I’d say it was also embedded. Interesting.”

“The Columbia505’s sensors gave it a diameter of twenty-three kilometers.”

“Where’s the exact center?”

“Way ahead of you.” Visual sensor images of Darklake City flashed up in Digby’s exovision. They focused on the Olika district, one of the original exclusive areas bordering the lakeshore; its big houses sat in lavish grounds, a mishmash of styles representing the centuries over which they’d been added to and modified. In the middle of the district was a long road running parallel to the shore. The center of the image expanded, zooming in on a lavender-colored drycoral bungalow wrapped around a small swimming pool. Probably the smallest house in the whole district.

“Oh, my God,” Paula said.

“That’s the center,” Digby said. “1800 Briggins. Registered to a Paul Cramley. Actually, he’s lived there for … oh. That can’t be right.”

“It is,” Paula told him.

“Do you think the T-sphere generator is underneath the bungalow? I can run a deep scan.”

“Don’t bother.”

“But …”

“Laril is perfectly safe. Unfortunately, Araminta won’t be able to call him for advice now, not without paying the price to Paul’s ally.”

“Then you know this Cramley person? My u-shadow can’t find anything on file.”